Chapter 20
Alistair had been silent for a full minute, and that alone was alarming.
He stood in the middle of Hentley House’s study, hands clasped behind his back, turning slowly as though inspecting a battlefield after the smoke had cleared.
His gaze moved from the newly arranged furnishings to the desk, to the papers Blaise had spread across it, then back again to the room itself.
His expression was grave enough for Parliament or a funeral.
Blaise watched him over the top of the estimates. “If you are about to say something unkind, do try to make it original.”
“I am deciding whether cruelty would be sufficient.”
“Alistair…” Blaise’s tone held a warning.
Alistair smirked at him.
Blaise lowered the papers. “You have been in the room five minutes.”
“Four, and I have suffered for all of them.”
“You wound me,” he responded drily.
“Not as thoroughly as this room has wounded taste.” Alistair looked at the drapery distastefully.
Blaise laughed despite himself. “You pompous bastard.”
“I am trying to save us both.” Alistair pointed, not quite at any one object, but at the room in its entirety. “If the garden party looks anything like this study, Marcus is doomed.”
Blaise tossed the estimates onto the desk. “The garden will not look like the study.”
“That is the first sensible thing you have said today.” Alistair crossed his arms and looked at Blaise concernedly.
“Do not look at me like that.”
“I have said nothing.” Alistair shrugged.
“You are in a charming mood, cousin.”
“I came at your invitation to discuss decor for a garden party designed to coax your elusive nephew into society. I expected difficulties. I did not expect to be assaulted by a room.” Alistair retorted.
Blaise moved to the window, though the view offered little assistance.
He turned back. “The party must be distinct. If we make it another dull parade of lilies, lemonade, and mothers measuring the prospects of sons, Marcus will vanish before the second tray is carried out.”
“He may not even appear, regardless.”
That is true. Although Blaise would not admit it.
“At twenty-one, I remember I would rather have walked into the Thames than submit to half the women my mother called eligible.” Alistair continued.
Blaise scoffed. “At twenty-one, you were insufferable. And we are not discussing your tragic youth.”
“No,” Alistair agreed. “We are discussing Marcus’s potentially tragic future.”
Blaise glanced again at the estimates. “It need not be tragic.”
Alistair never handled affection directly. He circled it, mocked it, and made it present by refusing to name it. Blaise understood the method because he used it himself often enough. But at that moment, Alistair looked at him with the deepest compassion.
He picked up one of the papers again and tried to avoid looking at him.
“The garden at Knoxford House can manage the numbers. I want movement through the spaces. And places for conversation that do not resemble traps. And music, but not so near the terrace that one must shout. And food that suggests abundance without vulgarity—”
“And Marcus.” Alistair cut him off.
Blaise sighed loudly. He had a strong feeling Marcus would not show up, out of arrogance.
“It was Iris’s thought,” Blaise admitted.
And he prayed she would not be disappointed, although he did not understand why that meant so much to him.
Alistair nodded once. “I suspected as much. And how is the wonderful, beautiful widow that—”
“Say another word, and I will throw you out.” Blaise felt a sudden wave of protectiveness over Iris.
“You would have to catch me first.”
“I have longer legs.”
The men were silent for a minute before they both laughed in shared camaraderie. Blaise touched the scar along his face, deep in thought, as Alistair moved nearer the desk and tapped one of the lists. “Perhaps you should ask her for some assistance, since it was her idea.”
Blaise leaned back against the desk. “She has her own household to manage.”
“Yes, you are standing in it, Blaise.” Alistair gestured wildly to the study.
Blaise gave him a long look. “You are suspiciously eager to place me under Lady Hentley’s supervision.”
“I am eager for the party not to humiliate us, since our nephew will be doing that.” Alistair rolled his eyes.
Blaise smiled, but his mind had shifted to Iris’s honey-colored hair and amber eyes. He knew she could handle the affairs well for the party, but to have them at Knoxford House so close to his red room…
Alistair collected his gloves from the edge of a chair as Blaise moved the estimates into a neat stack, though neatness did not improve his thoughts.
“I shall take my leave, cousin; I would sooner face the study again.” He gave the room one last disgusted look. “Good day, Vale.”
“Good day, Skelton.”
When the door closed, the study seemed to take a breath.
Blaise remained still for a moment, listening to Alistair’s receding footsteps through Hentley House. Domestic sounds gathered in the wake of his departure. The room held the aftertaste of conversation, of mockery, and of questions no one had asked plainly.
He returned to the desk and stood over the papers.
Marcus will come.
Blaise sat, reached for a blank sheet, then stopped.
What would he write that he had not already written?
Marcus,
Your absence grows tiresome.
“No.” Blaise shredded the letter and reached for another.
Marcus,
I ask you again, as your uncle and guardian—
Blaise let out a low breath and set the page aside. There were previous notes somewhere on the desk, drafts perhaps, along with the list of ladies’ names Iris had made for him to revise. He opened the top drawer and began to search.
The study desk resisted organization. Papers had been stacked unorderly.
Receipts, household notes, a folded invitation, two sticks of sealing wax, a penknife with a nick in its handle.
He shifted one pile, then another, increasingly aware that he was rummaging in a desk that was not entirely his, in a house that was not entirely his, and for a purpose that seemed less clear by the minute.
“Where the devil—”
His fingers closed on a letter tucked beneath a packet of older correspondence.
The paper was not among his documents. He knew it before he pulled it. His name appeared on the outside in a hand he recognized.
Blaise.
He sat back.
For a moment, he did nothing. That was the last defense of a man who knew he was about to cross a line and wished posterity to record some hesitation. Then he came to and continued reading.
The first words struck with the intimacy of a voice at his ear.
He read them aloud before he could stop himself. “Blaise, I sit in the study you claimed as your own...”
Blaise continued reading it silently.
Line by line, Iris abandoned the safety of ordinary correspondence. Her words were not innocent nor composed. He should have stopped reading this confession, but he simply could not and did not want to.
Blaise’s mouth curved as he leaned back in the chair, the letter held loosely between his fingers.
Perhaps Iris should come with him to Knoxford House to help with the decor.
* * *
“That one,” Iris said, laying her gloved fingers upon the length of fabric before Blaise could dismiss another choice.
“No.” The word fell between them with the clean finality of a blade.
Iris did not remove her hand. The material was warm from where it had lain in a spill of afternoon. Iris had thought, foolishly perhaps, that Blaise might appreciate the restraint of it.
“No?” she repeated.
His dark blue eyes moved from the fabric to her face. The scar running from eyebrow to jaw pulled slightly when his mouth curved, not quite into amusement. She was tempted to kiss him then and there.
“It is too simple.” He stood across the table, and his very tall, broad shoulders made the quiet room seem narrower than it was. Knoxford House felt strange. Iris could not deny it. Even the air seemed different, as if accustomed to the command of its master.
She shivered thinking about the red room that was not far away. Iris protested about being here. And yet when he had asked her to help, she simply could not deny it.
Blaise touched the edge of the rejected material with one finger, then pushed it aside. “It would not do.”
“It will make a garden party habitable.” Iris countered.
“For whom? Only Marcus matters.”
“Did he even confirm that he is attending?”
His mouth moved again. This time, the amusement arrived. “Iris.”
She hated the way he said her name when he wanted her to yield to him. He said it softly and patiently. As if he had already seen the end of her resistance and was merely waiting for her to join him there.
“No,” she said, borrowing his own word and finding some satisfaction in it. “Do not Iris me as though I am a skittish mare refusing a gate. You asked for my opinion, and now you refuse it.”
“I asked for your eye.” He pointed out.
“My eye is attached to my opinion.”
“How unfortunate.”
Her fingers curled into the fabric with pure frustration and something even more intense. “Why ask for my help if you had no intention of listening?”
The question rang sharper than she had intended. She heard, beneath the annoyance, the hurt she had meant to keep hidden. It embarrassed her at once. She did not care about the material. Not truly.
Or not only.
She cared that she found herself arranging her time around him.
Blaise’s expression altered as he watched her, and he immediately stopped teasing. His gaze lowered to her hand on the cloth. “There is no need to fret; I am listening.”
“You would just disagree with uncommon speed again.”
She should have laughed to lighten the mood. Instead, she withdrew her hand and looked away. She felt Blaise’s eyes on her.
“Why did you bring me here, Blaise?”
She heard him shift behind her. “Why did you not give me your letter, Iris?”
The question was so abrupt that Iris could only stare at him, utterly confused.
“My what?” she asked him as she frowned deeply.
“Your letter.” Something in his tone made the room tilt.
She thought deeply and felt as though there had been an arrangement between them, one she had failed to honor.
“I do not know what you mean or what you are talking about.”
“Oh, I think you do.”
Iris opened her mouth, then closed it. Her mind moved backward until she remembered, and the blood left her face so quickly that her fingertips chilled.
“No,” she rasped as she spun around to face him.
Blaise did not move.
“No,” she said again, and this time it was not denial but horror. She looked around as if the letter might appear on the table through sheer force of shame. “I completely forgot I had written that.”
Iris felt completely humiliated. She had written what no respectable woman wrote. She had poured onto paper the things she could scarcely admit to Blaise and certainly not in daylight. She had addressed them to him, whose hands had already taught her how little she knew of herself.
“Iris.”
She shut her eyes, allowing his voice to roll over her. The letter seemed to unfold inside her skull, and each line was bright with disgrace. Her throat tightened.
“I did not mean—” she began.
“Do not lie to me and do not feel ashamed.” The gentleness in his voice made it worse.
She looked at him then. His face held no mockery.
That unsettled her more than cruelty would have done.
He stood before her as the Duke of Knoxford, black-haired, broad-shouldered, scarred and impossible, yet his attention had narrowed until there was nothing in the room but her.
She had wanted that attention. She had written that too.
Even your voice haunts me, and I find myself looking forward to you praising me.
A terrible heat rose beneath her skin.
“You wrote something you are ashamed of.”
Her breath caught.
“You intended to give it to me, then lost your nerve or your memory, though I suspect both serve the same master.”
Iris could not tell him that it was not shame but the ever-growing humiliation that filled her.
“Do not pretend to see me so plainly.”
His fingers came to her hair and gathered one honey-colored strand that had slipped loose near her cheek.
His touch was light, and it reminded her body of the weight of his hand in her hair as she knelt before him.
She remembered the heat of his gaze while he sketched her, and how cold his eyes could appear until desire lit behind them and made them almost unbearable to look into.
“Iris,” Blaise broke the overbearing silence, “would you like a taste of the red room?”
Her heart seemed to stop. The room around them lost its edges, and the faint shift of fabric under her own fingers competed with his breathing.
She stepped back.
Blaise let the strand of hair slip free, and he did not follow.
“I said a taste,” he murmured. “Not a sentence. Nor a trap. Nor anything you do not choose. All you have to do is say yes.”
Her back met the table. She had retreated only a pace, but it felt further.
“I cannot,” she said. “The week is not yet over.”
“Then say no.”
She truly wanted to. The word always came easily to her.
She had said no to hunger, to loneliness, and to need.
She had built a life from refusals and called it dignity.
She had survived years of being unseen by persuading herself that visibility was vulgar.
Yet here stood the one man who had looked at her too closely and had not turned away.
She thought about her unfinished letter.
All I know is that I want you to bind me with silk in that red room of yours and do as you please.
Her lips parted.
“Yes,” she said.