I did not feel. I could not feel.
And no matter that I had already felt too much today already, when she had made it so clear she, too, was as ashamed of me as I was.
You do not wish to feel, something in me whispered harshly. It was the truth. And I had built my life on truth, had I not? No matter the cost?
“Javier—” Imogen began when we stepped outside.
The music inside the ballroom played on, bright against the dark. Light from those chandeliers inside the palazzo blazed, dancing over the stones. But the temperature had dropped significantly, on the water and inside me, and our coats seemed little protection against the cold.
And my wife thought better of whatever it was she had been about to say.
I did not speak when I summoned our transportation and climbed on board. Or when I pried the mask from my face and sent it spinning into the water with a flare of temper I couldn’t conceal. We floated back down the Grand Canal, but this time I did not marvel at the palazzos that lined our way. I did not congratulate myself on my climb from grimy flats in Spain to famous canals in Italy’s most magical city the way I usually did.
Instead, I stood apart from Imogen and cautioned myself.
I needed to remain calm. Contained.
There had always been a monster in me, but it wasn’t the one her father and his pack of wolves imagined.
Whatever this was—this need people had to hurl emotions around like currency, though I had thought better of Imogen—I had never understood it. I had always stood apart from it, gladly.
She had told me she loved me and it beat in me like a terrible drum, dark and dangerous, slippery and seductive.
And I wanted no part of it.
We made it all the way across the lagoon, then docked at our hotel, and I still had not uttered a single syllable.
There were lights around the hotel’s courtyard, making it look festive though it remained empty of any guests but the two of us, just as I had wanted it. I waved away the waiting hotel staff and accepted the blast of the January wind—slicing into me as it rushed from the water of the lagoon—as a gift. It would keep me focused.
It would remind me who I was.
“Do not ever do that again,” I told her harshly when we had both climbed out of the boat. “It is not up to you to determine when we leave a place. Particularly not if I have business.”
“You could have stayed if you wished. I didn’t ask you to come with me, I merely said I was done.”
She was different. Or she was herself, again—the creature I had beheld what seemed like a lifetime ago now in her father’s house in France. She did not avert her eyes as I scowled at her. If there was any meekness in her at all, any hints of that uncertain innocence that had driven me mad on the island, it was gone.
Tonight Imogen was electrifying. Her curls cascaded around her shoulders like fire. Her eyes gleamed in the dark, inviting and powerful at once. She reminded me of an ancient goddess who might have risen straight from the sea in a place like this, gold-tipped and mesmerizing.
I wanted nothing more than to worship her. But that was what I had spent these last weeks doing, and what had I gained?
Protestations of love, of all things.
I was more likely to believe her a deity than I was to imagine her in love.
I started for the hotel and she was right behind me, hurrying as if she had any chance at all of catching me if I didn’t allow it.
“Will you chase me all the way up to our rooms?” I asked her from between the teeth I couldn’t seem to keep from clenching when I made it to the stately double doors that discreetly opened at our approach.
“Only if you make me chase you. When I was under the impression that the great and glorious Javier Dos Santos has never run from a fight in the whole of his life.”
She was a few feet behind me, looking serious and challenging as she closed the last of the distance between us. She didn’t look as if she’d exerted herself unduly running across the courtyard, despite the shoes she wore. Not my Don Quixote bride, who was perfectly happy to tilt at any windmill in sight.
Even if the windmill was me.
I strode inside, not sure what I was meant to do with the temper and din roaring inside of me. Not sure I could keep it locked away as I should, and equally sure I didn’t want to let any of it out.
I told myself I didn’t know what it was, that howling thing knotting loud and grim within me, but I did.
And I didn’t want to feel any of this.
I didn’t want to feel at all.
Imogen stayed with me as I made my way across the lobby and I cursed myself for having bought out the whole of the hotel, ensuring that this torturous walk took place in strained silence. I could hear Imogen’s shoes against the marble floors. I could hear my own.
And I could hear my heart in my chest, as loud as the roaring sea.
We got into the elevator together and stood on opposite sides as if sizing each other up.
I didn’t know what she saw, but I wasn’t at all pleased to find she looked no less like a goddess in close quarters.
“What happened to you?” I asked her, too many things I didn’t wish to address there in my voice.
“I was born a Fitzalan. Then I got married. Not much of interest happened in between.”
What did it say about me that I was tempted to laugh at that?
But I already knew what it said. This had gone on too long, this wildfire situation I should have extinguished the first time I’d seen her in her father’s heap of stone and history. I should never have brought her to La Angelita and, once I knew how it would burn between us, I should never have allowed us to stay as long as we had.
The responsibility was mine. I accepted it.
So there was no reason at all that I should have let my head tilt to one side as I beheld her there on the other side of the elevator, dressed in that sweep of deep black, the bright red-gold of her hair a striking counterpoint to the wall of gilt and flourish behind her.
“I think you know that I mean tonight. What happened at that ball?”
She didn’t smile this time. And somehow that only drew my attention to her mouth and those berry-stained lips I had tasted time and time again. Yet I could never seem to get my fill.
“My sister suggested I face reality.” I couldn’t read that gleam in her copper gaze. “I declined.”
I hadn’t spared a thought for Celeste, I realized now. She would have been there, of course. Annual charity balls like this one were exactly the sort of places Celeste liked to shine. But if she had been there tonight, I had missed it entirely. What was a bit of shine when my wife was like the sun?
I was appalled at the train of my own thought.
“Your sister is the last person on earth I would expect to comment on reality,” I said, perhaps more witheringly than necessary. “Given that her own is so dire and uninspiring.”
The elevator stopped at our floor, opening directly into our paneled foyer. This time it was Imogen who moved first, sweeping through to the grand salon that made up the bulk of the sprawling hotel suite’s public rooms and was even more ecstatically decorated than the hotel lobby, all statuary and operatic sconces.
She moved into the center of the room, leaving me to trail her as she had me down below. I stopped short when I realized that was what I was doing, following her about like some kind of...pet.
And when she turned back to face me, she still didn’t look the least bit sorry for what she had done.
“You could have married her. You didn’t. Why?”
It took me a moment to stop seething at the notion that I could be the pet in any scenario. And another to comprehend her meaning. When I did, I scowled.
“I believe we already covered this subject in some detail the night before our wedding. If the reality Ce
leste wished to discuss with you had something to do with me, you should already know she is in no way an expert on that subject.”
“Javier. Did she love you?”
The way she asked that question suggested she knew something I didn’t. And worse, I didn’t get the sense that simple jealousy was motivating the question.
I could have handled jealousy, but I didn’t know what this was.
“Your sister and I hardly knew each other.” It was hard to speak when my jaw was clenched so tight and my hands wanted so badly to curl into fists. “And as time goes on I consider that a great blessing. You must know Celeste better than anyone, Imogen. Do you believe her capable of loving anything?”
She didn’t tremble. Not exactly—and yet something moved over her lovely face. “No. I don’t.”
“But you must step away from all this talk of love,” I cautioned her. Though my voice was little more than a growl. “It has no place in an arrangement like ours. It has no place in the kind of lives we lead.”
It had no place this close to me, I thought, but did not say.
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” my blithely disobedient wife replied, without looking the least bit apologetic as she said it. “But it doesn’t change the fact that I’m in love with you, Javier.”
That torment inside me knotted harder, deeper, and only grew more grim.
“Love is the opiate of the weak,” I threw at her. “A gesture toward oblivion, nothing more. It is only sex dressed up to look pretty.”
“You are the most powerful man I have ever met. And yet you let my father send you away ten years ago, which tells me you must have wanted to go. Then you came back and took the only daughter available. Not even the one you’d come for the first time.”
I didn’t know where she was going with this. I only knew I didn’t like it. “You were a virgin, Imogen. I understand why this is difficult for you. Virgins are so easily confused.”
“You didn’t even know she was there tonight, did you?”
That took me by surprise. Another unpleasant sensation only she seemed capable of producing in me.
“No.” I knew I shouldn’t have said it when Imogen smiled as if I’d made some kind of confession. “Why do you continue to talk about your sister?”
“They whisper when they think I can’t hear, but I do,” my wife said in a soft, quiet way that only a fool would mistake for weakness. And I might have been acting the fool tonight, but I wasn’t one. “They think you only married me to get to her. I assume she thinks so, too.”
“I don’t want her.” I didn’t mean to say that, either, but it was as if that furious growl came out of me of its own volition. “She got what she wanted and so did I. There are no second chances where I am concerned, Imogen. You are either the best or I am bored.”
I didn’t understand the way she looked at me then. Almost as if I was causing her pain. But she was still smiling, though it was the kind of smile I could feel like a blow.
“I don’t care why you married me,” she said after a moment. “I don’t care if it was purely mercenary or if it was a means to an end like they all think. It doesn’t matter to me. What matters to me is what’s happened since.”
My heart was beating in that strange way again, that insistent and terrible drum. I recognized it. It reminded me of when I was a child, hiding from my parents’ demons in filthy hovels, surrounded by too many desperate people.
I shook the memory off. But the fury in me only grew.
“Once again, Imogen, you are confusing sex and passion for something else. But that something else does not exist. It cannot exist.”
Her eyes gleamed and I didn’t want to understand what I saw there. It made me perilously close to unsteady.
“I love you, Javier,” Imogen said. She kept saying it. “I don’t think it’s something you can order away.”
“You might think you do,” I gritted out, my voice like gravel. All of me like gravel, come to that. I felt as if I was turning to stone the longer I stood here. “But I know that you do not.”
“Don’t I?”
“It is a lie, damn you. Love is a weakness. It is a fairy story people tell themselves to excuse the worst excesses of their behavior. Our marriage is based on something far better than love.”
“Money?” Imogen supplied, and I found that defiance of hers grating tonight. “The fickle support of selfish old men?”
“Neither one of us walked into this marriage with any unrealistic expectations. That is more than any fool who imagines himself in love can say.”
“But I want more than easily met expectations,” Imogen argued, that gleam in her gaze intensifying. “I want everything, Javier. What’s the point otherwise?”
I knew that there were counterarguments I could make. Or better still, I could walk away and end this conversation altogether. I didn’t understand why I did neither of those things. Or why I only stood there as if I was rooted to the hotel floor, staring at this wife of mine as if I didn’t know her at all.
When I would have said I knew everything there was to know about her. From the poems she read to the sounds she made in the back of her throat when the pleasure I gave her was too much to bear.
“I told you I cannot abide lies,” I said, as if from a great distance. “Love is lies, Imogen. And I will never build my life on lies again.”
She made a noise that could as easily have been a sob as a sigh. She swayed slightly on her feet, and I had to order myself to stay where I was.
My protection was earned, I thought gravely, not given out like candy or sold like street heroin. But it was better when I saw she wasn’t toppling over where she stood, felled by the force of her inconvenient emotions. She was squaring her shoulders the way fighters did.
“Show me the lie,” she said.
At first I didn’t understand what she meant. But as I watched, she reached up and undid the clasp at her shoulder that held her dress on her body. And then, I could only stare in a mixture of astonishment and pure, mad lust as that beautifully inky dress slid down her lush body like a caress and pooled at her feet.
I stood as if I was merely another statue in this salon full of lesser Renaissance offerings. Imogen’s copper eyes glowed with more than a mere invitation. I saw in their depths a knowledge I refused to accept.
“I was raised by criminals,” I heard myself say as if the words were torn from me. “They trafficked in lies and poison, down in the dirt and the gutters. And love was just another drug they sold, a high that wore off before morning.”
I watched as she took that in, waiting for the censure. The revulsion. I watched emotion move across her face like a storm, but she didn’t recoil as I expected her to. Instead, she gazed at me with a kind of understanding that I wanted to deny with every breath in my body.
“We can play any game you like, Javier,” my wildfire wife told me as if she was the one with years and years of experience. As if I had been the virgin on our wedding day, locked away in a stone house for most of my life, and therefore needed her patience now. “We can start with an easy one, shall we? When I lie, I will stop.”
“Imogen.”
It was an order, but she didn’t heed it.
And I didn’t know if I would survive this. I didn’t know if I could. I wasn’t sure what was worse—if she obeyed me, put her clothes back on, and stopped confusing me with the sight of all that glorious flesh...
Or if she didn’t.
As I watched, she unwrapped the particular feminine hardware that held her plump breasts aloft. She reached down and hooked her fingers into the lace that spanned her hips. And I nearly swallowed my tongue as she rolled her panties down the long, shapely legs that I loved to drape over my shoulders as I drove into her. I watched as she kicked the panties aside. And then, still holding my gaze, she kicked off her shoes.
An
d then my wife stood there before me like the goddess I must have known she was from the very first moment I laid eyes on her on that balcony.
All of those red-gold curls tumbled over her, calling attention to the jut of her nipples and, farther down, that sweet thatch between her thighs in the same bright color.
“Is this a lie?” she asked, all challenge and defiance as she started toward me.
My mouth was too dry. My pulse was a living thing, storming through me and pooling in my sex.
She crossed the floor and stood before me. I could smell the soap she used in her bath and, beneath that, the warmth of her skin. And further still, the sweet, delirious perfume of her arousal.
I could feel my hands at my sides, fisting and then releasing. Over and over. But I didn’t reach for her.
“Or perhaps this is a lie,” she murmured, her voice hoarse and almost too hot to bear.
But then she put her hands on me, and taught me new ways to burn.
Especially when she ran her fingers over my abdomen, then down farther still, so she could feel the proof of my desire herself.
“What do you want?” I demanded.
I sounded like a man condemned.
“You,” she replied, much too easily. “I only want you, Javier. I love—”
But I’d finally had enough.
I heard the noise that came out of me then, like some kind of roar. It came from such a deep place inside of me that I didn’t know how to name it.
I didn’t try.
I pulled her into my arms, crushing my mouth to hers.
There was no finesse. If I was an animal—if I was the monster they’d always said I was—this was where I proved it. I lifted her from the floor, hauling her into my arms. Then I carried her over to the nearest antique chaise and laid her out upon it. My own sacrifice, once an innocent and now my tormentor.
I followed her down, too far gone to concentrate on anything but my own greed and the way she grabbed my coat as if I was taking too long. And the way her hips rose to meet mine long before I had finished wrestling with my trousers.
My Bought Virgin Wife Page 14
