Chapter 17
“Imight give you an heir after all, if that is what it feels like.”
He became serious immediately. The warmth left his face, and a wall came down behind his eyes.
“Do not say that. I do not want one. And ye should never say that again.”
She rolled her eyes. “Do not worry. I am not a woman, so I cannot give you one anyway.”
He looked at her. His fingers, the same fingers that had just been inside her, rose to his mouth. He tasted them slowly while holding her gaze the entire time.
“Ye taste plenty woman to me, Duchess.”
Heat flooded her face, neck, and every other part of her.
He raised an eyebrow. “It does not make any sense,” he added. “What ye told me about the physician. About yer courses.”
She looked at him. She could not help it. The smirk came out of its own accord, rising from wherever it had been hiding for three years, surfacing like a fish that had been waiting at the bottom of a deep pool for the right moment to break the surface.
It was the full smirk. The one that used to make her father groan, her brothers hide their valuables, and Caroline lock her bedroom door.
“That is because it was a lie,” she confessed. “I told Gordon I was barren, so he would never touch me. Mary helped me hide the truth. Nobody knew. That is how I remained a virgin, even though I was married for three years.”
He stared at her.
She watched it sink in. The truth. The scope of it.
Three years of performance. A fabricated medical condition.
A maid recruited and trusted with a secret that could have gotten them both punished.
A husband who controlled every aspect of her existence, deceived by a nineteen-year-old girl who was smarter, braver, and more ruthless than he had ever imagined.
He blinked. And then he laughed.
Not the short, controlled laugh she had heard from him before. Not the almost-laugh that moved the corner of his mouth. But a real laugh. Full, startled, and warm. It transformed his whole face.
The hard lines softened. His eyes crinkled at the corners. He looked younger, like a man who had just been presented with the most extraordinary piece of intelligence he had ever received and who could not decide whether to be impressed or terrified or both.
“Ye lied to him,” he chuckled. “For three years.”
“Every single day.”
“And he believed it.”
“He had no reason not to. I was nineteen and terrified. I was shaking when I told him. He assumed the shaking was from shame, but it was not. It was a performance.”
Edward shook his head slowly. He was looking at her with an expression she had not seen from him before.
Not admiration, exactly. It was deeper than that.
It was the respect of one operative for another.
The recognition that she had run a long-term intelligence operation from the inside of a locked bedroom with no training, no backup, and no margin for error, and she had won.
“Ye are the most dangerous woman I have ever met.”
“I will take that as a compliment.”
“It is one. And I have met very dangerous women.”
“The one in Florence who tried to get you killed?”
“Among others. None of them deceived a man who lived in the same house as them for three years without slipping once.” Edward paused. “The Crown should have recruited ye.”
“The Crown does not recruit women.”
“That is their loss.” He paused and looked at the ceiling.
“Three years. Ye kept up a lie for three years under the same roof as the man ye were lying to. Ye managed his expectations. Ye recruited an asset. Ye maintained cover under pressure. Ye adapted to changing conditions. And ye did it all without a single day of training.”
“You make it sound like espionage.”
“It was espionage. The best kind. The kind where the target never knew he had been deceived, even before he died.” He shook his head. “Ye are wasted on the aristocracy, Duchess.”
“And you are wasted on compliments, Duke. You sound almost sincere.”
“I am entirely sincere. It is the most alarming thing that has happened to me in years.”
She laughed. The sound was small, warm, and real. He felt it in his chest like a match striking.
He finally understood what her sister had meant. The flowers on the forehead. The frog in the boot. The apple and the false holiday.
This was who Valeria was. Not the careful, controlled widow. Not the measured, polite duchess. But this woman. The one who had survived Gordon Hansley by lying to his face every single day for three years with a smile so innocent that nobody questioned it. The hellion that Caroline had described.
That girl had not died. She had gone underground.
She had hidden inside the careful woman the way a seed hid inside a shell, waiting for the conditions to change, waiting for warmth and light and space.
And now the shell was cracking, the girl was pushing through, and she was lying on a carpet with paint on her hands and a smirk on her face, and she was magnificent.
A wave of possessiveness hit him like a blow, hot and primal.
He wanted to pull her against him and never let her go.
He wanted to claim her right there on the carpet, make her his in every way possible.
He wanted to hear her say his name the way she had said it five minutes ago—breathless, broken, and full of want.
But he could not. Because he truly did not think he was worthy of being a father.
The things he had done. The men he had killed.
The years he had spent in the dark, doing the Crown’s dirty work.
Those were not the foundation a child deserved.
And if he touched her again, if he took her the way his body was demanding he take her, he would not be able to stop.
And nine months later, there would be a consequence that neither of them had planned for and that he did not deserve.
He silently vowed, lying on the carpet beside her with paint on his hands and her taste on his lips, not to let himself near her again.
Not like this. Because the next time, he would not be able to control himself.
And control was the only thing standing between him and a future he did not believe he had earned.
They lay there with paint on their hands and the fire burning low. She was warm beside him, and he could smell lavender, paint, and the salt of her skin.
He did not move. He looked at the ceiling. She looked at the ceiling. The ruined portrait watched them from the wall, eyeless and faceless and finally, mercifully, powerless.
“We should get dressed,” he said eventually.
“Probably.”
Neither of them moved.
A knock sounded at the door.
“Valeria?” Caroline’s voice, muffled through the oak. “If you are still in there, you should come out because we must plan a ball and a wedding, and we have no time.”
Valeria sighed and closed her eyes.
“We also need to discuss the seating chart and the menu, and Richard wants to know if the baby can be the ring bearer, even though the baby has not been born yet. And honestly, Valeria, I do not have time for whatever is happening in there.”
“Nothing is happening.”
“I do not believe you. Five minutes.” Caroline’s footsteps retreated.
Valeria opened her eyes.
Edward sat up and helped her get dressed. His hands were steady on the laces. He tied them with the same care he had used to undo them. He did not look at her while he worked.
When her bodice was straight, her skirt was smooth, and the only evidence was the paint on their hands and the flush on her skin, he turned her around.
“Yer hair,” he said.
“What about it?”
“There is blue paint in it.”
She reached up and felt the stiff streak. “I will say it is Caroline’s fault.”
She walked to the door. Stopped. Looked back at him.
He was still sitting on the floor, paint on his jaw, his shirt untucked. His expression was the same one he wore when he was feeling too much and trying to contain it.
She knew that face now. She was learning all his faces.
“See you at supper?” she asked.
“I will be by the window.”
“Of course, you will.”
She opened the door and checked the corridor. It was empty.
She walked out with her chin up, her back straight, paint under her fingernails, and blue in her hair.
Edward spent the afternoon in the library. He pulled a book from the shelf, sat in a chair by the window, opened it, but did not read a single word.
He was thinking about Valeria. About the way she had looked on the carpet with paint on her hands and firelight on her skin. About the sounds she had made when he had touched her. About her lie, the brilliant, audacious lie that had kept Gordon out of her bed and kept her safe and whole.
He was thinking about what Caroline had said. He had been wrong about Valeria. Not about her strength. Not about her intelligence. But about her nature. He had seen the composure, the careful control. Yet he had not seen what was underneath.
Underneath was a hellion. A trickster. A woman who had survived a monster by out-lying him, and who had walked out of her cage, painted over his portrait and laughed until she cried, and lay with a killer on a carpet in front of a dying fire.
Edward closed the book. He would not touch her again. Not until the wedding. Not until he could trust himself to stop.