I couldn’t tell if the pulse that pounded in me then—in my wrists and my ears, my breasts and between my legs—was fear or something else. Something far more dangerous.
All I knew was that I wanted whatever Celeste had appeared to have on my settee. I wanted that confidence. I even wanted her smugness.
Because it seemed to me that was some measure of power.
I didn’t want to be what they called me. The lesser Fitzalan sister. The unfortunate one. Not here. Not now.
I didn’t want this man—who had broken me wide-open in ways I didn’t know how to explain without, as far as I could tell, so much as breaking a sweat—to know how inexperienced I was. I didn’t want to give him my innocence, particularly if he thought it was his by right.
Just once, I thought defiantly, I wanted to feel sophisticated.
Just once, I wanted to be the sleek one, the graceful one.
I wasn’t sure I could fake my sister’s effortlessness. But I knew that my smirk was getting to him. I could see it in all that stone and metal that made his face so harsh.
“All the better,” Javier growled at me, though he didn’t look anything like pleased. “You should know that I am a man of a great many needs, Imogen. That I will not have to tutor you how best to meet them can only be a boon.”
I didn’t believe him. I didn’t know what it was that whispered to me that he minded a great deal more than he was saying, but I knew it all the same.
Or you want to know it, something whispered in me, leaving marks. You want to affect him, somehow, after he took your breath away like this.
I didn’t want to think such things. I found myself frowning at him instead.
“Careful,” Javier said with a soft menace that made me feel molten and shivery all over again. “If you do not want an example of the sort of appetites I mean, here and now, I’d suggest you go back wherever you came from. There is a wedding in the morning. And an entire marriage before us in which, I promise you, you will have ample time to learn what it is I want and expect. In bed and out.”
And then I felt twisted. As if there was something wrong deep within me. Because the fact he was dismissing me stung, when I knew I should have been grateful for the reprieve. I flushed again, but this time it felt more like poison than that same impossible, irresistible heat.
I was only pretending to be like Celeste—and the look on Javier’s harsh face suggested that I wasn’t doing a particularly good job. I was certain that if he touched me again, I would never be able to keep it up.
And no matter that there was a part of me that shimmered with longing. That wanted nothing more than to feel his hands on me again. And more.
So much more.
I knew I had to take the escape hatch he had offered me—or lose myself even further.
Possibly even lose myself for good.
I slid off the table to find my feet, and fought to keep my expression from betraying how tender I felt where his hand had been between my legs. It felt as if my panties were somehow too tight, as if I was swollen, and I hardly knew how to walk on my own.
Yet I did. I managed it.
I skirted around him as if he was on fire, convinced that I could feel that blistering heat of his from feet away. Convinced that he had branded me, somehow. And entirely too aware of his glittering, arrogant gaze.
But I had a long night ahead of me to fret over such things.
I only understood that I expected him to reach out and take hold of me again when he didn’t. And when I made it to the spiral stair and ran up it as fast as I could on my rubbery legs, the clatter of my heart inside my chest was so loud I was surprised he didn’t hear it and comment on it from below.
I made my way along the second-floor gallery, aware of his gaze on me like a heavy weight—or some kind of chain binding me to him already—but I didn’t turn back. I didn’t dare look back.
Maybe there was a part of me that feared if I did, I might go to him again. That I would sink into that fire of his and burn alive, until there was nothing left of me but ashes.
When I slipped back beneath the tapestry and into the servants’ walkway, there was no relief. It was like I carried Javier with me, in all the places he had touched me and, worse by far, all the places I only wished he had.
It was as if I was already half-consumed by that fire of his I both feared and longed for.
But I would die before I let him know that he had taught me more in those wild, hot moments than I had learned in a lifetime.
The reality was, I thought about what a wedding night with this man might entail and I...thought I might die, full stop.
I knew that was melodramatic, but I indulged in it anyway as I made my way through the shadowy recesses of my father’s house. Why had I gone to Javier in the first place? Why had I been so foolish? What had I imagined might happen? I wanted to sink into a bath and wash it all away, let the water soothe me and hide me. I simply wanted to be back in my rooms again, safe and protected.
Because a deep, feminine wisdom I hadn’t known resided there inside me whispered these final hours before my wedding might be the last bit of safety I would know.
I knew too much now, and none of it things I’d wanted to learn. I had found a magic and a fire, yes. But now I knew how easily I surrendered. I knew how my body betrayed me.
I knew, worst of all, that I wanted things I was terribly afraid only Javier Dos Santos could give me.
And I wasn’t paying sufficient attention when I slipped out from the servants’ hall. I was usually far more careful. I usually listened for a good few minutes, then used the carefully placed eyeholes to be certain that no one was in sight before I slipped back into the house’s main corridors.
But Javier had done something to me. He had used my own body against me, as if he knew what it could do better than I did. He had made me feel as if I belonged to him instead of to myself. Even with all this distance between us, clear on the other side of the rambling old manor house, I could feel his hands on me. Those powerful arms closed around me. His harsh, cruel mouth while it mastered mine.
That was the only excuse I could think of when I stepped out and found myself face-to-face with my father.
For a long, terrible moment, there was nothing but silence between us and the far-off sound of rain against the roof.
Dermot Fitzalan was neither tall nor particularly physically imposing, but he made up for both with the scorn he held for literally every person alive who was not him.
To say nothing of the extra helping he kept in reserve for me.
“Pray tell me that I have taken leave of my senses.” His voice was so cold it made the ancient stone house feel balmy in comparison. I felt goose bumps prickle to life down my arms. “I beg you, Imogen—tell me that I did not witness an heiress to the Fitzalan fortune emerge from the servants’ quarters like an inept housemaid I would happily dismiss on the spot.”
I had imagined myself brave, before. When I had taken off on a whim and found the man my father had chosen for me. When I had tangled with a monster and walked away—changed, perhaps, but whole.
But I realized as I stood there, the focus of my father’s withering scorn as I so often was, that when it counted I wasn’t the least bit brave at all.
“I thought I heard a noise,” I lied, desperately. “I only ducked my head in to see what it was.”
“I beg your pardon.” My father looked at me the way he always did, as if the sight of me was vaguely repulsive. “Why should a lady of this house, a daughter of the Fitzalan line, feel it is incumbent upon her to investigate strange noises? Are you unable to ring for assistance?”
“Father—”
He lifted a hand. That was all.
But that was all that was needed. It silenced me as surely as if he’d wrapped that hand around my throat and squeezed. The hard light in his
dark gaze suggested it was not outside the realm of possibility.
“You are an enduring disappointment to me, Imogen.” His voice was cold. Detached. And I already knew this to be so. There was no reason it should have felt like an unexpected slap when he took every opportunity to remind me how often and comprehensively I let him down. And yet my cheeks stung red as if he’d actually struck me. “I do not understand this...willfulness.”
He meant my hair. He meant those curls that had never obeyed anyone. Not him and not me, certainly. Not the relentless nuns, not my old governesses, not the poor maids he hired to attack me with their formulas and their straight irons to no avail.
“You might almost be pretty, if distressingly rough around the edges, were it not for that mess you insist on flaunting.”
My father glared at my curls with such ferocity that I was almost surprised he didn’t reach out and try to tear them off with his hand.
“I can’t help my hair, Father,” I dared to say in a low voice.
It was a mistake.
That ferocious glare left my hair and settled on me. Hard.
“Let me make certain you are aware of how I expect this weekend to go,” he said, his voice lowering in that way of his that made my stomach drop. “In less than twenty-four hours you will be another man’s problem. He will be forced to handle these pointless rebellions of yours, and I wish him good luck. But you will exit this house, and my protection, as befits a Fitzalan.”
I didn’t need to know what, specifically, he meant by that. What I knew about my father was that whenever he began to rant on about the things that befit a member of this family, it always ended badly for me.
Still, I wasn’t the same girl who had foolishly wandered off in search of my husband-to-be. I wasn’t the silly creature who had sat on my own settee staring out at the rain and dreaming of a stable boy. She felt far away to me now, a dream I had once had.
Because Javier Dos Santos had branded me as surely as if he’d pressed hot iron against my skin, and I could still feel the shock of it. The burn.
“What do you suggest I do?” I asked, with the sort of spirit I knew my father would find offensive. I couldn’t seem to help myself. “Shave it all off?”
My father bared his teeth and I shrank back, but it was no use. My back came up hard against the wall. There was nowhere for me to go.
And in any event, it was worse if I ran.
“I suspect you are well aware that I wish no such thing, Imogen.” If possible, my father’s voice dripped with further disdain. “I take it you imagine that your marriage will provide you with some measure of freedom. Perhaps you view it as an escape. If you know what is good for you, girl, you will readjust that attitude before tomorrow morning. Your new husband might not be of the blood, but I assure you, he expects total and complete obedience in all things.”
“I never said—” I began.
My father actually smiled. It was chilling. “In fact, Dos Santos is nothing but a common, rutting creature who handles any and all conflict with the deftness you might expect from an uncivilized beast. I shudder to think how he will choose to handle these displays of yours.”
I thought I had a good idea of how he might handle them now, but I dropped my gaze, terrified that my father might see all that need and fire Javier had taught me, written all over me. And because I didn’t want to see the malicious glee I knew would be stamped all over my only living parent at the notion my husband would handle me.
I tried not to miss my mother as it did no good. But in moments like this I couldn’t help myself. I knew that if she’d lived, she wouldn’t have defied my father, either, but at least I’d had no doubt she loved me.
“Silence at last?” my father taunted me. “That will not help you, either. The die is cast, I am afraid. You will spend the rest of this day and evening locked in your rooms. But do not imagine you will have the opportunity to retreat into those books you love so much, unnatural as you are. I will send in your attendants and mark my words, Imogen. I do not care if it takes from now until the moment the ceremony begins tomorrow, but you will look like a proper Fitzalan for the first time in your life, I swear it. You will tame that mess you call hair. You will do something with your face, for a change. You will be manicured and pedicured and forced to look like the pride and joy of this house no matter what it takes.”
“Father,” I tried again, “none of this is necessary.”
“You cannot be trusted,” he seethed at me. “You are an embarrassment. I have never understood how a child of my loins could come out so slovenly. Quite apart from those curls, look at how you walk around my house knowing full well we have important guests who expect the Fitzalan name to connote nothing but grace and elegance, handed down over centuries.” His scornful glare swept me from forehead to toes, then back again. “You look as common as he is.”
That was the worst insult my father could think to hurl at me.
And the part of me that wished I could please him, no matter how well I knew that was an impossibility, recoiled.
But I didn’t say a word. I stood there, letting him skewer me in every way possible, because it wasn’t as if there was any way to stop him. There never had been.
When he was done, he straightened, though he already stood as if there was an iron pole where his spine should have been. He adjusted the cuffs of his jacket indignantly, as if my slovenliness was contagious.
“Go to your rooms at once,” he told me, as if I was a small child. Which was how I felt when he looked at me. “You will sit there and you will await your attendants.”
“Yes, Father.” I tried to sound obliging and obedient.
He reached over and grabbed my arm, his fingers closing painfully over my biceps. But I knew better than to make any sound of protest.
“You have less than a day remaining in this house,” he hissed. “Less than a day remaining to conduct yourself appropriately. And I warn you, Imogen. If you attempt to embarrass me further, you will not like how this wedding ceremony goes. Remember that all I require is your presence at the ceremony. It is utterly irrelevant to me if you are capable of speaking or even standing.”
He left me there, marching off without so much as a backward glance, because he was certain that I would obey him. He was certain—and he was right.
I knew that none of his threats were idle. He would roll me into my own wedding ceremony strapped down to a stretcher if he wished, and not one guest would raise an eyebrow. I wasn’t a person to them. I wasn’t me. I was a Fitzalan heiress, nothing more and nothing less, and it was my father’s right to do with me what he pleased. The guests here were as interested in my feelings on what happened in my life as they would be in the thoughts of any piece of livestock.
I could feel the fingerprints Father had left on me, bruising up on my arm already. I ducked my head down, frustration and fury making my eyes water, as I headed toward my rooms.
As ordered.
But the things my father had said to me had, perhaps, the opposite effect of what he’d intended.
Because I had been so focused on Javier. On the fact he was meant to be a monster. I had been so worried about marching myself down the aisle and straight on into my own doom.
I hadn’t spent nearly enough time thinking about the fact that monster or not, Javier could only be an improvement on the monster I would be leaving behind.
I might never be free, but I would be free of my father.
And if the price of that was an unpleasant evening of attempts to beat me into submission and make of me the perfect Fitzalan bride to honor my father’s vanity, I could only believe it was worth it.
CHAPTER FOUR
Javier
I WASN’T ENTIRELY surprised that my blushing bride was nowhere to be seen at the tedious drinks affair Dermot Fitzalan threw that night.
After all, this was not
the kind of wedding that got written up in the gossip pages or excessively photographed for the Style sections of various magazines across the globe, rife with planned events and excessive opportunities to celebrate the romantic idiocy of the marrying couple. My wedding was not a performance.
It was a contract and Imogen was incidental. I had paid for access. For a connection to the kings across time who lived in the Fitzalan name. For the pièce de résistance to add to my collection.
“Have you come with no family of your own, Dos Santos?” asked one of the wolves gathered for this occasion that I doubted anyone would call joyous. He was an overly titled idiot who had spent the last few moments risking his continuing health by standing too close to me and making a great show of looking around the room while he did it. He had obviously wished me to ask what he was doing. I had not. “What kind of man attends his own wedding solo?”
I raised my glass, but made no attempt to wrestle my expression into anything approaching polite. “A man who is well aware that he is making a business acquisition, which I am perfectly capable of doing without an entourage.”
The other man brayed with laughter, and I was already bored. I left him without another word, making my way through the high-ceilinged room that had been set up to host this supposedly genial cocktail hour ahead of what promised to be an even duller banquet. I knew Fitzalan was showing off, the way he always did. The guests were meant to be in awe of this historical monument he called a house, me most of all. I was meant to be cowed into reverence by the medieval flourishes and the history in every ostentatious antique.
I was meant to feel small.
Sadly for Fitzalan and his self-regard, I felt quite the opposite.
I couldn’t get my bride-to-be and her wild, wholly irreverent red-gold curls out of my head.
Imogen Fitzalan was not at all what I had been expecting and I could not recall the last time anything had surprised me. Much less a woman. Women tended to blur together for me, in truth. Those who approached me hungered for my wealth, my power, and were willing to trade their bodies for a taste of it. And who was I to refuse these generous offers? I accepted them, I enjoyed them, and then I promptly forgot them.
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