His for Revenge

Good lord, but he was still hard.

“This is our marriage,” he told her, his voice a grating thing, harsh and a little too mean. He thought she’d flinch again, but her gleaming eyes only narrowed.

“This had better also be dinner,” she said as crisply as if she was discussing the weather of a distant city. And as if she’d put on a sheet of armor beneath her clothes. “Or I may collapse from starvation. And while I might view that as a handy escape from all this excitement, I doubt that’s what you have in mind.”

“I’ve never had an arranged marriage before,” he said grimly as she moved farther into the room with a wariness she made no effort to hide, then perched on the edge of the chair nearest the door. “Perhaps nightly collapses are but par for the course.”

She eyed him. “Arranged marriages are really quite stable,” she said after a moment. “Historically speaking. More so than romantic marriages.”

“Because the arrangements are so well orchestrated by fathers like yours? Lovingly and with great concern for the participants? Or because neither party cares very much?”

“The latter, I’d think,” she said, ignoring the sardonic way he’d asked that, though he could see by that gleam in her gaze that she’d heard it. “In our case, anyway. Once you’ve overcome your shock at finding the wrong sister at the altar, of course.”

Her gaze then was as arid as her voice, and Chase couldn’t understand why he cared. When he knew he shouldn’t.

“I was surprised to learn the notorious Ariella Elliott had a sister in the first place,” he said, with some attempt to make his voice less rough. “Somehow, that never came up in all those discussions with your father. Or in any of the articles I’ve seen about your sister over the years. Though there was no attempt to hide you at any of the dinners we both attended.”

He still stood by the window, watching her as if doing so would lead to some grand revelation, and countered that restless thing in him that wanted things he refused to acknowledge by shoving his hands in the pockets of his trousers. Quite as if he worried he’d otherwise have to fight to keep them from her.

Zara smiled. It was a slap of perfectly courteous ice and told him a number of things he didn’t wish to know about her.

“I don’t date musicians or actors. I don’t attend the sorts of parties that the paparazzi cover, much less stagger out of them under the influence of unsavory substances at ungodly hours of the morning. I like books better than people. None of that makes for interesting gossip, I’m afraid.”

He regarded her with what he wished was a dispassionate cool. “What would the gossips say about you, then? Interesting or otherwise?”

There was something vulnerable about her soft mouth then, a darker sheen to her golden eyes, but her chin edged high and she didn’t drop her gaze from his.

“Is this a little bit of friendly, husbandly interest?” she asked. “Or are you merely gathering ammunition?”

She wasn’t at all what he’d expected. That turned in him like heat. Like need.

“Everything is ammunition, Zara. But only if you’re at war.”

A ghost of a smile flirted with her mouth then, and was gone in the next instant. “And we, of course, are not at war.”

“This is our wedding night, is it not?”

She studied him for a moment, and he wished that things were different. That he was, to start. That she was anyone other than who she was. An Elliott and his wife.

“I’m writing a master’s thesis in English Literature,” she said after a moment. “My field of study is Gothic novels in popular culture. It’s my father’s opinion that I’d be better served getting a degree in something that made for better cocktail party conversation. Everybody has an opinion about Romeo and Juliet, for example. Why not study that instead of stupid books only hysterical women read?”

Chase was sidetracked from his own dark thoughts. “Your father has an objection to advanced degrees? Surely most parents would be proud.” His own, for example.