Page 8 of Dangerous

“So you lie to your patients about your name. What kind of a quack are you, anyway?”

Well, sort of free. I gave Blaine an irritated look. “My name’s Mira Holler, and it will always be Mira Holler.”

“Well, it’ll be Mira Steel from today,” he said, shrugging as the elevator doors slid open and revealed the penthouse floor of the hotel we were at. I hadn’t had the presence of mind to notice its name on our way here.

Blaine led the way to the only set of doors on the floor, found the key card in his tux pocket, and let us in.

I trailed after him, having nowhere else to go, and paused at the look of the suite once the door closed behind me. Everything was glass, gold, and white, with fresh flowers adorning all surfaces. Along the far wall, massive windows displayed a striking view of London and the Thames, the curtain of night interrupted by the multitude of lights from the city.

Blaine didn’t give the luxurious surroundings so much as a second look. He went straight for the mini bar and filled two glasses with liquor and ice. He held one out to me while taking a long draw from his own glass.

I walked over to him and snatched the offered glass out of his hand. The burn of whiskey on my tongue was oddly comforting, and I drank deeply. Too deeply, for someone my size who up until today drank maybe once in a blue moon, but I didn’t care much at that point. Getting hideously drunk seemed like a perfectly reasonable response to everything that’d happened.

“You’re not going to like being married to me.” Blaine leaned back against the bar and looked at me with something akin to a challenge in his stormy eyes.

I snorted. “No shit.”

“It’s not too late to get an annulment.”

A jolt of excitement shot through me. “You’d do that?”

“Me? Fuck no.” He downed the rest of his drink and poured himself another, eying me over his shoulder as he did. “If that’d been an option I’d have just said no to this whole bloody arrangement to begin with.”

I stared at him, the anger making itself known again with a heated rush of blood to my cheeks and chest. “You thinkIwould have gone through with this if I’d had a choice? This may come as a shock to you,Mr. Steel, but you’re not exactly Prince Charming. I would quite literally rather marry the homeless guy who reeks of moldy cheese and asks me to suck his cock every time I pass him on my way to work than I would you, but here we are!”

Blaine snorted, emptying half his glass of whiskey in one swig. “Here we are indeed,Mrs. Steel.Guess you’ll just have to get used to sucking my cock instead, huh?”

I blinked. Twice. He was obviously as unhappy about this forced marriage as I was, yet he still found the energy to be a grade-A prick.

“You’re a pig,” I hissed. “Don’t for one second think I’ll put up with any of your crap just because I’m forced to live with you.”

“You’ll put up with exactly what I say you will.” He was angry too, his eyes flashing darkly at me. “I’m your husband now, whether you like it or not, so you better get used to doing as you’re told.”

The same urge to slap him as I’d experienced in our disaster of a therapy session made my palms itch, but despite my—partly alcohol-fueled—bravery, I wasn’t dumb enough to test my luck. Instead, I grabbed the bottle of whiskey from the bar next to him and stomped toward the white-and-gold painted door I presumed led to the bedroom.

“I’m going to bed,” I announced, before I slammed the door behind me with a satisfyingly dramatic bang.

Five

Mira

To my great relief, someone had filled the bedroom wardrobe with clothing, and upon closer inspection, it turned out that half of it was mine. Perhaps I should have felt violated that someone had gone through my personal belongings without my knowledge or consent to bring it here, but it seemed so insignificant compared to everything else my family had done that I was just grateful I could get out of the uncomfortable wedding dress my mother had picked out and into something soft and familiar.

When I walked into the en-suite bathroom and caught a look of myself in the mirror, I was suddenly extra glad I had my own clothes available—I looked like a big, poofy nightmare. My mother had decided on puff sleeves, a full skirt that accentuated my already rounder-than-ideal hips, and so many sequins it looked like a fairy had had an acute round of diarrhea all over me.

But it wasn’t just the dress that composed the horrifying image that stared back at me from the mirror. It was also my face.

It wasn’t so much the makeup—I never bothered to wear much, if any, so the lack of pizazz wasn’t unusual—as it was the red rims underneath my eyes and the pale, taut look of my skin. I looked like an abuse victim—all that was lacking was a badly covered bruise or two.

Angrily, I tore off the dress, ripping it in my haste. I wasn’t a victim—not anymore.

I took a swig of the bottle I’d hijacked from Blaine, and then I went to work.

There were bottles of tonics and lotions on the shelves next to the sink, and I didn’t hold back. I washed and scrubbed and sprayed and smeared until my skin glowed rosy and the woman who looked back from the mirror was closer to who I’d become in the past eight years rather than who I’d been for the first eighteen of my life.

When I loosened my hair from the tight braid it had been in all day and ran my fingers through it, some of the tension in my shoulders finally melted away. My chestnut locks fell over my shoulders in unruly waves, encircling my breasts and upper arms.

I grazed a hand over the white scars on my soft belly as I looked at myself in the mirror. Not that any amount of scrubbing would ever makethosego away. The permanent reminder of who I’d been—the unbreakable proof of my inherent weakness. I hated them almost as much as I hated the people who had put them there.

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