Zara had been raised on a steady diet of no boundaries. Her father was a tyrant. Her mother cared more about scoring her pound of flesh from him than her own daughters. The older sister she’d hero-worshipped when she was a kid turned nastier by the year. Ariella was on a crash course to becoming their father, a man who truly believed that he got to make whatever rules he felt like following that day by virtue of who he was and how much money and power he had.
Zara was fed up with no boundaries.
“You have to leave,” she said, firm and direct. Unmistakable. “Now. I take my privacy very seriously.”
“Are we not cleaved unto one?” Chase’s tone was dark and there was something terrible in his gaze, mocking and harsh. “I’m sure I heard something about that earlier today.”
“We are engaging in mutual thorn-removal, nothing more,” she corrected him, using his phrase and not sure why it made that gaze of his get harsher. Wilder. Untamed in a way that made something deep in her belly coil tight. “And I may have married you, but I didn’t agree to any kind of intimacy. I don’t want any. That’s not negotiable.”
“Has anything about this been negotiable?” he asked, his voice almost idle, though Zara didn’t believe it at all. Not when those eyes of his were on her, intent and arresting. “Because what I recall is your father parading your sister under my nose in a variety of questionable attire and telling me that he’d crush me if I didn’t marry her.”
Zara felt almost outside herself then, as if she was watching this interaction from a great distance. It was the way he’d said questionable attire, maybe, because it summoned Ariella as surely as if she was a genie in a bottle, and Zara wanted nothing more than to smash that bottle against the tile floor. If it had made any kind of sense, she would have thought what she felt was hurt. And something so close to offended it might as well have been the same thing.
“Is that what this is?” she asked with a coolness she didn’t feel at all, not in any part of her, like that wilderness that he carried in him was catching. “You’ve been downgraded from the coveted main attraction to its much less interesting runner-up and you want to see the full extent of that downward spiral? Why didn’t you say so?”
“I beg your pardon?”
Zara didn’t let herself think it through. She slid both her hands out to the high sides of the bath and then she stood up. Water coursed down her body and there was a howling sound inside her head, but she didn’t take her gaze from Chase’s.
Not for a second.
“This is it,” she said, aware that her voice was shaking, and it wasn’t with upset. It was more complicated than that. Challenge and disappointment and fury, and the fact that none of it made sense didn’t make it any better. “Take a good look, because I’m not doing this again, and yes, it really is as bad as you fear. You married me, not Ariella. I’ll never be any fashion designer’s muse. I’ll never be photographed in a bikini unless the goal is to shame me. No one would ever call me skinny and no one has ever claimed I was anything like beautiful. I’ll never fast my way down to Ariella’s weight and even if I did, even if I wanted to, it wouldn’t matter. We’re built completely differently.”
For a moment—or a long, hard year or two—there was nothing but the sound of the water she stood in, still sloshing from how quickly she’d stood. And that pounding thing in her head that made her ears feel thick and her stomach churn.
Chase simply stared.
He was frozen in place, something she couldn’t read at all stamped on his gorgeous face, making him look something other than simply beautiful. Something more. Something so dangerous and so intent, she felt it thud through her, hard. Then he blinked, slowly, and Zara understood that she cared a good deal more about what he might say next than she should.
Which meant she’d made a terrible mistake. As she so often did when she decided to act before she thought. Why could she never seem to learn that lesson?
“Yes,” Chase scraped out into the close heat of the bathroom, in a hoarse voice that shivered over her like warm water but was much, much hotter, a match for that deep, dark blue of his gaze and as irrevocably scalding. “You bloody well are.”
* * *
If she’d taken a sledgehammer to the side of his head, she couldn’t have stunned him more.
She was so…pink. So perfect.
That was all Chase could think for long moments. She’d looked round and solid all draped in white as she’d been; stout and tented, like a gazebo. That’s what he’d thought in the limousine, uncharitably. Perhaps this was his punishment.
Or, a sly voice inside of him, located rather further south than his brain, she is your reward for all of this.
It was hard to argue with that. She was a symphony of curves. Gorgeous, mouthwatering, stunning lushness, from the fine neck he could remember beneath his palm in the church in an almost alarmingly tactile manner to a pair of heavy, perfect breasts, plump and flushed from the damp heat yet marked by fine blue lines that reminded him how fair she was.
And nipples so pert they made his mouth actually ache to taste them. Chase was glad he’d happened to lean against the door, because he wasn’t certain he could stand on his own.
Her waist was the kind of indentation that made him understand, profoundly, whole schools of art he’d never paid much attention to before, particularly with the breathtaking flare of her hips beneath, wide and welcoming and making that trim V between her legs all the more delectable.
He wanted to be there—right there—more than he could remember wanting anything. Ever.
All that and the riot of reds and coppers and strawberry blonds that she’d fastened atop her head somehow, the wet heat making tendrils into curls and spirals that framed her elegant face, making him as hard as a spike and incapable of thinking of anything for long moments but getting his hands in the mess of it, deep. Holding her still while he thrust himself between those perfectly formed thighs, plundered that astonishingly carnal mouth of hers, and happily lost what was left of his mind.
Chase was a product of his time, he understood then, and felt sorry for all the men his age. Like them, he’d always preferred longer, slimmer women by rote, preferably with the smooth leanness that spoke of countless years of deprivation. Women who wore clothes in ways that emphasized their narrow hips and the angular thrust of their collar and hip bones. Women who looked good in photographs, especially the kind that he was always finding himself in, splashed here and there in the harsh glare of the British press.
Women like Zara, he thought in a kind of daze as an ancient, primitive need he’d never felt before pounded through him, should never, ever be confined to anything as foolish as modern clothing. They should never be subjected to a dress like that monstrosity she’d worn today. They should never be contained in photographs that adored angles and punished soft curves. Not with bodies like this, like hers, that were made to be seen whole in all their primal glory. That were created purely to be worshipped.
She was branded into him now, he thought wildly, so red-hot and deep he might never see anything or anyone else again.
And he was so hard it hurt.
“Then we need never repeat this experience,” she was saying, her voice a brittle slap against all that warm heat, and Chase was still knocked senseless. He couldn’t follow what she was saying, not with his heart trying to kick its way out of his chest, so he stayed where he was and watched as she stepped out of the tub and yanked one of the towels from the nearby rack, wrapping that gorgeous body of hers away from view.
He wanted to protest. Loudly.
“You can go now,” she said, her voice even more rigid than before, and when her gaze met his again, those miraculous eyes of hers were smoky with something bleak. “I trust it won’t be necessary for any further object lessons