I didn’t ask myself why I was doing this. I only knew it was tied to the grief I felt for the sister it turned out I barely knew and that dread inside me that pulsed at me, spurring me on.
I eased my way through the servant’s door that disappeared behind a tapestry at one end of the gallery. I flattened myself to the wall and did my best to keep my ears peeled for any signs of life.
And it was the voice I heard first.
His voice.
Commanding. Dark. Rich like dark chocolate and deep red wine, all wrapped in one.
Beautiful, something in me whispered.
I was horrified with myself. But I didn’t back away.
He was speaking in rapid Spanish, liquid and lovely, out of sight on the floor below me. I inched forward, moving away from the gallery wall so I could look over the open side of the balcony to the great room below.
And for a moment, memory and reality seemed tangled up in each other. Once again, I was gazing down at Javier Dos Santos from afar. From above.
Once again, I was struck by how physical he seemed. Long ago, he had been dressed for the evening in a coat with tails that had only accentuated the simmering brutality he seemed to hold leashed there in his broad shoulders and his granite rock of a torso.
Today he stood in a button-down shirt tucked into trousers that did things I hardly understood to his powerful thighs. I only knew I couldn’t look away.
Once again, my heart beat so hard and so fast I was worried I might be ill.
But I wasn’t.
I knew I wasn’t.
I watched him rake his fingers through that dark hair of his, as black and as glossy as I remembered it, as if even the years dared not defy him. He listened to the mobile he held at one ear for a moment, his head cocked to one side, then replied in another spate of the lyrical Spanish that seem to wind its way around me. Through me. Deep inside me, too.
With my functional Spanish I could pick up the sense of the words, if not every nuance. Business concerns in Wales. Something about the States. And a fiercer debate by far about Japan.
He finished his call abruptly, then tossed his mobile onto the table next to him. It thunked against the hard wood, making me too aware of the silence.
And too conscious of my own breathing and my mad, clattering heart.
Javier Dos Santos stood there a moment, his attention on the papers before him, or possibly his tablet computer.
When he raised his head, he did it swiftly. His dark eyes were fierce and sure, pinning me where I stood. I understood in a sudden red haze of exposure and fear that he had known I was here all along.
He had known.
“Hello, Imogen,” he said, switching to faintly accented English that made my name sound like some kind of incantation. Or terrible curse. “Do you plan to do something more than stare?”
Javier
I WAS A man built from lies.
My faithless father. My weak, codependent mother. The lies they had told—to each other, to the world, to me and my sisters—had made me the man I was today, for good or ill.
I allowed no room in the life I had crafted from nothing for lies like theirs. Not from my employees or associates. Not from my sisters, grown now and beholden to me. Not from a single soul on this earth.
And certainly not from myself.
So there was no hiding from the fact that my first glimpse of my future bride—the unfortunate Fitzalan sister, as she was known—did not strike me the way I had anticipated it would.
I had expected that she would do well enough. She was not Celeste, but she was a Fitzalan. It was her pedigree that mattered, that and the sweet, long-anticipated revenge of forcing her father to give me the very thing he had denied me once already.
I had never done well with denial. Ten years ago it had not taken me to my knees, as I suspected Dermot Fitzalan thought it would. On the contrary, it had led me to go bigger, to strive harder, to make absolutely certain that the next time I came for a Fitzalan daughter, their arrogant, self-satisfied father would not dare deny me.
I had expected that my return to this cold, gloomy mausoleum in the north of France would feel like a victory lap. Because it was.
What I did not expect was the kick of lust that slammed through me at the sight of her.
It made no sense. I had been raised in the gutters of Madrid, but I had always wanted better. Always. As I’d fought my way out of the circumstances of my birth, I’d coveted elegance and collected it wherever I could.
It had made sense for me to pursue Celeste. She was grace personified, elegant from the tips of her fingernails to the line of her neck, and nothing but ice straight through.
It had made sense that I had wanted her to adorn my collection.
The girl before me, who had dared try to sneak up on a man who had been raised in dire pits filled with snakes and jackals and now walked untroubled through packs of wolves dressed as aristocrats, was...unruly.
She had red-gold hair that slithered this way and that and stubborn curls she had made no apparent attempt to tame. There was a spray of freckles over her nose, and I knew that if I could see them from this distance, it likely meant that my eyes were not deceiving me and she had not, in fact, bothered with even the faintest hint of cosmetics in a nod toward civility.
On the one hand, that meant her dark, thick lashes and the berry shade of her full lips were deliciously natural.
But it also showed that she had little to no sense of propriety.
She was otherwise unadorned. She wore a navy blue dress that was unobjectionable enough, with classic lines that nodded toward her generous figure without making too much of it, and leather boots that covered her to her knees.
I could have forgiven the hair and even the lack of cosmetics—which suggested she had not prepared for her first meeting with me the way a woman who planned to make the perfect wife would have.
But it was the way she was scowling at me that suggested she was even less like her sister than I had imagined.
Celeste had never cracked. Not even when she’d been denied what she’d so prettily claimed she wanted. Oh, she’d caused a carefully prepared scene for her father, but there had never been anything but calculation in her gaze. Her mascara had never run. She had never presented anything but perfection, even in the midst of her performance.
The fact it still rankled made it a weakness. I thrust it aside.
“Surely that is not the expression you wish to show your future husband,” I said quietly. “On this, the occasion of our first meeting.”
I had heard her come in and creep along the strange balcony above me the butler had told me was a gallery. Not a very good gallery, I had thought with a derisive glance at the art displayed there. All stodgy old masters and boring ecclesiastical works. Nothing bold. Nothing new.
Until she’d come.
“I want to know why you wish to marry me.” She belted that out, belligerent and bordering on rude. A glance confirmed that she was making fists at her sides. Fists.
I felt my brow raise. “I beg your pardon?”
Her scowl deepened. “I want to know