His for Revenge

* * *

He was trapped in a nightmare, Chase thought, staring at that outstretched hand in stunned, outraged amazement. There was no other explanation. For any of this.

“I know who you are,” he grated, and when he didn’t take her hand she merely dropped it back in her lap, looking wholly unperturbed. Exactly as she’d looked in the church, when he’d been glaring at her fiercely enough to burn holes through her.

Except for when you kissed her.

But Chase shoved that thought away, along with the image of her flushing that intriguing shade of scarlet in the wake of that kiss he still didn’t know why he’d given her, and scowled at his bride instead.

The truth was, while he’d recognized who she must have been because she’d been ushered up the aisle by his nemesis, he couldn’t remember if they’d ever met before. He wasn’t sure he’d have known her name even if they had, just as he wasn’t sure why that made him feel something like ashamed. He had a vague memory of her in a black dress that had fit her much better than the gown she wore today, and a flash of red hair from across a table. That was it.

Every other interaction he’d had with her family had involved her pain-in-the-ass father and blonde, brittle Ariella, who was apparently even more useless than he’d already imagined she was. And his imagination had been rather detailed in its low opinion of her.

“You tricked me,” he said then, trying to gather his wits, as he’d been noticeably unable to do for some time now. Since Big Bart Whitaker had died six months ago, leaving him neck deep in this mess that got bigger and deeper and swampier every bloody day. Since he’d had to give up his life in London and come back to the States to take his place as president and CEO of Whitaker Industries, where he’d done nothing but clash with Amos Elliott—the driving opposing force on his board of directors and the bane of his existence. And now his father-in-law, for his sins. “I could have you up on fraud charges, to start.”

Zara Elliott did not look alarmed by this possibility. She was awash in masses and masses of a frothy, unflattering white fabric, like a foaming and possibly furious marshmallow had exploded from every side of her while her quietly aristocratic face remained serene. But her eyes—her eyes were a bright, warm gold. The color of late afternoons, of the sun dripping low on the winter horizon.

Where the hell had that come from? He must have had more whiskey for his breakfast than he’d thought.

“I’m three inches shorter than Ariella and at least two sizes larger,” she said. “At a conservative estimate.”

Her voice was smooth and warm, like honey. She sounded, if not happy, something like content. Chase didn’t know how he recognized that note in her voice, given he’d never felt such a thing in his life.

So that was why it took him a moment to process what she’d said. “I don’t follow.”

“Was I tricking you or were you not paying very much attention, if you couldn’t tell the difference the moment I set foot in that church?” She only smiled when he scowled at her. “It’s a reasonable question. One we can ignore, if you like, but which a judge may dwell on in any hypothetical fraud trial.”

“This hypothetical judge might well find himself more interested in the marriage license,” Chase replied. “Which did not have your name on it when I grudgingly signed it.”

Her smile only deepened. “My father imagined that might cause you some concern. He suggested I remind you that the license was obtained right here in this very county, where he’s reigned supreme for decades now, like his father, uncles, grandfather and so on before him. He wanted me to put your mind at ease. That license will read the way it should before the end of the day, he’s quite certain.”

Chase muttered something filthy under his breath, which had no discernible effect on her composure. He leaned forward and rummaged around until he found the half-drunk bottle of whiskey in the bar cabinet and then he took a long swig of it, not bothering to use a glass. That sweet, obliterating fire rolled through him, but it was better than the numbness inside of him, so he ignored the scraping flames and took another hefty swig instead.

After a moment, he offered her the bottle. It only seemed polite, under the circumstances.

“No, thank you.” Also polite. Scrupulously so.

“Do you drink?” He didn’t know why he cared. He didn’t care.

“I like wine, sometimes,” she said, as if she was considering the matter in some depth as she spoke. “Red more than white. I’ll admit that beer is a mystery to me. I think it tastes like old socks.”

“This is whiskey. It doesn’t taste of socks. It tastes of peat and fire and the scalding anticipation of regret.”

“Tempting.” Her soft mouth twitched slightly in the corners, and he decided the whiskey was going to his head, because he found that far more fascinating than he should have. He couldn’t recall the last time a woman’s naked mouth had seemed so riveting. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d noticed a woman’s mouth at all, save what it could do in the dark. “How much whiskey did you have before the ceremony?”

He eyed her for a moment, then eyed the bottle. “Half.”

“Ah.” She nodded. “I thought you might be drunk.”

“Why aren’t you?” he asked, not caring that the dark rasp in his voice gave away far too many of the things he needed to keep hidden.

“Sadly, that wasn’t on the list of options I was given when I woke up this morning and was informed Ariella had flown the coop.” Her impossibly golden eyes gleamed with something almost painful Chase didn’t want to understand, but her voice was still perfectly cheerful. It didn’t make any sense. “I had to fight for a single cup of coffee in all the panic and blame. Asking for something alcoholic would have started a war.”

He felt something very much like ashamed again, and he didn’t like it. It hadn’t occurred to him that she might find this marriage as unlikely and unpleasant a prospect as he did, and he didn’t know why something in him wanted to argue the point. Like it made any difference who wanted what. They were both stuck now, weren’t they? Just as her father had intended.

And it didn’t matter to him which Elliott sister was stuck with him in Amos’s handiwork. It made no difference to his plans. No matter what Zara’s mouth did to his peace of mind.

Chase decided he didn’t particularly care for any of these thoughts and took another long pull from the whiskey bottle instead. Oblivion was the only place he truly enjoyed these days. He’d considered permanently relocating there, in fact. How hard would it be to lose himself entirely in this or that bottle?

But he never did it, no matter how many nights he’d tried. Because the fact remained: the only thing he had left of his father, of his parents and his family legacy, was Whitaker Industries. He couldn’t let it fall entirely into Amos Elliott’s greedy hands. He’d already compromised and merged companies with the man his father had considered a better son to him than Chase had ever been. He couldn’t sell it now. He couldn’t step aside.

He couldn’t do anything but this.

Chase took another drink from the bottle, long and hard.

“Where is your sister?” he asked, with what he thought was remarkable calm, under the circumstances.

Those golden eyes cooled considerably. “That’s an excellent question.”

“But you don’t know?” He let his gaze track over that face of hers, her pale skin blending into the white veil that billowed around her, reminding him of a bird’s plumage. He found he was fascinated by the fact her voice remained the same, so unassailably polite, no matter what her gaze told him. Her mouth bothered him, he decided. It was too full. Too soft and tempting. Especially when she smiled. “That’s your position?”

“Chase,” she said, then hesitated. “Can I call you that? Or do you require that your arranged brides address you in a different way?”

He let out a short laugh, which shocked the hell out him. “Chase is fine.”

“Chase,” she said again, more firmly, and he had the strangest sensation then. Like this was a different time and there truly was an intimacy to the use of proper names. Or maybe it was just the way she said it; the way it sounded in that mouth of hers. “If I knew where Ariella was, I wouldn’t have shoehorned myself into this dress and married you in front of three hundred of my father’s closest friends, neighbors and business associates.” She smiled at him, though those impossible eyes were shot through with temper then, and he understood that was where the truth of this woman was. Not in her practiced smiles or her remarkably cheery voice, but in her eyes. Gold like the sunset and as honest. “If I knew where she was I would have gone and found her and dragged her to the church myself. She is, after all, the Elliott sister who agreed to marry you. Not me.”

He watched her mildly enough over his whiskey bottle, and noted the precise moment she realized she’d devolved into something like a rant. That telltale color stole over her cheeks, and he watched it sweep over the rest of her, down her neck and to parts hidden in all that explosive white. He found he was fascinated anew.

“No offense taken,” he said, forestalling the apology he could see forming on her lips. “I didn’t want to marry either one of you. Your father demanded it.”

“As a condition of his agreement to back you and your new COO, yes,” she said. “Your new brother-in-law, if I’m not mistaken?”

“Nicodemus Stathis and I have merged our companies,” Chase said, as thinly and emotionlessly as he could. “And our families, as seems to be going around this season. My sister tells me she’s blissfully happy.” He wondered if Zara could see what a lie that was, if that was what the slight tilt to her head meant. If she knew, somehow, how little he and his younger sister Mattie had talked at all in the long years since they’d lost their mother, much less lately. He shoved on. “Your father is the only remaining thorn in my side. You—this—is nothing more than a thorn-removal procedure.”

That was perhaps a bit too harsh, the part of him that wasn’t deep in a fire of whiskey reflected.

“No offense taken,” she said, her voice as merry as his had been cool, though Chase wasn’t certain he’d have apologized, if she’d given him the chance. Or that she wasn’t offended, come to that. “I’m delighted to be of service.”

“I know why Ariella was doing this—or why she said she was all right with it,” Chase said then, bluntly. “She quite likes a hefty bank account and no commentary on how she empties it. Is that a family trait? Are you in this for the money?”

Did he only imagine that she stiffened? “I have my own money, thank you.”

“You mean you have your father’s.” He toasted her with his bottle. “Don’t we all.”

“The only family money I have came from my grandmother, as a matter of fact, though I try not to touch it,” she replied, still smiling, though that warm gold gaze of hers had iced over again, and Chase knew he should hate the fact he noticed. “My father felt that if I wouldn’t follow his wishes to the letter, which involved significantly less school and a lot more friendly games of things like tennis to attract his friends’ sons as potential boyfriends-slash-merger options, I shouldn’t have access to any of his money.”

“Your sister makes defying your father her chief form of entertainment,” Chase said, focusing on that part of what she’d said instead of the rest, because the rest reminded him of the many steps he’d taken to make sure that, while his father might have employed him, Big Bart had never supported him. Not since the day he’d turned eighteen. And he didn’t want that kind of common ground with this woman. “She told me so herself.”

“Yes,” Zara said calmly, her gaze steady on his. “But Ariella is beautiful. Her defiance lands her on the covers of magazines and the arms of wealthy men. My father may find her antics embarrassing, but he views those things as a certain kind of currency. In that respect, I’m broke.”

Chase blinked. “I’m very wealthy,” he pointed out. “In all forms of currency.”

“I didn’t marry you for your money,” she said gently. “I married you because this way, I can always remind my father that I sacrificed myself for him on command. To a wealthy man he wanted to control. Talk about the kind of currency Amos Elliott appreciates.” Her mouth shifted into that smile of hers that did things to him he didn’t like or understand. “He isn’t a very nice man. It’s better to have leverage.”

Chase felt caught in the endless gold of her eyes then, or perhaps it was the near-winter afternoon outside the window that seemed to be some kind of extension of them, the sun brilliant through the stark trees and already too close to the edge of night.

“Are you looking for a nice man, then?” he asked quietly. From somewhere inside himself he hardly recognized.

“It would be difficult for you to be a worse one than my father,” Zara replied in the same tone. “Unless it was your singular purpose in life and even the briefest Google search online makes it clear that you’ve had other things to do.”

Was she being kind to him? Chase couldn’t fathom it. It made something great and gaping hinge open inside of him, too near to all that darkness he knew better than to let out into the light. He knew better than to let anyone see it. He knew what they’d call him if they did. He called himself that and worse every day.

Monster. Murderer.

He had blood on his hands that he could never wash clean, and this woman with eyes like liquid gold and the softest mouth he’d ever touched was being kind to him. On the very day her vicious father had lashed them together in unholy matrimony.

“I sold my own sister into her marriage because it benefited the company. I sold myself today.” His voice was colder than the December weather outside. Colder than what he kept locked inside. And all those things he hid away swelled up in him then. Those memories. Those terrible choices. The day he’d lost his mother on that South African road where he’d made the choice that defined him, the choice that he still couldn’t live with all these years later. To say nothing of the truth about his relationship with the father he felt he still had to prove himself to, even now, when Big Bart Whitaker would never know the difference. “You’ll want to be careful, Zara. I’ll ruin you, too, if you let me.”

She studied him for a moment, and then she smiled, and he didn’t know how he knew that this one was real. Even if it felt like it drew blood.

“No need to worry about that,” she said quietly. “I won’t.”

CHAPTER TWO

THE HOUSE WAS like something out of a Gothic novel.

Zara had to fight to conceal her shiver of recognition from the man who lounged beside her in the black mood he’d worn throughout the drive.

“Cold?” he asked. Chase’s voice was polite on the surface, but his gaze was a wilderness of blue and almost liquid, somehow, with a kind of sharp heat that speared straight through her. And none of it friendly.

“Not at all,” Zara said, though she was. “Your house isn’t the most welcoming place, is it?”

Gothic, she thought again. She’d read significantly more Gothic novels than the average person and not only because she was writing a master’s thesis on the topic. On some level she should have expected she’d find herself in the middle of one. It was the only thing her absurd wedding day had been missing.

“It’s December.” Chase’s voice was as cold as his estate looked in the beam of the limousine’s headlights. Barren and frozen as far as the eye could see. “Nothing in this part of the country is welcoming at this time of year.”

But it was more than that. Or it was her imagination, Zara amended, which had always been as feverish as the rest of her was practical. The old stone manor rose like an apparition at the top of a long, winding drive through a thick and lonely winter forest of ghostly, stripped-bare trees and unfriendly pines coated with ice and the snowy remains of the last storm. Several inches of snow clung to the roof above the main part of the house, and each of its wings glittered with icicles at the gutters, though the sky above tonight was clear. Thick and almost too dark, but clear.

She tried to imagine the house festooned in spring blossoms or warmed by the summer sun, and failed. Miserably.

For the first time in her life, Zara questioned her addiction to Daphne du Maurier and Phyllis A. Whitney novels. They might have helped her through an awkward adolescence and paved the way toward what she hoped would become her life’s work, but they had also made her entirely too susceptible to the dark possibilities lurking in a scary old mansion, a bridegroom she scarcely knew and whatever rattled around in the gloomy shadows of places like this.

“Are you sure you don’t have any madwomen locked away in the attic?” she asked, appalled when her voice sounded more shaken than wry.

“Making me a convenient bigamist and you therefore free of this mess we’re both stuck in?” he replied, smooth and deadly, and shocking Zara. She wouldn’t have pegged him as a reader of Jane Eyre. Or a reader at all, come to that, when he could be off brooding beautifully somewhere instead. “I’m afraid not. My apologies.”

Chase did not sound remotely sorry. Nor did he sound drunk, which Zara couldn’t quite understand. She’d expected sloppiness when he’d continued to drink from that whiskey bottle throughout the drive, had braced herself for his unconsciousness and his snores. Instead, he simply seemed on edge.

More on edge, that was.

Maybe the place—and the man—was more welcoming in the daylight, Zara thought as diplomatically as possible as the car pulled up to the looming front entrance. Then again, it hardly mattered. She wasn’t here to settle in and make a happy home for herself. She was here because Grams had wanted her to try. She was here because this proved, once and for all, that she was the good daughter. Surely this finally settled the matter. Surely her father would finally have to recognize—

“Come,” her brand-new husband said from much too close beside her, his hand at her side and that disconcerting gaze burning into her as surely as that small contact did, and when she jerked her head around to stare back at him it was even worse. All that irrational, unmanageable fire. “I’d like to get out of these clothes, if you don’t mind. And put this lamentable farce behind me as quickly as possible.”

Zara couldn’t keep herself from imagining beautiful Chase Whitaker without his clothes any more than she could stop herself from breathing her next breath. All that long, lean, smooth muscle. All that ruthlessly contained power—

Get a hold of yourself! she yelped inwardly.

And then she pretended she didn’t see the way his eyes gleamed, like he could read her dirty mind.

Chase ushered her into the grand front hall of the sprawling stone mansion, adorned with art and tapestries and moldings so intricate they almost looked like some kind of architectural frosting, with what felt like more irritation than courtesy. He introduced her to his waiting housekeeper, Mrs. Calloway, without adjusting his stride and then marched Zara up the great stair to the second floor. Zara had the jumbled impression of graceful statues and priceless art, beautifully appointed rooms and long, gleaming hallways, all in a hectic blur as they moved swiftly past.

He didn’t speak. And Zara found she couldn’t. Not only was the house lifted from the pages of the books she studied, but now that she was this close to getting out of her horribly uncomfortable dress at last and, God willing, sinking into a very deep, very hot, restorative bath for about an hour or five, every single step that kept her from it was like sheer torture.

That and the fact that Chase was more than a little forbidding himself. It was that set way he held himself. Contained and furious, even as he prowled along 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.