His for Revenge

by Caitlin Crews

  And that frown only deepened when she saw the name on her display.

  Dad.

  Zara swallowed. She sat down on the edge of the high bed, wrapping the towel tighter around her while everything she’d been feeling moments before spiraled out of her, as if off into a puddle on the floor at her feet.

  But you are not a coward, Zara Elliott, she told herself briskly, whatever else you might be, and Grams asked you to give him a chance, didn’t she, and then she picked the phone up and swiped the button to answer it before she could think better of it.

  “Hi, Dad,” she said chirpily. “Merry Christmas Eve!”

  “Spare me the holiday nonsense, Zara,” Amos said in his typically blunt, rude way. “Christmas is for feebleminded idiots who need an excuse to spend money they don’t have.”

  Nothing ever changed with her father. On some level, Zara supposed she ought to take a kind of comfort from that. She found she couldn’t quite do it.

  “That attitude is likely to get you put straight on the naughty list, mister!” she pointed out in the same too-cheerful voice—and then remembered that there were a thousand reasons not to talk to her father that way.

  One of them being the thunderous silence that followed, during which she shut her eyes and covered them with her free hand, imagining Amos’s gritted teeth and evil expression as if he was standing in front of her.

  “I expected to hear from you by now,” he said after a moment, and Zara understood that this was a gift. More of a gift than she’d received from her father in a long while. That he was ignoring her suicidal attempt to tease him and she should be grateful.

  Except she didn’t feel grateful.

  Something new and much too hot charged through her, making her feel reckless and invulnerable at once.

  “Has our relationship changed in some way?” she asked, and though she couldn’t seem to control her mouth the way she knew she should, she used a mild, calm tone. As if polite defiance would go over better. “The last time I called home to chat you told me you’d let me know when you wanted to talk to me, and not to try to insert myself where I wasn’t wanted. I believe that was my freshman year at Bryn Mawr.”

  There was a stunned sort of silence. Zara felt her heart beat too hard in her chest and told herself that was excitement. Victory, not fear.

  “I don’t think you want to test me,” he growled at her, his tone even nastier than before. “Not when there’s so much at stake.”

  “You called me, Dad,” she pointed out, and she was sure she could actually hear her father gnashing his teeth. There was probably something wrong with her that she enjoyed it.

  “We’re having the usual Christmas dinner tomorrow at the house,” Amos told her in that vicious way of his. “I expect to see both of you. You can leave the attitude behind. It’s time to see if my investment is paying any dividends, and if I think you’re in my way, I won’t hesitate to crush you. I hope you’re hearing me.”

  Zara heard him. But she chose not to focus on that part of what he’d said.

  “And by ‘your investment,’ am I to assume you mean…me?” she asked drily. “Honestly, Dad, compliments like that are going to give me a big head. I might turn into Ariella before the end of the day if you keep that up.”

  “I mean the connection to the Elliott family, not you,” Amos belted at her, loud and rough. She held her cell phone away from her ear and could still hear him perfectly. “And you better not be playing these dumb games of yours with Chase Whitaker. You better believe I would never have involved you in this if it could have been avoided—”

  “You mean, if Ariella hadn’t run away, proving herself perhaps slightly less trustworthy than the daughter who showed up and walked down the aisle?” Zara asked. “Maybe?”

  It was like she had no control over her own bravado. It was easier over the phone, of course, where she wasn’t within arm’s reach—but this was bordering on insanity, surely. Or it was brilliant and long overdue, depending on how she chose to look at it.

  And she knew exactly where the confidence to talk to her father like this had come from. You are beautiful, Chase had said, and it moved in her like courage. Now, when she needed it most.

  “You need to do what you’re told for once,” Amos hissed then in that cold, horrible way that still got to her. Even when he wasn’t in the same room. “Don’t make me adjust that attitude for you. I don’t think you’d like it.”

  Zara was sure she wouldn’t. And then she despaired of herself. Because this man wasn’t worth the loyalty she felt to him and she knew it, no matter what rose-colored glasses Grams might have worn. She kept thinking there was something she could do to make him say, “Oh, my bad, of course you’re wonderful—what have I been thinking all these years?” When she knew very well there wasn’t. He was worse than all the villains she studied, and scarier, because he was real. Hell, she had no naïveté left when it came to him, and she’d still married a stranger because he’d wanted it. Was it bold to throw some attitude his way—or sad that she still answered his phone calls?

  “Are you listening to me?” Amos sounded even angrier, and something like incredulous. Because no one ignored him, did they?

  “The thing is, Chase has his own set of Christmas traditions,” Zara lied, pressing her fingers to her temple to ward off the headache this phone call was summoning. “It means a lot to him. There’s no way he’s going to abandon them for me. And in fact, pushing him might cause more harm than good.” She heard her father mutter something and pushed on. “But he plans to attend the Whitaker Industries New Year’s Eve party. I think he wants to start a new tradition. I assume you’ll be there?”

  “You have one week,” Amos snarled at her. “I better not go to that party on New Year’s and find out you’ve ruined something that I’ve spent a lot of time and energy working on. I promise you, you will not like what happens if I do.”

  And then he hung up. With a slam of the landline he still used into its cradle, making Zara’s ears ring in protest.

  “Merry Christmas to you, too,” she muttered, and put her cell phone back down on the bedside table. Then she sighed, low and long and deep.

  She didn’t let herself dwell too much on her father, or the horrible way he both spoke to her and made her feel. She also didn’t torture herself with worrying about what consequences he might heap on her for talking to him like that when she knew perfectly well that he wanted to hear nothing at all from her but quiet obedience, if that. What would be the point? Amos was Amos. The only question was why she kept putting herself in a position where he could say those hurtful things to her.

  This was for you, Grams, she told her grandmother silently. But this is the end of it.

  She walked over to the closet and went inside, dressing on autopilot. When she was done, she’d pulled on a pair of cream-colored velvet trousers and a dark green Henley top, as if her subconscious refused to let go of the holiday spirit no matter what a dampening influence Amos had been. She combed through her damp hair and tied it in a low knot at the nape of her neck. There was a full-length mirror in the dressing part of the walk-in closet, and she stared into it, not seeing all the ways her body and Chase’s body had come together in the night, so miraculous and beautiful, but seeing her father’s scorn instead. Hearing Ariella’s lilting, malicious laughter. The music of her whole life.

  This is a coup for you.

  No matter how many times Chase had told her she was beautiful, or even set about proving it, she still saw what they did. An awkward woman, nothing like skinny, who would never be anyone’s first choice for anything. It was the same thing she’d always seen.

  The difference was, this time, it didn’t make her sad. It made her furious. At her father, her sister. At herself. At this absurd situation she never should have let herself get trapped in no matter how great the temptation to be vindicated, to honor the one family member who had treated her well, to prove herself at last—

  But the thought tha
t she might have missed out on Chase, however temporary this was, however long it took her to recover from it when it was finished, made her heart ache inside her chest.

  And she decided that made it as good a time as any to find out how her husband felt about the holidays.

  * * *

  She found him in the office high on the second floor in the wing of the house Mrs. Calloway had told her housed a selection of guest suites and a separate entrance, should business associates require access to the Whitakers yet not be suitable to mix with family.

  Chase was frowning down at the laptop open before him, sitting at the great desk that loomed large in the center of the room with stacks of open files before him and several serious-looking binders filled with more documents at his elbow. The only noise in the room came from his fingers tapping against the keys, and Zara found herself caught there in the doorway, watching all that quiet ruthlessness of his turned to the details of the work a man in his position must have to do all the time, but which she’d somehow never imagined him doing. Smiting minions with a glare, yes. Typing out emails like mortal men? No.

  She didn’t move or even breathe hard, but he knew she was there almost at once. She saw him frown in the same instant his fingers paused on the keys, and then that wild blue gaze was slamming into her from across the room.

  The last time she’d seen the blue of his eyes, it had been dawn enough that there was a faint shimmer of a matching color in the dark night beyond her windows and he’d been thrusting deep inside of her.

  Zara felt heat rush over her, staining her cheeks and making her body shiver into total awareness. Chase allowed only that tiny crook of his clever lips. She still felt it like the sun bursting forth after a long afternoon of rain.

  Oh, the dangers this man presented. She was already as good as lost.

  “Do you celebrate Christmas?” she asked, because the only other thing she wanted to talk about might involve her launching herself over that great big desk to get to him, and what if he’d only intended that to be the one night it had been? She couldn’t face it. “I’m assuming you must, given the amount of holiday decorations all over this house.”

  “The Calloways celebrate Christmas,” Chase said, sitting back in his chair and threading his hands together behind his head. He wore the kind of long-sleeved shirt that looked simple and understated and which Zara knew was therefore exorbitantly expensive. It couldn’t possibly cling to his every gorgeous muscle like that if it wasn’t. “They take today and tomorrow off, of course. My father and Mattie used to have Christmas here. My father called that ‘roughing it,’ because my sister did the cooking.”

  Zara would not have imagined that someone like Mattie Whitaker knew her way around a kitchen, but that was the least interesting part of what he’d said. She leaned one shoulder against the door frame.

  “Your father and Mattie? Not you?”

  That hard, terrible thing she’d seen several times before moved over his face then. He sat forward and dropped his hands, then stood in the same smooth motion, as if whatever it was he was thinking of was too harsh to take while seated.

  “Not me.” He studied her for a moment. “I prefer to ignore Christmas.” It looked as if he fought with himself then; she could see it flash in all that stark blue, and she didn’t know if he lost or won, but he continued. “I have since my mother died.”

  She felt stricken. “You were only a kid when your mother died.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you never came here and joined in with your sister and father?”

  A barely noticeable pause. “No.”

  Zara nodded. She told herself he couldn’t possibly see that swell of sympathy for the boy he’d been flood through her.

  “You’re in luck then,” she told him. “I’ve just declared this the anti-Christmas.”

  “We don’t have to declare it anything,” he said in that harsh way of his that should have felt like a slap, but didn’t. Maybe because she could see that dark thing in his gaze. Maybe because she mourned for a thirteen-year-old boy who had lost too much. “We can continue to pretend it isn’t happening, which I’ve found has worked marvelously for the past twenty years.”

  “You’ll be happy to know that I declined my father’s generous invitation to spend Christmas at his house,” she said as if he hadn’t spoken. “You’re welcome. I’ve been to that Christmas dinner many times, and let me assure you, it’s not as much fun as it sounds. It’s a bit more like the Inquisition. Everyone ends up drunk, in tears or both. I believe it’s my father’s favorite day of the year.”

  “Yet I bet you show up every single year anyway,” Chase said, and not in a complimentary way. “Dutiful and obedient to the bitter end.”

  “The point,” Zara said loftily, “is that I’ve spent a lot of time hiding in the guest bathroom in the far part of the house imagining what a perfect anti-Christmas would entail.”

  Chase moved from around the desk then, that predatory gleam in his gaze that sent Zara’s heart into overdrive.

  “If it doesn’t feature you naked and in my bed, I’m not interested,” he said, and then he was in front of her, sweeping her into his arms and picking her up again, making her head swim.

  This time, she didn’t fight with him. This time, she smiled.

  “I think that can be arranged,” Zara murmured, and then his mouth was on hers and she didn’t care what day it was. She just wanted him again.

  And again.

  And again, like there was nothing in the world but this. But him.

  Them.

  For however long it lasted.

  * * *

  Chase hated Christmas. He preferred to spend the whole of it working, and had spent years telling himself that he enjoyed it that way. England had always seemed to more or less shut down from roughly the fifteenth of December onward, and he’d had a whole half month to himself. He could hide away from the world and no one questioned it, as they were all too busy adhering to their traditions and Christmassing themselves half to death.

  But whatever Zara called what they were doing, he found he liked it.

  They’d spent most of Christmas Eve in his bed, which had suited him fine. Chase had dedicated himself to truly memorizing every last one of her gorgeous curves, and then they’d slept wrapped around each other. In a manner that Chase was opting not to question or even look at too closely, as he doubted he’d like all the alarms that set off inside him.

  And now it was late on Christmas morning, and Zara was standing in the kitchens of Greenleigh, wearing a pair of his boxers, that lush little cashmere thing she’d worn before and an adorable pair of thick socks. Her hair hung about in an untamed tangle of red that reminded him of all the times he’d wrapped it around his fists or buried his fingers in it throughout the night.

  And she was cooking him pancakes, like every domestic daydream he’d ever had about a family life he’d always known he didn’t deserve.

  “Chocolate chip pancakes,” she told him over her shoulder. “Because this is the one day a year that sugar doesn’t count. Well, maybe the second day, depending on your feelings about Halloween.”

  He could fall in love with her, he thought then, watching her fondly from the far counter with a mug of strong, dark coffee at his lips—

  And then froze. Appalled.

  Because, of course, he already had.

  He felt that rocket through him. He felt the ancestral stones buckle beneath his feet. He felt everything he knew to be true about himself quake, then shift.

  He felt.

  Not that Zara noticed.

  “The ultimate Christmas morning delicacy is, obviously, cinnamon rolls, but I couldn’t find the right ingredients,” she was saying, completely unaware what had happened right there before her. Completely oblivious to the seismic event that had knocked him sideways. She glanced over at him and laughed. “What? Everyone has a pastry preference, Chase. It doesn’t make you less of a man to admit it.”

 
And Chase couldn’t help himself. He surrendered.

  She fed him hot, gooey pancakes, sitting cross-legged on the gleaming countertops. She made him laugh more in the course of a single morning that he thought he had in a year. In twenty years. She was like a fountain of joy, and he wanted nothing more than to bathe in it—and he did.

  Despite what was coming. Despite what he knew he would do to her before this was over.

  He laid her out over that same counter and he feasted on her. Their mouths met, sweet from the chocolate and still too hot to bear, and Chase stopped holding himself back. He stopped pretending he could.

  He took her in the library, stretched out on the rug before the fire, then again in one of those leather chairs. He propped her hands against the windows that looked over the river and took her from behind, reveling in the things their bodies could do together. Reveling in all the things he felt with this woman that he’d never felt before—that he’d never imagined he could feel.

  And when he wasn’t sunk deep inside of her, when she wasn’t moaning out his name, she talked. She told him of her Gothic heroes and their naive maidens. She told him of her college friends and the adventures they’d had, far removed from the merciless glare of the public. She told him what it was like to work on her master’s at Yale and how she’d meant to redecorate her grandmother’s cottage once it had passed to her but had found she couldn’t bear to change a thing.

  She cast that spell of hers with every word, pulling him deeper with every story, until Chase couldn’t help but believe. That he was a normal man. That this was like any other love affair and would simply bloom and grow the longer they were together.

  He believed that he could keep from hurting her. He believed that he was the man she seemed to see when she looked at him in that way of hers, with her eyes so warm they rivaled the sun and that pretty smile on her mouth.

  Chase wanted to be that man more than he could remember wanting anything.

  He slept with her and he woke with her, and it was very nearly dizzying, how quickly he became accustomed to both. To the scent of her hair, the sweet smell of her skin. To the soft weight of her against him in the night. To the scratch in her voice when she woke, and the way she frowned at him until she had her coffee.