His for Revenge

by Caitlin Crews

  He let himself believe, even though he knew better.

  And then, soon enough, reality intruded in the form of a curt phone call from his brother-in-law and new chief operating officer, and their time was up. And Chase knew that while he would never forget these days he’d spent with the woman who should never have become his wife, they might also be the death of him.

  It felt like a fair trade.

  “We leave for Manhattan today,” he barked out at her over the breakfast they’d taken to having in the private salon off the master bedroom.

  “Today?” she asked, reasonably startled.

  “Today.” He sounded like an ass and he couldn’t seem to stop himself. It was that or throw away all of his plans and collapse into her—but he couldn’t do that. This wasn’t about him. It was about the company. It was about the debt he could never repay. It was about revenge. He scowled into his own coffee and saw nothing but the deep, clawing murk of the past. “As soon as possible. Mrs. Calloway is packing your things.”

  He felt the way she looked at him, reproachful and watchful at once, but he knew better than to look her way. He’d melt. Again. Possibly for good, and then he’d truly be the failure his father had gone to his death believing he was.

  “Then we’d better not linger,” Zara said in that way of hers that would have made him laugh the night before. That should have made him laugh now, but he could feel himself changing. Growing his once-impenetrable armor back even as he sat there across from her in the elegant little room.

  Reverting to form, something whispered inside of him.

  When he looked at her, he knew his face was blank, and he told himself he was just as hollow within. And it was as much a lie as all of this pretending had been. A lie or a wish—what difference did it make? He was still the man he was. The monster hiding in plain sight, with all of that blood on his hands.

  “This has been a lovely holiday,” he told her, his voice chilly. “But we’ve only two days between now and New Year’s Eve and quite a bit to accomplish.” When she only stared at him as if he’d grown a new head, he let impatience seep into his expression. His voice. “Do you have a problem with that?”

  He watched her shift in her seat. Her legs were folded beneath her as always and she’d pulled on one of his button-down shirts, letting the silk caress those mouthwatering curves of hers in all the ways he wanted to do. She looked edible. She looked like his, damn it.

  But her marvelous eyes were turning wary and that wicked, carnal mouth was pressed into a too-neutral line, and this thing that never should have started was finished. Chase knew it. He welcomed it. It was time to move on.

  So there was no reason at all it should tear at him as it did.

  “Certainly not,” she said quietly, and the Zara he knew had disappeared again, behind that cool, competent shell he remembered from their first, early days. “I believe you tasked me with finding a dress that fits me. We’d best get moving. There’s no telling how long a quest like that might take.”

  And he told himself to get used to it when she stood up and walked away from him, because this was only the beginning. Who cared if he mourned? He was good at mourning.

  This was the easy part.

  CHAPTER NINE

  AFTER THE ISOLATION of Greenleigh, Manhattan was a dizzying rush. All of that speed and sound, the whirl of so many lights and that pulsing energy that settled deep in the bones. Gusts of arctic winds swept through the concrete canyons and temporarily blinded Zara every time she turned a corner, no matter how well she bundled herself up against the chill.

  And it was the change of scenery that was making her feel off balance and strange, Zara assured herself, and not Chase’s abrupt change of demeanor since he’d announced it was time to leave for the city.

  You knew this wouldn’t last, she reminded herself as she walked through the famed marble lobby of The Plaza hotel, a New York City landmark and one of Zara’s favorite places on earth. The Plaza was where Grams had stayed whenever she visited the city while she was still alive, and Zara had a thousand fond memories of meeting her here for tea and spending nights on the roll-out bed in the well-appointed sitting rooms of the various suites she’d stayed in. It’s your own fault if you imagined it might.

  Her friends wanted updates about her feelings. The tabloids had found her email and harassed her daily for any and all hints of something scandalous they could run. Her father left increasingly angry voice mails. And Zara had ignored all of them and spent the past two days sitting in the study on the bottom floor of the two-story suite Chase had declared was theirs for the duration, ignoring the elegant, iconic French decor and dutifully working on her thesis. When she hadn’t been making the rounds to the Manhattan dress shops she could tolerate—meaning, the ones her sister didn’t patronize—to find a dress that Chase might think “fit her.”

  Which might very well have been his restrained, very British way of telling you that you looked fat at your wedding, she reminded herself.

  Not that she disagreed. But she wished he’d never said that. She wished a lot of things. It was as if that brief spate of Christmas cheer had never happened. As if it was all nothing more than the fevered fantasies of the Ugly Duckling Elliott sister who’d stolen her sister’s man, as the tabloids now told it.

  Until he came to her late at night, that was.

  In the dark, Chase was tormented and possessed, and he took her like their lives depended on it. Zara half believed that they might. The Manhattan lights kept their bedroom bright, but he was always in shadow, always moving over her and in her like those increasingly dark dreams of hers, never showing her all those parts of himself she’d thought she’d come to know well in that big old house of his upstate.

  It didn’t take a genius to understand that Chase was coming undone, and that it no doubt meant this marriage was, too.

  Zara made her way to the elevator and stepped inside, telling herself to be philosophical. Resigned to the inevitable, not saddened by it. She’d known the risks when she’d introduced the physical into this bloodless marriage on paper. She’d known that what happened between them would never, ever be anything but temporary.

  There is absolutely no use crying over spilled milk, she told herself briskly as the elevator rose toward their floor. There never is.

  No matter that she was desperately afraid that she might have fallen in love with him. That was her version of “casual.”

  Her version of casual sucked.

  She let herself into the large, airy suite dotted with huge windows that overlooked Central Park and let in so much winter light it nearly burned. She shrugged out of her coat and kicked off her boots, padding on bare feet down the hall, past the study she’d set up as her office while Chase spent his time at the Whitaker Industries headquarters several blocks south, and into the living room with its great, gold-rimmed mirror arching high above the marble fireplace.

  And then stopped in her tracks when she heard a very familiar peal of laughter wafting toward her down the staircase from the second floor.

  From the bedroom.

  Zara stood stock-still, not believing her own ears. This was her vast swath of insecurities talking, surely, treating her to an auditory hallucination—

  But footsteps followed the laughter, and she watched in a frozen kind of horror as Ariella sauntered into view.

  Her feet appeared first, clad in ankle boots with her typical skyscraper heels that made no concession whatsoever to the fact that it was late December and the city streets were icy and treacherous. Then her long, skinny legs, shown to great advantage in a pair of dark leggings that hugged every lean inch of them. Then her teeny-tiny hips, wrapped in some kind of complicated metal belt that made them look that much more slight and narrow. Then her much-photographed torso, shown to great advantage in a dark blazer with a gauzy scarf tossed around her neck.

  And then she was right there on the stairs leading down from the bed where Chase had kept Zara awake until well
into the morning—only hours ago, Zara couldn’t help but think—all that carefully highlighted blond hair gleaming in the afternoon light and a self-satisfied smirk on her face as she saw who waited for her below.

  She took her time. Ariella had always enjoyed a good entrance.

  “Just look at you, Pud,” Ariella trilled, using that awful nickname that had once been Pudding that she’d bestowed upon Zara for eating too much dessert one miserable summer. “What have you been doing all day? Digging sewers in the outer boroughs?”

  Until that moment, of course, Zara had believed she looked good. Better than good. She’d tamed her hair into a concoction featuring a number of braids and collected it all in a big bun that she’d thought looked pretty and interesting at once. She was wearing a royal-blue sweater dress that she’d imagined made all of her curves sing. She’d been looking forward to gauging Chase’s reaction to it, though she’d told herself several lies about that, as that felt slightly pathetic and needy. Still. There it was.

  And she hated the fact that one snide comment from her sister made her doubt what she’d seen with her own eyes in her mirror that morning and in the dress shop she’d just left after finally finding the perfect New Year’s Eve gown.

  But she merely smiled, because it had been a long time since she’d showed Ariella that kind of weakness.

  “Did you get confused, Ariella?” she asked, infusing her voice with concern. “I know dates and times and responsibilities aren’t your strong suit. You were supposed to turn up at the church in Connecticut over three weeks ago. Not here at The Plaza today.”

  Ariella came to the bottom of the stairs, stopped with a bit of dramatic license and rolled her eyes.

  “He’s not really your husband, Zara. You’re not that delusional, are you?” She laughed when Zara only stared back at her. “Or maybe you are. I don’t know how to break this to you—” and she made sure to smirk again, then let her expression turn lascivious and pointed at once “—but Chase doesn’t seem to think he’s very married.”

  The twelve-year-old inside of Zara reacted exactly the way Ariella wanted her to react to that insinuation—with horror and upset. Far more of both than was warranted, she understood, from something she kept trying to tell herself was “casual.” But the rest of Zara was much older than twelve and had been dealing with Ariella for far too long to take anything she said to heart.

  That Zara sighed. “Let me guess. You really don’t like the fact that the tabloids are suggesting that I could steal a man from you.”

  “Because you couldn’t!” Ariella spat at once. “The very idea is hilarious! Look at you!”

  And then she waved her hand up and down, taking Zara in with the loopy gesture, making Zara feel tiny and hugely fat at once. As intended.

  Zara locked that away. This wasn’t junior high school, no matter how her sister behaved.

  “Let this be a lesson to you, Ariella,” Zara said very calmly. “When you run away from your own arranged wedding ceremony, someone else might be called upon to take your place. And the tabloids might draw their own conclusions.”

  Ariella glared at her, her hazel eyes narrowing. “You’re loving this, aren’t you?” she asked softly. “You’ve waited your whole, sad life for this kind of attention.”

  It was Zara’s turn to roll her eyes. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I love each and every demonstration of how little you think of me. It warms my heart. And it’s always been my dearest wish to be neck-deep in one of Dad’s ugly little plots. This is all a dream come true.”

  Ariella pursed her lips, then sashayed over to the long, ornate couch, sweeping up the long, black coat Zara had failed to notice was tucked away on the far side.

  “Enjoy it while you can,” Ariella advised coolly. Then she looked up, as if she could see past the gleaming chandelier and into the master bedroom suite above them, and smiled that smug smile of hers again. “I know I did.”

  Zara observed, as if from a far greater distance than simply the length of the sitting room bathed in too much sharp December light, that despite all the thousands of ways her sister had insulted and hurt her over the years, this was the first time she thought she really might haul off and punch her. Preferably right in her face.

  But she knew better than to say anything—to give Ariella any more ammunition or satisfaction, especially if it could be construed as jealousy over Chase. She only crossed her arms over her front and waited as her sister took her sweet time buttoning up her coat and then pulling on her sleek leather gloves.

  “I’ll be sure to tell Dad that things are finally in check,” Ariella was saying, sounding delighted with herself. “I know he’ll be relieved. And I suppose I’ll see you at the New Year’s Eve party. If you still insist on coming.”

  “Chase wants me there,” Zara replied, though she knew better than to engage like that. There was no winning a fight with someone who wasn’t fighting for anything—whose single goal was to inflict pain. No winning and no point trying. But she couldn’t seem to help herself. “And I am nothing if not a dutiful wife, Ariella. I find I’ve taken to the role like it was made for me.”

  Ariella didn’t like that, Zara could see, and that just about made this whole scene worth it. Her pretty face twisted in something like disgust. Or maybe it was pure rage.

  “It wasn’t,” Ariella said, and her voice was poisonous. “Like everything else, it was made for me, and you’re the unwanted, unattractive backup plan. Too bad, Pud. But then, you can’t imagine this was ever going to work out, can you?”

  Her derisive laughter told Zara what she thought of that. And then she flounced toward the door, her ridiculous heels loud in the long hallway. Zara trailed after her automatically, leaving enough distance between them that she might—might—fight off the urge toward violence.

  “I don’t need an escort to find my way out,” Ariella said as she opened the door and looked back over her shoulder. “I didn’t need one on my way in, either.”

  “Don’t be silly, Ariella,” Zara replied, summoning up another smile, though this one was much sharper than its predecessors. “I’m making sure the door is locked. This is New York City. You never know what garbage might roll in off the streets.”

  Ariella looked surprised for a moment, but then she laughed in her superior way and closed the door behind her. And she was gone, leaving nothing but the faint scent of her perfume—a lovely bit of something citrus, of course, everything about her was calculated to be effortlessly lovely—behind.

  Zara’s hands shook as she threw the dead bolt, and she imagined that she could hear further peals of laughter from the hall beyond. Ringing in her ears. Taunting her. She gritted her teeth and turned back to the suite, glaring ferociously at the floor and her own feet in the tights she’d worn against the bitter cold outside. She ordered herself not to think about it. Not to give Ariella what she wanted. Not to succumb to that same self-hating madness that had chased her across so many years.

  It didn’t matter what Ariella had been doing here. It didn’t matter what might or might not have happened between her and Chase. Because she might have the title at the moment, but Zara wasn’t really his wife. She knew that. She knew it—even if her heart balked.

  He was never yours, a caustic voice told her, harsh and true. You can’t lose something you never had to begin with.

  But when she walked into the living room, Chase was standing on the stairs that led up to the second story, staring down at her with a black look on his face and his wild blue eyes like a hard slap.

  * * *

  “Why the hell do you let her speak to you like that?” Chase demanded, incredulous, when that wasn’t what he’d meant to say at all.

  Zara stiffened, pulling herself up to her full height in the arched doorway to the hall and the door beyond, looking like a bloody queen in a soft dress that licked all over her the way he couldn’t seem to stop yearning to do. The way that was driving him mad even now, when he entertained the foolish notion that
he might protect her.

  He, who would only hurt her, and well did he know it. It was laughable. But still, it worked in him, like need. Like madness.

  “If there is a way to stop Ariella doing exactly what she wants, when she wants to do it, I’ve never discovered it,” she said in a light, airy voice he didn’t believe at all. “Did you fare any better?”

  Chase scowled at her. “Is that an accusation?”

  He watched her hands ball into fists and something very old and very tired moved over her face. It made that foolish thing in him that wanted so desperately to play the hero for her shift to full alert. It made him wish her sister were a man so Chase could have dealt with her as she deserved.

  “We might be married,” Zara said, her voice bland and cool and he hated it, “but I’d have to be a particular brand of idiot to imagine those vows meant anything to you. You’re not required to keep any promises to me.” Her gaze was dark and it hit at him. Hard. “Nevertheless, I’d like to think you’re not stupid enough to sleep with Ariella when she’s that obviously playing one of her games. No doubt at my father’s urging.” She shrugged. “But then again, the male libido makes its own rules, doesn’t it? Or so says the history of the world.”

  Chase felt a muscle in his jaw tense, and he didn’t know if he walked down the remaining stairs toward her to protect her—or make her pay, somehow, for thinking less of him when he knew that was what he should want. When it was no less than he deserved.

  He should let her think he’d done exactly what Ariella wanted her to think he’d done. It would make everything easier.

  “Of course I didn’t touch her,” he said instead, and there was no reason for it. Only Zara’s lifted chin, her challenging gaze. Only that perfect mouth of hers and that stillness in the way she held herself that made him want to hold her instead. “She was here all of three minutes before you arrived, she was decidedly not welcome and I made no secret of that, and I’ve no idea how she wrangled a key from the front desk.”