My Bought Virgin Wife

by Caitlin Crews

  It was possible I was panicking.

  I forced myself to breathe as Javier led me over to a set of the floor-to-ceiling windows that made up the outside walls of this room. This house. Up close, I saw they were actually sliding doors. Javier nodded toward the series of sparkling blue pools outside, each reflecting the blue of the sky above and the sea beyond, and it seemed some kind of dream to me after such a cold, gray January at my father’s house. After all the cold, gray Januaries I’d endured there.

  It was a gift. It fell through me like the sunlight itself, warming me from the inside.

  “The top one is the hottest,” he told me, and there were things in his voice I didn’t understand. Dark, tangled things. Intimate things. I shuddered. “Go sit in it and soak.”

  “I didn’t bring a bathing costume,” I heard myself whisper.

  His hand tightened at the nape of my neck, just the slightest bit. Just enough to assure me he felt every shivery, shuddery thing that worked its way through me. “You will not require one, querida.”

  It didn’t occur to me to disobey him. He pulled open the heavy sliding door and I walked through it of my own volition. The breeze was warm, or I was warm, and I breathed it all in, deep. I went over to the side of the first, highest pool, and busied myself unzipping boots that seemed too clunky and severe for all this Mediterranean sunlight. He had done away with my panties, another thing I couldn’t quite think about directly without blushing, so I pulled off my dress, unhooked my bra, and then went to the edge of the pool. I could see the steam rising off it in the air that could only be the slightest bit cooler. I didn’t question it. I eased my way in, sighing a little as the heat enveloped me.

  And only as I sat there did I understand the true beauty of these pools and the careful way they had been arranged. Because as I sat, I couldn’t see the other pools I knew were there, laid out on different levels here on this cliff high above the water. I could only see the sea.

  I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful in person, with my own eyes. There was the sun up above, the blue sea wherever I looked, and the sweet January air that I suspected might be considered cool to those who lived in this climate year-round. But it felt like some kind of prayer to me.

  And when Javier slid into the water next to me, I was tempted to imagine that prayer had been answered. I didn’t look at him. I was afraid to look at him, I understood, because he was so big and male and I could still feel where he’d been inside of me.

  And looking at all his flesh, stretched out in such an unapologetically male fashion beside me, might...change me.

  We sat in the hot water overlooking the endless stretch of blue for a forever or two. The water soaked deep into my bones, or so it felt. It made me feel as boneless as he did. Maybe it was the sun, washing over the both of us and making me feel all kinds of things I never had before.

  Light. Airy. As if I was made of the sunlight and the deep blue water, infused with all that glorious warmth. As if I were connected to the bright pink flowers that crawled up the stone walls of the villa, or the almond tree blossoms, or even the sweet scent of jasmine that danced on the breeze.

  “Your life has been lonely, has it not?” he asked after a long while. “Is that why you pretended you weren’t a virgin? To confuse the issue?”

  And I should have felt ashamed, I thought—but I was too boneless and warm, suspended in all that sunlight and blue.

  “Lonely compared to what?” I turned to look at him, my breath catching. And that place between my legs pulsing with fascination. And hunger. “What of your life? You had no friends or family at your own wedding. Are you lonely?”

  He eyed me as if I had grown fangs there before him. “I do not get lonely.”

  “Well, neither do I.”

  “You told me you miss your mother every day.”

  The air went out of me at that, but I managed to smile at him anyway. “Yes, but that is no more than another part of me. A phantom limb. I miss her, but it doesn’t make me lonely. It reminds me that I loved her.” And that she had loved me the way my father had never managed to, but I didn’t say that. “I thought you lost your father, too.”

  “I did.” There was an arrested look on his face then. “But I do not miss him, Imogen. If I miss anything, it is the father he never was.”

  I didn’t know how long we merely gazed at each other then. I only knew that somehow, I felt more naked than I had before. When Javier moved again, rising from the pool, I wasn’t sure if I felt a sense of loss or relief.

  “Come,” he said from behind me, and I felt as glutted on sunshine as I did shaky and exposed, but I obeyed him.

  It was not until I climbed from the pool that I realized that I was showing myself to him. Fully naked, as I had felt in the water. I stopped at the top of the stairs and froze, though the alarm I surely ought to have felt seemed dulled, somehow, as if the sun had taken that, too.

  Or that look in his dark gaze had.

  Javier had wrapped a towel around his lean hips and something about the contrast between the bright white of the fabric and his olive skin made a different kind of heat tumble through me. And his dark gaze blazed as it moved over me. I felt the heat of it in the fullness of my breasts, the flare of my hips.

  He did not speak as he came toward me, then wrapped me carefully, so carefully, in a towel of my own. His expression was grave, that gaze of his intent.

  And he made me shudder. Simply by tucking me into the embrace of that towel, then smoothing a few curls back from my face, with a kind of quiet heat that spiraled through me like reverence. And then again when he ushered me over to a table, saw that I was seated with a courtesy that made me ache, and only then raised a finger to beckon his servants near.

  I hadn’t known I was hungry until the table was covered, piled high with all sorts of delicacies I knew must be local to the region. Cheeses and olives. Marvelous salads made of wild, bright-colored produce. An aromatic chicken, steeped in spices. Almonds and various dishes. I hardly knew where to look. What to taste first.

  The food seemed like a part of the sun, the sea. Javier himself. As if there was not one part of this new world I found myself in that wasn’t different from the one I had left behind, down to this meal before me with all its sweet, bright colors and savory combinations instead of my father’s routine meals made to cater to his vanity in his trim physique, never to tempt him in any way.

  Here, with Javier, everything was a temptation.

  Especially Javier himself.

  He sat across from me, the acres of his bare chest as lush and inviting as the food between us, all mad temptation and sensory overload.

  And this man had bought me. Married me. He had taken me from my father’s house, and then he had taken me in every other meaning of the term. He had brought me out of the rain, into the light. And now it seemed I found every part of him as sensual as his hands on my body or his hard, cruel mouth and the wicked things it could do against mine. Or that impossibly hard heat of him, surging deep inside me.

  He leaned back in his chair, lounging across from me, and I discovered that watching him eat was almost too much for me to bear. Those big, strong hands that I now knew in an entirely different way. Even his teeth, that I had felt graze the tender flesh of my neck. I felt goose bumps dance up and down my arms, then down my spine, and all he did was tear off a crust of bread and dip it into a saucer of olive oil.

  Javier was beautiful. Rugged and demanding. He was harsh and he was beautiful and I knew, now, what it was to have him deep inside me.

  And I understood that I would never be the same. That I was changed forever, and even if I didn’t know quite what that meant—even if I wasn’t sure how it would all play out or what it meant to be married at all, much less to a man so different from my father or my sister’s husband—I knew that there was no going back to the girl I’d been on that wi
ndow seat a mere day before, staring out at the rain and dreaming of a safe, sweet stable boy I had barely met.

  Here, now, sharing a table with a man like Javier in all the seductive sunlight, it was clear to me exactly how I’d been fooling myself.

  There were girlish dreams, and then there was this. Him.

  And even as I shivered inside, the shiver turning into a molten heat there where I was still soft and needy, I was glad I knew the difference.

  “Let me know when you have eaten your fill,” Javier said almost idly, though there was something about his voice then.

  Stirring. Intense. As if he knew full well why I couldn’t quite sit still.

  “Why? Do you not have enough?”

  A flash of his teeth. Another man’s smile, though in Javier, all I could see was its menace. As if I had insulted him.

  “Do I strike you as a man who goes without, Imogen?”

  “I only meant... Well, it is an island.”

  Javier’s mouth kicked up in the corner in that way it did, so rarely. His real smile, I knew. Not that other thing he deployed as a weapon.

  And this was wired to that molten heat in me, because all I could feel was the fire of it.

  “I want to make sure you have your strength, querida,” he murmured, which did not help the fire at all. If anything, it made it worse. Because I could see the same bright flame in his gaze. “As we have only just begun.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Imogen

  “TODAY WE FLY to Italy,” Javier announced one morning weeks later, without warning. “You may wish to prepare yourself for a touching reunion with your family.”

  He sat, as he always did, at that table out on the terrace overlooking the pools and the endlessly inviting ocean where he preferred to take his breakfast each day. The morning was bright and clear, and yet as I sat there across from him I felt as if I’d been tossed back into the shadows, cold and gray, I thought I’d left behind in France. I must have made some kind of noise, because Javier set aside one of the many international newspapers he scanned each morning and raised his dark brows at me.

  “We will be attending a charity ball in Venice. It is an annual opportunity to fake empathy for the less fortunate, something at which your father excels.” He studied me for a moment. “Do you have an objection to charity, Imogen? I seem to recall you mentioning you wished to make it the cornerstone of your existence.”

  I realized I was gaping at him and forced my mouth shut. It was ridiculous that I was reacting like this. There was no reason at all to feel that he had...broken something, somehow, by announcing that we had to leave this place. Particularly for the sort of event that I knew would thrust us both back into the world I had done such a great job of pretending no longer existed these past weeks.

  A world that included my father.

  I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay like this forever. The days had rolled by, sunlight and deep blue, the sea air and the soft, sweet breeze.

  It was the first holiday I had ever been on in my life.

  And yes, of course, I knew it wasn’t truly a holiday. Javier worked each and every day. I would have worked myself, had there been something for me to do, but every time I asked he shook his head and then told me to amuse myself as I pleased. So I swam in the pools. I braved the sea on the afternoons when the temperature edged toward hot. I took long, rambling walks down to the ruins on the far end of the island and back, basking in the sunshine and solitude that felt a great deal like freedom.

  And anytime he wasn’t working, Javier was with me.

  Inside me.

  All over me, and me all over him, until I could no longer tell the difference between this day or the next. Between his hand and mine, clenched together on the coverlet as he surged inside of me.

  I learned how to kneel down and give him pleasure with my mouth. I learned how to accept his mouth between my legs in return. I learned how to explore every inch of his fascinating body with my hands, my mouth, my teeth. We ate the food that always seemed to be taken directly from the heart of all the brightness and calculated to be as pretty as the sun-drenched island around us, and then we rolled around more.

  He called me adventurous. He called me querida.

  I called him my husband, marveled that I had ever thought him a monster, and every day I wondered how any person could be expected to hold so much sensation inside. I could scarcely imagine how my one, single body could contain all these things I felt. All these joys I dared not name.

  I didn’t want to leave.

  I didn’t want to return to that cold, cruel world I had left behind without so much as a backward glance, or anything that reminded me of it. I didn’t want to start what I knew would be the endless circuit of balls and events that comprised the bulk of the high-society calendar. I had been raised to make that calendar the center of my life. From events like the Met Ball in New York that made the papers to the aristocratic private house parties all over Europe that were only murmured about later, behind the right hands. I had allowed myself to forget that part of my value was appearing at these things, dressed to communicate my husband’s wealth and might.

  If it were up to me, these weeks on La Angelita would have been a permanent relocation. I wanted us to stay here forever, wrapped up in each other, as if everything else was the dream.

  But somehow, I knew better than to say it.

  Because this is not his dream, a foreboding sort of voice whispered in me, like a blast of cold air down my spine.

  “I have always wanted to see Venice,” I managed to say.

  I even forced myself to smile. To meet that considering gaze of his.

  “You are not so convincing.”

  “I am drunk on the sea air and all this sun.” And you, I thought, but knew better than to say. Because in all these halcyon days of sex and sun and nights that never seemed to end, there had been no talk of emotion. No whisper of the things I had been raised to consider the province of other, lesser people. “I will have to sober up, that is all.”

  “I have business that requires my sobriety. You will have nothing to do but party, which certainly doesn’t demand any teetotaling should you oppose it. Though I suppose the party itself is your business.”

  I felt some of the magical glow that had been growing in me by the day stutter a bit, and I resented it. I rubbed the stuttering spot between my breasts and resented that, too.

  “If parties are my business, I’m afraid you’re going to be deeply disappointed. There were not many parties in the convent.”

  “Which is why you were sent to that finishing school to top off your chastity with dreary lessons in how to bow, and when, and to whom. You know this very well.” Javier set his newspaper aside entirely then, and regarded me for a moment that dragged on so long I almost forgot there had ever been anything but the stern set to his hard mouth and the way his gaze tore into me. “If there is something you would like to tell me, Imogen, I suggest you do so. I have no patience for this passive-aggressive talking around the issue you seem to enjoy.”

  “There is no issue. I have nothing to tell you.”

  “Did you think that you would stay on this island forever? Locked away like a princess in a fairy tale? I know I have a fearsome reputation, but I do not believe I have ever tossed a woman in a tower, no matter the provocation.” That curve of his mouth caused its usual answering fire in me, but today it felt like a punishment. “I do not believe I have to resort to such things to get what I want. Do you?”

  He did not have to resort to anything to get what he wanted from me. I gave it to him with total, obedient surrender. And happily.

  And it hadn’t occurred to me until now that he wasn’t as swept away as I was. That this was all...his design.

  I had to swallow hard against the lump in my throat then.

  “This is no fairy tale.�
�� It cost me to keep my voice light. “For one thing, Fitzalans are not princesses. We have long been adjacent to royal blood, but very rarely of it. Royals are forever being exiled, revolted against, decapitated. Fitzalans endure.”

  I felt as if I’d been slapped awake when I hadn’t realized I’d fallen asleep. When I’d no idea how deeply or long I’d been dreaming. It had been weeks since I’d spared a thought for my father and all the ways I was likely to disappoint him. Or since I’d worried about Celeste and the way my favorite—and only—sister had looked at me on my wedding day. Or how she’d looked at Javier as we’d left the manor house.

  I didn’t welcome the return of these preoccupations.

  Or, for that matter, the fact that it had been weeks since I had given a single thought to the state of my hair and its defiance of all accepted fashion dictates. I clipped it up or I let it curl freely, and that was all the attention I gave the curls that had so dominated my previous life. I hadn’t thought about how badly I played the part of a graceful, effortless Fitzalan heiress. I hadn’t thought about how different things would be now that all the snide society wives could address me directly instead of merely whispering behind their hands as I walked behind my father in my slovenly way, with the dresses that never quite fell right and the hair that never obeyed. I hadn’t thought at all about the many ways I stood in my more accomplished, more beautiful sister’s shadow, not for weeks, and now it was likely I would have to do it all over again.

  And this time, where Javier could watch and judge the two of us side by side.

  I didn’t like thinking about it. My stomach rolled at the very notion. I glared down at my coffee and told myself there was nothing wrong with my blurry eyes. Nothing at all.

  “We will be attending one of the most famous charity balls of the season,” Javier said, his voice darker than it had been before. Darker and somehow more intense. “I was asked to donate a staggering amount of money, and my reward for this act of charity is that I am forced to attend the ball. We will all put on masks and pretend we do not recognize each other when, of course, we do. It is all very tedious. But this time, I will at least be spared the endless advances of the unmarried. And the unhappily married.”