Because I knew without a shadow of a doubt that had I married Celeste the way I had wanted to do ten years ago, she would not have come to me with a collection of books. Just as I knew that while there was very little possibility that Celeste had spent any time in this library of her own volition growing up, it was a certainty that Imogen had.
There was no reason that should have washed through me like heat.
I picked up the first book of poetry on the stack before me and flipped it open, not surprised that it fell open to a well-worn page. My eye was drawn to a poem that someone—and I was certain I knew who—had clearly liked so much that she’d underlined the things that had struck her most.
“‘For here there is no place that does not see you,’” I read, with two lines drawn beneath it in blue ink. “‘You must change your life.’”
I closed the book again and left it there, that odd heat still surging in me.
And when I finally started back toward my rooms, I found that I was far more intrigued with this business arrangement of mine than I had been before I’d arrived here.
I had wanted a Fitzalan wife. And I prided myself on getting what I wanted, by any means necessary. When I had decided at a mere eight years old that I would get out of the stark war zone of my youth, I had done whatever I needed to do to make that happen. I had lied to liars, cheated the cheaters, and had built my own catapult before I rocketed myself straight out of my humble beginnings. It had required a ten-year wait to bend Dermot Fitzalan to my will the way I had done, but I had never wavered.
I had wanted the Fitzalan blood. The Fitzalan consequence and breeding. All the aristocratic splendor that went with a connection to these people and the nobility they hoarded like treasure. I had wanted all of it.
I still did.
But I also wanted Imogen.
CHAPTER FIVE
Imogen
I DIDN’T KNOW how most weddings were meant to go.
I had no idea how they were conducted out there in the world where people made their own choices, but mine was not exactly the festival of emotion and tearful smiles I’d been led to expect by entirely too many bright and gleaming online wedding sites. Or reports from my friends at the convent, whose glittering nuptials had been spread across glossy magazine inserts all over the globe—and as such, had been far too crass and common for my father to permit me to attend.
Not that I had truly imagined it would be otherwise.
I had been presented in my father’s rooms first thing, after a long evening and another long morning—already—of what one of my attendants had euphemistically claimed was my opportunity for pampering.
If this is pampering, I’d thought a bit darkly as they’d worked on me as if I was the Christmas goose, I’m glad this is the first I’ve had of it.
But soon enough it had been time to parade me before the only person whose opinion mattered. I had been marched down the hall of the family wing to my father’s sitting room and presented. He had been taking his usual breakfast and had deigned to lower the corner of his newspaper, the better to glare at me as he took in my appearance.
He glared at me for a long time.
The attendants he’d ordered to handle the problem that was me had done their duty. I was buffed and shined and beaten to a glow. But the true achievement was my hair. They had straightened it, time and again. They had poured product on it. They had ironed it and brushed it and had blown it out, more than once, so ruthlessly that it still hurt. Then, not to rest on their laurels, they had painstakingly crafted the kind of sweeping, elegant chignon that my sister made look so elegant and easy.
It had taken hours. I felt...welted.
“I see I should have taken you more in hand years ago,” my father said acidly, as if my transformation was somehow as upsetting as my usual appearance was to him. “Why have you roamed about in your usual state of disarray all this time if it was possible for you to look like this?”
I didn’t think that was a real question. I could still feel yesterday’s bruises on my arm, reminding me of the many virtues of silence, but he continued to glare at me until it occurred to me that he meant me to answer it.
“Well, sir, it took hours,” I said, awkwardly, given my scalp still ached and the movement of my jaw needed to form words made it worse.
“Yet you felt the reputation and honor of your family did not merit putting in these hours at any other point in your life.” My father shifted his glare to the attendant at my side, dismissing me with a curl of his lip. “See to it she does not mess herself up as she is wont to do. I want there to be not so much as a single hair out of place at the ceremony, do you understand?”
“Of course, sir,” the attendant murmured, also not looking at me.
Because what I thought about the discussion did not signify. To anyone.
And that, naturally, comprised the entirety of the fatherly advice I received before my wedding.
When I was escorted back to my rooms, they were buzzing with activity. My things were being packed by one set of attendants while another set was responsible for dressing me, and no one required my input on these matters. I let them herd me into the wedding ensemble that had been chosen without my input, muttering to each other as they sewed me into the gown I knew my father had paid a fortune for, as it was nothing short of an advertisement for his power.
But then, Javier had also paid a fortune for this, I assumed. So I supposed it was best if he, too, got his money’s worth in the form of a proper bride. Even I knew that what mattered on occasions like this was perception. No one in this house cared if I was happy. But they likely all cared deeply that I look happy. As well as elegant and effortless and fully a Fitzalan, the better to honor the blood in my veins.
They might whisper about the ways I was lowering myself. They might titter about lying down with the dogs. They would talk among themselves about the variety of ways money was neither class nor nobility and amuse themselves with their feelings of superiority every time they looked at Javier, who could buy and sell them all. A few might even tut sympathetically about the sacrifice I was making.
But if I dared show so much as a hint of trepidation, they would turn on me like the jackals they were.
When I was dressed in acres of sweeping white and draped in fine jewels that proclaimed my father’s consequence and taste to all and sundry, my attendants sat me on the bench at the foot of my bed and ordered me not to move. I had been sitting there stiffly, certain I would somehow spill something on myself without actually having anything to spill, when Celeste appeared.
My father felt bridesmaids were gauche—or he was unaware and/or uninterested in the fact I’d actually made friends at school—but I supposed it didn’t matter anyway, as Celeste filled all those roles for me.
I sighed a little as she came into the room, careful to maintain my painfully perfect posture, lest I inadvertently wrinkle something. Or make my hair curl. Celeste looked beautiful, as always, and she certainly didn’t look as if it had taken hours upon hours and an army to achieve it. She wore a dress in another, warmer shade of white that only enhanced all her blond beauty.
“I’m supposed to be the bride, but I think everyone will be looking at you instead,” I said, and smiled at her.
She smiled back. But I couldn’t help thinking it took her too long.
“You’ve made the guests quite curious, you realize,” she said, her voice so light and merry I forgot about how long it might have taken her to smile. “How mysterious, to hide away the night before your own wedding. What on earth were you doing? Engaging in some last-minute contemplation and prayer?” She shook her head at me as if I was a silly, hopeless creature she’d happened upon in the gardens and had rescued out of the goodness of her heart. “I hope you weren’t continuing the same futile line of thought as yesterday.”
“I was enjoying an enforced batter
y of spa treatments, courtesy of Father.” I held up my hand so she could behold the manicure. It wasn’t my first manicure, of course, but the women had done more than simply try to shape the ragged nails I had presented them. They had built me new ones, long and elegant enough to rival Celeste’s. “I had no idea that so-called pampering could be so painful.”
“A wedding is the last day where a girl should look like some kind of dreadful tomboy, Imogen,” Celeste said with one of her carefree laughs that somehow landed strangely on me. I told myself it was the unnatural way I was sitting there, like some kind of wooden doll. “But don’t worry. I can still see the real you in there. A little bit of makeup and pretty nails doesn’t change the truth of who you are.”
That should have made me smile, surely. But for some reason, instead, it raked over me as if the words had an edge.
An edge I found myself thinking about a little too much as she conferred with my attendants and determined the time had come at last to transport me to my fate. Because once I started thinking of such things, all I could see was that edginess. Celeste looked beautiful, certainly, but she was holding herself as if all her bones had gone brittle in the night.
And when she returned to my side, it again took a moment for her to summon her smile. I didn’t let that fact drift away this time, and saw that no matter how she curved her lips, it did not reach her eyes.
A hollow pit seemed to yawn open in my belly.
But I didn’t say a word as she motioned for me to rise to my feet and I obeyed. Because I only had one sister. And if she thought as little of me as everyone else in my life, did I really wish to know it? This was the only family I had left.
That hollow pit had teeth, I found. But I endeavored to ignore it.
“Have you seen my groom?” I asked as she linked her arm through mine and led me toward the door, her steps measured and purposeful. “I’m hoping he might have changed his mind.”
I was joking, of course. And yet the look Celeste gave me then was...odd. It was as if I’d somehow offended her.
“One thing you should know about Javier, Imogen, is that he never changes his mind,” she told me, no hint of her usual laughter in her voice. And no attempt at the light and airy tone I associated so strongly with her. “Never. When he is set upon something, when he has made up his mind, nothing else will do.”
That settled uneasily in my gut, right there in that same hollow place, but I didn’t question her on it. The brutal way she was holding herself next to me, so rigid and sharp, and the way she looked at me kept me quiet.
And besides, I could still feel the way Javier had touched me. Kissed me. Turned me utterly inside out without it seeming to affect him in the least. While I was still boneless at the very thought—though it was the next day.
I tried to conceal the shaky breath I let out then, but the sharp look Celeste threw my way told me I hadn’t fooled her.
She seemed to soften a bit beside me then. Another thing I opted not to prod at. Something else I didn’t want to know.
Downstairs on the main floor of the house the great ballroom had been transformed into an elegant wedding venue. My father waited for me at the doors. He swept a critical glance over me when Celeste presented me to him, then slipped inside herself.
“Let’s get this over with quickly,” he said gruffly, looking down his nose at me. “Before you revert to type.”
And without any further conversation, and certainly no inquiries into my state of mind or feelings about this momentous occasion, he nodded to the servants to fling the doors wide. Then he led me down the center of the room.
I had dreamed about this, too. A wedding. My wedding. I had spent years imagining how it would feel. What I would do. How magical it would all seem, even if it was an exercise of strictest duty, because it meant the next stage of my life was about to begin.
But magical was not the word that came to mind today. I gazed out at the assembled throng of people my father deemed important, all those greedy-eyed men and the haughty women they had brought with them as decoration. The members of my own extended family, those cousins and relations who I wasn’t sure I’d recognize out of context, who were entirely too impressed with themselves to do more than stare back at me as if I was inopportuning them by marrying in the first place.
I was tempted to pretend my mother was still alive. And here. And just out of sight, beaming with a magic all her own...
Because there was precious little magic in this room today. And maybe I was the empty-headed, disappointing creature everyone seemed to think I was, because the lack of it surprised me. I suppose I’d imagined that if I was going to dress up like this and play the part of a fairy-tale bride, everyone else might do the same.
But the way the guests all eyed me as if I was nothing more than a piece of meat laid out for their consumption, I thought we might as well have forgone this ceremony altogether, signed a few papers in the presence of an authority somewhere, and been done with it.
I was trying my best not to let any of my thoughts show on my face when my gaze slid—at last—to the center of the makeshift aisle my father had placed between the tables and the man who waited at the head of it.
And it was as if everything else simply...disappeared.
Every time I saw him I was struck anew. This time was worse than before, not least because I felt the impact of him in so many different places. My breasts felt heavy. My stomach was a knot. In between my legs, I was soft and hot at once.
And Javier could tell.
I knew he could.
He watched me approach as if he had already claimed me in every possible manner. As if this was nothing but a formality. Inevitable in every way.
Something about that hummed in me. Like a song.
I forgot about this crowd of mercenaries and snobs, none of whom I would ever have invited to anything had it been up to me. I forgot about the strange way my sister was behaving, all edges and angles when I had expected at least a modicum of sisterly support. I even forgot about my father, who gripped my arm as if he expected me to fling myself out of the nearest window.
None of that mattered. Not while Javier watched me come to him, dressed for him, his gaze like lightning and the storm at once.
As if he had commanded me to do this thing for the simple reason it pleased him.
As if this was nothing more than an act of obedience.
I didn’t know why that word somersaulted through me the way it did. Like a sweet little shiver that wore its way down into the depths of me, deep into places I hadn’t known were there.
When I had never wanted to obey anyone, and no matter that I’d had no choice in the matter for most of my life. My father. The nuns. The attendants who were less servants than prison wardens. That was the trouble with the way Javier looked at me. That light in his dark eyes made me imagine the kind of obedience that I might choose to give him.
That faint curve to his hard mouth made me wonder what he might give me in return.
We reached the head of the aisle and my father swiftly handed me over to Javier, as if he dared not risk a delay.
My fate, I thought as Javier’s hands wrapped around mine. My doom.
This monster I had to hope was truly a man, somewhere behind his harsh exterior.
A man who I knew without the slightest shred of doubt would be inside me, and no matter if he was a monster to his core, before I saw another dawn.
I hardly heard a word of the ceremony. The priest intoned this and that. We made our responses.
But nothing was real to me. It was all a kind of dream until Javier slid that heavy gold band onto my finger, as if it was an anchor.
“You may kiss the bride,” the priest said severely, as if, were it left to him, he would rid the world of kissing altogether.
But I didn’t care about the opinions of a priest I would never s
ee again. Because Javier was pulling me toward him with the same easy confidence my body remembered all too well, bending his head—
And I was filled with a sudden panic.
Did he really want to do this here? What if I responded to him the way I had yesterday? Right here, where everyone could see me... Where my father could watch as I fell apart and shamed him...
I shuddered at the notion. And I saw a corner of Javier’s hard, cruel mouth curl as if I’d amused him.
“Be strong, Imogen,” he ordered me. “It is only a little while longer until you will leave this house and be entirely in my hands.”
“That is not exactly a relaxing thought,” I murmured in reply.
That curl deepened, only slightly.
And then he claimed my mouth with a sheer ruthlessness that nearly took my knees out from under me.
He gave no quarter. He made no allowance for the fact we were in public.
Javier, it was instantly clear to me, didn’t care who saw me tremble in his arms.
And when he finally raised his head, there was no mistaking it.
He was smiling.
That was what stayed with me as the guests applauded anemically, and the servants swept in to begin serving the wedding breakfast. His ruthlessly male, deeply satisfied smile.
I expected Javier to leave me so he could make his rounds, talking the usual dry business men always did at these things. As far as I knew it was the point of them. But instead, he stayed beside me. So close beside me, in fact, that I could feel the heat of him.
It sank deep beneath my skin, then into my bones, as if he was that restorative bath I hadn’t had last night. Though I did not have to study the man who stood with me—the man I had married, which I couldn’t quite take in—to understand that he was nothing so easily comforting as a warm bath.
He was something else altogether.
“Are you very hungry?” Javier asked.
I found the question perhaps more startling than I should have. I chanced a look at him, feeling that same shivery thing wind its way through me, making my knees feel weak. Because his gaze was so direct, so dark and confronting. His nose was a harsh blade, his mouth that hard line, and I felt scraped raw.
My Bought Virgin Wife Page 6
