His for Revenge - CAITLIN CREWS

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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.”

      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,

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