Chapter 18 #2
“If you do not mind my saying,” he said, “that is why I wanted to wait for you on the terrace just now. There have been unpleasant moments for you on balconies as of late, and I wanted you to at least be on a terrace with one man who cares—”
He cut himself off right before he admitted to caring about her, but Isabella continued to look at him with hope.
“Well,” he muttered, “you know my feelings.”
“Do I?” she smirked, turning her attention to the main course of their dinner.
“I would imagine the coupling we did last night, and the morning before that, and then in the bathroom, says quite enough.”
“Oh, I do not know,” she mused playfully. “I might have to be reminded several times a day.”
“Per day?” His eyebrows rose up, and he laughed roughly. “Then I ought to stop my exercising in the woods, for you might just work my body enough in that case.”
“Perhaps I can.” Her lashes lowered, and she peered up at him from beneath them. Before he could pursue her across the table as the dark expression on his face suggested he wanted to, Isabella cut into her meat, bringing it to her lips.
“You are right,” she said, tasting it, changing the topic purposefully. “This meat is very expensive and exquisite.”
Her husband’s fingers tightened where he gripped the edge of the table. “You are a tease, Isabella, and when you are ready to stop teasing, I shall have you begging for what you want.”
Heat curled through her stomach, and she bit her lip, forcing herself to continue meeting his gaze where he would expect her to look away bashfully. There was something about their newfound intimacy that was emboldening her, she thought.
Finally, he joined her in eating their food, but after a moment that seemed heavy with thought, he asked her a question she was not prepared for.
“What do you enjoy doing when it rains and you are stuck inside?”
“What do you mean?”
Oscar’s expression was hard to read, and she could not figure out where the question came from. She tilted her head at him. “Humor me. I have wondered this for a while.”
“You continue to be an enigma to me,” she laughed, frowning down at the table, thinking. “Well, I read, of course. I despise embroidery, but my mother always told me that rainy days without social calls were perfect for practice. I was never very good at it. Sibyl is, though.”
“You speak of your sisters often, but not yourself.” He gave her a long look over the rim of his wineglass. “I am asking about you. Let yourself be known, Isabella.”
And that mere invitation possibly meant more than she realized. For somebody to ask her to take off a performative mask, an avoidant one, and let her true self be known. She could only blink for a moment as thoughts of how she had kept herself occupied behind closed doors.
“It is foolish,” she muttered, waving it off. “Uninteresting and—”
“I still wish to know.”
Isabella swallowed. “I daydream. It sounds very simple and silly, but I can occupy myself for a very long time getting lost in my thoughts.
I daydream about pretty things, beautiful things, and I do not mean the jewelry my mother once made me wear as she paraded me through one ballroom after another.
I mean emotionally beautiful things. Everything was always about matching, whether one liked the company of her match or not, so I let myself imagine a life where that match loved me.
“A life where I could take off every damned mask my mother pressed to my face and told me to woo my suitors to elevate our family name. A life where… a life where love bloomed effortlessly. I have always claimed to have no time for romance, have always forced myself to scoff at Sibyl’s openness, but secretly, I am just jealous that she had the allowance to explore her fondness for romance and whimsy. ”
“And you were not?”
Isabella shook her head. “Not after Hermia’s scandal, even before that.
When she was labeled a spinster, it shamed our family greatly, and my mother already had me preened to be the next diamond of her daughters.
” Her voice dropped to a whisper, and she felt as though she was peeling away too many layers of herself as she confessed in a whisper, “I have spent my whole life pretending, and there were days when I feared I lost myself in those pretenses. So much so that I stopped recognizing myself in the mirror.”
“And now?”
“Now…” The smile that began to form wasn’t one she fought to let appear. “Now, I find myself not needing to pretend. Now, I believe I recognize the Isabella I see.”
“I recognize her,” he told her, still holding her gaze with such intensity that her heart fluttered. “I see who she is, and I’m rather fond of that lovely lady. I see your masks, but I see the woman beneath, and both of them urged me to continue seeing my proposal to you through.”
There was enough exposure in his own voice to match hers that she suddenly didn’t feel so unraveled and peeled apart.
Isabella wished to cross the table and kiss him, but she rather enjoyed simply speaking with him. It was so rare that he let her linger in conversation with him, and she didn’t want to risk losing this moment.
“How about you?” she inquired. “When it rains, and you cannot go out to exercise, or walk Morris as far, what do you do?”
“I work. I read ledgers, sign contracts, and send letters.”
“How terribly boring,” she joked. “You should get a hobby.”
At that, Oscar gave a delightful bark of laughter that rang with surprise. “Heavens, you are bold. I have hobbies; I just do not let myself indulge in them. Like you, I wore masks and enacted performances for the pleasure of my parents.”
He frowned and pursed his lips, as though annoyed with himself for letting something like that slip from his mouth.
“Tell me,” she requested softly.
He eyed her carefully for a moment, then his features softened.
“Everything I did was based on their approval,” he confessed, “so I learned to simply be that shell they needed to fill with instruction rather than my own favorite things.”
“Like sugar,” she guessed.
“Like sugar,” he affirmed with a tiny, amused smirk. “And like painting, although I am terrible at it. And I—” he stopped before laughing once at himself, a self-deprecating sound. “I enjoy playing the pianoforte, which I am not very good at either. But I do have a secret talent.”
Isabella leaned in, interested. “Do tell me.”
“I enjoy translating books,” he told her.
“What?” she smiled.
“Have you ever come across the leather-bound books in the library near the far-right corner? They are full of Greek, French, and Latin translations that I’ve done.
Poetry, essays, research notes. I started doing it at Cambridge, where I met Edmund.
I always did his translation work if he needed it. ”
Isabella’s mouth parted in wonder. “I did not expect that.”
“Sometimes there is beauty in the world that eyes do not see, and the English language cannot convey enough. An original text can be more poetic than others realize, and I grew hungry to learn it all.”
“So, you are a linguist, too?”
“On pourrait dire que,” he told her, and the sound of French on his rough tongue made Isabella burn.
Her eyes grew heavy as she gazed at him.
One could say that, he’d just said. Her French was passable, but she understood it brokenly enough.
“Are there any other secrets about the notorious Duke of Rochdale?”
“None.” He was too quick to say, but there was a knowing smirk on his lips.
“But… a secret is that as much as I hate the nickname the ton has given me, I also resent that I understand it. I do punch first, and think second, but I’ve always been a fighter, as I told you.
My instincts are protective, and for me, that is often best delivered by eradicating the threat by putting them down. I am beastly, am I not?”
“A hero is a hero, no matter his methods.”
“Hero.” He twisted the word into something that sounded terrible, but Isabella wanted him to know how she felt.
“You saved me, Oscar,” she murmured. “You took me from my scandals, from my family, from the pressures that were crushing me. You have given me freedom.”
“I gave you locked doors.” His voice turned flatter, and she feared she was losing his openness.
“Once,” she allowed. “Yes. But you are unlocking them with me, not for me, but with me. That means a lot more than you realize. You are allowed your locked doors, and I pushed too hard at the start when heaven knows I have my own, too. But as long as you are willing to let me take your hand as we unlock them together, then I am content.”
Silence fell between them. After a long minute, Oscar sighed, looking at her, agonized. “You truly think I am your hero?”
“I know you are.” She leaned forward, linking her fingers beneath her chin in a pretty, innocent way. “And now I find myself hungering for dessert.”
“You have not finished your main course.”
“How can I, when the man who is the true course is looking at me as though I am the only thing he wishes to devour?”
A small smile lifted the corners of Oscar’s lips as he stood up from his seat, making quick work of clearing the table to another surface. Then, he tugged her up.
He bent her over the table between one breath and the other, and Isabella gasped as her nightgown was tugged up to her hips.
And then his fingers were pulling her apart, exposing her in the most intimate way, and she felt the wet press of his tongue as he tasted her again.
She moaned softly, already pushing her hips back into his face. He licked and licked at her until her thighs trembled, until she gripped the table and threatened to claw marks into it.
When he slipped two fingers into her, alongside his tongue, Isabella’s voice cracked loudly in the room, her cry filling the space.
The candles continued to flicker on the windowsill nearby, and she watched the flame, thinking that Oscar was a flame in her. He scattered her shadows and brought to light everything about herself she thought was unpretty, everything that would not win the heart of a suitor.
Yet somehow he saw all of her, and he wanted her.
When she climaxed, it was a shattering thing that had her jolting against the table, her hips circling against his face in pleasure she could not hold back. It crashed over her in a tidal wave, and she gasped out his name, reaching back to snag his hair between her fingers.
The sounds he made into her folds were obscene, but she found herself yearning for them. The delightful sounds of attraction—the sounds of him eating her like the finest sweet treat he had been granted.
And when her release ebbed, and Oscar gave a low groan against the back of her thigh as he caught his breath, she turned to him, her eyes hooded.
On his knees, Oscar looked up at her.
“What dress do you despise wearing to balls?” he asked her, once again making her stop and wonder.
“You ask the strangest things,” she said, still breathless.
He kissed the fullness of her thigh before he pressed his face to her skin. “Maybe I want to know so I can tear it off you to free you from its confines.”
Isabella clawed through her pleasure to find a true answer, her skin burning at the thought he proposed.
“I despised the debut dress my mother picked out for me. It was pale pink, and I did not want to be known as a delicate pink flower. I wanted to feel more powerful than the dress allowed me to feel.”
When he didn’t answer at first, she wondered why. But then he pinned her with a heavy, aroused gaze as he stood up to claim her mouth.
Pulling back, he murmured against her lips, “You are no delicate flower, Duchess. You have more power over me than you can fathom. No withering posy could bring me to my knees as you do.”
Before she could answer, he had undone his breeches and was sliding into her. Everything else—every strange question, every vulnerable answer, every heavy silence—was gone, replaced by a drowning desire that they both burned through.