Chapter 10 #2
Something clicked by the evening, when she realized he would not be coming out unless she did something about it. She had had enough.
She crossed the corridor to his study with purpose, opened the door without knocking, and stepped inside.
Adam was sitting at his desk, on which papers lay in giant, orderly stacks. The candlelight threw a warm circle over the surface, over his hand, and over the hard line of his jaw as he looked up. He was in a white shirt that only reached his torso, before the desk hid the rest from view.
The smell of beeswax and polish filled her nostrils as she stepped further into the room. The entire place felt masculine and restrained, and so full of control that her anger rose further just standing in it. She shut the door behind her.
“You took your breakfast alone,” she said.
His expression shifted so subtly that another person might have missed it. “Did I?”
“You know you did.”
“I had work to do.”
“So have many men, and still they manage to acknowledge the wives they have brought home.”
Adam set down the paper in his hand. “If this is about breakfast?—”
“It is not about breakfast.” Emily drew closer to the desk. “It is about your determination to put as much distance between us as the manor’s architecture will allow.”
“Emily—”
“Do not Emily me. You married me and then vanished. Am I to understand that this is how our household shall run? You in one part of it, I in another, with servants sent between us as if we are two neighboring nations?”
His mouth tightened. “You exaggerate.”
“No, I improve upon what is already insulting.”
He rose. That should have been a warning, but Emily did not care.
“You have shut me out of your bed, your table, and now half the day. If separate lives were your ambition, you might have mentioned that the house itself would be split to suit it.”
Adam came around the desk slowly, the kind of measured movement that only sharpened the force of it. “You think I am hiding.”
“I know you are.”
Something flashed across his face. “You know very little about it.”
“Then enlighten me.”
He let out a rough breath. “You storm into my study and demand honesty as if I was never honest in the first place. I was straightforward with you from the beginning, wasn’t I? I told you what this was, did I not?”
Emily stopped. “What I hate most in you is that you say one thing and do another.”
For a second, neither of them spoke. The room felt suddenly smaller, the fire too warm, the silence too close.
“You cannot keep ignoring me for the entirety of our marriage, Adam. That is simply impossible.”
Adam cleared his throat, low and hard. “Oh, I cannot ignore you even if I wanted to. Trust me, I have tried.”
The words struck through every layer of anger she had brought into the room.
“Then why are you trying in the first place?” She heard her tone shift.
He took one step closer. “Because it is safer.”
“What is safer? What are you so afraid of?”
His jaw flexed. He did not answer.
That refusal, after everything, drove her past caution. “You do not get to say that and then stand there, Duke .”
“I am trying to keep things in order. You cannot understand.”
“Need I remind you, Adam, that this is marriage. This is not some sum you have to calculate on those ledgers of yours.”
She did not finish speaking when he moved.
One moment, there was space between them; the next, his hand was on her waist, the other on the back of her neck, and his mouth was on hers with all the force he had denied them both for days.
Emily made a sound against his lips that was filled with anger, relief, and surrender all at once.She kissed him back without hesitation and without thought, because this was the truth she had dragged out of him, and it was hotter and harsher than she had imagined.
He kissed her like a man already deep in something he did not know how to survive.
Adam’s hand spread at her waist, holding her there. His mouth moved against hers with urgency, and every part of her that had spent the day furious with him went limp under his touch.
She felt his restraint fraying in the way he gripped her waist and the way his breathing quickened. In the rough sound that left him when she gripped his shoulder.
His hand slid beneath the folds of her dress and lifted them. The shock of cool air against her ankle, then her calves, made her pulse leap.
Emily did not stop him. She could not have. His thigh pressed between hers, and she felt a bulge pulse maddeningly between her legs. Her head tipped back against his hand as the room slowly narrowed to just the heat, breath, and fabric between them.
Suddenly, Adam went still.
He pulled back far enough for her to see his face, and what she saw there made confusion crash through her desire at once. She recognized fear when she saw it. When he looked at her and then at the desk behind her, horror seemed to seize him from the inside.
“What? What is it?”
He stepped back, not answering.
Emily’s breath came unsteadily. “You do understand that you are no longer at war, do you not? I understand people who come back from war have trouble forming relationships with?—”
“No.”
He closed his eyes for one brief second and opened them again.
“Adam.”
“This is not just about the war, Emily. It is far worse than that.”
“Adam—”
“Please leave. Go to your bedroom.”
The words landed like ice water.
Emily stared at him. “You cannot expect me to accept that as an answer.”
He stepped back as if distance itself were mercy. “You have to be the one to go, Emily. I cannot.”
Emily lowered her dress with hands that were steady only by force. Every part of her burned—her mouth, her skin, her pride. “As you wish.”
She turned, opened the door, and walked out with all the dignity she could still gather, leaving him alone in the study.
Something was wrong with him. There was no denying it now.
And she was going to get down to the root of the matter.