He had to stop. He had to remember that whatever else she was, she was an Elliott. She might have proved herself far more interesting than her shallow, grasping, run-of-the-mill sister, to say nothing of that body, but she was still an Elliott.
Which meant there was only one way this could go.
“I appreciate the show,” he said in a voice that made her jerk where she stood, as surely as if he’d hauled off and slapped her. Exactly as he’d planned, and yet Chase loathed himself at once—and he’d have thought he’d hit his maximum where that was concerned years before. You always have somewhere lower to go, don’t you? He waited until the red blazed across her face, until her gaze turned stormy. “There’s a private dining room on this floor, above the library. Follow the hall to the end and it will be the arched doorway in front of you. You’ve got ten minutes.”
“And you will have to drag my dead body in there,” she said, her voice stiff with a fury he could see all too plainly in her gaze. Fury and whatever that darker, harsher thing was. He told himself it wasn’t his to know. That he didn’t want to know. “As that is the only way I’ll ever spend another moment in your company.”
“Trust me, Zara,” he said, his voice much too low and not nearly polite enough, things he didn’t want to think about all over his face—or so he assumed from the way she stiffened in reaction, and not, he could see too plainly, because she was offended. “You don’t want me to come back here and force the issue. You really don’t.”
CHASE WAITED FOR HER in the small dining room, the place Big Bart had reserved for immediate family alone. There was a huge, formal dining room downstairs near the old-fashioned ballroom that now housed a grand piano Chase’s mother had once played, and another medium-sized dining room that his father had used for smaller gatherings, but this one had always been off-limits. It was close. Intimate.
Exactly what Zara had indicated she didn’t want.
His mouth twisted in derision, and Chase moved away from the window before he could look too closely at his own reflection there against the dark night beyond. He already knew what he’d see, and there was no point in it. There was nothing he could change now. It was done.
Going into that suite hadn’t helped. It had only underscored the scope of his own failures. He’d never spent much time in his sister’s rooms, not even when he and Mattie had been small and far happier. Not even before.
Even now, all these years after she’d moved out and despite what she’d sacrificed two months ago for the family and the company by marrying Nicodemus Stathis, he couldn’t think about his sister without losing another great chunk of himself in all that guilt. It cut too deep, left him nothing but gutted and useless. It had always seemed a kindness to simply keep his distance instead. To let her grow up without the dark weight of the secrets he carried. To let Mattie, at least, be free.
Not that it had worked.
I’m guessing you don’t wake up every night of your life screaming then, Mattie had said the last time they’d spoken. She’d sounded raw. Unlike herself. He’d been as unable to face that as anything else. A coward down to his bones, but that hadn’t been news. Calling out for Mum again and again.
Chase didn’t wake up in the night, he thought now as he found himself by the window again, looking out toward the Hudson River at the low end of the property even though he couldn’t see it with the dark December night pressing in on all sides. Nightmares would have been beside the point. He carried his ghosts around with him in the light.
He never forgot what he’d done.
And neither had his father.
Maybe that was why Big Bart Whitaker had left his empire in such disarray. It was so unlike him, after all. Chase had always been Bart’s heir, and because of that he’d spent the past decade working his way up the ranks until he’d achieved the VP slot in the London office. He’d never minded that his future had been so mapped out for him. He’d enjoyed the challenge of proving he wasn’t just his surname, but a capable businessman in his own right, no matter what the papers intimated. Everyone had always assumed that he’d move from London to the Whitaker Industries corporate headquarters in New York and transition into his eventual leadership of the company. That had always been the plan, except it had never been the right time, had it? Bart had always had other things to do first. Chase had always found a different reason to stay in London.
The truth, he acknowledged now, was that they’d been a good deal more comfortable with each other when there was a nice, wide ocean between them.
Maybe the fact that Bart had left Chase to fend for himself wasn’t a mistake. Maybe Bart had thought that if Chase couldn’t hold on to Whitaker Industries against the tiresome machinations of Amos Elliott or the cash flow issues that the merger with his brand-new brother-in-law would solve, he didn’t deserve it.
And Chase couldn’t find it in him to disagree.
He’d forgotten where he was, he realized when he heard a light step on the old floors behind him and scented the faintest hint of jasmine in the air.
“I don’t understand what this is,” Zara said from the doorway, her voice tight. But she’d still come on time, he noted. “I don’t understand what you want.”
Neither did he, and that should have alarmed him. It did. But it also occurred to him that the only time in the past six months—hell, in the past twenty years—that he’d actually forgotten about that lonely stretch of South African road and what he’d done there, what he’d become and what that had done to his family, was when Zara Elliott held his gaze and did her best to confound him, one way or another. In the bath, yes. God help him, the bath. But in the limo, as well.
He didn’t want that to mean anything. But he couldn’t seem to ignore it, either. And that spelled nothing but doom for them both.
Chase turned, slowly, and felt a deep, purely masculine regret lodge beneath his ribs when he saw she’d dressed. Of course she had. Black, stretchy pants that clung to those marvelous hips and her well-formed legs and what looked like a particularly soft sweater on top, a bit slouchy and roomy, so that her softly rounded shoulder peeked out when she moved. Her wild, glorious hair was combed through and fixed neatly at the nape of her neck, and he wanted the other Zara back. That powerful, compelling goddess creature he wanted to taste. Everywhere. With his teeth. That stunning woman he had the agony of knowing was just there, now hidden beneath clothes that couldn’t possibly flatter her as much as no clothes at all did. Nothing could.
This was his bride. His wife. His wedding night, some darkness inside him reminded him.
Good lord, but he was still hard.
“This is our marriage,” he told her, his voice a grating thing, harsh and a little too mean. He thought she’d flinch again, but her gleaming eyes only narrowed.
“This had better also be dinner,” she said as crisply as if she was discussing the weather of a distant city. And as if she’d put on a sheet of armor beneath her clothes. “Or I may collapse from starvation. And while I might view that as a handy escape from all this excitement, I doubt that’s what you have in mind.”
“I’ve never had an arranged marriage before,” he said grimly as she moved farther into the room with a wariness she made no effort to hide, then perched on the edge of the chair nearest the door. “Perhaps nightly collapses are but par for the course.”
She eyed him. “Arranged marriages are really quite stable,” she said after a moment. “Historically speaking. More so than romantic marriages.”