It had been years ago, but my memories remained as vivid as if it had happened yesterday.
He was dark like sin. A stain against the stones. His hair was glossy and black, so dark it looked nearly blue and reminded me of nothing so much as a raven’s wing. His face was cruel and hard, so harsh it took my breath away. He had been made of muscle, hard and dangerous, a striking counterpoint to the genteel men I had been raised with. He was not elegant. He was not graceful.
He had no right to my beautiful sister, I had thought fiercely.
A sentiment my father had echoed in no uncertain terms. Celeste, he had bellowed throughout the manor house, was meant for better.
But it seemed Javier Dos Santos was good enough for me.
“Of course I do not hate him,” Celeste said now, with more of that laughter that seemed to suggest I was very young and foolish. I didn’t care for it, but I couldn’t work out how to ask her to stop. “Where do you get such ideas?”
“From you. When you screamed that you hated him, and would hate him forever, and would never cheapen yourself by succumbing to the kind of dime store forgiveness—”
“Here is what I can tell you about Javier,” Celeste said, cutting me off. And pronouncing his name as if it was a meal. “He is not like other men. You should know this, going in. Throw out any preconceptions you might have.”
“The only man I know is Father. A handful of priests. And your husband.”
I had not meant to say those words the way I did. Your husband. As if I was pronouncing some kind of judgment.
But Celeste settled further back against the settee as if she was relaxing. As if this was the moment she could finally retreat from her usual strict perfection and render herself boneless. “Javier is virile. Animalistic, even. He will take what he wants, and worse, you will happily debase yourself to give it to him.”
I frowned. “I have no intention of debasing myself. Much less happily.”
Celeste waved a hand. “You will. He will demean you, insult you, and likely make you cry. And you will thank him for it.”
My heart was pounding so hard it made me feel dizzy. My throat was dry, and my tongue felt thick in my mouth. And that dread seemed to pulse in me, hotter and wilder by the second.
“Why are you telling me these things? The day before I must marry him?”
If Celeste was abashed, she didn’t look it. At all. “I am merely trying to prepare you, Imogen.”
“I already think he is a monster. I’m not certain why you think talk of debasement and insults would improve the situation.”
“You will have to watch that tongue of yours, of course,” she said, almost sadly. “He won’t put up with it. Or the way you run about heedlessly as if you are one of those common women on a treadmill somewhere, sweaty and red-faced.”
Because she was naturally slim and beautiful, of course. She assumed that anyone who had to work for perfection didn’t deserve it.
It had somehow never occurred to me before that this description might apply to me, too.
“You are very lucky, then, that you were spared this,” I said softly. “That I am here to carry this burden for you. For the family.”
I had never seen her look as she did then. Her face flushed with what I could only call some kind of temper. Her chin rose. And her eyes glittered. “Indeed. I count myself lucky daily.”
I found my hands on the hem of my pajama top, fiddling with the fine cotton as if I could worry it into threads. Betraying my anxiety, I knew.
And as strangely as my sister was behaving today, she was still my sister. The only person who had never punished me for asking questions.
This was why I dared to ask the one thing that had worried me the most since my father had announced my engagement to me over Christmas dinner.
“Do you think…?” I cleared my throat. “Will he hurt me?”
For a long moment, Celeste did not speak. And when she did, there was a hard look in her eyes, her lips twisted, and she no longer looked the least bit relaxed.
“You will survive it,” she told me, something bleak and ugly there between us. “You will always survive it, Imogen, for better or worse, and that is what you will hold on to. My advice to you is to get pregnant as quickly as possible. Men like this want heirs. In the end, that is all they want. The sooner you do your duty, the quicker they will leave you alone.”
And long after she swept from my room, I stayed where I was, stricken. And unable to breathe. There was a constriction in my chest and that heavy dread in my gut, and I couldn’t help but think that I had seen my half sister—truly seen her—for the first time today.
It filled me like a kind of grief.
But I was also filled with a kind of restlessness I didn’t understand.
That was what got me up and onto my feet. I dashed the odd moisture from my eyes with hands I knew better than to keep in fists. I started for the door, then imagined—too vividly—my father’s reaction should I be found wandering about the house when it was filled with important wedding guests, clad only in my pajamas with my hair obviously unbrushed.
I went into my bedroom and dressed quickly, pulling on the dress the maids had left out for me, wordlessly encouraging me to clothe myself the way my father preferred. Not to my own taste, which would never have run to dresses at this chilly time of year, no matter that this one was long-sleeved and made of a fine wool. I paired the dress with butter-soft knee-high leather boots, and then found myself in my mirror.
I had not transformed into elegance during my vigil on the settee.
Curls like mine always looked unkempt. Elegance was sleek and smooth, but my hair resisted any and all attempts to tame it. The nuns had done what they could, but even they had been unable to combat my hair’s natural tendency to find its own shape. I ran my fingers through it as best I could, letting the curls do as they would because they always did.
My hair was the bane of my existence. Much as I was the bane of my father’s.
Only then, when I could say that in all honesty I had at least tried to sort myself out into something resembling order, did I leave my room.
I made my way out into the hall in the family wing, then ducked into one of the servants’ back stairs. My father would not approve of his daughter moving about the house like one of the help, but I had never thought that he needed to know how familiar I was with the secret passages in this old pile of stones. Knowing them made life here that much more bearable.
Knowing my way through the shadows allowed me to remain at large when there was a lecture brewing. It permitted me to come in from long walks on the grounds, muddy and disheveled, and make it to my own rooms before the sight of me caused the usual offense, outrage, and threats to curtail my exercise until I learned how to behave like a lady.
I
carefully made my way over to the guest wing, skirting around the rooms I knew had been set aside for various family members and my father’s overfed friends. I knew that there was only one possible place my father would have dared put a man as wealthy and powerful as Javier Dos Santos. Only one place suitable for a groom with such a formidable financial reputation.
My father might have turned Javier from the house ten years ago, but now that he was welcome and set to marry the right daughter, Dermot Fitzalan would spare him no possible luxury.
I headed for what was one of the newer additions to the grand old house, a two-story dwelling place appended to the end of the guest wing where my grandmother had lived out her final days. It was more a house all its own, with its own entrance and rooms, but I knew that I could access it on the second level and sneak my way along its private gallery.
I didn’t ask myself why I was doing this. I only knew it was tied to the grief I felt for the sister it turned out I barely knew and that dread inside me that pulsed at me, spurring me on.
I eased my way through the servant’s door that disappeared behind a tapestry at one end of the gallery. I flattened myself to the wall and did my best to keep my ears peeled for any signs of life.
And it was the voice I heard first.
His voice.
Commanding. Dark. Rich like dark chocolate and deep red wine, all wrapped in one.
Beautiful, something in me whispered.
I was horrified with myself. But I didn’t back away.
He was speaking in rapid Spanish, liquid and lovely, out of sight on the floor below me. I inched forward, moving away from the gallery wall so I could look over the open side of the balcony to the great room below.
And for a moment, memory and reality seemed tangled up in each other. Once again, I was gazing down at Javier Dos Santos from afar. From above.
Once again, I was struck by how physical he seemed. Long ago, he had been dressed for the evening in a coat with tails that had only accentuated the simmering brutality he seemed to hold leashed there in his broad shoulders and his granite rock of a torso.