beside her. It seemed particularly obvious in a place like this, all shadows and absence, empty rooms and echoing footsteps.
You’re becoming hysterical.
When she felt like herself again, she was sure she’d stop thinking like this. She was sure. And then she’d fish her cell phone out of the bag she fervently hoped was in that limo and she would either listen to the host of apologetic messages Ariella should have left for her today, or, in their far more likely absence, call Ariella until her sister answered and explained this great big mess she’d made.
And then maybe all of this would feel a little bit less Gothic.
Particularly if she got out of this damned dress before it crippled her forever.
“Here,” Chase grunted, pushing open a door.
Zara blinked. Her head spun and her heart began to race and her feet suddenly felt rooted to the floor. “Is this…?”
“Your rooms.” He smirked. “Unless you planned to make this a more traditional marriage? I could no doubt be persuaded. I’ve certainly had enough whiskey to imagine anything is a good idea. My rooms are at the other end of this hall.”
Zara thought she’d rather die than persuade him to do anything of the kind. Or anyone like him who would, she had no doubt, need nothing in the way of persuasion if she was lanky, lovely, effortlessly appealing Ariella.
Not that you want this man either way, she reminded herself. Pointedly. She’d always been allergic to his type: basically, male versions of her sister. Younger versions of her father. Entitled and arrogant and no, thank you.
Despite that thing in her that felt like heat, only far more dangerous.
“Whiskey wears off,” she said crisply. “And more to the point, I haven’t had any.” She brushed past him, determined to sleep in whatever the hell room this was, even if it was a cell and her only option was the floor. “This is perfect, thank you.”
“Zara.” She didn’t want to stop walking, but she did, as if he could command her that easily. You’re tired, she assured herself. That’s all. “I’ll be back later,” he said, his voice dark and, yes, foreboding.
“For what? Persuasion? There won’t be any. No matter when you come back.”
He let out a noise that might have been a laugh, and the madness was that she felt it skim down the length of her spine like a long, lush sweep of his fingers.
There was no reason that she should have felt him the way she did then, like an imprint of fire, large and looming over her from behind, like he could cast a shadow and drown her in it all at once. And there was no reason that her body should react to him the way it did, jolting wide-awake and hungry, just like that.
“I’ll be back,” he said again, a low thread of sound, dark and rough, and she felt that, too. Felt it, like his hands against her skin.
She nodded. Acquiesced. It was that or succumb to panic entirely.
Zara waited until he closed the door behind her, then let out a long breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. It came out in a kind of shudder, and she had to blink back all that overwhelming heat from her eyes.
Then she actually looked around her.
The bedroom suite was done in restrained blues accented by geometrical shapes etched in an elegant black, with a lit fireplace against one wall that was already crackling away and an inviting sofa and two chairs in front of it that begged for a book, a cozy throw blanket and a long, rainy afternoon’s read. The bed was a cheerful four-poster affair, with quilts and blankets piled high and a multitude of deep, soft-looking pillows. It was a contented, happy sort of room, and it made all that Gothic fervor ease away, leaving Zara feeling overtired and foolish in its wake.
Her gaze snagged on the set of photographs on the mantel above the fireplace as she walked deeper into the room, all featuring pictures of a very tall, very recognizable black-haired girl, solemn dark eyes and an enigmatic almost-smile on her pretty face. Mattie Whitaker. Chase’s infamous sister.
Zara read the tabloids, and not only when she was stuck in line at the supermarket. Mattie had been all over them recently for her “secret marriage” to “playboy Chase’s greatest rival,” which Zara didn’t think could have been too terribly secret if there were all those pictures of Mattie and her harshly attractive husband gazing at each other in front of a glorious Greek backdrop. Just as Nicodemus Stathis couldn’t possibly be the terrible rival the papers wanted him to be if Chase and he were working on a merger.
Shockingly, she told herself derisively, the papers lie, as your entire life watching Ariella manipulate them to her benefit should have made you well aware.
But it was Mattie Whitaker’s bathroom she cared about then, not the marriage Chase had claimed he’d sold his sister into. Or what the tabloids might have made up about it.
“That,” she said out loud as she headed for the far door across the bedroom, “will be something Mattie and I can bond over across the table at Christmas. Our delightful forced marriages, whether secret or not.”
She lost her train of thought and let out a sigh of delight instead when she walked inside and found the bathtub of her dreams waiting for her, vast and deep enough for a group of people, placed before high windows that looked out into the silken night.
Bliss.
Zara turned on the tap greedily and dumped a capful of the foaming bath salts that sat on the tub’s lip into the warm stream. Then she ripped that veil straight off her head, not caring that it tugged at her hair. That it hurt. It came off with a clatter of hairpins against the floor, and Zara moaned out loud in stark relief as she massaged her way over her abused scalp, pulling out the remaining pins and letting her hair fall free at last.
Now it was time to deal with that torturous dress. The water poured into the bath behind her as she tugged and pulled, twisting herself this way and that as she tried to free herself. It was far more difficult than it should have been—but Zara was desperate. She yanked even harder—
And then at last she heard a glorious tearing sound, the fabric finally gave—and she yanked it all off, kicking the tattered remains away as the dress fell to her feet in a voluminous cloud. At first, she hurt more than she had before. Her breasts ached, and she could see the angry lines the built-in corset had left all over them and her belly, red and pronounced because she had the kind of skin that showed every last mark like a neon billboard.
And because the dress had been made for her sister, who better resembled a starving gazelle and had needed that corset to create the illusion of the cleavage she didn’t have rather than tamp down any existing breasts.
It was such a relief to be free of that hideous torture device that Zara’s eyes filled with tears. But she refused to indulge them, not here in this too-Gothic mansion with the whiskey-pounding, possibly dangerous husband she’d never met before the ceremony. Not when she didn’t know that she’d stop. Not when the wedding was only the latest in a long stream of things she could probably cry about, if she let herself.
Not here. Not tonight. Grams had maintained her stiff upper lip to the very last of her days. Zara could do the same with far less provocation.
She
