The cathedral is quiet enough to hear a pin drop, but all I can hear is the deafening thud of my pulse in my ears as Malachi reaches to hold the hem of my veil. He lifts it slowly, draping it backward to reveal both the tiara and my face, and I have no choice but to meet his eyes.
Unlike that night in December seventeen years ago, his expression no longer mirrors that delicious warmth of new love in my heart, rather he wears a face of cold, etched stone. Similar to that night, his hands frame my face as he tilts my chin upward. And when he settles his lips on mine for the first time in eleven years, I’m hit like a two-by-four to the face that I’m in even deeper trouble than I realized, because it’s still there.
Chemistry.
Heat.
Desire.
Carnal need.
Malachi’s mouth parts over my bottom lip, and his tongue does a discreet sweep across mine before it retreats as he ends the kiss. He pulls slightly away from my face, his eyes penetrating mine, and they do a subtle, sinister flash as his jaw pulses.
“Do not look at me like that,” he murmurs through a throaty growl that’s masked by the cheering, applauding congregation. “I don’t love you. That kiss was for show. I will die before I ever place my lips on yours again, and I would sooner hang myself than consummate this marriage. The only pledge I’m making today is that I will make sure you feel exactly how much I despise you every single day for as long as I live. And you will take it, because you belong to me now, Duchess.”
With that, he takes my hand as he turns from me to face the congregation and plasters on a very convincing smile as he waves. After a second of me standing in a stupor, he does a quick, harsh clamp of his hand around mine, squeezing it so hard that my bones nearly fracture.
I force a smile and wave with my opposite hand, all the while my battered heart flinches with that same knife-twisting sensation I first felt eleven years ago.
THREE
MALACHI
Present
IT HAS BEEN SAID that when you lose someone to the clutches of death, your grief is your love for that person turned inside out. The deeper your love for them, the deeper your grief.
Hate is a lot like that when, rather than dying, the person you love betrays you.
When the person you love betrays you, your love for them is turned on its head, and the depths with which you loved them become the depths with which you hate them.
And my love for Isla Sofía Reyes was eternal and bottomless.
So now, eleven years after she betrayed me in the most spineless, heartless, callous manner imaginable, the intensity with which I hate her knows no bounds.
That said, despite the now-eternal and bottomless intensity of my hate for this woman, I still made a vow to her. And unlike her, I always keep my word.
Isla has been my wife for three days now. She has spent the majority of that time in the west wing of the palace I always promised her that I would bring her to one day.
Again, I always keep my word.
The only thing that changed was the reason I married her and brought her here.
I gave her the west wing because it offers the best view of the sunset, and on a clear day, you can see the distant shores of Ireland from the bay window of the main bedchamber. If nothing else, it’s something that can occupy her attention and compel her to stay in her room so I don’t have to see her. Because, despite always keeping my word, I do not like having her in my home.
Isla being in this palace, as my wife, as my duchess, as I always promised, is like having a tender bruise that you can’t help pressing on. Or a cavity that, for some inane reason, you can’t help sucking air through your teeth to feel how much it fucking stings. And I have to do whatever I can to hinder my compulsion to inflict even more suffering on myself than she’s already caused.
So, in the west wing she will stay. Probably for the rest of our lives.
Or at least, until I can deal with the problem that necessitated me dredging up my vow to her and keeping my word.
Unfortunately, I have a very public role in my country, and as my wife, Isla now has to participate in it from time to time. Especially given the arrangement I made with her father, my parents, and the members of parliament that served as the pretense for which I chose to marry her.
Today we have to make our first public appearance as the Duke and Duchess so I can speak on the initiative of providing free access to the internet to our citizenry. I do believe in this initiative. Corwick’s economy and literacy rate are in the shitter, and providing this to them will help improve that over the long haul. I’ll never be the king of this country, so my responsibility is to take on pet projects that I actually care about.
So today, I’ll make the speech officially announcing the Freedom of Information Access Initiative, and Isla will stand at my side while I do it. Which means she has to get the fuck out of the west wing for the afternoon. Which means I have to go fucking talk to her and tell her to be ready to leave by four p.m.
The walk from my study in the east wing of the palace to her bed chamber in the west wing takes a good fifteen minutes. When I arrive at the end of the main corridor where her chamber is, the door is wide open.
I glance inside to see her sitting cross-legged on the seat in the bay window, a laptop balanced on her legs, while she types furiously. Her hair is long and loose and falling in shiny, ebony waves over her shoulders, the sun hitting at just the right angle to illuminate it to a warm, chocolate hue. With eyes turned down toward the screen, her lush, black lashes are nearly flat against the apples of her cheeks. Full lips in a pensive pout. She’s wearing a red tank top that’s thin enough that it borders on pornographic, barely concealing her braless breasts underneath. Her tiny, equally thin shorts aren’t much better.
Isla is fucking spectacular. She always has been. And she certainly used that to her advantage after I left for my last year of college.
“Duchess,” I bark, causing her to jump and grab the screen of the laptop as it nearly topples off her lap. “What the fuck are you typing?”
I know she hates me as much as I hate her now, and I wouldn’t put it past her to go sniffing around on the internet for ways to nullify our marriage.
She coughs as though I startled her enough to make her choke on oxygen and cuts her big, timid, brown eyes up at me. “I’m just writing.”
“What are you writing?”
Her jaw hangs slightly for a beat. “Just creative writing. It’s just something I do in my spare time.”
I narrow my eyes at her and then march into the room, grabbing the laptop and lifting the screen to my line of sight. Then I have to slap the lid shut and set it on the desk because the three sentences I just read are far more pornographic than her tiny tank top and shorts.
“So, you write smut,” I say dryly. “How very classy, Duchess.”
She jumps up off the seat and steps around me to stuff the laptop into a bag on the floor next to the bed. “If you don’t like it, don’t snatch my computer and read it.”
“I have to ensure that you’re not skimming the internet for additional ways to betray me,” I clip. “Consider yourself fortunate that I allow you to have a computer at all.” I point at the bag. “I could confiscate that and issue you a typewriter.”
She sits on the edge of the bed and hangs her head, fingering the diamond on her hand. “You’re an asshole.”