Chapter 4 #2
“I am being a duke who has just discovered that the bride at his altar was not the bride he contracted for.” His gaze did not waver from her face. “You will forgive me, I trust, if I take a moment to ascertain the precise nature of the goods I have been delivered.”
The goods.
Something hot and terrible rose in her throat.
She set her teeth against it. She would not weep.
She would not give him that satisfaction, not here, not in this gleaming carriage with the violets trembling in their brass holder and her hands hidden in her skirts and her wedding ring sitting heavy and unfamiliar on the fourth finger of her left hand.
“I am untouched,” she said. Her voice was steady.
She was rather proud of it. “I am three-and-twenty and unmarried. I have no suitors. No man has even so much as stolen a chaste kiss from me. I have never—” She stopped.
Swallowed. “I have never been alone with a man for longer than the duration of a country dance. There is no child. There has never been a man. You may have whatever proof of that you require when the time comes.”
She had not meant to say the last part.
It was out before she could call it back—a brittle little flourish at the end of an otherwise dignified speech—and she watched, with a dawning sense of horror, as his eyes changed.
The cold in them did not retreat, exactly. But something else moved beneath it. Something interested. Something that had not been interested before.
“Ah,” Tristan said, very softly. “Now that is a different proposition altogether.”
She felt the heat climb her throat, her cheeks, the tips of her ears.
“I did not mean—”
“I know precisely what you meant.” He smiled, slow and faintly wolfish, and she understood, with a sinking lurch of her stomach, that she had handed him a weapon.
“You meant to defend your honor. Most successfully, I might add. I withdraw any implication that you have been less than you ought to be.”
“Thank you,” she managed.
“But since we are speaking plainly—”
Oh, no.
“—you will permit me to be plain about one further matter.”
She said nothing. She could not seem to find words.
The carriage rocked gently beneath them, and a single shaft of sunlight slid across his knee, illuminating the faint sheen of the dark wool, and she had the distinct sense of being cornered by something elegant and unhurried that meant her no good at all.
“I did not enter this marriage out of any great affection for your friend,” he said.
“I entered it because it was suitable. Because it was time. Because a man in my position requires a wife and an heir, and Eliza Redding seemed a pleasant, biddable young woman who would discharge those duties with a minimum of fuss.” He paused.
“You will note, Imogen, that those requirements have not altered. Only the woman has.”
Her breath caught.
“What I am saying,” he went on, with the same dreadful patience, “is that I intend to take full advantage of the privileges of this marriage. All of them. I did not stand at that altar this morning to acquire a houseguest. I acquired a wife. And tonight, when the breakfast is done and the guests are gone and we are at last in the privacy of our own apartments at Somerset, you may expect me to behave precisely as a man behaves on his wedding night.”
The carriage seemed suddenly very small.
She felt the words land somewhere low in her body, in a place she had not known could be struck so accurately by mere language.
Her face flamed. Her pulse, which she had only just brought back under some semblance of order, broke free of its discipline and began to beat very fast and very high in her throat.
“You—” She wet her lips. “You cannot possibly—”
“I most certainly can.” His voice was still pleasant, still soft, still threaded with that thin bright line of cold amusement. “Unless, of course, you would prefer to seek the annulment we both know neither of us can afford.”
“That is not—” She stopped. Started again. “That is not fair.”
“No,” he agreed. “It is not. But you, my dear, surrendered your claim to fairness somewhere between the vestry and the altar.”
She stared at him. He stared back. Outside, the hedgerows flashed past in a green blur, and somewhere a curlew called, and the wheels of the carriage turned with their relentless, indifferent rhythm, carrying her toward Somerset House and a wedding breakfast and a night she had not, she now realized with a small, wild lurch of comprehension, prepared for at all.
She had thought—
What had she thought?
That she would stand at the altar, and speak the vows, and Eliza would be safe, and she would have procured a husband. The first step in her father’s assignment for her.
Certainly, this man, her husband, could afford her some time to… to, well, she didn’t know what she would do with additional time. But something that would ease this strange apprehension that had lodged itself in her body.
She had not thought of this.
She had not thought of him.
Obviously, she’d known who she would be marrying. But this morning, he’d been nothing more than a name and title and handsome figure at the front of the church.
Tristan tilted his head, and she had the distinct, infuriating sense that he was reading every one of these realizations as they crossed her face.
“You have gone very pale,” he observed. “Shall I ring for the carriage to stop?”
“No.”
“Are you quite certain? You may take a moment, if you require one.”
“I require nothing from you, Your Grace.”
“Tristan.”
“Tristan.” She set her jaw. “I require nothing.”
“As you wish.” He inclined his head, and the small, infuriating smile returned to the corner of his mouth.
“Though I should mention, for the sake of complete candor, that it is not too late to revise your account of yourself. If there is anything further you would like to confess, anything I ought to know before we cross the threshold of Somerset together, I would suggest you make use of the remaining mile.”
“There is nothing further.”
“Mm.” He regarded her for a long moment. Then, with the air of a man closing a small but satisfying ledger, he settled more comfortably against the squabs and turned his gaze toward the window. “Very well. We shall consider the formal interview adjourned.”
She permitted herself, at last, to breathe.
The breath shook on the way out, leaving no doubt to either of them that her nerves weren’t settled in the least.