“Of course.” He snaked his arm around Cath’s waist, drawing her forward to stand next to him. “Cath, I’d like you to meet my parents, Richard and Evita Chamberlain. Mother, Father, allow me to present my wife, Mary Catherine Talarico.”
Surprise wiped the Chamberlains’ faces blank, and for a long moment there was no sound in the entry hall but the air moving in and out of her lungs. Presumably, everyone else had quit breathing. Cath braced herself for the shouting that would surely follow, but second after second ticked by, and the silence took on a life of its own. Was this how they handled the unforseen in Nev’s family? It was so
chilly
. Utterly foreign to her.
Brazen it out
. “Chamberlain,” she said, breaking the silence. “It’s Mary Catherine Chamberlain now, darling.” And she smiled up at Nev as if blissfully unaware that he’d just dropped a bomb.
“Right, love. I’m not used to it yet. We were only married Wednesday,” he explained for his parents’ benefit.
Cath readied the explanation she and Nev had agreed on—that they’d married at the registry office, wanting the ceremony to be quiet and private, just between the two of them—but the conversation dropped dead all over again. If she and Nev had been in Chicago, her aunt Nina would have asked a dozen questions by now, and her uncle Pete would have either thrown a punch or broken out the alcohol. Cath didn’t know what to think about all this polite silence.
Evita had managed to plaster her social mask back in place, and she smiled icily at Cath. “Well, it sounds like we have a
lot
of catching up to do. Let’s get settled in the parlor, where we can talk properly.” She began leading the way, her heels tapping on the marble floor.
Richard spoke, bringing her to a halt. “I think congratulations are in order first.” He offered his hand to Nev and gave it a hearty shake. “Married. I can scarcely believe it.” Pulling Cath into a loose approximation of a hug, he said over her shoulder, “And to such a lovely bride. Welcome to the family, Mary Catherine.”
“Please, call me Cath. Only Nev calls me Mary Catherine, and he does it just to tease me.”
Evita had no choice but to follow suit. She hugged her son and planted an air kiss on either side of Cath’s face, saying, “Congratulations, to be sure. I’m so looking forward to our getting better acquainted.”
The grip of her fingers on Cath’s shoulders was not the least bit friendly.
The parlor looked like it had been plucked from a Jane Austen novel, uncomfortable Regency settees and all. She couldn’t possibly sit in this room. The furniture belonged in a museum. Stalling, she escaped to the bathroom to “freshen up.” It seemed the best way to describe clutching the vanity top and taking deep breaths until she’d convinced herself she wasn’t about to lose her lunch.
Once she had that under control, she checked her reflection in the mirror. The woman staring back at her was Not Her. Her hair waved softly around her face, and her dress was elegant despite the slightly wrinkled lap. A long strand of freshwater pearls and irregular chunks of amber looped twice around her neck, glowing against the cocoa backdrop. With lips a bit swollen from Nev’s kisses in the driveway—his misguided attempt to calm her down, or so he’d claimed—and cheeks suffused with nervous color, she looked every inch the fresh, pretty bride Nev’s father supposed her to be.
God, but inside she was dying to get out of this place. It was one thing to pretend to be New Cath until the habits of respectability sank in and quite another to try to pass as the woman looking back at her in the mirror.
You can do this, Talarico. How hard can it be, pretending you want to spend the rest of your life with Nev? Grow a pair and get your ass back out there
.
Thus encouraged, she returned to the parlor.
Nev was fielding a rapid series of questions from his mother when Cath sat beside him on the stiff sofa. He took her hand and squeezed it, but he felt about a million miles away. He was pure City in this parlor. Super cool. Super smart. Super rich.
She tried not to notice that she didn’t like this Nev all that much.
“And how did you two meet?” Evita asked.
Nev stilled, as if he hadn’t seen the question coming. She had. As soon as it had sunk in that she’d be meeting Nev’s mother, she’d invented a more appropriate backstory for the two of them. “We met at the Tate, actually—the Tate Modern, I should say. There was a reception for the new exhibit on Dadaism, and Nev and I literally bumped into each other. He was so charming and apologetic”—here she gave him a loving look—“that I let him take me on a walk along the South Bank. We ended up having crêpes from one of those riverside vendors. Banana Nutella, wasn’t it, darling? And we talked for hours.”
“She let me take her on a proper date the next day,” Nev added, rising to the challenge.
“Love at first sight, was it?” Richard asked, sounding bemused.
“Pretty much,” Cath agreed. Nev smiled at her, and the ice thawed. She stopped caring about her dress, and started thinking instead about how much she wanted him to lean down and kiss her, to cup her face in his hand the way he did when he planned to make torturously slow love to her, and then—
But this is all an act, you dope. Let’s not get carried away
.
Thank Christ for the voice of reason. Cath tore her eyes away so she could stare at her feet, ensconced in a very pinchy, very boring pair of brown-and-tan pumps.
“What a charming story,” Evita said, her tone conveying she wasn’t the least bit charmed. “Tell me, Cath—”
But Richard came to the rescue again. “Evita, why don’t we let Nev and Cath get settled in their room? They must be tired from the drive. We’ll have plenty of time to talk this evening.”
Evita’s tightly clamped lips said she wasn’t happy about this plan, but she’d been
outmaneuvered. “Brilliant, Richard, of course that’s what we must do. Now let’s see, where shall we put you? I don’t suppose your old room will do, Neville? I was going to put Winston and Rosemary there, but we can get another room ready for them.”
“That will be fine, Mother. If you’ll show Cath the way up, I’ll retrieve our things from the car.”
Evita led her to a large corner room on the top floor of the house. A four-poster bed in dark wood dominated the furnishings, while windows on both outer walls offered a beautiful view of the surrounding area. Cath spotted a formal garden, as well as paths leading to a small copse by a stream.
“Perhaps Neville will give you a tour of the grounds before dinner,” Evita remarked.
“I’d like that.”
The fifteen-year-old Chicago urchin in her head laughed.
A tour of the grounds. How chaaarming
.
“I’ll leave you to your unpacking then. I do so look forward to our getting better acquainted later on.” She squeezed Cath’s hand, crushing her rings rather painfully against her fingers. “I’ve longed to have Neville married. I would’ve liked to have had the wedding here, of course, but he’s never shown much regard for my wishes. In any case, it will be good to have him settled.”
She sounded as if she might actually mean it. Cath smiled sweetly. “We’re going to be happy together, Nev and I. We’re very much in love.”
“Yes,” Evita said in a strange, almost distracted voice. “Yes, I can see that. Well, dinner will be at seven. We can talk then.” And with another shoulder clutch and an air kiss, she was gone.
Chapter Fourteen
He must have passed his mother in the hall, because he showed up with their bags then. Dropping them inside the door, he pulled it shut behind him and flipped the lock. When he turned and met her eyes, she saw that City had taken a hike. Nev stood across the room, hot as the infernal regions, and he was looking at her like he wanted to screw her six ways from Sunday.
“Take it off,” he said.
He stepped toward her, shrugging out of his jacket and tossing it onto a chair. She backed toward the window. “Take what off?”
“Cath, if you don’t take that dress off right now, I won’t be blamed for what happens to it.”
Another advance, another retreat. He wore a summery blue-checked shirt, open at the throat, tucked into dark blue jeans that had probably cost a mint. Prince Charming in casual wear. Only this royal personage had just popped open the clasp on his belt.
“No.” She propped her hands on her hips. “Quit being so bossy.”
He paused, studying her for a long moment, and then grinned and yanked the belt out of the loops with one quick tug that made his biceps bunch. And her slightly faint. “You like it.”
“I don’t.”
She did.
He unbuttoned his fly, and her pulse kicked into high gear. “Your mother thought you might like to show me the grounds.”
“Later. This won’t take long. Lose the dress.”
“I’m not having sex with you in this room. It’s too creepy. You grew up sleeping in here, didn’t you? You probably have teenager porn under the bed.”
“I grew up away at school. I only ever slept here on holiday.” He pulled his shirttails out and pointed to the four-poster. “And now we’re going to sleep here, and I’m going to have sex with you in that bed.” As he scanned the rest of the room, his fingers worked loose the top button of his shirt. “Or quite possibly up against that wall, if you don’t behave.” He took a step closer, freeing another button. “Bent over and clinging to the bedpost.” Another step, another button. “Sitting on top of the chest of drawers.”
Now he stood directly in front of her, his shirt unbuttoned to the waist, the low murmur of his voice making liquid heat pool between her legs. “In the shower. On the floor. I’m not fussed at the moment. But if you don’t take that dress off immediately, I’m taking it off for you.”
She wanted to resist him. To punish him. Not for bringing her here and making her pretend to be someone she wasn’t—she’d agreed to do that, after all—but for the way he’d been in the parlor, talking to his mother. For his capacity to turn from Nev to City and back again in the blink of an eye. She didn’t like his social mask, and she didn’t like his secrets. She hated his bedroom, with its gorgeous Victorian furniture. Despised that he had grounds instead of a patchy front yard. Resented how much she wanted him in spite of all of it.
“Have you ever had sex in this room, Neville?” she asked, throwing his name down like a gauntlet.
He raised an eyebrow. His eyes had gone hard, iron beneath the moss of the forest floor. “You honestly want me to answer that question?”
“Yes.” She needed to fill the room with the ghosts of those women’s bodies, to debauch the white, textured wallpaper and all its memories of boyhood Nev. If she could imagine him here with other women, a string of purebred ponies writhing on his bed and calling out his name, she might manage to fend off the gauzy impulse to comfort him for what she now knew must have been an awful, empty childhood with a Dragon Lady for a mother.
“Yes. I have.” He said this with a smirk, daring her to be offended.
“How many women?”
She didn’t know what they were doing at his house, but she knew what he wanted from
her right now. He’d come to her for oblivion, seeking an hour’s absolution for the sin of his family.
She refused to absolve him. He’d brought her here. He’d made her wear this ring and this dress. He was Nev, but he was City, too, and she was sick of watching him switch back and forth. She wanted both of them at the same time, in the same body. Here, where he’d made her pretend to be someone else, she’d force him to be who he really was.
He began to unwind the strand of pearls from her neck. “This turns you on? Making me talk about other women?”
Her nipples were hard enough to use as weapons. Hell yes, it turned her on. “How many?”
“Four,” he said. “No, five.” He dropped her necklace on the floor. Her eyes were drawn to the thin strip of skin exposed by his unbuttoned shirt. The swell of his pectoral muscle. The trail of golden hair leading down into the open fly of his jeans. The ridge of his cock behind the zipper. She could smell his arousal, sweat and pheromones or whatever it was his body released when it wanted to rut.
“Did you make all of them strip for you the second they crossed the threshold?”
Smiling, he grabbed her by the waist and pulled her tight against him, pressing his erection into her stomach. His hands found the zipper of her dress and drew it down. “Is it better if I say yes? That this is part of the tour, and you’re nothing more than number six? Would that make you happy?”
No
. “Yes.”
“Too bad.” He pushed the dress down her arms, dropping to his knees to slide it down her hips and off. “You’re the only woman who’s ever made me this desperate.” He held her hip with one hand and took off her shoes, one at a time, caressing her instep through the silk of her stockings as he lowered each foot to the ground.
His face was at her crotch, and he planted a kiss on her panties before dropping his gaze to her feet, then slowly sweeping it over her, taking in the sheer stockings with their garters, the
pink satin and chocolate-colored lace. Her stomach. Her bra. Her face. “If I’d known you were wearing that, I’d have had you in the backseat of the car.”
“I should hang up the dress,” she whispered.
“Forget about the dress. If I’m not inside you in the next sixty seconds, I’ll drop dead.” His hands began roaming, strong fingers gripping her hips, stroking her waist and stomach, pushing aside the cups of her bra to pluck at her nipples.
When he moved to slip his fingers inside her panties, Cath pushed him away with a foot to the center of his chest, and he sat back on his heels. “No,” she said. “We’re going to do this my way or not at all.”
He caught her foot, holding it against him as he ran one large hand straight up the inside of her leg to cup her crotch. She was wet, and he knew it. He had her off-balance, literally and figuratively, and he knew that too. But damn it, she was going to be in charge.
“What’s your way, love?”
“I’m going to get off. You’re going to watch.”
His eyes went dark with understanding. “I see. Can I join in the fun?”
“No. You keep your pants on and your hands to yourself. Lie on the bed.”