Chapter 7 #3
Nicholas’s hard winter eyes found hers, and dragging her deeper into the pits of the alley, he ripped his mask from his face. “What the devil do you think you’re doing here?”
Isadora’s hands were shaking. She made a valiant effort to subdue them, but the trembling only spread, traveling up her arm until it felt as though her very bones quivered in her body. If she opened her mouth now, she would most certainly start to cry.
He heaved a breath, lips thinning, as though her emotions were the most inconvenient thing in the world.
“Shock,” he grumbled, and took hold of her arm, drawing her into the shocking warmth of his body.
She took a moment to process he was not in his usual garb; her face pressed against a rough and cheap cotton shirt, and beneath it, the iron-hard living heat of him.
“N-Nicholas…” She could barely get the words out. “H-how did you know to find me?”
“I didn’t.” His large hand rubbed gently up and down her spine, broad and warm through her habit. Then, deeming her having recovered enough to speak, he stepped away again. “I happened to come back outside, and then…” He waved a hand at her. “What are you doing here?”
“I—” She could hardly confess to having followed him here, but what else was she to say? There was no other reason on earth for her to be in this dark and dangerous alley. “You… you’ve been leaving the house a great deal.”
“I see.” His eyes flashed dangerously. “And so you thought it incumbent upon yourself to follow me into danger?”
“If you had just admitted to me where you were going, there would be no danger!” she cried out.
“You employ secrecy and wonder at my wanting to uncover it? Is such a thing so surprising to you? We are husband and wife; I had thought we should be at least apprised of each other’s comings and goings—or do you not think I deserve that privilege? ”
He glared at her, his pale eyes gone glacial in the guttering lamp. “You knew what sort of marriage you were entering.”
“One of mutual respect, I’d so clearly mistaken.”
“I am not obliged to reveal all of my secrets to you—and moreover, I expected you to have more sense than to come here alone like this. Did you not think you might get cornered?” He loomed over her, pressing her into the wall much as the ruffian had done, except with Nicholas, she felt nothing but a fluttering, eager fire deep in her core.
“Did you not think that a lady, dressed as one, wearing a gold ring like this on your finger, might draw every hungry eye on this street?”
No, she hadn’t considered that at all. In fact, she hadn’t given much consideration to anything but what Nicholas was doing and why he had come here. She stared up into his shadowed face, heart pounding, something that was adjacent to fear but was very much not fear thrumming through her veins.
“Nicholas,” she whispered. “I… I think you’re scaring me.”
His hand curled around hers, and she realized with a start that he wasn’t wearing his usual gloves. The shock of his bare heat against her skin, his fingers sliding over hers, made her gasp. He did not pull away. Instead, he folded her fingers closed around her wedding ring, one by one.
“Keep that safe,” he muttered, voice rasping in a lower register than she had ever heard it.
“I will. When he took it, I thought…” She had thought she would never get it back. “Are you… very angry with me?”
“I’m angry that my wife put herself in danger.” He shook his head and drew back, and the night air rushed cold into the space he left. “We should return home.”
“My mare—”
“I will send someone to collect her. Now, come.” He took her hand, leading her toward a more salubrious street that abutted that alley, where their carriage stood waiting—which explained why she hadn’t been able to find it.
As they climbed inside, his breath hissed through his teeth, and he pressed his hand flat to his side.
“Nicholas?” She caught his elbow, helping him up inside the box. Inside was almost perfectly dark, but she could still hear his labored breaths, heavy with pain. “What is it? Are you hurt?”
“Just a scratch.”
“Where? How?” She fumbled for him, and his hands once again closed over hers, stilling them against the rough linen of his chest.
“It’s nothing for you to concern yourself over.
The ba—the man had a knife, that’s all, and he got in a slice before I took him down.
” He said the words perfectly evenly, but Isadora felt panic rise in her.
Nicholas had been hurt because of her. She had been the one to follow him, and then he had intervened, ridding her of her attackers and, simultaneously, hurting himself in the process.
Now he sat bleeding in the dark and calling it a scratch.
“I am so sorry,” she said, her voice catching.
“It’s nothing, Isadora.”
That was perhaps one of the only ever times he had said her Christian name, and her heart pounded with this newfound awareness. “It’s not nothing. When we return home, you will allow me to bandage it.”
He scoffed. “You will do no such thing.”