father preferred. Not to my own taste, which would never have run to dresses at this chilly time of year, no matter that this one was long-sleeved and made of a fine wool. I paired the dress with butter-soft knee-high leather boots, and then found myself in my mirror.
I had not transformed into elegance during my vigil on the settee.
Curls like mine always looked unkempt. Elegance was sleek and smooth, but my hair resisted any and all attempts to tame it. The nuns had done what they could, but even they had been unable to combat my hair’s natural tendency to find its own shape. I ran my fingers through it as best I could, letting the curls do as they would because they always did.
My hair was the bane of my existence. Much as I was the bane of my father’s.
Only then, when I could say that in all honesty I had at least tried to sort myself out into something resembling order, did I leave my room.
I made my way out into the hall in the family wing, then ducked into one of the servants’ back stairs. My father would not approve of his daughter moving about the house like one of the help, but I had never thought that he needed to know how familiar I was with the secret passages in this old pile of stones. Knowing them made life here that much more bearable.
Knowing my way through the shadows allowed me to remain at large when there was a lecture brewing. It permitted me to come in from long walks on the grounds, muddy and disheveled, and make it to my own rooms before the sight of me caused the usual offense, outrage, and threats to curtail my exercise until I learned how to behave like a lady.
I carefully made my way over to the guest wing, skirting around the rooms I knew had been set aside for various family members and my father’s overfed friends. I knew that there was only one possible place my father would have dared put a man as wealthy and powerful as Javier Dos Santos. Only one place suitable for a groom with such a formidable financial reputation.
My father might have turned Javier from the house ten years ago, but now that he was welcome and set to marry the right daughter, Dermot Fitzalan would spare him no possible luxury.
I headed for what was one of the newer additions to the grand old house, a two-story dwelling place appended to the end of the guest wing where my grandmother had lived out her final days. It was more a house all its own, with its own entrance and rooms, but I knew that I could access it on the second level and sneak my way along its private gallery.
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
