Page 69 of A Bride for the Heartless Duke
Soft footsteps padded across the room. She turned drowsily at the rustle of discarded clothing, and a moment later the mattress dipped. Nicholas slipped naked beneath the covers beside her.
She smelled the spirits upon his breath before she touched him, and she froze.
There was nothing extraordinary in it. He had spent the evening with Oliver, and gentlemen drank at their clubs.He certainly didn’t move as though he were drunk. And yet adrenaline pounded through her body, banishing the last veil of sleep.
“Nicholas?” The word came out quiet, not betraying her alarm.
“Who else were you expecting?” The anger in his voice cut through the last of her sleepiness. “Another man?”
She sat up, trying to make him out in the dark. “What are you talking about?”
“Nothing,” he sighed, exhausted. “Come here.” He tugged her down beside him, and she lay across his chest the way she had for the past week, listening to the sound of his heart. It pounded under her ear, elevated.
“What did you do this evening?” she whispered.
He stiffened, and all the earlier doubts returned, magnified. “Nothing of consequence,” he murmured, the words deceptively calm. “What does any man do at his club? We drank and talked and played cards.”
“Did you lose?”
His breath brushed her hair as he snorted. “In a manner of speaking.”
“What does that mean?”
“What does anything mean? Stop asking questions, Isadora.”
Her full name. Recently, he had been calling her nothing butDora. “Has something happened to put you in a bad mood, Nicholas?”
He released her and rolled over. “It’s nothing. Go to sleep.”
“Nick—”
“I didn’t come home so you could lecture me about my behavior.”
She sucked in a breath, facing the ceiling and biting back the sting of tears. An unreasonable reaction to what was a mild scolding from her husband, but she felt the lash of his temper as though it was the tip of a cane against her skin.
In the darkness, she wondered if he might apologize. But he merely lay still as though sleeping, though she could tell from his breathing that sleep had not taken him yet. The covers rustled as though he reached for her, then drew back.
She waited for comfort that never came.
In the end, sleep was a long time in coming for her, too.
It was only at breakfast that the true nature of Nicholas’s nighttime misadventure became clear. He had risen earlier than she, despite coming to bed later, and the first thing she spotted was his freshly bruised knuckles. The sight halted her on the threshold, the words dying in her throat.
He had gone back to bare-knuckle boxing.Why?After his promise, after everything they had said to one another, and she’d given herself to him, he had still returned to it…
She had believed the bond between them had deepened into something strong enough to hold him.
Clearly, she had mistaken a fragile happiness for trust.
She swallowed, and he lowered his broadsheets. Faint shadows bruised the skin beneath his eyes, betraying a sleeplessness his composed posture could not. Even exhausted and dishevelled by guilt, he was more handsome than any man had a right to be.
“Nicholas…” she managed.
His throat moved, and his brows came together. For a fleeting second, his fingers tightened around the edges of the newspaper. He drew in a long breath, then inclined his head and raised the papers again.
He was not reading. She knew it.
They had fallen asleep at separate ends of the bed, and now this. She’d had this tantalizing taste of happiness, and now he was taking it away again.
