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.”
“Because the arrangements are so well orchestrated by fathers like yours? Lovingly and with great concern for the participants? Or because neither party cares very much?”
“The latter, I’d think,” she said, ignoring the sardonic way he’d asked that, though he could see by that gleam in her gaze that she’d heard it. “In our case, anyway. Once you’ve overcome your shock at finding the wrong sister at the altar, of course.”
Her gaze then was as arid as her voice, and Chase couldn’t understand why he cared. When he knew he shouldn’t.
“I was surprised to learn the notorious Ariella Elliott had a sister in the first place,” he said, with some attempt to make his voice less rough. “Somehow, that never came up in all those discussions with your father. Or in any of the articles I’ve seen about your sister over the years. Though there was no attempt to hide you at any of the dinners we both attended.”
He still stood by the window, watching her as if doing so would lead to some grand revelation, and countered that restless thing in him that wanted things he refused to acknowledge by shoving his hands in the pockets of his trousers. Quite as if he worried he’d otherwise have to fight to keep them from her.
Zara smiled. It was a slap of perfectly courteous ice and told him a number of things he didn’t wish to know about her.
“I don’t date musicians or actors. I don’t attend the sorts of parties that the paparazzi cover, much less stagger out of them under the influence of unsavory substances at ungodly hours of the morning. I like books better than people. None of that makes for interesting gossip, I’m afraid.”
He regarded her with what he wished was a dispassionate cool. “What would the gossips say about you, then? Interesting or otherwise?”
There was something vulnerable about her soft mouth then, a darker sheen to her golden eyes, but her chin edged high and she didn’t drop her gaze from his.
“Is this a little bit of friendly, husbandly interest?” she asked. “Or are you merely gathering ammunition?”
She wasn’t at all
