Page 22 of The Big Bad Duke

Or perhaps he was projecting his own horrors onto her words. Because though the nightmares still plagued him at night, his waking hours were not much better.

They sat in companionable silence for a few long moments. Neither of them speaking. Neither feeling the need to fill the quiet.

She sat beside him on the bed in nothing but a thin, oversized nightgown, only a foot of space between them, her wrist still in his, a dagger lying between them.

He was naked under the sheets, he just realized.

It was too intimate a tableau. Yet it didn’t feel strange or shameful. It felt as though it were a regular occurrence for them to sit like this, in a dark bedchamber, alone.

Quiet. Familiar.

And that terrified him more than any nightmare.

This ease between them was dangerous. It reminded him of before. Of a time when he believed in tomorrow. When he thought he deserved happiness.

It couldn’t have been normal for her either, to be in such intimate quarters with a strange man. Or was it?

“I don’t suppose your husband would be pleased to learn that you’re in another man’s bedchamber in the middle of the night,” he said, keeping his tone neutral.

She scrunched her nose slightly and looked away. “Actually, I don’t believe he would care.”

“Ah.” He released a slow breath. Perhaps it was normal then. “A marriage of convenience?”

“For him,” she said quietly.

“And for you?”

She looked at him, her gaze filled with both defiance and despair. “For me, it’s just another cage.”

Her voice was flat. Emotionless. But there was a storm brewing in her dark eyes.

He studied her a moment longer. She stared back. That open, curious gaze that had ensnared him at a ball just a few days earlier.

“So… you’re free to have affairs?” he asked before he could stop himself. Where the hell had that question come from?

Wherever it came from, it now hung heavy between them, and he couldn’t take it back. Most importantly, he wasn’t so certain he wanted to take it back.

She didn’t flinch, but her delicate throat moved with a swallow.

“I am.”

A pause.

“And are you?”

She licked her lips. “Are you asking if I’ve had them?”

“No. I’m asking if you’re currently having them.”

“Not at this exact moment.” She paused. “Yet.”

He shouldn’t have smiled. Not at that. But something in her audacity—direct, unapologetic—sparked heat low in his gut.

“Yet,” he echoed, his voice an octave lower than before.

She tipped her chin up slightly, daring him to say something, testing how far she could push him. Or perhaps how far he would go on his own.

Gideon was not a man easily pushed. “Is that your intent?”