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 of her.
It made no sense. I had been raised in the gutters of Madrid, but I had always wanted better. Always. As I’d fought my way out of the circumstances of my birth, I’d coveted elegance and collected it wherever I could.
It had made sense for me to pursue Celeste. She was grace personified, elegant from the tips of her fingernails to the line of her neck, and nothing but ice straight through.
It had made sense that I had wanted her to adorn my collection.
The girl before me, who had dared try to sneak up on a man who had been raised in dire pits filled with snakes and jackals and now walked untroubled through packs of wolves dressed as aristocrats, was...unruly.
She had red-gold hair that slithered this way and that and stubborn curls she had made no apparent attempt to tame. There was a spray of freckles over her nose, and I knew that if I could see them from this distance, it likely meant that my eyes were not deceiving me and she had not, in fact, bothered with even the faintest hint of cosmetics in a nod toward civility.
On the one hand, that meant her dark, thick lashes and the berry shade of her full lips were deliciously natural.
But it also showed that she had little to no sense of propriety.
She was otherwise unadorned. She wore a navy blue dress that was unobjectionable enough, with classic lines that nodded toward her generous figure without making too much of it, and leather boots that covered her to her knees.
I could have forgiven the hair and even the lack of cosmetics—which suggested she had not prepared for her first meeting with me the way a woman who planned to make the perfect wife would have.
But it was the way she was scowling at me that suggested she was even less like her sister than I had imagined.
Celeste had never cracked. Not even when she’d been denied what she’d so prettily claimed she wanted. Oh, she’d caused a carefully prepared scene for her father, but there had never been anything but calculation in her gaze. Her mascara had never run. She had never presented anything but perfection, even in the midst of her performance.
The fact it still rankled made it a weakness. I thrust it aside.
“Surely that is not the expression you wish to show your future husband,” I said quietly. “On this, the occasion of our first meeting.”
I had heard her come in and creep along the strange balcony above me the butler had told me was a gallery. Not a very good gallery, I had thought with a derisive glance at the art displayed there. All stodgy old masters and boring ecclesiastical works. Nothing bold. Nothing new.
Until she’d come.
“I want to know why you wish to marry me.” She belted that out, belligerent and bordering on rude. A glance confirmed that she was making fists at her sides. Fists.
I felt my brow raise. “I beg your pardon?”
Her scowl deepened. “I want to know why you want to marry me, when if you are even half as rich and powerful as they say, you could marry anyone.”
I thrust my hands—not in anything resembling fists—into the pockets of my trousers, and considered her.
I should have been outraged. I told myself I was.
But the truth was, there was something about her that tempted me to smile. And I was not a man who smiled easily, if at all.
I told myself it was the very fact that she had come here, when our wedding was not until the morning. It was the fact she seemed to imagine she could put herself between her grasping, snobbish father and me when these were matters that could not possibly concern her. Daughters of men like Dermot Fitzalan always did what they were told, sooner or later.
Yet here she was.
It was the futility of it, I thought. My Don Quixote bride with her wild hair, tilting at windmills and scowling all the while. It made something in my chest tighten.
“I will answer any questions you have,” I told her magnanimously, trying my best to contain my own ferocity. “But you must face me.”
“I’m looking right at you.”
I only raised a hand, then beckoned her to me with two languid fingers.
And then waited, aware that it had been a long time indeed since I had been in the presence of someone...unpredictable.
I saw her hands open, then close again at her sides. I saw the way her chest moved, telling me that she fought to keep her breath even.
I learned a lot about my future bride as the seconds ticked by, and all she did was stare down at me. I learned she was willful. Defiant.
But ultimately yielding.
Because when she moved, it was to the spiral stair that led her down to the stone floor where I stood.
Perhaps not yielding so much as curious, I amended as she drew near, folding her arms over her chest as if she was drawing armor around herself in order to face me.
I took a moment to consider her, this bride I had purchased outright. This girl who was my revenge and my prize, all in one.
She will do, I thought, pleased with myself.
“I suppose,” I said after a moment, in the cool tone I used to reprimand my subordinates, “you cannot help the hair.”
Imogen glowered at me. Her eyes were an unusual shade of brown that looked like old copper coins when they filled with temper, as they did now. It made me wonder how they would look when she was wild with passion instead.
That lust hit me again. Harder this time.
“It is much like being born without a title, I imagine,” she retorted.
It took me a moment to process that. To understand that this messy, unruly girl had thrust such an old knife in so deftly, then twisted it.
I
