And unable to look away.
“No,” I managed to say, after taking much too long to stare at him. “I am not hungry at all.”
“Then I see no reason to participate in this circus.”
I didn’t really process what he said, because he wrapped his arm around my back. That heavy arm of his, all roped muscle and lean, leashed power, and I...floated off somewhere. There was nothing but the wild buzz in my head, Javier’s arm around me, and that shivery thing that became a flush, working its way over me until I thought that intense heat between my legs was actually visible. Everywhere.
But I came back to reality with a sharp crack when Javier steered me directly toward my father.
“Fitzalan.” Javier nodded curtly, which was not the way people normally greeted my father. They tended toward obsequious displays of servility. But that was not Javier. That was not the man I’d married. “You will wish to say your goodbyes to your daughter.”
My father drew himself up into the human equivalent of an exclamation point, all hauteur and offense. He gazed at Javier, then turned that same gaze on me.
I flinched. Javier did not.
“I am afraid I am not following you,” my father said in the same distant, appalled voice he used when forced to have a conversation with the servants instead of merely issuing demands.
I thought that really, I should have jumped in to assure Javier that my father was not about to launch into any protracted farewells. That had I slipped off without a word he would likely have had no idea I’d gone.
But I couldn’t seem to operate my mouth. I couldn’t seem to form any words.
And Javier’s arm was around me. It was all I could focus on.
I looked away from whatever strange, male showdown was happening between Javier and my father, and found my gaze snagged almost instantly. It was Celeste. She was sitting at one of the tables next to her husband, paying no attention to whatever conversation the count was having with a selection of other European nobles who looked as close to death by heart attack and advanced age as he did. She looked as effortlessly gracious as always, not a single glossy hair out of its place.
It was the look on her face that struck me. It was so...
Bitter, a voice inside me supplied.
And she wasn’t looking at the count. Or my father. Or even me.
She was looking at Javier.
I didn’t have time to process that, because Javier was moving again, striding away from my father and leaving me no choice but to hurry to keep up or be left behind. Or, more likely, dragged.
“Are we truly leaving our own wedding breakfast?”
I told myself I was breathless from the sudden sprint, that was all.
“We are.”
“I didn’t think that was allowed.”
My breath caught when he stopped, there on the other side of the great doors that led into the ballroom. Because we were suddenly something like alone, out here in the grand foyer that my father always said had offered gracious welcome to a host of Europe’s aristocrats. It was a shock after all the eyes that had been on us inside.
And it was even more of a shock because I was suddenly even more aware of how...difficult it was to be near this man.
My palms felt damp. There was that awful, betraying flush that only seemed to sizzle against my skin. There was heat in all the most embarrassing places.
And still I could only seem to manage to stare at the man who had married me as if I was mesmerized. I thought perhaps I was.
“Listen carefully, Imogen,” Javier said sternly, but his tone didn’t start any alarms ringing in me. There was still all that mad electricity in his gaze. And that hint of a potential curve in one corner of his mouth. “You are my wife now. Do you understand what that means?”
My heart began to pound, hard. “I think I do.”
“Clearly you do not.”
He reached over and smoothed his hand over the glossy surface of my chignon, grimacing slightly. No doubt because my hair had been shellacked so many times it was now more or less a fiberglass dome.
“This hair,” he growled. “What have you done to it? I prefer your curls.”
I blinked at that, aware that if he hadn’t still been touching me, I would have assumed I was dreaming. No one liked my curls. Not even me.
Especially not me.
“My father wanted me to look the part today,” I managed to say despite my confusion. “He has very specific ideas about how a proper Fitzalan heiress is meant to look.”
Javier dropped his hand from my head, but it was only to take my hand. The hand where he had slid that heavy ring that I was sure I would never grow accustomed to. He looked at the ring a moment, then he looked from the ring to the place on my arm where my father had grabbed me yesterday. My attendants had done what they could to cover the marks, but he was so close now. I was sure he could see them.
His hard mouth turned grim. And his gaze when it met mine seemed to shudder through me, so intense was it.
“Your new life begins now,” he told me in the same dark, gruff way. “You are a Dos Santos wife, not a Fitzalan heiress today. You need no longer concern yourself with the petty concerns of the man who raised you. It does not matter what he likes, what he wants, what he allows.”
He toyed with my hand in both of his, almost idly—though I knew somehow that nothing this man did was truly idle.
“This is true of the whole of the world,” Javier told me gravely. “It has nothing to do with you. There are no laws, no leaders, no men of power anywhere that you need consider any longer. You are above all of that.”
“Above...?” I echoed, as caught up in his intensity as I was in the way he traced my fingers and warmed my hand between his.
“You are mine,” Javier told me, that dark gaze like a new vow, hard on mine. “And that, Imogen, is the beginning and end of everything you need to know, from this moment on.”
CHAPTER SIX
Javier
I COULDN’T LEAVE that old pile of self-satisfied stone fast enough.
Or its equally smug inhabitants.
We could have stayed for what would likely have been an interminable wedding breakfast, of course. I could have subjected myself to more condescension. I could have stood in that room, choosing not to let myself get offended by every sanctimonious or outright snobbish comment aimed in my direction. I could have pretended I didn’t see the way Celeste watched me, as if she still somehow believed that I would waste all these years and all this time chasing after her when she had made her choice.
But I saw no point in playing those games. I already had what I wanted.
I had already won.
A Fitzalan heiress wore my ring as I had told Dermot Fitzalan one would, sooner or later. Nothing else mattered. Nothing in this old house, at any rate.
I had won.
That Dermot Fitzalan had clearly put his hands on what was mine did not surprise me. Men like Dermot wielded their power in every petty way they could. But it was a rage for another time, beating in me like a pulse.
If I gave in to it here, I feared I would raze these stone walls to rubble.
And I didn’t know what to do with the notion that the woman at my side—my prize, my wife—was clearly so used to her father’s behavior that she not only hadn’t commented on it, she didn’t look particularly cowed by it, either.
I took Imogen’s hand in mine and started toward the grand entrance, ordering the servants to bring my car around as I moved. One thing men like Fitzalan always did well was train their staff to perfection, so it did not surprise me to find my car waiting when we stepped out of the house and, more, another car idling behind it with all of our bags.
I had left instructions, but even if I had not, there was no way all of Imogen’s belongings could have fit into a Lamborghini Veneno. Even
if they could, the point of a Lamborghini was not the hauling of baggage, as if it was some kind of sedate, suburban SUV.
I handed her into the sports car that was more a work of art than a vehicle, and then climbed into the driver’s seat myself, taking pleasure in the way her wedding gown flowed all over the bucket seats and danced in the space between us. It threatened to bury us both in all those layers of finery.
I wouldn’t mind if it did.
I liked the dress in the same way I liked the ring I’d put on her finger. I like signs. Portents and emblems. I liked the optics of a Fitzalan girl at my side, dressed in flowing white with my ring—mine—heavy on her finger. I could see faces at the windows inside and knew that those same optics weren’t lost on our audience.
I had won a major victory and no matter how they looked down on me, these stuffy, inbred aristocrats knew it. In fact, I thought the snobbier they were to my face, the more aware they likely were that my money and its reach had surpassed them in every possible way.
I was a nobody from the gutters of Spain, and yet I was the one the world still bowed to. They were ghosts holding fast to a past few remembered any longer.
But I remembered. And I had done the unforgivable. I had used all my filthy money to buy my way into their hallowed little circles. I had dared to imagine myself their equal.
They would never accept me, but I didn’t need acceptance.
I had what I wanted. The past in the form of the lovely aristocrat beside me, and the future we would make together with my influence.
I drove off from the Fitzalan manor house, allowing the car to growl and surge forward like the high-powered, predatory beauty it was. But as I drove it down the lane, half of my attention was on Imogen, who was leaving her childhood home behind her. It would have been normal if she’d shown a bit of trepidation. Or emotion.
Something complicated, even, to match those marks on her upper arm.
But she didn’t look back.
I made it to the landing strip where my plane waited for us in record time, exhilarated by all the power and speed I had in my hands again. Especially after these dreary days locked up with ponderous old men who talked about long-gone centuries as if they’d personally lived through them.
It was Imogen I was focused on as we climbed out of the car near the plane, however, not the haunted remains of what had once been Europe’s most powerful families.
“You look as if you have seen a ghost,” I said as I helped her—and all the filmy layers of her wedding dress—out of the car. I tried to imagine what might upset a sheltered creature like this. “Do you miss your late mother, perhaps?”
She looked a little pale, it was true. Though I couldn’t tell if that was an emotional reaction on her part after all, or if it was that damned makeup slapped all over her face, hiding those freckles I liked so much, despite myself.
When I looked closer, however, her copper eyes were sparkling.
“I miss my mother every day,” she said. “But that was fast.”
In that same demure voice she had used at our wedding ceremony. The one that made me almost wonder if the half-wild creature who had turned up in my rooms yesterday had been nothing more than a figment of my clearly oversexed imagination.
I was wondering it again when she smiled at me, big and bright enough to make me very nearly forget all the ways they had muted her for the wedding. “I think I like fast.”
I felt that directly in my sex.
“I am glad to hear that. I believe I can promise you fast.”
I was not only speaking of cars, but I wasn’t sure she took my meaning. She reached over and ran her fingers lightly over the sensually shaped hood of the Lamborghini, then jerked them away. And her smile turned guilty.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have touched it.”
“You can touch it whenever you like.”
“Oh. Are you sure? Only, I was under the impression that most men are very picky about who they let touch.”
“They are perhaps choosy about how they are touched,” I said in a darkly amused voice I made no attempt to hide. “But if you show me a man who claims to be overly picky about where a beautiful woman places her fingers, I will show you a liar.”
She curled the fingers in question into a fist, and swallowed hard enough that my gaze drifted to that neck of hers I longed to taste.
When her eyes met mine again, she seemed almost...shy. “Are we still talking about your car?”
I felt my mouth curve. I didn’t want to answer that. “If you like.”
“I think I may have given you the wrong impression yesterday,” she said in a rush, as if it had been difficult for her to get the sentence out. “I don’t know why I came to your rooms in the first place. And it certainly wasn’t my intention—”
“We will have nothing but time to revisit what happened in my rooms,” I told her. “Not a single detail will be overlooked, I assure you.”
She looked nervous, and another man might have taken pains to put her at her ease. But I was enough of a bastard to enjoy it.
“Oh. Well. I mean, I think you might have come to a certain conclusion...”
Her voice trailed away as I took her hand again, and I liked that. I liked the way her pulse beat wildly in the crook of her neck, there where I could see it. I liked the heat of her hand in mine and the smoothness of her manicured fingers twined with my hard, calloused ones.
I wanted to be inside her more than I wanted my next breath. I wanted her beneath me, above me. I wanted her in every position I could imagine, and I was a creative man. But they had turned her into a stranger with all that makeup and alien hair.
I didn’t like it at all.
“I had intended to jump straight into the sweet satisfaction of consummation,” I told her as I led her toward the plane’s folded-down stairs.
And I made a split-second decision as we moved. I had planned to take her to my penthouse in Barcelona. It was not the place I considered my true home, but it had seemed to me to be more domestic and private than other properties I had. But she was naive and she was mine. There were marks on her shoulder and they had rendered her unrecognizable. And I wanted things I couldn’t quite name.
I followed an urge I hardly understood, and decided I would take her home instead.
“It is not a long flight to the Mediterranean, I grant you.” I sounded stiff and strange. I knew it was because I had made a revolutionary decision—when no one was usually granted access to my private island but me. “Still, I thought there would be ample time to take my first taste of wedded bliss.”
I could feel her tremble. It was another show of those nerves that lit me up from the inside out, like heat and triumph all at once. Because I liked a little trepidation. I was not an easy man, nor a small one. And Imogen might have indicated that she had already rid herself of her innocence, but I could tell by all these jitters that she had not gotten much experience out of the bargain, no matter who she had been with.
I shoved away the little twist of something darker and stickier than simple irritation that kicked around in me at that thought. Of Imogen spread out beneath another man’s body, allowing him inside her...
She was mine. The thought of another’s fingers all over her...rankled.
But I was not in the habit of showing my emotions. To anyone. Even myself, if it could be avoided.
“Do you have some objection to the marital bed?” I asked her instead as I allowed her to precede me up the stairs and into the jet. I even attempted to keep my tone...conversational.
I couldn’t see her face then. But I saw the way she froze, then started again almost at once, as if she didn’t want me to see her reaction any more than I wished to show her mine. I saw how hard she gripped the railing in one hand, and the way she bent her head as she wound as much of the fabric of her heavy dress around her fre
e hand as she could.
I didn’t have to see her face to watch the way she trembled. Again. Still.
“I have no objection,” she said over her shoulder, in a voice that didn’t sound quite like hers. As if her nerves were constricting her throat.
I waited until we had both boarded the plane. I spoke to the captain briefly about the change in flight plans, and when I made my way back into the sleek lounge area, it was to find Imogen seated on one of the leather couches, prim and proper and still awash in all that white.
I threw myself down on the couch facing her, stretching my legs out so that they grazed hers. And then waited to see if she would jerk herself away. Because she was a girl raised to suffer through her duty no matter what, and it had occurred to me that she might very well consider the marital bed one of those duties.
I didn’t care to interrogate myself about why, exactly, that idea was so unpalatable to me.
When she didn’t move her legs away from mine—when instead she sighed a little bit and stayed where she was—it felt a great deal like another victory.
And the creeping flush that turned her ears faintly pink told me she knew it.
“It looks as if they spent a great deal of time making you into a mannequin today,” I said after a long moment spun out into another. “This was certainly not for my benefit. Is this how you prefer to present yourself?”
She took her time raising her gaze to mine, and when our eyes met, hers were cool. I found I missed her wildness. “My father takes his reputation very seriously. You have been saddled with the disappointing Fitzalan daughter, who, I am ashamed to say, requires the aid of a battalion of attendants to look even remotely put together. I assumed you knew.”
I didn’t think she looked ashamed. If anything, I would have described her as faintly defiant somewhere behind all that composure.
“Remember what I told you, please. The only disappointment that need concern you now is mine. And I am not disappointed.”
My Bought Virgin Wife Page 7
