Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Isadora watched the bedchamber door, brushing out her hair for the umpteenth time.
Her heart felt a little unsettled in her chest, though she could not have said why. Nicholas had gone to his club with Oliver that afternoon, and there was nothing remarkable in his remaining out late. The two men were friends. They were entitled to an evening in one another’s company.
Even so, there rested a stone in the pit of her stomach when she glanced at the clock on the wall and noticed it was almost two in the morning. She had postponed retiring for as long as she could, hoping to see him when he returned. Evidently, she was not to have that small pleasure tonight.
Well, that was perfectly fine.
She placed the brush on the dressing table and carried her candle to the bed. One night apart was hardly a tragedy. Married couples survived such things constantly. Nicholas would return, and tomorrow they would share breakfast, and she would feel foolish for ever having worried.
She held tightly to that picture as she climbed beneath the covers.
Just as sleep began to draw her under, the door creaked open.
Soft footsteps padded across the room. She turned drowsily at the rustle of discarded clothing, and a moment later the mattress dipped. Nicholas slipped naked beneath the covers beside her.
She smelled the spirits upon his breath before she touched him, and she froze.
There was nothing extraordinary in it. He had spent the evening with Oliver, and gentlemen drank at their clubs. He certainly didn’t move as though he were drunk. And yet adrenaline pounded through her body, banishing the last veil of sleep.
“Nicholas?” The word came out quiet, not betraying her alarm.
“Who else were you expecting?” The anger in his voice cut through the last of her sleepiness. “Another man?”
She sat up, trying to make him out in the dark. “What are you talking about?”
“Nothing,” he sighed, exhausted. “Come here.” He tugged her down beside him, and she lay across his chest the way she had for the past week, listening to the sound of his heart. It pounded under her ear, elevated.
“What did you do this evening?” she whispered.
He stiffened, and all the earlier doubts returned, magnified. “Nothing of consequence,” he murmured, the words deceptively calm. “What does any man do at his club? We drank and talked and played cards.”
“Did you lose?”
His breath brushed her hair as he snorted. “In a manner of speaking.”
“What does that mean?”
“What does anything mean? Stop asking questions, Isadora.”
Her full name. Recently, he had been calling her nothing but Dora. “Has something happened to put you in a bad mood, Nicholas?”
He released her and rolled over. “It’s nothing. Go to sleep.”
“Nick—”
“I didn’t come home so you could lecture me about my behavior.”
She sucked in a breath, facing the ceiling and biting back the sting of tears. An unreasonable reaction to what was a mild scolding from her husband, but she felt the lash of his temper as though it was the tip of a cane against her skin.
In the darkness, she wondered if he might apologize. But he merely lay still as though sleeping, though she could tell from his breathing that sleep had not taken him yet. The covers rustled as though he reached for her, then drew back.
She waited for comfort that never came.
In the end, sleep was a long time in coming for her, too.
It was only at breakfast that the true nature of Nicholas’s nighttime misadventure became clear. He had risen earlier than she, despite coming to bed later, and the first thing she spotted was his freshly bruised knuckles. The sight halted her on the threshold, the words dying in her throat.
He had gone back to bare-knuckle boxing. Why? After his promise, after everything they had said to one another, and she’d given herself to him, he had still returned to it…
She had believed the bond between them had deepened into something strong enough to hold him.
Clearly, she had mistaken a fragile happiness for trust.
She swallowed, and he lowered his broadsheets. Faint shadows bruised the skin beneath his eyes, betraying a sleeplessness his composed posture could not. Even exhausted and dishevelled by guilt, he was more handsome than any man had a right to be.
“Nicholas…” she managed.
His throat moved, and his brows came together. For a fleeting second, his fingers tightened around the edges of the newspaper. He drew in a long breath, then inclined his head and raised the papers again.
He was not reading. She knew it.
They had fallen asleep at separate ends of the bed, and now this. She’d had this tantalizing taste of happiness, and now he was taking it away again.
“Why?” she asked, despising the tremor in her voice.
His eyes remained fixed on the newspaper. “Why what?”
“You know perfectly well.”
He exhaled. “Sit down. Eat something. And compose yourself before Sophia comes down.”
“Compose myself?” Isadora opened her mouth to argue more, then closed it again when Sophia skipped in, oblivious to the tension between them.
“Good morning!” Sophia chirped. “I thought I might give the kittens to the stables so they can have rat catchers. Cats catch rats.” She smiled, evidently pleased with herself and this conclusion.
Isadora stepped in. “That’s a lovely idea, Soph, but I think the kittens will be better suited to a genteel household.”
Sophia frowned. “Are you sure?”
“Oh yes. Have you seen their coats? They will be beautiful.” And the stablehands would probably neglect the unwanted kittens; there were already cats in the stables, and the last thing they needed were more.
“I’m sure we can find them new homes. Do you not agree, Nicholas?
” She asked the question pointedly, and Nicholas lowered the newspaper once more to look at Sophia.
“They will be safe,” he said vaguely. “We will find somewhere for them to be. But I agree with Isadora that the stables are perhaps not the right place.”
Sophia pouted, but she collected some toast and buttered it in silence.
Isadora sank back in her seat, relieved that she could lapse back into her thoughts.
Nicholas was fighting again—which meant there was something wrong.
Something he wasn’t telling her. He’d told her about Grace’s death, and he had even told her how terrified he was of his own intensity.
Surely this had to be something different.
She caught his arm as he was about to leave the room, halting him in place. “Sweetheart,” she said, the endearment tripping off her tongue. “What is this about? You can tell me, you know. You can tell me anything.”
The implacable expression in his eyes as he looked down at her suggested he felt differently. All the certainty she had been carrying about the future of her marriage evaporated in an instant.
“There is nothing you need concern yourself over,” he said, and that was that. He left the room, and Isadora was left to collect the scattered remnants of her dreams.
Nicholas looked at the brandy in his hand in disgust. His head still pounded from the night before, and although he welcomed the pain—he knew he deserved it—he didn’t particularly fancy making the same mistake twice.
Guilt scraped at his insides at the thought of how rude he had just been to Isadora. The things he’d said—he’d had to, but that didn’t make it any more palatable. And it didn’t mean he had to enjoy the prospect of hurting her, or hate himself any less for what he was doing.
He was a despicable human being.
Oliver read through the letter Sherborne had sent right at the very beginning of his marriage. Although Nicholas had largely dismissed it out of hand, he had kept the letter. Just in case.
Oliver scratched the back of his neck. “Do you think it could be real?”
“I hardly know what to think. Sherborne was with her, definitely. He knew details about her—intimate details—that he could not have known unless they were together. But when? Sophia?” He blew out a long breath. “I loved Grace, Oliver.”
“I know.”
“It wasn’t the same as…” Nicholas shook his head.
Thinking about Isadora would get him nowhere.
Yes, the way he felt toward Grace was far and away different from the way he now felt toward Isadora.
Grace felt like duty, and affection borne of that duty.
Like the taste of attending socials, throwing parties, mingling with the ton.
While Marriage with Isadora felt… it felt like home, in a strange and bizarre way.
But he had still loved her.
At the time, he had believed she would never betray him. But when they were in the marriage together, fighting for their life together—or so he could have thought—such a betrayal had seemed inconceivable. Just as inconceivable as him finding some lightskirt to replace Grace.
While he was in love, while he spent his life with someone who ought to dedicate themselves to him, he was blind to the potential for betrayal.
“I can’t prove it either way,” he murmured. “She resembles Grace, not me—but she doesn’t resemble Sherborne, either. There’s no way to verify his claims.”
Oliver cleared his throat. “Were you… intimate before she got with child?”
“Often enough,” Nicholas said. “There were no gaps. If there had been, I might have been suspicious at the time, but it was perfectly plausible—even likely—that the child was mine.”
“So Sherborne can’t know. Neither could Grace have done.”
“No.” Ignoring his better instincts, Nicholas took a long gulp of the brandy, savoring the burn as it went down. “All I have are the doubts he’s instilled in me, and those I cannot so easily rid myself of.”
As though summoned by talk of doubts, Nathaniel Windham strolled past their table. At the sight, Nicholas’s hackles rose. First Sherborne, now this man.
Before he could think better of it, he pushed himself off the table and strode after the other man.
At the fair, Dora had taken him away from Windham, preventing a confrontation, and at the time, her words had reassured him.
But now… now he saw them only as a means of separating her two beaus and ensuring they were not given a chance to meet and contradict each other’s stories.
If she still cared for Windham—if perhaps the man had convinced her to lie with him or fall back in love with him, or even just charm her into fondness—then Nicholas ought to know.
“Your Grace,” Windham drawled from the table he sat at. He raised his tankard. “What brings you here?”
“Stay away from my wife.”
Windham stared up at him, eyes bloodshot from too much ale already. “And what if she chooses to stay closer to me?” he asked, a tiny smile playing around his mouth. “What then, Your Grace? Will you call me out for my sins? Or will you throw her out, instead?”
Oliver came around fast and grabbed his arm. “Steady, Winchester.”
“Stay away from her,” Nicholas warned. “I will know.”
Windham let out a harsh laugh. “Planning on watching me, are you?”
Oliver dragged Nicholas back to their table, and Nicholas sank back down on the seat.
He didn’t want to doubt Isadora, but the fact was, when he’d been in his marriage with Grace, he had assumed her fidelity—only hindsight throwing doubt on his assumptions—and if he assumed the same of Isadora and she hurt him…
What was left of their marriage now? What could be left unless he became a tyrant, having her followed every time she left the house, tracking her movements obsessively to ensure she did not betray him.
And then there truly would be nothing left.
How could he ever move past this? How could he ever trust that Isadora wouldn’t do the same?
If they had a child, would he constantly be wondering if the child were his?
He couldn’t trail Isadora around in a practical sense—that was not a solution.
She would not accept it, either, and why should she?
Grace and her suspected infidelity had broken something inside him, and he didn’t know how to go about repairing it. There would always be a question in the back of his mind about Sophia’s parentage, and for all he told himself it didn’t matter, he didn’t know if he could fully believe it.
“Your wife has nothing to do with this,” Oliver muttered, livid as he’d ever seen him, and thank god for the man. “Nor does she care for Windham either. That blackguard knows it. If you were in your right mind, you’d know it too.”
“If not him, then why not another gentleman?” Nicholas mumbled, dropping his head in his hands. “Plenty will show her favor.”
“I can’t answer that for you. You will just have to trust her,” Oliver sighed.
A bitter, humorless laugh escaped Nicholas. “And there’s the rub of it,” he said, knowing the truth of the words as they landed. “I don’t see how I can ever trust anyone again.”