Chapter Seven #2
Not that I’d have wanted to disobey that last command, anyway, but I might as well take credit for it. In fact, I’d taken my scheduled dose the night before, leaving my curse comfortably soothed. Which only made my body’s response to his in the carriage all the more puzzling and disturbing.
No, I would not think about that, particularly not while we were in the same room. I might need to consider it more thoroughly later tonight when I was alone.
Oh, gods. If he even meant to continue to leave me alone. Sooner rather than later, he’d said.
And he’d kissed me in the carriage even though he’d claimed he didn’t want to. Kissed me, and held me so tightly I’d hardly been able to breathe.
As I could hardly breathe now.
“I took my potion last night,” I went on tentatively, as he hadn’t shown any sign of answering me, his brow furrowed and his jaw tight.
“But it won’t prevent you from—it only prevents me from—do you mean to use me tonight?
It makes me sick to ask you for anything.
” His hand clenched around his glass so that his knuckles went white.
I’d infuriated him, and he could still choose to lock me in that dusty attic, and it took every bit of my strength not to bury my face in my arms again.
“But please don’t torment me by leaving me to wonder if you’ll come to me later on when I’m not expecting it.
If you want to come to me, I’ll be ready. ”
For a moment I thought he might lash out at me; the sudden tension in his body, in the pressure of the air around him, demanded an explosion.
And then he seemed to pull himself in, calming, becoming the urbane Lord Stefan that I’d started to think might be his armor as much as his weapon.
“As you’ve seen for yourself, I enjoy the company of whores,” he said coolly, but with a faint rasp to his voice that gave him away.
Or perhaps I’d merely begun to observe him with obsessive closeness, a necessity if I meant to survive this marriage.
“I feel no shame in admitting it. And you, despite your relative innocence, are here as a whore of sorts. Trading your body for an escape from your seclusion, or whatever else he offered you. That may make you think I’d feel no shame in lying with you. To some extent, you’re right.”
He glanced down at his glass, raised his eyebrows in seeming surprise at finding any liquor in it, and tossed it back. The carefully gentle way he put it on the sideboard had me quivering with tension in a way that throwing it across the room wouldn’t have done.
When he looked back at me, his eyes burned.
“You may amuse yourself as you wish by convincing my mother I’m a deviant who likes to corrupt more or less willing novitiates,” he said, very low.
“And I’m not prone to shame. As I’ve said.
But I beg you’ll do me the honor of refraining from imagining I’m the sort of man who’d violently rape a terrified young virgin, or simply a young prude, whatever you are—whether or not he happened to be my consort, or in my father’s employ, or both.
Or, in fact, anyone of any description, including the more traditional variety of whore.
Feel free to sleep in that chair if you wish, or in your bed, or on the floor, for all I care.
You’ll be equally safe from me anywhere in this house tonight, and you may be sure of it, because I shan’t be in it. ”
And with that, he strode out of the room, flinging the door open against the wall with a crash and not troubling to close it behind him.
His footsteps echoed as he went down the stairs. A short, sharp command to a footman, followed by a murmured assent and the sound of the front door opening and closing, told me he’d meant what he said.
Would he return to the same brothel? Or find another? Or perhaps he had a more genteel lover somewhere in the neighborhood, conveniently close by? Someone he eagerly wanted to put in his lap and caress and kiss, rather than simply doing so to prove a point…
It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter at all. I’d be safe in my room tonight, and Aldrich would bring me a cup of tea and one of those lemon scones that had been fresh this morning and would still be delicious tonight. My bloody husband could go and do whatever he bloody well pleased.
I rose slowly, rubbing at my aching temples, and left the study to drag myself up the stairs.
The house lay in brooding silence around me.
Surely I’d won this round of whatever game I’d been dragged into when Ser Prendian came to fetch me away, hadn’t I?
The Lord Chancellor had been pacified for now.
Lady Estella, albeit for all the wrong reasons, meant to provide me with a gentleman’s wardrobe, and more than that, she and her husband had maneuvered Lord Stefan into allowing me out of the house to wear it.
Lord Stefan had been mortified and discomfited in a way that surely I ought to find very funny, as he’d suggested.
But it didn’t feel like I’d won. It didn’t feel like it at all.