My Bought Virgin Wife

by Caitlin Crews

  I saw her work to keep her face still. Polite and composed, which I knew in her world meant wiped clean of anything but that slight smile. Still, there was emotion in that copper gaze of hers that I couldn’t quite read.

  “My father does not share your taste, it appears. He insisted that for once in my life I represent the family appropriately.” She reached up and patted that smooth helmet of a chignon they’d crafted for her. It didn’t move. I doubted a blowtorch could move it. “The main point of contention, as ever, was my hair. It offends my father. He has long been under the impression that I will it to curl for the express purpose of defying him.”

  I studied her as the plane began to taxi for our takeoff. She looked as elegant as I could have wished. She looked pulled together and carefully curated, the jewel of any collection, even mine. I had no doubt that every man in that ballroom today who had sneeringly referred to her as the lesser of the two Fitzalan sisters had kicked himself for his lack of vision. She looked like what she was: the lovely daughter of an extraordinarily wealthy and powerful man who had been raised to be adorned in gowns and stunning pieces of jewelry. A woman who would function as decoration and an object of envy, whose pedigree was as much in the way she held herself as in the decidedly blue blood that ran in her veins.

  She looked perfect, it was true.

  But she did not look like Imogen.

  She did not look like my Don Quixote bride, who carried windmills in her smile and an irrepressible spirit in her wild red-gold curls.

  I wondered how I would have felt about the vision before me now if I hadn’t seen the real Imogen yesterday. Would I have been satisfied with this version of my Fitzalan bride? Would I have accepted this smooth version of her, no edges or angles? Would I already be inside her to the hilt, marking my claim upon her tender flesh?

  I couldn’t answer that. But I did know this: the woman sitting before me looked entirely too much like her sister.

  I wanted the Imogen who was nothing at all like Celeste.

  And I opted not to look too closely at why that was.

  “You say I have not disappointed you,” Imogen said as the plane soared into the air, then turned south to cross France, headed toward Majorca and the Balearic Islands off the coast of Spain. “And I appreciate the sentiment. But you’re looking at me as if I’m every bit the disappointment my father always told me I was.”

  “I’m staring at you because you do not look like yourself at all.”

  “Are you an expert, then?”

  “I did meet you before the wedding, Imogen. Perhaps you have already forgotten.”

  Her ears pinkened yet again, telling me clearly that she hadn’t forgotten anything that had happened yesterday. Neither had I.

  “I’m not sure why you think that was an example of me looking more myself.” She gave the impression of shrugging without doing so. “Perhaps it was yet another costume. The many faces of Imogen Fitzalan.”

  “Imogen Fitzalan Dos Santos,” I corrected her, all silken threat and certainty. I considered her another moment. “Are you planning to maintain this costume?”

  Her expression was grave. “I shouldn’t think so. It took quite a long time. And several battalions of attendants, as I said.”

  “This I believe.”

  I stayed where I was, lounging there as the plane hurtled along, my arms stretched out along the back of the sofa. I did not dare move—because if I did, I was quite certain that I would stop caring all that much about what was the real Imogen and what was not. I would put my hands on her and that would be that.

  I was not a man given to denying myself much of anything. So I wasn’t entirely sure why I didn’t go ahead and do it.

  I suspected it had something to do with those marks on her arm and the fact I could not—would not—make myself yet another brutish male she would have to suffer. That was not at all what I wanted from her.

  I nodded toward the rear of the jet instead.

  “I have no interest in claiming a mannequin,” I told her, not certain I recognized my own voice. “Your bags have been taken into one of the staterooms. I suggest you use this flight to wash away all traces of—” I let my gaze move over her hair, her face “—this.”

  “‘This,’” she repeated. She made a sound that I thought was a laugh, though her expression was clear of any laughter when I raised a brow at her. “Which part of this? Do you want me to re-chip my nails? Un-exfoliate my skin?”

  “Do something with your hair,” I told her, aware that I felt very nearly...savage. It was need and lust mixed up with that possessiveness I didn’t quite know how to handle, much less that softer thing I couldn’t name. “It doesn’t suit you. And I cannot see your freckles.”

  “That is for your benefit,” she replied, quick enough that I felt the lick of it in my sex again, the reappearance of that defiant girl I had met after all. “Surely everyone knows that the sight of a stray freckle on the nose of one’s carefully vetted and purchased bride might scar a man for life.”

  “Wash it all off,” I ordered her quietly. “Or I will come back and do the washing myself, and I’m not certain you will enjoy that as much as I know I will.”

  There was no mistaking the bright sheen of heat in her gaze then, no matter how quickly she dropped it to her lap. For a moment, I thought I could feel flames leap and dance between us, taking up all the oxygen in the cabin.

  “That won’t be necessary,” she said, addressing her lap. Because, no doubt, she imagined that was safer. “I may play the part of a helpless female, Javier, but I assure you I can handle a simple shower.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Javier

  I WATCHED HER go in a great cloud of white—moving as quickly as I supposed a person could on an airplane without actually running—and sat where I was for a beat or two after I heard the door to the stateroom open and then shut. Emphatically.

  I pulled out my mobile, scrolling through the nine or ten million things that needed my attention immediately, but set it down again without retaining anything. I could feel her, still. Her taste was in me now, and I wanted more.

  I wanted so much more.

  Even though I had just told her that I wasn’t going to help her wash off her bridal costume unless it was necessary, there was a part of me—a huge part of me—that wanted to head back there anyway.

  It had never occurred to me that the other Fitzalan daughter would get to me in this way.

  I had assumed, in fact, that she would not. Rumors had always suggested that she was awkward and shy, unused to the company of men. I had expected a shy, trembling flower. I had assumed she would require patience and a steady hand and I had been prepared to give her both to get what I wanted.

  “The best-bred ones are always crap where it counts,” one of the braying jackasses last night had informed the whole of the room as I’d claimed my drink and cautioned myself against swinging on any of the genteel crowd. Not because it wouldn’t have been entertaining, but because it would only prove their wildest speculation about my monstrous, animalistic tendencies to be true and I refused to give them such satisfaction. “They make it such a chore. Best to get a few brats on them as quickly as possible and move on to more tempting prospects.”

  He had not been speaking to me directly. I was not sure he had even been aware I was in the room. The man in question had been a group or two away, perfectly happy to spout such a thing next to the ratchet-faced woman I could only assume was his unhappy wife. The chore herself, in other words.

  All the men in the group had laughed. None of the women had.

  And I understood this was how things worked in such circles. I understood that the unpleasant submission of wife to husband was a part of what made their world go round, and they all made the best of it. Because there were lands to think of. Inheritances. Bloodlines and legacies.

  Easy enough
to lie back and think about the comfortable future. Easy enough to suffer a little in order to gain so much in return.

  If I understood anything, it was that particular math.

  But I was not one of those blue-blooded aristocratic horror shows, a fact they had taken great pains to make sure I understood this weekend. And understand I did. I understood that they would hate me forever because I could take what they wanted, I could claim it as my own, and I could laugh at the notion that it mattered how little they thought of me.

  Just as I could dismiss the notion that I needed to treat the aristocratic wife I’d gone to such trouble to buy the way they would have, if she’d been theirs.

  I did not need my wife to be my partner, the way I knew some wives were to their husbands, each of them committed to the continuation of their family’s influence. And I’d watched my parents sell out each other—and us—too many times to believe in love. But if there was one thing I knew I was good at, and took pride in the practicing, it was sex.

  I had been certain that in this, at least, I would manage to work a bit of magic, no matter how repressed and overwhelmed my convent-trained wife appeared.

  But that was before Imogen had appeared in my rooms and let me taste exactly how sweet she was. How soft, how hot.

  And now I had no doubt at all that whatever else there might be between us, we would always have that deliciously wild heat and everything that came with it.

  Windmills all around.

  Steady, I ordered myself. There was no point rushing things now when I had waited ten years to get here.

  I picked up my mobile again, and forced myself to concentrate on my business. And when I looked up from putting out fires and answering the questions only I could, hours had passed. The plane was landing.

  And the woman who walked out of the back of the plane to meet me was the Imogen I remembered. The Imogen I wanted.

  Gone was the wedding dress and all its gauzy, bridal splendor. In its place, the first Senora Dos Santos wore another dress like the one she’d had on yesterday when I’d first caught sight of her. Three-quarter sleeves and a hemline no one in their right mind would call provocative. Another pair of glossy, polished leather boots.

  But what got my attention most was the hair. Her glorious hair, curling this way and that. I could see that it was still damp, so it looked darker than its usual red-gold, but I hardly minded. Not when I could see the curls I already thought of as mine and, even better, those freckles scattered across her nose.

  “Much better,” I told her.

  “I’m glad you approve,” she said, and though her tone was nothing but polite, I found myself searching her face to see if I could locate the edge I was sure I had heard. She looked out the windows. “Where are we?”

  “This is the Mediterranean,” I said, gesturing out the window at the deep blue surrounding us. “Or more properly the edge of the Balearic Sea, somewhere between Menorca and Sardinia.”

  She came and sank down on that sofa across from me again. “I’ve seen pictures of the Mediterranean, of course. But I’ve never been before.”

  “I was given the impression you haven’t been anywhere.”

  “My role is to operate as an ornament,” Imogen said, without any particular bitterness. “Not to travel the world, collecting experiences. I’ve had to make do with pictures on the internet.”

  “I am not at all surprised that your father feared that if you left, you wouldn’t return to his tender mercies.”

  Imogen gazed at me, a faint, sad curve to her lips. “Do you know, I never tried to leave. I’m not sure he was the one who was afraid. He might not have been much in the way of family, but he was the only one I had and I suppose that meant more to me than it should have.”

  I didn’t know why that touched me. I hated that it did. It was one thing to enjoy the fact that we had chemistry, and all the things that could mean for the marriage ahead of us and the sort of sex I had not been looking forward to doing without.

  It was another entirely to feel.

  Especially when those feelings tempted me to imagine I could relate in any way to a girl who had been raised wrapped up tight in cotton wool and convent walls when I had never been protected or sheltered from anything. On the contrary, my parents had often used me to help sell their poison.

  I had learned how to mistrust everything by knowing full well no one could trust me.

  “I have an island,” I told her coolly, determined that there be no trace of those unwelcome feelings in my voice. “It is not very big. But I think it will do nicely enough.”

  Her gaze moved from the deep blue of the water below to me, then back again, and I could see the trepidation written all over her, stamped into her skin, and yet her anxiety didn’t thrill me as much as it had before.

  What I could not seem to get straight in my head was why I had presented my island to her in the fashion I had. My own words seemed to hang there in the cabin as the plane lowered toward the ground. Had I truly dismissed it—called it not very big? The private Mediterranean island that I had long used as my primary home? It was the one place on the planet I could be sure there would be no eyes on me unless I allowed it. Unless I expressly invited it.

  Which I never did.

  When I had stood in that house with Imogen’s father and all the stuffed shirts he called his contemporaries, there had not been a single part of me that had felt in any way inferior. The very idea was laughable. But let Imogen gaze at me, her freckles uncovered and her curls unleashed because I had demanded she reveal herself to me, and I was undermining myself.

  Until this moment, I hadn’t known I had such a thing in me.

  To say I loathed it was an understatement.

  I let that betrayal of myself simmer in me as the plane touched down. I said nothing as we disembarked, allowing Imogen to take her time down the metal stairs, making noises of pleasure as she went.

  Because, of course, the island I called La Angelita was—like everything in my collection—a stunning thing of almost incomprehensible, unspoiled beauty. In every direction was the sea, flirting here, beckoning there. The island was barely ten miles across, with the ruins of an old villa of some sort on one end, and high on the cliffs at the other, my own version of a manor house.

  Except mine was built to bring the island inside instead of keeping the dour northern French weather out. I had insisted on wide-open spaces, graceful patios, arches beneath red-roof tiles so that everything was airy and expansive. Notably unlike the depressing blocks of flats I’d been forced to call home as a child.

  I was proud of this place and the way I’d had it built to my exact specifications. I showed it to very, very few. My own family had never merited an invitation.

  It was possible, I thought as I swung into the Range Rover that had been left for my use by my staff, that I was experiencing a most uncharacteristic attack of nerves myself.

  Except Javier Dos Santos, Europe’s most feared monster, did not have nerves. I did not suffer from any kind of performance anxiety. If I had, I would likely have remained in the neighborhoods of my youth, working a dead-end job if I was lucky. Except young men in those neighborhoods were very rarely lucky. They usually ended up dying as my own father had, victims of their own greed and circumstances, slinging poison until it killed them one way or another.

  “What a lovely spot,” my wholly unaware new wife said, beaming around in all the Mediterranean sunshine as if she hadn’t the slightest idea what she was doing to me. I supposed it was possible she didn’t, though that suggested she was far more innocent than she had told me she was. “How often do you make it here?”

  “La Angelita is my primary residence.”

  “You mean it’s your home.”

  That was what I called it, but only to myself. The word home had too many associations I shied away from. Too many feelings attached
. “That is what I said.”

  Her smile only widened at that. It made me...restless.

  By the time we drove up to the house itself, sprawled there at the highest point of the island to capture the sweeping views in all directions, I was certain that I had made a terrible mistake. I should have taken her to Barcelona as planned, where I could have been far more certain there was nothing of me to be found. I had properties in every major city across the globe, and even more than that in tucked-away, hard-to-reach places. There was a beach in Nicaragua that I had been meaning to visit for some time, for example, to bask in the lack of crowds. There was a mysterious rain forest in Uganda, a spectacular oasis in Dubai.

  I should never have brought her here.

  Especially when I pulled up to the front of the villa and my brand-new wife turned to me, her eyes shining, as if I had given her a gift.

  “This is wonderful. I thought I would be marched off to some dreary place like my father’s house. Somewhere in the pouring rain, very grave and serious and cold, where I would have the opportunity to contemplate the occasion of my marriage in daily sober reflection in the bitter chill. This already seems much better than that.”

  “Far be it from me to keep you from sober reflection of any kind.”

  She was still smiling. “I suspect I’ll enjoy all kinds of reflection a great deal more in all this sunshine.”

  “I do not know how you are used to spending your days,” I heard myself say as if I was auditioning for the role previously played by her own officious father. “But the first thing you must know about your new life, Imogen, is that I am not a man of leisure. My primary occupation is not finding ways to live like a parasite off the interest of family investments without ever having to lift a finger. I work for my living. I always have and, I promise you, I always will.”

  I expected her to be offended at that, but instead she gazed at me with a thoughtful expression on her face. “Does that mean I am expected to work, too?”

  I scowled at her. “Certainly not.”