been transformed into something out of a fairy tale. White roses climbed the stone arches of the garden. Hundreds of candl

hole city. Try to look like a man who's not at his own funeral."Damien didn't answer. The quartet's melody swelled, and three hundred heads turned toward the arch of white roses at the end of the garden.And then she stepped through it.He had seen her once, in a borrowed navy dress and a stubborn expression. He had thought her handsome, in a plain, unguarded way. He had not thought about her since. He was certain of that.But the woman walking toward him now in a cloud of lace and gold light was not plain, and was not unguarded. Her arm rested lightly on her brother's sleeve. Her chin was lifted. Her eyes stayed forward, bright and steady, fixed on him with an expression he could not name. Not fear. Not hope. Something fiercer. Something that looked, impossibly, like grace.The evening wind caught her veil and lifted it behind her like a banner. The last light of the sun lit her from the side, turning her skin to burnished bronze and the lace to something spun from sugar and gold. She passed the lanterns one by one, and he realized, with a distant sense of alarm, that he had stopped breathing.Careful, he told himself. It's a performance. She's paid to look like this.She reached the altar. Her brother kissed her cheek, shook Damien's hand with a grip just a little too firm, and gave him a long look that said, very clearly, If you hurt her, I will find a way. Then he stepped back, and Zara stood alone beside him.Close up, he could see her pulse beating at the base of her throat. He could see that her fingers were trembling around the stems of her bouquet, though her face gave nothing away. She smelled like jasmine and vanilla. She did not look at him."Dearly beloved," the officiant began.* * *Zara heard almost none of the ceremony.It came to her in fragments. The officiant's warm baritone, speaking of love and commitment and the sacred union of two hearts. A bird singing in the oak above them. The soft crackle of a candle flame. Beside her, a man with a face like carved stone, so close that his sleeve brushed hers and her whole arm prickled with awareness she did not want.This is what a dream looks like, she thought, when it's leased."Do you, Damien Alexander Cross, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?"A pause. The garden waited."I do."His voice was low and perfectly steady. It was the voice of a man signing a check. But as the words left him, Zara felt something strange: a tiny hitch in the middle of them, so brief she might have imagined it."And do you, Zara Elise Monroe, take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as you both shall live?"The words were enormous. They were meant for someone else, for a woman who had chosen this, who had walked toward a man she loved with her whole heart. Zara thought of the bakery. She thought of the sign that said Monr