“That’s a pity. I have always wanted to.”
“Let me guess.” My voice was too harsh. She didn’t deserve it. But I noticed that she also didn’t seem to react to it, particularly. It was almost as if she was so used to being badly treated that she hardly noticed it at all, and I couldn’t say I liked that, either. But I didn’t stop. “It has long been your heart’s dearest dream to find yourself working in a factory, is it? Backbreaking hours on a factory floor, canning, perhaps? Doing boring, repetitive work, where mindless perfection is required hour after hour after hour? Or let me guess, you would prefer something in a field somewhere? Hideous physical labor among the crops, perhaps. Or there is always the oldest of all professions.”
“You are mocking me, of course,” she said, in such a calm voice that something I hadn’t felt in a decade shifted inside of me, then shot out oily tentacles. Shame. I’d last felt it when I’d burned all bridges with my father and used the fire to propel me out of his world, once and for all. “Though now that you mention the oldest profession, you should probably know that the most famous Fitzalan widow of the twelfth century was rumored to have been quite the mistress of her field. I’m sure it was terribly scandalous at the time. Now it’s just a story my father likes to tell.”
“Even if I wished to put you to work tomorrow, what could you do?” I asked her, still unable to stop myself, and still not sure why I was angry in the first place—and her matter-of-fact talk of ancient prostitutes in her family line only made it worse. “By your own admission you have been trained to be a quiet, genteel decoration, nothing more.”
She said nothing for a moment, and I was too aware that we were still sitting in the drive as if frozen there. The sun danced over her, catching those freckles and the gold in her curls. My jaw ached, I was clenching my teeth so hard.
“I am more aware than you could ever be of my own limitations,” Imogen told me quietly. With a dignity that felt like a slap. “I know that there is no possibility that I will ever find myself working in a factory. But perhaps I could contribute to the welfare of those who do. There are supposed to be advantages to this much wealth and privilege. Would it be the worst thing in the world if I tried to use them for good?”
I didn’t know what I would do if I stayed where I was, caged up in that Range Rover. As if I had somehow shut myself in a box and couldn’t find my way out. I slammed out of the vehicle, then stormed around the front of it, my gaze hard on Imogen’s.
I opened her door and took her hand as she exited, because she might know her limitations, but I had studied mine. I had determined that of all the things that might trip me up or get in my way in the world I chose to inhabit, manners would not be one of them. I knew which fork to use. How to address whoever might be standing in front of me. How to tie my own damned tie. That was what I had done with the ill-gotten money I’d stolen from my father when I’d left his particular den of iniquity. I’d learned how to look like the man I wished to become.
Then I’d become him.
I was aware that in the places people like Imogen frequented, acts of chivalry were considered the very height of manners. The difference between me and those who practiced it—because the act was what mattered, and the more public the better—was that not one of them had any respect for this woman.
And I was terribly afraid I had more than was wise.
I led my wife into my house, aware of something primitive that beat in me, forcing me to examine it with every step. I had never been possessive like this before. I hardly knew what to make of it.
“I don’t suppose you have a library?” she asked me as we crossed the first atrium, where the sun and breeze brought the sea inside. I could hear the hope in her voice.
Just as I could hear how hard she had worked to strip the sound of it from her words.
It pierced me. It was as if she had taken one of the ceremonial blades that hung as decoration on my walls and thrust it straight through me. I thought of those three stacks of books on the table in her father’s library. Telling me things about her I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
I didn’t understand why it felt like this. As if I could see her, straight through her, and yet was somehow showing her entirely too much of me.
I was not a man who needed to be known. I was more than happy to remain a mystery. I actively courted it, in fact. And at the same time I didn’t want to think of Imogen in my house the way she’d been in her father’s. Hiding in out-of-the-way places like that library, steering clear of her father’s ego and cruelty. And I certainly didn’t care for the comparison.
“Yes,” I said stiffly. “There is a library. But most of the books in it are in Spanish.”
If I expected that to dim her enthusiasm, I was sadly mistaken. If anything, she brightened. “I need to work on my Spanish. I’m not quite fluent yet.”
And that was too much. I had an unsolicited vision of Imogen, with her red-gold curls and those sparkling eyes, crawling over me. Naked. And whispering sex words in Spanish. Mi pequeño molino.
I didn’t think then. My hands did the thinking for me. Before I knew what was happening, they were pulling her to me.
“There is only one word you need to know in Spanish, Imogen.” I bent my head. Her lips were a temptation almost beyond imagining. Ripe and sweet, and this time I already knew how good she would taste. “Sí. All you need to learn is sí. Yes, my husband. Yes, Javier. Yes.”
I could feel her tremble. But it wasn’t fear. I could tell that from how pliant she was, there between my hands. But if I had been in any doubt, her copper eyes glowed.
I crushed her mouth to mine, as if in a fever.
I didn’t care that we were in the wide-open foyer of my house. My staff was paid handsomely for their discretion. But that was the last thought I gave the matter.
I feasted on her. Her mouth was plump and ripe and mine, and I had married her, and the fact I was not yet inside her was like torture.
I could feel the pulse of it in my neck. My gut. And in my sex most of all.
I lifted her up, high against my chest, then pulled her thighs around me so she could lock her ankles in the small of my back. I didn’t break the kiss, carrying her with me as I moved, my arms wrapped around her to keep her from falling even as she held on to my neck.
I found the first available surface, an incidental table against the nearest wall, and propped her on the edge of it. I kept her at an angle, moving my hands down to find their way beneath that skirt with an urgency I had no desire to temper.
And still I kissed her, deeper and more wild with every stroke. I could taste the addicting heat in her. I could taste every small cry she made in the back of her throat. I could smell the shampoo and soap she had used in the shower on my plane, and they struck me as impossible aphrodisiacs.
There was no time left. I felt mad with the need to claim her. Now.
It was like a drumbeat pounding in my head, and everywhere else besides.
I hooked my fingers on the scrap of lace I found beneath her dress, and tore it off. She made a noise of surprise against my mouth, but my fingers were in the soft heat between her legs, and I felt her turn molten.
I felt clumsy and something like desperate as I fumbled with my own trousers, shoving them out of the way, and letting the hardest part of me spring free at last.
I shifted, and picked her up again, notching the head of my sex against her heated furrow. I angled my head, taking the kiss deeper, thrilling in her uninhibited response to me and those greedy little noises she couldn’t seem to stop making.
I didn’t understand why this woman got to me the way she did. I didn’t understand the things she had made me feel. But I told myself none of that mattered, because there was this.
I gripped her bottom, positioned her perfectly, and then slammed myself home.
And everything changed.
Imogen cried out. Her body, which had been pliant and soft, stiffened.
And I knew.
She was so tight around me it was something like a dream—and I knew.
I muttered a curse and clamped down on the vicious need stampeding through me, bringing myself under control.
“You are a virgin,” I bit out, vaguely surprised that I was even able to speak.
Her eyes were slick with unshed tears. Those fine, ripe lips of hers looked vulnerable. Her hands had somehow ended up in fists against my chest.
But still, she tilted up her chin and met my gaze, her curls tumbling over her shoulder as she moved. Because this was Imogen.
“Of course I’m a virgin,” she said, and though her voice was scratchy, there was no mistaking the challenge in it. “I was under the impression that was what you paid for.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Imogen
IT HURT.
Oh, how it hurt.
I had meant to tell him, despite my bravado back at my father’s house. But I hadn’t. And then he had kissed me, sweeping me into his arms, and everything had been so thrilling, so wild—
I felt betrayed that had turned to this. To pain, though the sharpness was fading. But there was still this impossible...stretching.
I could feel him inside me. And that part of him, it seemed, was as mighty and powerful as the rest of him.
“You told me you were not a virgin.” Javier’s voice was the darkest I had ever heard it. Strained, almost. Gritty and harsh, but that seemed the least of my worries. “You made certain to tell me you had given your innocence to another.”
It struck me as more than a little ridiculous that we were having a regular conversation. Like this. Both of us half-naked and parts of us connected in that too real, still heavy and unsettling way. I thought that all things considered, I’d very much like to cry. Though I refused to dissolve in front of him. I refused to prove that I was every bit the too-sheltered convent girl he already thought I was.
“I didn’t actually say I’d slept with someone else,” I pointed out.
We were so close. I wanted to shove him away from me even as he continued to hold me in the air, wrapped around his big body. And at the same time I wanted to move even closer to him, though I didn’t think that was even possible.
And I had no idea why I couldn’t catch my breath. I told myself it was the way he continued to stretch me from the inside out. I didn’t know if it was the picturing it that made my throat go dry, or the actual sensation.
Javier’s expression was far too intent. His dark eyes glittered. “This seems as good a time as any to tell you that I cannot abide lies. Of any kind. Ever. You would do well to remember that, Imogen.”
I wanted to tell him what he could do with his dire warnings, but he was inside me and I was...wide-open in ways I could hardly process.
“I wanted you to think I had slept with someone, yes,” I corrected myself, and then hissed out a little breath when he moved, there below, where I felt exposed and too soft and split open and shivery.
He didn’t move much. He pulled the littlest bit out, then slid in again, and I shifted in his firm grip, irritably, to accommodate him.
He still held me up and it was odd to think about that. That he could be so strong that he could continue to hold me like this, my legs wrapped around him and all of my weight propped on his hands.
And on that other part of him, I supposed.
When I flushed a bit at that, he moved again. Still, only that very little bit. He did it once, then again. And again.
“Why would you tell me something like that?” Javier did not sound angry, exactly. His voice was too rich. Too dark. It was as if his voice was lodged inside me, too. “It was never my intention to hurt you, Imogen. And now I have. I wonder, does this fit into the story you have in your head? The barbarian commoner who took you like an animal and hurt you on your own wedding night?”
My breath was doing funny things. And he hadn’t stopped that odd little rocking of his. “I don’t have any stories in my head.”
“I told you how I feel about lies. They say I am a brute, do they not? A monster? Did you want to make sure there could be no debate about that? Do you plan to report back that I am actually far worse than you’d imagined?”
“I don’t know what you... I would never... I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
But I didn’t know if that was true. Had I meant it? After all, I hadn’t told him any different and I was the only one who knew the truth. If there was someone to blame for my discomfort, I was very much afraid it was me. I might not have had much experience—or any, come to that—but I had only met him yesterday and he’d had his hands between my legs with dizzying speed.
I had known the moment he swept me into his arms today where he was headed, hadn’t I? The destination might have been fuzzier in my mind. Gauzier, perhaps. But I’d known where we were going.
Maybe he’s right, a terrible voice inside me whispered. Maybe you wanted the pain.
I couldn’t tell if the wave of sensation that washed through me then was heat or shame, frustration or need, and I wasn’t sure I cared. I moved against him instead, making my own kind of rocking. And something was different then. Something had eased a little, deep inside me, and so I shifted again.
And that time, the wild sensations that swirled around in me were somehow a part of that feeling that stretched me. A part of it and yet something else, too. Something infinitely hotter.
Something that seemed to reflect in Javier’s eyes as well.
He gripped me harder. And then he began to move. Or more to the point, he moved me.
He lifted me up, then settled me back down on that insanely hard part of him, and waited. When I only sighed a little, then sneaked my hands back up around his neck again, his eyes gleamed.
“I do not wish to play into your stereotypes,” he murmured, lifting me and settling me again. Then again. “There are any number of ways this marriage can and may yet be terrible, mi esposa, but it will not be because I am a monster in this way. I will not brutalize you in bed. That is the very last thing I would ever wish to do while inside you.”
He lifted me up, and put me down again, and every time he did it there was...more. More heat. More sensation.
More greed, stampeding through me like some kind of sudden rain shower. I wanted to dance in the storm. I angled myself closer, heedless and needy and amazed, so I could rub the tips of my breasts against the hard wall of his chest.
I did it once, not sure why I wanted to do such a thing until the mad sensation of it made me shudder. I did it again, and he laughed.
Then he picked up his pace.
And I had meant to say more. I had meant to somehow explain the decision I had made. Why I hadn’t told him that I was a virgin and why that didn’t count as the kind of lie I shouldn’t have cared if I told him or not.
But I couldn’t concentrate on anything except that glorious heat inside of me. Him. The thickness, the length. The way he seemed to fit me perfectly, over and over and over.
I began to feel that same crisis. I began to pant and shake. And all the while he held me as if he could do it forever, thrusting into me over and over again as if I had no purpose on this earth but this. Him. Us.
And when I finally broke, it washed over me like another kind of storm, intense and endless. I sobbed out his name, tipping my head forward to bury my face against his neck.
But Javier wasn’t done. He shifted me back against the table, angling me so he could hold me against him with one strong arm and brace himself against the wall with his other hand.
And when he thrust into me then, I understood he had been holding back.
This was deeper. Harder.
So wild I wasn’t entirely sure I would survive. So hot and glorious I wasn’t sure I wanted to s
urvive.
I had already exploded into too many pieces to count, but something about his ferocity lit that fire in me all over again, tossing me from one great crisis straight into the arms of another.
And this time, when it hit me, I screamed.
I felt him pulse within me as he let out a deep groan I only wished was my name, and then he dropped his head to mine.
I had no idea how long we stayed there like that. Panting. Connected.
And for my part, anyway, completely changed.
But eventually, Javier pushed himself away from me. He reached down to release himself from the clutch of my body, and I didn’t understand how I could feel...empty. When I had never known what it was to feel filled before.
I watched him, half in embarrassment and half in fascination, as he tucked himself away into his trousers again. Then he tugged me off the table and onto the floor, my dress falling down to cover me as if he’d planned that, too.
He didn’t say a word. He studied my face for a moment and I regretted the sunlight that poured in from all the open spaces in this house of his, no doubt showing him things I would have hidden if I only knew how. He slid his hand to the nape of my neck, set me in front of him, and propelled me through the sprawling, open house that way.
I should have objected. I should have told him I didn’t require that he march me about as if his hand was a collar.
But I was too busy concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other when I felt as if I was made out of froth and need and might shiver to pieces again at any moment. I was surprised I could walk at all. I felt giddy. Silly.
And that didn’t change when Javier brought me into a huge, sprawling set of rooms I understood at a glance were his. And likely also mine, though my brain shied away from that, as I had never shared a room—or a bed—with anyone in my life. I couldn’t understand how it worked. I’d seen a thousand images of couples tangled around each other, of course, but I couldn’t imagine how I would settle like that, with arms heavy over me, or my face pressed against someone’s back, or...
My Bought Virgin Wife Page 9
