Page 26 of A Bride for the Heartless Duke
His gaze dropped to that mouth. Soft, ripe, still parted around her last unspoken word. It would be the work of a single moment to lean down and take it, to taste what he had imagined countless times since their wedding night. He knew a little of how her milky-white body looked under her clothes; her nightgown had teased him with those curves so generously.
Her breath caught, held for a fraction of a second, then released. The pulse in her throat fluttered, and she swayed nearer, her eyes never leaving his. Some distant, drowning part of him understood: whatever else lay between them, she wanted him too.
They were husband and wife. Perhaps she, too, had lain awake imagining his kiss. Perhaps more than his kiss.
But if he kissed her, he would not stop. He would have her down among the bloodied rags and bathwater, silk and lawn torn out of his way, and he would not surface until he had learnedeverysound she could make—
He strangled the thought too late. Inside his trousers, he throbbed, now fully hard. He prayed she wouldn’t look down.
With an effort that pulled his wound white-hot, he released her wrist and set her back from him. He welcomed the pain. Pain was good—pain reminded him of where he was and just how much he had to lose.
“Thank you,” he said, his voice distant, not something he recognized at all. “For all of it. But Isadora—you must never follow me again. If you wish to know where I go, then ask.”
She had gathered her hands, the fingers of one still pink from his blood, into her chest, folded together like a flower. Her expression had closed, the earlier wonder and anticipation locked behind reserve that looked alarmingly like hurt. Her eyes searched his. “Will you truly tell me?”
The answer rose in him before she even finished asking, and he did not need to speak it aloud.
Her jaw flexed.
“How am I supposed to trust you when you will not trustme?”
“I—” The fighting was the last thing in the world still his. Sophia he loved beyond breath, but she was half Grace’s, and every day more her own. The estates were duty. The title was a harness. Only the ring remained—sweat and blood and the clean animalhonesty of fists—the one place he could let himself go without destroying anyone else but himself.
He could not let Isadora into that place. If she saw what lived in him there, she would never look at him the same way again.
“There is no other woman,” he said at last. “If that is your fear.”
Her lips parted and closed again. A peculiar expression crossed her face, but it was not one he could decipher.
“I… see,” she said finally.
“Beyond that—I promise it is nothing that need concern you.” He strode to the door that separated their two chambers and opened it, holding it wide. “Do not follow me again, Isadora. Promise me.”
After a long moment, she inclined her head. “Very well.”
“Good.” He ushered her out of the room and closed the door behind her.
Then he rested his forehead against the wood and forced himself not to go after her to soothe the hurt across her face. This was for the best. They would have no future if he came to feel more for her than simple admiration.
They must keep their distance.
Only then would she ever be safe and happy.
Nicholas nursed his ale in the murky tavern, the candles drooling wax across the pitted tables. In the day since his last conversation with Isadora, he had gone out of his way to avoid her, but nothing had assuaged the guilt in his chest.
She had appeared at breakfast with dark circles under her eyes, and he had been hard-pressed not to ask her about them and find solutions for whatever ailed her.
Except, what ailed her was him—he already knew.
A man slid into the chair opposite, a tankard in his hands, liquid slopping across the table. “My apologies,” he said with the familiar thick accent of the York gentry, and Nicholas recognized him as being the same gentleman who had approached him the last time he’d been out fighting. The man who thought him nothing more than a mere pugilist, not a duke.
Nicholas shrugged and took a long drink. The man took his place opposite.
“Remember me?” the man grinned. “Oliver Chant.”
“I remember,” Nicholas muttered.
“I was meaning to thank you for getting me out of the bind I was in that night,” he chuckled, clapping a hand on Nicholas’s shoulder before it wilted beneath one glacial glance. “Haven’t seen you around as often as usual. Why the sour mood?”
