Chapter 1: Burning the Altar
He snatched the lighter from her, his thumb brushing the scorched lace before snapping it shut. “A cheap stunt,” he said, his voice all silk and threat as the organist began to play. “Now walk, or I’ll drag your father’s company through the mud before they reach the chorus.”
He pulled her close, the scent of him—cedar and cold ambition—searing through the satin of her ridiculous dress. “Every step you take is mine,” he breathed against her temple, his hand a brand at the base of her spine.
“And every word you say is a lie,” she shot back, her smile a razor in the gilded light. She burns, a silent inferno in lace and satin, turning to face the altar with a look that could scorch the roses in their perfect, stupid vases.
She took the first step, then deliberately ground the spike of her heel into the pristine satin of his shoe. “Whoops,” she whispered, not looking at him, her voice sweet as poisoned syrup. “Slipped.”
He tightens his grip on her waist, his fingers digging into the satin with a promise of bruises. “Try that again,” he murmurs, the words a cold current against her ear, “and the heel breaks.”
She drove the sharp point of her knee-high boot into his shin. A hard, satisfying thud of leather against bone, followed by his sharp, stifled grunt; his hand on her waist turned to iron, but he never broke stride, forcing her onward down the aisle as if nothing had happened.
“Clever,” he muttered, his breath hot and sharp against her ear as his hand slid from her waist to the back of her neck, a possessive clamp that promised later retribution. The officiant’s voice, a dry drone about lifelong bonds, cut through the perfumed air as he demanded, “Do you, Damien, take this woman?”
“I do,” Damien said, his voice clear and absolute, a blade slicing through the chapel. He turned his head just enough for his lips to brush the shell of her ear, his breath a dark promise as the officiant turned to her. “No,” he whispers back, the word for her alone, a searing betrayal of the vow he’d just sworn. A violent tremble, born of pure rage, locked her knees.
The officiant cleared his throat, the sound like dry parchment in the sudden, waiting silence. “And do you, Lexi, take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?”
“NEVER, BASTARD.”
The word echoed, a final, cracking denial in the perfumed silence, before Damien’s hand tightened in her hair and he kissed her. It was not a kiss of love, but of conquest, a brutal sealing of a bargain that dissolved her fury into a shock of pure, tremulous sensation.
He broke the kiss, his grip shifting from her hair to her wrist, a brutal vice of tailored silk and latent strength. The ornate chapel doors, heavy with gilt and expectation, flew open before his shoulder, and then the blessed, humid night air hit her face as he dragged her, stumbling in her ridiculous heels, toward a waiting town car whose engine growled like a beast unchained.