sloshing from how quickly she’d stood. And that pounding thing in her head that made her ears feel thick and her stomach churn.
Chase simply stared.
He was frozen in place, something she couldn’t read at all stamped on his gorgeous face, making him look something other than simply beautiful. Something more. Something so dangerous and so intent, she felt it thud through her, hard. Then he blinked, slowly, and Zara understood that she cared a good deal more about what he might say next than she should.
Which meant she’d made a terrible mistake. As she so often did when she decided to act before she thought. Why could she never seem to learn that lesson?
“Yes,” Chase scraped out into the close heat of the bathroom, in a hoarse voice that shivered over her like warm water but was much, much hotter, a match for that deep, dark blue of his gaze and as irrevocably scalding. “You bloody well are.”
* * *
If she’d taken a sledgehammer to the side of his head, she couldn’t have stunned him more.
She was so…pink. So perfect.
That was all Chase could think for long moments. She’d looked round and solid all draped in white as she’d been; stout and tented, like a gazebo. That’s what he’d thought in the limousine, uncharitably. Perhaps this was his punishment.
Or, a sly voice inside of him, located rather further south than his brain, she is your reward for all of this.
It was hard to argue with that. She was a symphony of curves. Gorgeous, mouthwatering, stunning lushness, from the fine neck he could remember beneath his palm in the church in an almost alarmingly tactile manner to a pair of heavy, perfect breasts, plump and flushed from the damp heat yet marked by fine blue lines that reminded him how fair she was.
And nipples so pert they made his mouth actually ache to taste them. Chase was glad he’d happened to lean against the door, because he wasn’t certain he could stand on his own.
Her waist was the kind of indentation that made him understand, profoundly, whole schools of art he’d never paid much attention to before, particularly with the breathtaking flare of her hips beneath, wide and welcoming and making that trim V between her legs all the more delectable.
He wanted to be there—right there—more than he could remember wanting anything. Ever.
All that and the riot of reds and coppers and strawberry blonds that she’d fastened atop her head somehow, the wet heat making tendrils into curls and spirals that framed her elegant face, making him as hard as a spike and incapable of thinking of anything for long moments but getting his hands in the mess of it, deep. Holding her still while he thrust himself between those perfectly formed thighs, plundered that astonishingly carnal mouth of hers, and happily lost what was left of his mind.
Chase was a product of his time, he understood then, and felt sorry for all the men his age. Like them, he’d always preferred longer, slimmer women by rote, preferably with the smooth leanness that spoke of countless years of deprivation. Women who wore clothes in ways that emphasized their narrow hips and the angular thrust of their collar and hip bones. Women who looked good in photographs, especially the kind that he was always finding himself in, splashed here and there in the harsh glare of the British press.
Women like Zara, he thought in a kind of daze as an ancient, primitive need he’d never felt before pounded through him, should never, ever be confined to anything as foolish as modern clothing. They should never be subjected to a dress like that monstrosity she’d worn today. They should never be contained in photographs that adored angles and punished soft curves. Not with bodies like this, like hers, that were made to be seen whole in all their primal glory. That were created purely to be worshipped.
She was branded into him now, he thought wildly, so red-hot and deep he might never see anything or anyone else again.
And he was so hard it hurt.
“Then we need never repeat this experience,” she was saying, her voice a brittle slap against all that warm heat, and Chase was still knocked senseless. He couldn’t follow what she was saying, not with his heart trying to kick its way out of his chest, so he stayed where he was and watched as she stepped out of the tub and yanked one of the towels from the nearby rack, wrapping that gorgeous body of hers away from view.
He wanted to protest. Loudly.
“You can go now,” she said, her voice even more rigid than before, and when her gaze met his again, those miraculous eyes of hers were smoky with something bleak. “I trust it won’t be necessary for any further object lessons tonight, will it?”
And Chase could think again then. With both his brains. More than that, he remembered himself and what he was doing, something he couldn’t believe he’d lost track of for even a moment. He opted not to analyze that too closely. Not while the wife he didn’t want was still within an easy arm’s reach, her skin still pinkened and softened from her long soak, her warm golden eyes still shooting sparks—
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
