The Spaniard's Untouched Bride, page 16
“My father loved himself more than he loved anyone in his own life. My grandfather is the same. He doesn’t love Diego and me the way a grandfather should love his grandsons. He didn’t love his own son the way that he should have. And my father certainly didn’t love our mother or love us. It is not a decision in your head that keeps you from harming those around you. It’s selflessness. And that only comes from one place. It comes from love. It comes from loving someone more than you love yourself. From the desire to see them happy even if you’re miserable. And I...I felt that for you. Even as it tore me apart to send you away. That is not a testament to my own strength, or to my own goodness, but to you. To the fact that you reached inside me and found something there I didn’t think existed. That you make me want something I didn’t think I could want.”
“Matías,” she said, closing the distance between them and kissing him, fiercely, ferociously. “I love you. And I think... I think you are a good man. I think that you are better than your name. Than the legacy of your father and your grandfather.”
“I should hope so. Because I actually do need the job on your ranch.”
“Do you?”
“Well, we shall see how it goes, but Diego and I have both forfeited the game.”
“What do you mean?”
“He has told our grandfather his marriage has ended, and I already announced to my grandfather I was divorcing you. And so, neither of us is married. Neither of us has fulfilled the terms of my grandfather’s will. We refuse to play.”
“Why did Diego do that?”
Matías sighed heavily. “For the same reason I did. For love. Because in the end we would rather do the right thing for the women we love than the right thing for ourselves, and I believe that’s the first time either of us have ever felt that way.”
“Has he told Liliana?”
Matías shook his head. “Not when last we spoke. But it was my conversation with him that made me realize I had to come to you. That I had to try.”
“I love you,” she said again. “I love you. More than myself.”
“And I love you more than myself. And I will do so for the rest of my life, as long as there is breath in my body.”
“I trust you.”
He smiled, those simple words obviously touching something deep inside him.
“You are everything I need,” he said, dropping a kiss on her lips. “You are strong, but you are fragile. Beautiful. My wife, and my stable girl.”
She laughed. “I believe, my dear, that you might end up being my stable boy. After all, I am the owner of this rancho.”
“So you are. I shall have to comfort myself with my billion-dollar industry.”
“Well, if it won’t keep you warm at night, I promise that I will.”
He picked her up, holding her tightly in his arms. “Well, that, my lovely wife, I do believe.”
And this time, when she passed over the threshold of her house, she truly felt like she was home. Because her heart was with her. And she was in his arms.
EPILOGUE
MATÍAS STEPPED OUT onto the balcony at the Navarro rancho, overlooking the fields before him. And he smiled when he saw his wife, riding up the path on the back of Fuego, who she had brought out to stay with them for the weekend.
She was still wild, that woman, even after several years of marriage. And he would have her no other way. He lived to watch her ride. To watch her race.
It had taken some convincing but he had finally talked her into acting as the jockey for Fuego and the two of them had had a few very successful years. Until she’d had to take time off for her pregnancy. And then for the next one.
“Papá.”
He looked down at his son, who was standing there staring up at him with wide, dark eyes. His mother’s eyes.
“Yes, Cesar?” he asked, bending down and picking the little boy up, holding him in his arms.
“Is Mamá coming back soon?”
“Yes,” Matías said. “She’s on her way for supper. You know how she likes to ride in the afternoon.”
“Me, too,” said his son.
Matías knew that was true. Because it was in his blood. Just as it was in Camilla’s.
During dinner they ate on the terrace and Matías held baby Amelia on his lap while Cesar peppered Camilla with questions about each and every horse. A routine evening. One he loved more and more with each passing day.
But not half as much as he enjoyed what transpired after dinner. After the children were in bed. Tonight he and his wife sat outside in the warm air, a fire lit in the ring in front of them the only light besides the stars.
She kissed him passionately, switching positions so she was straddling his thighs. “I think tonight,” she said, “I would like to have you out here.”
“Something you won’t be able to do when Diego and his family arrive,” he pointed out.
His reconciliation with his brother had occurred after they’d both decided to quit playing their grandfather’s game. And it turned out the old man had been so entertained by being outmaneuvered by his grandsons that he’d ended up gifting the estate in equal parts. And then had kept on living. Much to everyone’s surprise.
“Which is why I must make the most of it now,” she whispered against his lips.
When they were sated he carried her up to bed, and held her in his arms.
And when he dreamed it was only of her.
* * *
If you enjoyed The Spaniard’s Untouched Bride look out for the second installment in Maisey Yates’s Brides of Innocence duet!
The Spaniard’s Stolen Bride
Available next month!
Keep reading for an excerpt from My Bought Virgin Wife by Caitlin Crews.
Join Harlequin My Rewards today and earn a FREE ebook!
Click here to Join Harlequin My Rewards
http://www.harlequin.com/myrewards.html?mt=loyalty&cmpid=EBOOBPBPA201602010003
We hope you enjoyed this Harlequin Presents title.
You want alpha males, decadent glamour and jet-set lifestyles. Step into the sensational, sophisticated world of Harlequin Presents, where sinfully tempting heroes ignite a fierce and wickedly irresistible passion!
Enjoy eight new stories from Harlequin Presents every month!
Connect with us on Harlequin.com for info on our new releases, access to exclusive offers, free online reads and much more!
Other ways to keep in touch:
Harlequin.com/newsletters
Facebook.com/HarlequinBooks
Twitter.com/HarlequinBooks
HarlequinBlog.com
Join Harlequin My Rewards and reward the book lover in you!
Earn points for every Harlequin print and ebook you buy, wherever and whenever you shop.
Turn your points into FREE BOOKS of your choice
OR
EXCLUSIVE GIFTS from your favorite authors or series.
Click here to join for FREE
Or visit us online to register at
www.HarlequinMyRewards.com
Harlequin My Rewards is a free program (no fees) without any commitments or obligations.
My Bought Virgin Wife
by Caitlin Crews
CHAPTER ONE
Imogen
IN THE MORNING I was to marry a monster.
It did not matter what I wanted. It certainly did not matter what I felt. I was the youngest daughter of Dermot Fitzalan, bound in duty to my father’s wishes as women in my family had been forever.
I had always known my fate.
But it turned out I was less resigned to it than I’d anticipated when I was younger and far more silly. And when my wedding had not loomed before me, beckoning like some kind of inevitable virus that nothing could keep at bay.
There were no home remedies for my father’s wishes.
“You cannot let Father see you in this state, Imogen,” my half sister, Celeste, told me briskly as she swept in. “It will only make things worse for you.”
I knew she was right. The unfortunate truth was that Celeste was usually right about everything. Elegant, graceful Celeste, who had submitted to her duty with a smile on her face and every appearance of quiet joy. Stunning, universally adored Celeste, who had the willowy blond looks of her late mother and to whom I had forever been compared—and found lacking. My own lost mother had been a titian-haired bombshell, pale of skin and mysteriously emerald of eye, but I resembled her only in the way a fractured reflection, beheld through a mist, might. Next to my half sister, I had always felt like the Fitzalan troll, better suited to a life beneath a bridge somewhere than the grand society life I’d been bred and trained for.
The life Celeste took to with such ease.
Even today, the day before my wedding when theoretically I would be the one looked at, Celeste looked poised and chic in her simple yet elegantly cut clothes. Her pale blond hair was twisted back into an effortless chignon and she’d applied only the faintest hint of cosmetics to enhance her eyes and dramatic cheekbones. While I had yet to change out of my pajamas though it was midday already and I knew without having to look that my curls were in their usual state of disarray.
All of these things seemed filled with more portent than usual, because the monster I was set to marry in the morning had wanted her first.
And likely still wanted her, everyone had whispered.
They had even whispered it to me, and it had surprised me how much it had stung. Because I knew better. My marriage wasn’t romantic. I wasn’t being chosen by anyone—I was the remaining Fitzalan heiress. My inheritance made me an attractive prospect no matter how irrepressible my hair might have been or how often I disappointed my father with my inability to enhance a room with my decorative presence. I was more likely to draw attention for the wrong reasons.
My laugh was too loud and always inappropriate. My clothes were always slightly askew. I preferred books to carefully vetted social occasions where I was expected to play at hostessing duties. And I had never convinced anyone that I was more fascinated by their interests than my own.
It was lucky, then, that my marriage was about convenience—my father’s, not mine. I had never expected anything like a fairy tale.
“Fairy tales are for other families,” my severe grandmother had always told us, slamming her marble-edged cane against the hard floors of this sprawling house in the French countryside, where, the story went, our family had been in residence in one form or another since sometime in the twelfth century. “Fitzalans have a higher purpose.”
As a child, I’d imagined Celeste and me dressed in armor, riding out to gauzy battles beneath old standards, then slaying a dragon or two before our supper. That had seemed like the kind of higher purpose I could get behind. It had taken the austere Austrian nuns years to teach me that dragon slaying was not the primary occupation of girls from excruciatingly well-blooded old families who were sent away to be educated in remote convents. Special girls with impeccable pedigrees and ambitious fathers had a far different role to fill.
Girls like me, who had never been asked what they might like to do with their lives, because it had all been plotted out already without their input.
The word pawn was never used. I had always seen this as a shocking oversight—another opinion of mine that no one had ever solicited and no one wanted to hear.
“You must find purpose and peace in duty, Imogen,” Mother Superior had told me, time and again, when I would find myself red-eyed and furious, gritting out another decade of the rosary to atone for my sins. Pride and unnatural self-regard chief among them. “You must cast aside these doubts and trust that those with your best interests at heart have made certain all is as it should be.”
“Fitzalans have a higher purpose,” Grand-Mère had always said.
By which, I had learned in time, she meant money. Fitzalans hoarded money and made more. This was what had set our family apart across the centuries. Fitzalans were never kings or courtiers. Fitzalans funded kingdoms they liked and overthrew regimes they disparaged, all in service to the expansion of their wealth. This was the grand and glorious purpose that surged in our blood.
“I am not ‘in a state,’” I argued to Celeste now, but I didn’t sit up or attempt to set myself to rights.
And Celeste did not dignify that with a response.
I had barred myself in the sitting room off my childhood bedchamber, the better to brood at the rain and entertain myself with my enduring fantasies of perfect, beautiful Frederick, who worked in my father’s stables and had dreamy eyes of sweetest blue.
We had spoken once, some years ago. He had taken my horse’s head and led us into the yard as if I’d required the assistance.
I had lived on the smile he’d given me that day for years.
It seemed unbearable to me that I should find myself staring down so many more years when I would have to do the same, but worse, in the company of a man—a husband—who was hated and feared in equal measure across Europe.
Today the historic Fitzalan estate felt like the prison it was. If I was honest, it had never been a home.
My mother had died when I was barely eight, and in my memories of her she was always crying. I had been left to the tender mercies of Grand-Mère, before her death, and my father, who was forever disappointed in me, but still my only remaining parent.
And Celeste, who was ten years older than me. And better at everything.
Having lost my mother, I held fast to what was left of my family, and no matter if that grip often felt a good deal more like a choke hold I was performing on myself. They were all I had.
“You must look to your sister as your guide,” Grand-Mère had told me on more than one occasion. Usually when I’d been discovered running in the corridors of the old house, disheveled and embarrassing, when I should have been sitting decorously somewhere, learning how to cross my ankles and incline my head in sweet subservience.
I had tried. I truly had.
I had watched Celeste come of age before me, elegant and meek in ways I envied and yet failed to understand. She had done it all with grace and beauty, the way she did everything. She had been married on her twentieth birthday to a man closer in age to our father—a hereditary count who claimed the blood of famed kings on both sides, stretching deep into Europe’s gloried past. A man who I had never seen crack so much as the faintest smile.
And in the years since, Celeste had presented her ever-glowering husband with two sons and a daughter. Because while I had been raised to do my duty and knew what was expected of me—despite the dark thoughts I had about it in private while dreaming of Frederick’s blue eyes—Celeste had bloomed in her role as countess.
It was hard to look at all that blooming, I thought uncharitably now. Not the day before I turned twenty-two, came into my fortune, and—not coincidentally, I was well aware—married the man of my father’s choosing, who I had never met. My father felt a meeting was unnecessary and no one argued with Dermot Fitzalan, least of all the daughters he used as disposable pawns.
Happy birthday to me, I told myself darkly.
I would celebrate with a forced march down the aisle with a man whose very name made even the servants in the manor house recoil in horror.
A man I knew all manner of terrible things about.
A man widely regarded as a devil in the flesh.
A man who was not even the member of some or other gentry, as I had expected my eventual husband would be, given my father’s celestially high opinion of himself and all he felt his vaunted pedigree—and thus mine—demanded.
In contrast, Celeste’s husband, the dour count, had a title that ached with age—but had very few lands behind it. Or any money left over after all those centuries of aristocratic splendor, I had heard them whisper.
And this, I knew, was why my father had chosen a man for me who might have lacked gentility and pedigree, but more than made up for both with his astonishing wealth. Because this would surely add to the Fitzalan reach and financial might.
Genteel Celeste, so gentle and fragile, had been married carefully to a title that would sit well on her perfect brow. I was hardier. I could be sold off to a commoner whose coffers only seemed to swell by the year. In this way, my father could have his cake and eat it, merrily.
I knew this. But it didn’t mean I liked it.
Celeste settled herself on the other end of the settee beneath the windows in my sitting room, where I had curled in a miserable ball this gray January day as if my brooding could make time stand still and save me from my fate.
“You will only make yourself ill,” she told me, pragmatically. Or at least, that was how I interpreted the way she gazed at me then, down the length of the aristocratic nose she shared with our father. “And nothing will change either way. It is a wasted effort.”
“I do not wish to marry him, Celeste.”
Celeste let out that lilting laugh that I normally thought sounded like the finest music. Today it clawed at me.
“You do not wish?” She laughed again, and I wondered if I imagined the hardness in her gaze when it faded. “But who, pray, told you that your wishes mattered?”
I noted the year in as grim a tone as I could manage. “Surely my wishes should be consulted, at the very least. Even if nothing I want is taken into account.”
“Fitzalans are not modern, Imogen,” Celeste said with a hint of impatience, as I knew my father would. Though he would not hint. “If what you want is progress and self-determination, I’m afraid you were born into the wrong family.”
“It was hardly my choice.”
“Imogen. This is so childish. You have always known this day would come. You cannot possibly have imagined that you, somehow, would escape what waits for every Fitzalan from birth.”
“Matías,” she said, closing the distance between them and kissing him, fiercely, ferociously. “I love you. And I think... I think you are a good man. I think that you are better than your name. Than the legacy of your father and your grandfather.”
“I should hope so. Because I actually do need the job on your ranch.”
“Do you?”
“Well, we shall see how it goes, but Diego and I have both forfeited the game.”
“What do you mean?”
“He has told our grandfather his marriage has ended, and I already announced to my grandfather I was divorcing you. And so, neither of us is married. Neither of us has fulfilled the terms of my grandfather’s will. We refuse to play.”
“Why did Diego do that?”
Matías sighed heavily. “For the same reason I did. For love. Because in the end we would rather do the right thing for the women we love than the right thing for ourselves, and I believe that’s the first time either of us have ever felt that way.”
“Has he told Liliana?”
Matías shook his head. “Not when last we spoke. But it was my conversation with him that made me realize I had to come to you. That I had to try.”
“I love you,” she said again. “I love you. More than myself.”
“And I love you more than myself. And I will do so for the rest of my life, as long as there is breath in my body.”
“I trust you.”
He smiled, those simple words obviously touching something deep inside him.
“You are everything I need,” he said, dropping a kiss on her lips. “You are strong, but you are fragile. Beautiful. My wife, and my stable girl.”
She laughed. “I believe, my dear, that you might end up being my stable boy. After all, I am the owner of this rancho.”
“So you are. I shall have to comfort myself with my billion-dollar industry.”
“Well, if it won’t keep you warm at night, I promise that I will.”
He picked her up, holding her tightly in his arms. “Well, that, my lovely wife, I do believe.”
And this time, when she passed over the threshold of her house, she truly felt like she was home. Because her heart was with her. And she was in his arms.
EPILOGUE
MATÍAS STEPPED OUT onto the balcony at the Navarro rancho, overlooking the fields before him. And he smiled when he saw his wife, riding up the path on the back of Fuego, who she had brought out to stay with them for the weekend.
She was still wild, that woman, even after several years of marriage. And he would have her no other way. He lived to watch her ride. To watch her race.
It had taken some convincing but he had finally talked her into acting as the jockey for Fuego and the two of them had had a few very successful years. Until she’d had to take time off for her pregnancy. And then for the next one.
“Papá.”
He looked down at his son, who was standing there staring up at him with wide, dark eyes. His mother’s eyes.
“Yes, Cesar?” he asked, bending down and picking the little boy up, holding him in his arms.
“Is Mamá coming back soon?”
“Yes,” Matías said. “She’s on her way for supper. You know how she likes to ride in the afternoon.”
“Me, too,” said his son.
Matías knew that was true. Because it was in his blood. Just as it was in Camilla’s.
During dinner they ate on the terrace and Matías held baby Amelia on his lap while Cesar peppered Camilla with questions about each and every horse. A routine evening. One he loved more and more with each passing day.
But not half as much as he enjoyed what transpired after dinner. After the children were in bed. Tonight he and his wife sat outside in the warm air, a fire lit in the ring in front of them the only light besides the stars.
She kissed him passionately, switching positions so she was straddling his thighs. “I think tonight,” she said, “I would like to have you out here.”
“Something you won’t be able to do when Diego and his family arrive,” he pointed out.
His reconciliation with his brother had occurred after they’d both decided to quit playing their grandfather’s game. And it turned out the old man had been so entertained by being outmaneuvered by his grandsons that he’d ended up gifting the estate in equal parts. And then had kept on living. Much to everyone’s surprise.
“Which is why I must make the most of it now,” she whispered against his lips.
When they were sated he carried her up to bed, and held her in his arms.
And when he dreamed it was only of her.
* * *
If you enjoyed The Spaniard’s Untouched Bride look out for the second installment in Maisey Yates’s Brides of Innocence duet!
The Spaniard’s Stolen Bride
Available next month!
Keep reading for an excerpt from My Bought Virgin Wife by Caitlin Crews.
Join Harlequin My Rewards today and earn a FREE ebook!
Click here to Join Harlequin My Rewards
http://www.harlequin.com/myrewards.html?mt=loyalty&cmpid=EBOOBPBPA201602010003
We hope you enjoyed this Harlequin Presents title.
You want alpha males, decadent glamour and jet-set lifestyles. Step into the sensational, sophisticated world of Harlequin Presents, where sinfully tempting heroes ignite a fierce and wickedly irresistible passion!
Enjoy eight new stories from Harlequin Presents every month!
Connect with us on Harlequin.com for info on our new releases, access to exclusive offers, free online reads and much more!
Other ways to keep in touch:
Harlequin.com/newsletters
Facebook.com/HarlequinBooks
Twitter.com/HarlequinBooks
HarlequinBlog.com
Join Harlequin My Rewards and reward the book lover in you!
Earn points for every Harlequin print and ebook you buy, wherever and whenever you shop.
Turn your points into FREE BOOKS of your choice
OR
EXCLUSIVE GIFTS from your favorite authors or series.
Click here to join for FREE
Or visit us online to register at
www.HarlequinMyRewards.com
Harlequin My Rewards is a free program (no fees) without any commitments or obligations.
My Bought Virgin Wife
by Caitlin Crews
CHAPTER ONE
Imogen
IN THE MORNING I was to marry a monster.
It did not matter what I wanted. It certainly did not matter what I felt. I was the youngest daughter of Dermot Fitzalan, bound in duty to my father’s wishes as women in my family had been forever.
I had always known my fate.
But it turned out I was less resigned to it than I’d anticipated when I was younger and far more silly. And when my wedding had not loomed before me, beckoning like some kind of inevitable virus that nothing could keep at bay.
There were no home remedies for my father’s wishes.
“You cannot let Father see you in this state, Imogen,” my half sister, Celeste, told me briskly as she swept in. “It will only make things worse for you.”
I knew she was right. The unfortunate truth was that Celeste was usually right about everything. Elegant, graceful Celeste, who had submitted to her duty with a smile on her face and every appearance of quiet joy. Stunning, universally adored Celeste, who had the willowy blond looks of her late mother and to whom I had forever been compared—and found lacking. My own lost mother had been a titian-haired bombshell, pale of skin and mysteriously emerald of eye, but I resembled her only in the way a fractured reflection, beheld through a mist, might. Next to my half sister, I had always felt like the Fitzalan troll, better suited to a life beneath a bridge somewhere than the grand society life I’d been bred and trained for.
The life Celeste took to with such ease.
Even today, the day before my wedding when theoretically I would be the one looked at, Celeste looked poised and chic in her simple yet elegantly cut clothes. Her pale blond hair was twisted back into an effortless chignon and she’d applied only the faintest hint of cosmetics to enhance her eyes and dramatic cheekbones. While I had yet to change out of my pajamas though it was midday already and I knew without having to look that my curls were in their usual state of disarray.
All of these things seemed filled with more portent than usual, because the monster I was set to marry in the morning had wanted her first.
And likely still wanted her, everyone had whispered.
They had even whispered it to me, and it had surprised me how much it had stung. Because I knew better. My marriage wasn’t romantic. I wasn’t being chosen by anyone—I was the remaining Fitzalan heiress. My inheritance made me an attractive prospect no matter how irrepressible my hair might have been or how often I disappointed my father with my inability to enhance a room with my decorative presence. I was more likely to draw attention for the wrong reasons.
My laugh was too loud and always inappropriate. My clothes were always slightly askew. I preferred books to carefully vetted social occasions where I was expected to play at hostessing duties. And I had never convinced anyone that I was more fascinated by their interests than my own.
It was lucky, then, that my marriage was about convenience—my father’s, not mine. I had never expected anything like a fairy tale.
“Fairy tales are for other families,” my severe grandmother had always told us, slamming her marble-edged cane against the hard floors of this sprawling house in the French countryside, where, the story went, our family had been in residence in one form or another since sometime in the twelfth century. “Fitzalans have a higher purpose.”
As a child, I’d imagined Celeste and me dressed in armor, riding out to gauzy battles beneath old standards, then slaying a dragon or two before our supper. That had seemed like the kind of higher purpose I could get behind. It had taken the austere Austrian nuns years to teach me that dragon slaying was not the primary occupation of girls from excruciatingly well-blooded old families who were sent away to be educated in remote convents. Special girls with impeccable pedigrees and ambitious fathers had a far different role to fill.
Girls like me, who had never been asked what they might like to do with their lives, because it had all been plotted out already without their input.
The word pawn was never used. I had always seen this as a shocking oversight—another opinion of mine that no one had ever solicited and no one wanted to hear.
“You must find purpose and peace in duty, Imogen,” Mother Superior had told me, time and again, when I would find myself red-eyed and furious, gritting out another decade of the rosary to atone for my sins. Pride and unnatural self-regard chief among them. “You must cast aside these doubts and trust that those with your best interests at heart have made certain all is as it should be.”
“Fitzalans have a higher purpose,” Grand-Mère had always said.
By which, I had learned in time, she meant money. Fitzalans hoarded money and made more. This was what had set our family apart across the centuries. Fitzalans were never kings or courtiers. Fitzalans funded kingdoms they liked and overthrew regimes they disparaged, all in service to the expansion of their wealth. This was the grand and glorious purpose that surged in our blood.
“I am not ‘in a state,’” I argued to Celeste now, but I didn’t sit up or attempt to set myself to rights.
And Celeste did not dignify that with a response.
I had barred myself in the sitting room off my childhood bedchamber, the better to brood at the rain and entertain myself with my enduring fantasies of perfect, beautiful Frederick, who worked in my father’s stables and had dreamy eyes of sweetest blue.
We had spoken once, some years ago. He had taken my horse’s head and led us into the yard as if I’d required the assistance.
I had lived on the smile he’d given me that day for years.
It seemed unbearable to me that I should find myself staring down so many more years when I would have to do the same, but worse, in the company of a man—a husband—who was hated and feared in equal measure across Europe.
Today the historic Fitzalan estate felt like the prison it was. If I was honest, it had never been a home.
My mother had died when I was barely eight, and in my memories of her she was always crying. I had been left to the tender mercies of Grand-Mère, before her death, and my father, who was forever disappointed in me, but still my only remaining parent.
And Celeste, who was ten years older than me. And better at everything.
Having lost my mother, I held fast to what was left of my family, and no matter if that grip often felt a good deal more like a choke hold I was performing on myself. They were all I had.
“You must look to your sister as your guide,” Grand-Mère had told me on more than one occasion. Usually when I’d been discovered running in the corridors of the old house, disheveled and embarrassing, when I should have been sitting decorously somewhere, learning how to cross my ankles and incline my head in sweet subservience.
I had tried. I truly had.
I had watched Celeste come of age before me, elegant and meek in ways I envied and yet failed to understand. She had done it all with grace and beauty, the way she did everything. She had been married on her twentieth birthday to a man closer in age to our father—a hereditary count who claimed the blood of famed kings on both sides, stretching deep into Europe’s gloried past. A man who I had never seen crack so much as the faintest smile.
And in the years since, Celeste had presented her ever-glowering husband with two sons and a daughter. Because while I had been raised to do my duty and knew what was expected of me—despite the dark thoughts I had about it in private while dreaming of Frederick’s blue eyes—Celeste had bloomed in her role as countess.
It was hard to look at all that blooming, I thought uncharitably now. Not the day before I turned twenty-two, came into my fortune, and—not coincidentally, I was well aware—married the man of my father’s choosing, who I had never met. My father felt a meeting was unnecessary and no one argued with Dermot Fitzalan, least of all the daughters he used as disposable pawns.
Happy birthday to me, I told myself darkly.
I would celebrate with a forced march down the aisle with a man whose very name made even the servants in the manor house recoil in horror.
A man I knew all manner of terrible things about.
A man widely regarded as a devil in the flesh.
A man who was not even the member of some or other gentry, as I had expected my eventual husband would be, given my father’s celestially high opinion of himself and all he felt his vaunted pedigree—and thus mine—demanded.
In contrast, Celeste’s husband, the dour count, had a title that ached with age—but had very few lands behind it. Or any money left over after all those centuries of aristocratic splendor, I had heard them whisper.
And this, I knew, was why my father had chosen a man for me who might have lacked gentility and pedigree, but more than made up for both with his astonishing wealth. Because this would surely add to the Fitzalan reach and financial might.
Genteel Celeste, so gentle and fragile, had been married carefully to a title that would sit well on her perfect brow. I was hardier. I could be sold off to a commoner whose coffers only seemed to swell by the year. In this way, my father could have his cake and eat it, merrily.
I knew this. But it didn’t mean I liked it.
Celeste settled herself on the other end of the settee beneath the windows in my sitting room, where I had curled in a miserable ball this gray January day as if my brooding could make time stand still and save me from my fate.
“You will only make yourself ill,” she told me, pragmatically. Or at least, that was how I interpreted the way she gazed at me then, down the length of the aristocratic nose she shared with our father. “And nothing will change either way. It is a wasted effort.”
“I do not wish to marry him, Celeste.”
Celeste let out that lilting laugh that I normally thought sounded like the finest music. Today it clawed at me.
“You do not wish?” She laughed again, and I wondered if I imagined the hardness in her gaze when it faded. “But who, pray, told you that your wishes mattered?”
I noted the year in as grim a tone as I could manage. “Surely my wishes should be consulted, at the very least. Even if nothing I want is taken into account.”
“Fitzalans are not modern, Imogen,” Celeste said with a hint of impatience, as I knew my father would. Though he would not hint. “If what you want is progress and self-determination, I’m afraid you were born into the wrong family.”
“It was hardly my choice.”
“Imogen. This is so childish. You have always known this day would come. You cannot possibly have imagined that you, somehow, would escape what waits for every Fitzalan from birth.”
