Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Marriage had a lot to teach Nicholas, for although just minutes ago he had been adamant that Isadora would not have a hand in tending to his wound, she had somehow contrived to lead him upstairs and sit him down on the edge of his bed, while she rang for warm water and rags so she could bathe his fresh cut.
There was a line of fire down his side where the man’s knife had caught him.
A shallow slice, painful but by no means dangerous.
Then her fingers went to his shirt buttons, and every thought of that pain left him entirely.
She worked them loose until cool air kissed his bared skin, and her gaze followed, sliding slow as poured honey down the ridges of his stomach to the bloodied cut at his side.
The pink tip of her tongue touched her upper lip before she caught it.
She asked nothing of the shoddy clothes. Or the mask. With her, he hadn’t had a chance to change, much less explain why he was there, or why he had gone out of his way to conceal his identity.
Something she had risked compromising.
Why had she gone out of her way to follow him at all?
“Are all men like… this… jagged here?” she whispered by his abdomen.
His brow arched as he looked down at her bent auburn head. “I am… not entirely sure how to answer that.”
Her curls had slipped their pins, garnet-dark, wine-dark, coiling loose against the milk-white nape of her neck, and her breath spilled warm across his ribs with every exhale.
When he had seen those two ragamuffins crowding her against the wall, rage had risen in him like floodwater.
He had wanted to break their legs for speaking to her.
Speaking to her. No, he had wanted far, far worse.
She was too delicate for that world. Too soft, too unbruised. She’d never seen the darkness that lingered in the gutters of society, and if he had his way, he would keep it that way.
“Does it hurt?” she asked, raising her head and framing him with those honey-brown eyes. They looked softer in the candlelight, like melted syrup.
“Not much.”
“Don’t lie to me. A cut like this has to hurt.”
“If you think you know the answer, why ask?”
“Because I just wanted to hear you say it,” she murmured, so gently he almost missed it.
“You wanted me to say I was in pain?” he frowned.
“I wanted to know you could admit to weakness.” She dipped the rag back and dabbed it against his side, and warm water traced a thin rivulet down his ribs.
Her fingers followed it, cool as pearls against the burn of the cut, and they were trembling—he was almost certain they were trembling—her knuckles grazing his waist and lingering there a breath longer than any nursing required.
“All right.” His voice rasped, but he couldn’t help it.
All he could think about was her scent, the feel of her fingers on his skin, and the lushness of her mouth as she sank her teeth into her lower lip, worrying it.
He wished he could free it, slide his fingers there instead. “I’ll admit it if you want me to.”
Her eyes shot back up to his. “You will?”
He nodded. “It hurts. But,” he prefaced, wrapping a hand around her dainty wrist to still hers, “it hurts far less now than it did.”
“Really?” Her thin brows drew together. “You bled right through your shirt.”
“I’ll buy a new one.”
She leaned closer, her breath flowering across his skin as she bent to examine the cut. “Should I stitch it closed?”
“No.” He tugged on the wrist he held, gently pulling her away. She came easily, looking up at him trustingly, and the thought that she could be so comfortable with him when he had seen her be so viscerally afraid with the other men made his chest ache.
He did not deserve to look at her the way he did in that moment, but he didn’t think he could stop himself. Already, despite his injury, he could feel himself hardening at her proximity, and the knowledge they were so close to a bed.
“I don’t need stitches,” he breathed, as gently as he could manage. Only hours ago, she’d had the fright of her life, and stitching his flesh back together was the very last thing she needed. “I promise you, Isadora.”
She glanced down at the place his fingers wrapped around her wrist.
He ought to release her, he knew, but he could not bring himself to.
Wanting Grace had been the very worst sin he could have committed, and it had gone so terribly, it had scarred him for the rest of his days. If not for him, she might still be alive now. It was his irrepressible passion that had led them down this dark path, and he had vowed—never again.
But in doing so, he had not considered Isadora.
This close, he could nearly count the scattered, faint freckles on her nose and cheeks, sun-blurred into almost nothingness. Her shell-pink lips were soft, twisting into an expression partway between a smile and something else. Something that drew him in and beckoned him forward.
His gaze dropped to that mouth. Soft, ripe, still parted around her last unspoken word.
It would be the work of a single moment to lean down and take it, to taste what he had imagined countless times since their wedding night.
He knew a little of how her milky-white body looked under her clothes; her nightgown had teased him with those curves so generously.
Her breath caught, held for a fraction of a second, then released. The pulse in her throat fluttered, and she swayed nearer, her eyes never leaving his. Some distant, drowning part of him understood: whatever else lay between them, she wanted him too.
They were husband and wife. Perhaps she, too, had lain awake imagining his kiss. Perhaps more than his kiss.
But if he kissed her, he would not stop. He would have her down among the bloodied rags and bathwater, silk and lawn torn out of his way, and he would not surface until he had learned every sound she could make—
He strangled the thought too late. Inside his trousers, he throbbed, now fully hard. He prayed she wouldn’t look down.
With an effort that pulled his wound white-hot, he released her wrist and set her back from him. He welcomed the pain. Pain was good—pain reminded him of where he was and just how much he had to lose.
“Thank you,” he said, his voice distant, not something he recognized at all. “For all of it. But Isadora—you must never follow me again. If you wish to know where I go, then ask.”
She had gathered her hands, the fingers of one still pink from his blood, into her chest, folded together like a flower. Her expression had closed, the earlier wonder and anticipation locked behind reserve that looked alarmingly like hurt. Her eyes searched his. “Will you truly tell me?”
The answer rose in him before she even finished asking, and he did not need to speak it aloud.
Her jaw flexed.
“How am I supposed to trust you when you will not trust me?”
“I—” The fighting was the last thing in the world still his.
Sophia he loved beyond breath, but she was half Grace’s, and every day more her own.
The estates were duty. The title was a harness.
Only the ring remained—sweat and blood and the clean animal honesty of fists—the one place he could let himself go without destroying anyone else but himself.
He could not let Isadora into that place. If she saw what lived in him there, she would never look at him the same way again.
“There is no other woman,” he said at last. “If that is your fear.”
Her lips parted and closed again. A peculiar expression crossed her face, but it was not one he could decipher.
“I… see,” she said finally.
“Beyond that—I promise it is nothing that need concern you.” He strode to the door that separated their two chambers and opened it, holding it wide. “Do not follow me again, Isadora. Promise me.”
After a long moment, she inclined her head. “Very well.”
“Good.” He ushered her out of the room and closed the door behind her.
Then he rested his forehead against the wood and forced himself not to go after her to soothe the hurt across her face. This was for the best. They would have no future if he came to feel more for her than simple admiration.
They must keep their distance.
Only then would she ever be safe and happy.
Nicholas nursed his ale in the murky tavern, the candles drooling wax across the pitted tables. In the day since his last conversation with Isadora, he had gone out of his way to avoid her, but nothing had assuaged the guilt in his chest.
She had appeared at breakfast with dark circles under her eyes, and he had been hard-pressed not to ask her about them and find solutions for whatever ailed her.
Except, what ailed her was him—he already knew.
A man slid into the chair opposite, a tankard in his hands, liquid slopping across the table.
“My apologies,” he said with the familiar thick accent of the York gentry, and Nicholas recognized him as being the same gentleman who had approached him the last time he’d been out fighting.
The man who thought him nothing more than a mere pugilist, not a duke.
Nicholas shrugged and took a long drink. The man took his place opposite.
“Remember me?” the man grinned. “Oliver Chant.”
“I remember,” Nicholas muttered.
“I was meaning to thank you for getting me out of the bind I was in that night,” he chuckled, clapping a hand on Nicholas’s shoulder before it wilted beneath one glacial glance. “Haven’t seen you around as often as usual. Why the sour mood?”
Nicholas grunted. “I got married.”
“Ah.” Oliver took a sip of his gin. “I would offer my congratulations, but by your face, it appears you’d be hoping for commiserations.”
Nicholas toyed with the truth for a long moment, before finally deciding to go for it. After all, Oliver still had no knowledge of his true identity while he was masked. “This isn’t my first marriage,” he admitted.
“Your first wife died?”
“Several years ago now.” Nicholas drained his ale and peered into the empty cup, wishing there was more. “My second wife—my current wife… ask me when I’m sober.”
“Do you like her?”
“That’s hardly the point.”
“I think it’s very much the point,” Oliver objected, topping up Nicholas’ cup with his gin. “If you married her.”
Nicholas harrumphed and swallowed it whole. “Affection has had precious little to do with my life, let alone either of my marriages. The first was duty. The second was necessity.”
“A mother for your daughter.” Oliver whistled softly. “That’s a great deal of woman to hire for one post. And she willfully accepted? Seems like you’re a fortunate man. Or will she scold you when you come back home at this hour?”
Nicholas thought of Isadora, probably in bed by now. After her promise to no longer follow him, he was reasonably sure she would keep to her word. Tomorrow, she would make no mention of it, and they would go on living as strangers.
“No,” he mumbled. “I suppose she won’t.”
“Blimey, are you trying to make the rest of us jealous? She is the wife most men dream of. Devoted to the cause, not the man.” Oliver beamed a crooked smile. “If you’ve truly no interest in her, then say the word. Perhaps I’ll take her off your hands.”
The hackles rose on Nicholas’s neck, which was absurd, given how little this veritable stranger in the house meant to him. “No one else touches her without a torn-off limb to show for it.”
“Ah, so it transpires you do like her after all!” Oliver crowed, delighted.
“Or if you don’t want her, you don’t want anyone else to have her either, which is an approximately worse position for her to find herself in, poor woman.
” He drained the last of his ale and settled forward on his elbows, perfumed in bergamot and ambergris, far too fine for this tavern of ne’er-do-wells.
Of which Nicholas must count himself among, given Oliver’s description of him just then.
“You’ll have to forgive me, Will. My sister swears I can’t keep my trap shut even when the Lord Himself would advise it. But my advice to you is that you go home tonight and tell her how fortunate you are to have such an unexacting wife.”
Nicholas snorted, thinking of the home he had contrived and the wife he had forged for himself.
But he nodded, and found, despite himself, that he liked this man with his ready tongue and his even readier smile, and his determination to see the world through rose-colored spectacles. He, himself, could never be quite like that, but he admired the man who could.
“I’ll do that,” he said, knowing he would do no such thing.
Another man peeled away from the bar and wove toward them, tankard of something foamy slopping over his knuckles.
Early thirties, perhaps, and drunk in the loud manner of a man who wished his audience to appease him.
He hovered by their table and squinted at Nicholas.
For all his swagger, his eyes—a muddy brown—were clear, and he had only the faintest trace of liquor on his breath as he leaned in, examining.
“Mm… no. She looks nothing like you.” His voice, like Oliver’s, held the cultured tones of a man who mingled in high society.
Nicholas half shot up. “What?”
Blood surged in his head, and he curled his hands into fists. But the man was already crossing the room to the exit, merging into the other patrons of this dimly lit establishment, a cloak over his head. Nicholas just caught sight of his tankard abandoned on a bench, and the door swinging shut.
“Strange fellow,” Oliver murmured, beckoning across the tavern for a refill, “you know him?”
Nicholas didn’t answer, launching himself from his chair and shouldering through the crush, out into the busy street.
The night met him with lamplight and noise and a dozen retreating backs, any of which might have been the right one.
A woman posted by the door stepped into his path, rouged to the cheekbones, henna-red hair frizzed loose from its pins, her bosom shoved up hard against laces that had seen better years.
“Ooh, in a hurry, are we?” She looked him up and down without a scrap of shame. “Who’re you after, sweetheart? I can be anyone you want.”
“A man just left here. Which way did he go?”
“Oh, you one of those types?” she slurred with a giggle and a hiccup. “I don’t think I can do that for you, love.”
“Where did he go, lady?” Nicholas growled.
She sucked her teeth, unimpressed. “Growl all you like, big man. I see a hundred faces before the church bells. How am I meant to know your one from Adam?”
Lost, then. Nicholas raked the street once more, end to end, but already he knew his case was futile. The man was gone.
She looks nothing like you.
The words hung in him like a splinter working deeper.
What had he meant?