Page 20 of A Bride for the Heartless Duke
Coughing, Nicholas straightened, hands locked behind his back. Every time he looked at Sophia now, that letter rose in his throat. After a night of reading it and re-reading it over and over, an ill feeling had begun to unfurl in the deepest recesses of his stomach. If Grace had truly been having an affair behind his back…
He kept catching himself searching her little face for the wrong man’s features—and finding, thank the Lord above, none.
She was his. He knew it. Hefeltit.
But already, he felt as though she was slipping away.
“A word in private, please,” he said to Isadora.
She frowned, confused, but nodded and uncurled, sauntering toward him like a feline. She quite possibly hadn’t the faintest notion of how gracefully she moved, did she? Her morning dress was washed soft and faithful to every curve, slipped at one shoulder to bare skin like the pale inner curve of a rose petal, one faint blue vein running beneath it.
She pouted up at him and he forced himself back to the present. Taking her wrist gently, he drew her out into the corridor. “You wrote a note to me for funds for a dancing master for Sophia,” he murmured once they were out of sight. “I came to tell you that such frivolous acts of communication aren’t necessary. Merely direct all your questions and demands to Gregson, and he will oversee the appropriate arrangements. When it comes to Sophia, I will spare no expense.”
Her eyes searched his, amber and liquid, and she frowned as though she wished to say something back. But after a moment, she merely inclined her head politely. “You are very generous, sir.”
“I do what I ought by my family.” Too curt, and he knew it, but her perfume had just reached him—orange blossom and soap—and a hotness coursed through him like a match dropped in dry grass. She was too close, and the vision of their weddingnight played out in his mind’s eye, the faint tips of her perfectly caressable breasts poking through a translucent nightgown.
Christ. Boxing tonight again.
He would have to. He needed to expunge the ungentlemanly feelings she’d stirred in him since then. Devil, what kind of woman wore a practically see-through nightgown in the presence of another man?
Well, frankly, any ordinary woman in the privacy of her own bedchamber.
Her eyes shuttered, and she returned to Sophia, summoning a smile for his daughter that she had not given to him.
Good.That was how things ought to be around here.
Even if, in his weaker moments, a tiny part of him wished it weren’t so.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Another day slipped by where Isadora played her role of duchess before the servants and played her very real role of nursemaid to Sophia in private.
They had spent the morning naming Molly’s unborn kittens—Sophia insisted onUnityfor the smallest after Isadora’s sister—and the afternoon butchering a duet at the pianoforte until they were both too giddy with laughter to sing another note. Strange as it felt at times, the girl had folded Isadora into her days as though she’d been expected all along.
It was the house that hadn’t.
And that was partially because of its master. She had not expected love; she was not such a fool as that. But she had thought there would be something. A feeling of belonging, maybe? Yes, that at least. Yet oftentimes, she found herself feeling like a tenant of Winchester rather than a duchess.
After trying to sleep for the past hour in an uncomfortably too-large bed, Isadora rose to the sounds of footsteps outside her bedchamber door. She listened in the silence that cloaked the house, not missing the glow of light that slipped in the gap underneath her door.
Someone was awake.
She rose, bare feet padding against the soft carpet, and crept to the door, opening it just in time to see Nicholas creeping down the stairs, a candle in his hand, the flame flickering with each step. He did not seem to notice her presence as he made his way down, and Isadora followed him as far as the head of the stairs as she listened to the sound of his passage through the house.
The front door clicked.
Hooves, on the gravel outside.
She hurried back to her bedchamber window, throwing open the curtains and peering into the moonlight-drenched scene before her. A carriage unhitching and rolling its way into the dead of night.
Where could he be going?
It was some time before she finally closed the curtains and went back to bed.
At breakfast, Isadora paid special attention to Nicholas’s hands. He sat as he always did at the head of the table, fingers encased in white gloves, the chair at his right standing empty, reading the broadsheets.
Sophia’s chair sat empty too. Spared her lessons for the day, she had gulped her chocolate standing up and gone down to the lake with the maids to feed the ducks. Without her, the breakfast room felt twice its size and half as warm. Isadora might have come along, but breakfasts were the only times she would see her husband most days.
