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She had been, right from the moment she’d walked into that room in Sedeshire Hall five months ago. He’d made every reservation she had about the ludicrous marriage disappear from her brain.
Or maybe it was more that her brain had ceased working altogether.
Despite all the pictures she’d ever seen of him in the papers—and there was a plethora of them, all displaying the man in all his honed magnificence—not one of them had even come close to conveying quite how breathtaking he was up close.
Quite how heart-stopping.
Six feet and four inches of pure, sizzling muscle that—she’d realised after a startling instant—had her hands actually itching to reach out and touch. To see if, beneath that exquisitely tailored suit that had clung so lovingly to his broad shoulders, he could possibly be as rock-solid as he looked. As though he was magnificent enough to rival even the most famous of the Greek statues. Myron’s Discobolus, perhaps. Or Glykon’s Farnese Herakles.
Oti had always considered herself relatively cultured, interested in such works of art on a purely intellectual level. Up until that moment. But, standing there in that room, it had been as though her whole world had suddenly tipped up on end and shifted. She’d felt more and more pyretic the longer she’d been in Lukas’s company and though she’d pretended it was just the circumstances of their meeting, she’d known it had all been a lie.
Now, there was no lying any more.
The bishop smiled benevolently at them and declared his delight at leading the marriage vows.
Oti’s heart gave another lurch.
‘And so it begins,’ Lukas murmured as he shot her a smile that, to the congregation, would surely have looked like a smile between lovers.
But she knew better. She was close enough to see the expression in those hard grey eyes. And the smile wasn’t reflected in them at all. Her heart began to hammer.
It hammered so loudly, in fact, that she could scarcely hear anything else for the rest of the service. Not the bishop’s loquacious additions, nor Lukas as he recited his vows, and not even herself as she echoed them.
It was like being in a fog, somewhere in the middle of the hedge maze that used to dominate the west part of the gardens of the Sedeshire estate when her mother had been alive.
As though the entire ceremony was happening to someone else on the other side of the eight-foot evergreens. She could see them but she could barely even hear them.
She would have been happy to stay like that for ever.
Lost.
It was only as the bishop was declaring them husband and wife that Oti finally began to come back to herself.
‘You may kiss the bride,’ he concluded with a flourish that she felt was wholly unnecessary.
Later, when she was alone, she would quiz herself over why she’d had it in her head that Lukas wouldn’t kiss her. Why a part of her had felt so ruffled by the idea of him...declining to do so. Later.
Not now.
Instead, Oti watched, almost transfixed, as he lifted one hand and moved it to her cheek; then he slid it around the back of her neck in a way that any onlooker might have even considered to be romantic. She knew the truth, and yet it almost fooled her.
Then he hauled her towards him, his eyes burning through her, wild and untamed and stirring up sensations inside that she was sure she’d never felt before. Then he lowered his head and, as he claimed her mouth with his, her entire body seemed to combust in flashes of white-hot heat.
And Oti’s world as she knew it imploded.
* * *
He should never have kissed her, Lukas castigated himself a short while later when he had finally ushered his too-lovely new bride into the back seat of their wedding car, barking out a low command to his driver before climbing in after her.
He should never have married her either. But that was hard to remember when he was still floored by their kiss. And it didn’t help that she was touching her fingers to her lips, with that same dazed expression shining in her too-blue eyes. He tried to pull his gaze away and look out of the window, but it was impossible.
Slowly, she turned her head to look at him. Her throat worked a few times.
‘What...was that?’
‘If I have to tell you—’ his voice was sharp, and not at all like himself ‘—then I can’t have been doing it right. And we both know that isn’t the case.’
It spoke volumes that she didn’t respond to that with one of her witty put-downs. As if she was too punch-drunk to manage it. Any other time, he might have taken that as a triumph.
