I had always known that I intended to marry a woman who could give my children the only thing I could not buy for them myself: blue blood.
But until that day came, I had always been perfectly happy to revel in the demands of the common red blood that coursed freely in me. It was a heavy pulse in me even now, surrounded by the pale blue aristocrats on all sides and the sort of ancient, theatrical objects cluttering every surface that I knew were meant to trumpet the value of their owner. I was surrounded by the worst sort of wolves, yet I was thinking about sex. All thanks to the bride I had expected would be a cold, prim virgin unable to make eye contact.
I wasn’t sure what to do with the surprise I felt. I wasn’t sure I liked it.
I made my way to the windows that overlooked the gloomy gardens out back as the fog rolled in to cap off another miserable French day. I preferred the bright heat of Spain, the warmth of my people, and the rhythm of my native language. I nursed my drink as I watched some of Europe’s wealthiest men circle each other warily as if violence might erupt at any moment, when I knew very well that was not how men like these attacked. They preferred a stealthier approach. They came at their enemies through hostile takeovers and cruel buyouts. They wielded their fortunes like the armies of lesser men.
They didn’t scare me. Not one of the men in this room had created what was his with his own hands. I was the only one here with that distinction.
It meant I was the only one here who knew what it was to live without these privileges. To grow up hard and have nothing but myself to rely on.
And that meant they had a weakness, a blindness, that I did not.
I was smiling at that notion when Celeste swept into the room on the arm of the animated corpse who had made her a countess. The decrepit aristocrat she had chosen over me.
I waited for that kick that I recalled so well at the sight of her. I had called it lust, back then. Lust and fury, need and madness.
But I knew it better now. Or I knew myself. It had been a kind of covetousness, the way I lusted after the finest cars and the most luxurious residences in the best locations. I had wanted Celeste, desperately. I had imagined she would be the crown jewel of my collection.
Yet tonight, as I saw her operate the room like the shark I hadn’t realized she was ten years ago—despite that flat gaze and the smile she leveraged like a weapon—that kick was missing. Was it that I was a decade older now? Perhaps I had seen too much to be turned around by a gracefully inclined neck and too many pretty lies. Or was it that I had finally tasted something sweet today and wanted more of it instead of these bitter dregs of once proud family lines?
If they are bitter dregs, what are you? a harsh voice inside me asked. As you are here to drink deep of what little they have to offer.
I didn’t know the answer. What I did know was that this evening wearied me already. It could have been any night on any continent in any city, surrounded by the same people who were always gathered in places like this. The conversation was the same. Measuring contests, one way or another. In the dangerous neighborhoods of my youth, men had jostled for position with more outward displays of testosterone, but for all the bespoke tailoring and affectations, it was no different here. Learning that had been the key to my first million.
And still all I could think about was Imogen. That ripe mouth of hers that looked like berries and tasted far, far sweeter. And better yet, her scalding softness that had clung to my fingers as she’d clenched and shook and fallen apart.
I had tasted her from my own hand as she sat before me on that table, attempting to recover, and now it was as if I could taste nothing else.
I’d forgotten about Celeste entirely when she appeared before me, smiling knowingly as if we shared a particularly filthy secret. As if we’d last seen each other moments ago, instead of years back.
And as if that last meeting hadn’t involved operatic sobs on her part, vicious threats from her father, and a young man’s blustery vows of revenge from me.
In retrospect, I was embarrassed for the lot of us.
“How does it feel?” she asked in that husky voice of hers that was so at odds with all her carefully icy blond perfection. But that was her greatest weapon, after all. Hot and cold. Ice and sex. All those deliberate contradictions at once, that was Celeste.
I eyed her entirely too long for it to be polite. “Are you suddenly concerned with my feelings? I somehow doubt it.”
Celeste let out that tinkling laugh of hers, as if I had said something amusing. “Don’t be silly, Javier.”
“I can assure you I have never been ‘silly’ a single moment in my life. There is little reason to imagine I might start now. Here.”
I did not say, with you.
“You and I know how this game is played,” she told me, managing to sound airy and intimate at once. “There are certain rules, are there not? And they must be followed, no matter what we think of them. I must commend you on thinking to offer for poor, sweet Imogen, the dull little dear. But it will all work beautifully now.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You were wise to wait,” she continued gaily, as if the harsh tone I used was encouraging. As if this was an actual conversation instead of a strange performance on her part. “For men with bloodlines as pristine as the count, there can be no stain upon his heirs. Not even a stray whisper. But I have already done my duty and given him spotless children without the faintest bit of scandal attached to their births. Why should he care what I do now?”
I stared at her. So long that the sly, stimulating smile faltered on her lips.
“You cannot imagine that you hold the slightest enticement for me, can you?” I asked with a soft menace I could see very well hit her like a blow. And she was lucky that I knew very well that no matter how disinterested the crowd around us might have seemed, everyone was watching this interaction. Because everyone knew that a decade back, I had made a fool of myself over this woman. “Is your opinion of yourself so high that you honestly believe I would so much as cross a street for you? Much less marry another woman for the dubious pleasure of becoming close to you in some way? I am interested in the Fitzalan name, Celeste. The blood of centuries of kingmakers. Not a single faithless woman I forgot the moment you made your decision ten years ago.”
But this was Celeste, who had never faced a moment she couldn’t turn into a game—and one in which she had an advantage. Though I was certain I saw a hint of uncertainty in her gaze, it was gone in an instant.
And then I was assaulted with that laughter of hers that had haunted me long after I had left this very house way back when. And not because I had longed to hear it again—ever—but because it was the soundtrack of my own, early humiliation. One of my very few losses.
“You do what you must, Javier,” she murmured throatily at me. “Play hard to get if your pride requires it. You and I know the truth, do we not?”
And, perhaps wisely, she did not stick around to hear my answer.
But when they called us into the formal dining hall for the banquet sometime later, I made my way over to Fitzalan and curtly told him that I would not be joining him at the table.
“I beg your pardon,” the man said in his stuffy way. I couldn’t tell if he looked more affronted or astonished—and this could have been as much because I had approached him without express invitation as what I’d said. “Perhaps you are unaware, Dos Santos, but you are the guest of honor.” In case I had failed to pick up on that little dig, that suggestion I didn’t know enough to realize the dinner was supposedly for me, he inclined his head in a show of benevolence that made my jaw clench. “You are the one getting married in the morning. It is customary for you to take part.”
I forced myself to smile, though it felt raw and unused. “I suspect you will all enjoy yourselves more if you can talk about me rather than to me.”
And I only lifted a brow when the other man sputtered in obvious insult.
Not because it wasn’t true. But because a man like Dermot Fitzalan was far more offended that anyone might dare call him out on his behavior. Especially if that “anyone” was a commoner like me.
I didn’t wait for his response, which no doubt insulted him all the more. I left the crowd without any further awkward discussions, then I made my way through the great house, not sure where my feet were taking me. My thoughts were a strange jumble of Celeste, then and now. The Fitzalan family and how Imogen fit into it, so different was she from her father and sister.
And I even thought about my own family, who it had never occurred to me to invite to take part in this spectacle.
My mother had never taken to the new life I had provided for her. She viewed it all with suspicion and saved the worst of that suspicion for me—especially because of the deal we’d struck. Namely, that I would support her only if she gave up her former life and habits entirely. No opiates. No drink. Nothing but the sweet prison of my money.
“Why must you have a wife such as this?” she had demanded the last time we spoke, when I had subjected myself to my usual monthly visitation to make sure neither she nor my sisters had backslid into habits that would—sooner or later—send the wrong sort of people to my door.
I would pay for their lives as long as they kept them quiet and legal. I would not pay to get them out of the trouble I’d insisted they leave behind in their old ones.
They had all flatly refused to leave Madrid. I had only convinced them to leave the old, terrible neighborhood after a criminal rival had murdered my father—years after I had cut him out of my life because he’d refused to quit selling his poison.
It had taken longer than that for my mother and sisters to kick their own seedy habits. And none of us pretended they’d done it for any but the most mercenary reasons. They all wanted the life I could give them, not the life they’d had—especially not when they might find themselves forced to pay for my father’s sins if they stayed there.
But that didn’t mean they liked it. Or me.
“The Fitzalan girl is an emblem,” I had told my mother, sitting stiffly in the house I kept for her and my sisters. I would not have discussed my marital plans with her at all, but had run out of other topics to discuss with these people who hated me for bettering them. “A trophy, that is all.”
“With all your money you can make anything you like into a trophy. What do you care what these people think?”
My mother had a deep distrust of the upper classes. My father had trafficked in too many things to count as the local head of a much wider, much more dangerous operation—and she had always been in peril herself because of it—but she knew that world. On some level she would always trust the streets more than the fine house I had provided for her.
Just as she trusted the desperate men who ruled there more than she ever would me.
“My children will have the blood of aristocrats,” I had said. “There will be no doors closed to them.”
My mother had made a scornful sort of noise. “No one can see another person’s blood, Javier. Unless you spill it. And the only people who worry about such things are too afraid to do such things themselves.”
My sisters, by contrast, had praised the very idea of a Fitzalan bride for their only brother, because they believed that if they pretended to be kind to me, I might confuse that for true kindness and increase my generosity.
“It will be like having royalty in the family!” Noellia had cried.
“She might as well be a princess!” Mariana had agreed rapturously.
My sisters had taken to my money with avid, delirious greed. They had not disagreed with me in years. On any topic. Because they always, always wanted more. And the longer they lived lavishly at my expense, the less they wanted to find themselves tossed back into the dank pit we’d all come from.
Or more precisely: the pit from which I had clawed my way, with all of them on my back.
I had made the same bargain with all of them. I would finance their lives as long as their pursuits never embarrassed me or caused so much as a ripple in the careful life I’d built.
We had always been family in name only. My father had used us all in different ways, either as mules or distractions or accomplices. We were all tainted by the man who had made us and the lies he’d told us.
And worse still, the things we’d done back then, when we’d had no other choices.
Or what I had done to get away from the tragedy of my beginnings.
Of course I hadn’t wanted them here, surrounded by so many of Europe’s hereditary predators, each and every one of them desperate to find something—anything—they could use to weaken my position in any one of the markets I dominated.
I wandered the Fitzalan house for a long while. Eventually I found myself in the library, cavernous and dimly lit this night. The roof up above was a dome of glass, though rain fell upon it tonight with an insistent beat that made me almost too aware of its potential for collapse. It felt too much like foreboding, so I focused on the books instead. On the shelves that lined the walls two stories high, packed tight with volume after volume I had never read. And had likely never heard of, for that matter.
I was not an educated man. There had been no time to lose myself in books when there were worlds to be won. And yet I felt it tug at me, that insatiable thirst for knowledge that I had always carried in me. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake, instead of the kind of intelligence I had learned to assemble to carry into boardrooms and stately homes like this one, so I might best whoever I encountered.
There were times I thought I would have killed for the opportunity to immerse myself in these books men like Dermot Fitzalan had grudgingly read at some or other boarding school in their youth, then promptly forgot, though they always considered themselves far more educated than the likes of me.
Men like him—men like all those who gathered around that dining table even now, no doubt trading snide stories of my barbaric, common ways—preferred to build beautiful monuments to knowledge like this library, then never use them. I didn’t have to know a single thing about Dermot Fitzalan’s private life to know that he never tarried here, flipping through all these books he had at his disposal simply because he wished to improve his mind. Or escape for an hour. Or for any reason at all.
Meanwhile, I still remembered the first library I had ever entered as a child. We had been rich for our neighborhood because my father ran product, but still poor in every meaningful way. There had never been any cozy nights at home, reading books or learning letters or tending to the mind in any way. Anything I knew I had been forced to pry out of the terrible schools I’d been sent to by law, often without any help from teachers or staff. And any bit of information, knowledge, or fact I’d uncovered in those sad places had been a prize to me.
The library in the primary school I had attended had been a joke. I knew that now. But what I remembered was my sense of awe and wonder when I had walked into a room of books, however paltry the selection or small the room. I hadn’t understood that I could read whichever of them I chose at will. It had taken me years to trust that it wasn’t another trick like the ones I knew from home. It had taken me a long time to truly believe I could take any book I liked, read it elsewhere, and return it for another without any dire consequences.
Here in this hushed, moneyed place that was palatial in comparison to the libraries in my memory, I pulled a book with a golden spine out from the shelf closest to me, measured the weight of it in my hand, then put it back.
I drifted over to one of the tables in the middle of the floor, set up with seating areas and tables for closer study. The table nearest to me was polished wood, gleaming even in the dim light, and empty save for three uneven stacks of books. I looked closer. One was a pile of novels. Another was of nonfiction, the narr
ative sort, in several languages. The third, the shortest, was of poetry.
“May I assist you, sir?” came a smooth, deferential voice.
I looked up to find one of the staff standing there, looking apologetic the way they always did. As if they wanted nothing more than to apologize for the grave sin of serving me. I had gotten used to service after all this time, but that didn’t make me comfortable with it.
“I am enjoying the library,” I said, aware that I sounded as arrogant as any of the men I had left to toast my humble roots in the banquet hall. “Does the family prefer it to remain private?”
“Not at all, sir,” the man before me replied, unctuously. He straightened. “The Fitzalan collection is quite important, stretching back as it does to the first recorded history of the family in this area. The most ancient texts are protected, of course, in the glass cases you may observe near the—”
He sounded as if he was delivering a speech from a museum tour. A very long speech. I tapped my finger against the stack of books nearest me. “What are these?”
If the man was startled that I had interrupted him, he gave no sign. He merely inclined his head.
“Those are for Miss Imogen,” he said. When I only stared back at him, he cleared his throat and continued. “Those are the books she wishes to take with her into her, ah, new life.”
Her new life. With me.
The servant left me shortly thereafter and I told myself that it was time to go back to my rooms. There was business waiting for my attention the way there always was, and I had better things to do than linger in a library.
But I couldn’t seem to move. I stared at those three stacks of books, and it was as if her taste flooded me all over again.
Imogen. Red-gold and wild. Tilting at windmills from all sides.
My Bought Virgin Wife Page 5
