to make like one of Cinderella’s unfortunate stepsisters and hack off a toe to fit into them—and shimmied out of the very bright, screaming red thong panties she’d worn beneath it all. The only thing in the whole, long, strange day that was hers.
Zara couldn’t control the deep, atavistic sigh she let out when she slipped into the bath at last. The water was hot and the bubbles were high enough to feel decadent without being so high they became a problem. She piled her hair—wild and thick and incredibly unruly from a day in pins and scraped into submission beneath that veil—up on top of her head in a messy knot as she tried to picture glamorous, couture-draped Mattie Whitaker lounging in this bathtub the way she was now. Mattie Whitaker, who was a good deal like Ariella in Zara’s mind—one of those effortless girls, all long, slender limbs; hot-and-cold-running boyfriends; and the ability to float through life without a single care.
Zara’s life had been charmed in its own way yet was significantly less gleaming, despite the fact she, too, was an Elliott. She’d failed to look the part from birth and hadn’t ever managed to act the part, either, despite the thousands of lectures Amos had delivered on the topic. Even when doing so would have been in her best interests.
Well. She’d acted the part today, hadn’t she? She’d done it. I did what you asked, Grams, she thought then. I gave him one last chance to treat me differently.
She shut her eyes and leaned back against the smooth porcelain, breathing in the jasmine-scented steam as she tried to expel all the tension of the day from her body. As she tried not to think about what had happened earlier in that church. Or what might happen later, because who knew what the expectations were in a situation this twisted? Or what she’d got herself into, marrying a man who was not only a total stranger, but who’d turned up to his own wedding half-drunk and entirely furious, and that had been before he’d seen the switch.
Zara didn’t know how long she sat like that, the water cascading all around her, the jasmine heat like an embrace, soaking all the red marks from the vicious gown away into the ether and her headache along with it. She was lazily contemplating climbing out of the bath and investigating the possibility of dinner when she felt a shift in the air. Everything simply went taut, her skin felt too tight, and she reluctantly opened up her eyes.
To find Chase leaning there in the doorway, looking dark and disreputable, lethally dangerous in a way that made the back of her neck tingle, and nothing at all like drunk.
For a moment Zara stopped breathing. Her heart gave a mighty kick against her ribs and then jackrabbited into high gear. Her ears rang as if someone had screamed, and her throat ached as if she was that someone, but she knew she’d done nothing at all but stare back at the man who shouldn’t have been there.
She needed to say something. She needed to do something. But he was so beautiful it hurt, even more so now that he’d changed out of his wedding suit and was something far more elemental in bare feet that defied the weather beneath a soft-looking button-down shirt he hadn’t bothered to do up properly over a pair of jeans. And his dark blue eyes seemed wilder than before, remote and with that aching thing at once, like some kind of ruthless poetry. She didn’t know what lodged in her chest then, only that it was much too sharp and alarmingly deep.
“Shouldn’t you be passed out on a floor somewhere?” she asked, harsher than she’d meant to sound.
Maybe this was his version of drunken, idiotic behavior. She’d witnessed the bitter end of her parents’ marriage over the course of too many drink-blurred nights, as they’d each got drunker and meaner. Ariella had sneaked out to escape it, while Zara had tried to hide from it in books where all the terrifying goings-on weren’t usually real, in the end. She’d never seen the appeal of getting drunk since.
Though even that looked better than it should on Chase Whitaker.
“I’m not drunk,” he growled at her. “Not nearly enough.”
He shifted so he could prop one of those finely cut shoulders against the doorjamb, and she felt the way he looked at her like a touch. Hot and demanding. And she understood then, that what happened here would set the stage for the whole of their unconventional relationship, however long it lasted, and in whatever form. If he thought he could walk in on her like this, what else would he think he could do?
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
