Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Dominic.” Her voice came at a quarter past midnight.
Dominic set down the pen, his head snapping in the direction of the door in almost panic.
Then came the knocks, three measured raps.
It was almost hilarious how well he knew her voice now, well enough to know that it was certainly not a maid, because all his servants knew to announce themselves with two sharp raps.
He crossed the room and opened the door.
Annabelle stood in the corridor in her robe and nightgown, her dark hair loose over one shoulder, a candle in her hand. The corridor behind her was empty.
He stood in the doorway without speaking.
“I’d like to speak with you,” she said. “I thought if you won’t come to me, I’d go to you instead.”
Ah. That did not bode well for him.
He could not turn her away, what with her standing right in front of him now, so he stepped back, and she swept in with a confidence that threw him for a moment, as though she owned the room.
Blinking once, twice, three times, Dominic finally closed the door and moved to the fireplace, which gave him somewhere to be that was not in her immediate vicinity.
With her in that slip of a gown, it was imperative that he maintained as much distance as he could manage, otherwise…
“Well, what is this about?” He asked, clearing his throat once.
Don’t look, don’t look, reverberated like a litany in his skull, growing more and more desperate as the seconds passed.
She set the candle on the writing table and turned, her expression accusing. “Why haven’t you come to my room?”
Because he did not trust himself to maintain his control for long. Because she did not deserve him ruining her any more than he already had.
Instead, he said, “Our marriage doesn’t need to be… “ He kept his voice level, clearing his throat again. “I don’t think it serves either of us to pretend we’ll be an ordinary couple.”
“And what does that mean?” Annabelle’s expression was turning dangerously dark.
“It means we didn’t arrive at this marriage by conventional means.” He looked at the mantelpiece, unable to hold her gaze while he said the words. “We needn’t act as though we did.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “At least look at me when you say that.”
He looked at her, reflexively, not fully intending to.
And it was among the worst decisions in a life that had not lacked for them.
She was standing six feet from him in her nightgown with her hair down and her eyes very blue and very direct, and he wanted to cross the room, and he was not going to cross the room.
“We don’t have to consummate the marriage,” he said. “We married to prevent a duel… and contain the damage our recklessness caused. There is no requirement beyond that.”
The arm holding the candle dropped. The flame shivered and recovered. She looked at him steadily, and said nothing, and the nothing went on long enough that he had to resist the urge to fill it.
“This is better,” he said. “For both of us.”
“Oh.” She frowned.
Dominic refused to flinch at the unimpressed sound. “In time, you’ll see that it is.” He said and wondered, truly, if he were speaking those words to himself.
She put the candle on the writing table. When she turned back, her mouth was pressed flat, and her chin was up.
“Why are you so insistent on keeping me at a distance?” She stepped forward once. “You kissed me…more than once. And not just that… You—” She stopped herself, cheeks flaming, and drew a breath. “Why?”
“I never gave marriage much serious thought.” He tightened his grip on the back of the armchair, trying his best to sound as uninterested as he possibly could. But he could hear it from his own tone: that it wasn’t working very well. “The situation arose, and—”
“You are a duke.” Her brows lifted. “Heirs have never been an afterthought for men in your position.”
“I know that.” He kept his eyes on the middle distance. “I also know I wouldn’t make a good husband…or a good father. Look how I am with James…and James is young, and he is—he’ll grow into the title considerably better than I ever managed. He will inherit the title.”
She looked at him. Her head tilted very slightly to one side. “What happened to you,” she said, “to make you think so little of yourself?”
His shoulders went rigid.
“Is this about Lucien?” she said. “He’ll come around. He was shocked. That’s all it is.”
“It’s not about Lucien.”
“What am I to you, then?” she said. “If not a wife.”
“You are my wife.”
“That is what the register says. It isn’t an answer.”
“We can be amicable,” he said. “Civil. There is no reason we couldn’t be friends.”
“Friends.” She said the word without moving. “Is that what we were when you kissed me? When you touched me in that garden—” She stopped.
“I won’t touch you again, if that’s what you want.”
“And if it isn’t what I want?” She stepped closer. She was four feet from him now, near enough that he could see the candle’s light in her eyes. “What then? We take lovers?”
“Don’t say that.” The words came out harder than he’d intended.
She did not step back. “Why do you behave one way and then another? You’ve made me feel—” She stopped again. Then quieter: “Why?”
He ran a hand through his hair and sat down on the edge of the bed.
The fire had burned low. Outside, the street was still. No carriage, no footstep on the pavement below, no sound from next door that might be Lucien awake at his desk, composing anything with a capital S.
Annabelle looked at him. Then she came and sat down beside him, a foot between them, her hands folded in her lap, and she waited.
He had told no one. Not Miles, who had been his friend for eight years, and not even Lucien, who had been his friend for ten. He had carried it with the specific efficiency of a man who had learned early that some things did not survive being said aloud.
“You deserve the truth,” he said. “After what I’ve put you through. At least that.”
She waited.
“My mother played every evening,” he said.
“In the music room downstairs. She was genuinely gifted, not in the way people say to be polite about a woman who plays tolerably well. She could play anything she had heard once through. She performed at events before her marriage, and men your brother’s age still spoke of it years after.
” He looked at his hands. “My father resented it. Her talent. The attention it brought her. So… he drank. At least, I think that’s why. ”
She did not move.
“When I was nine, he came home one night. I was at the top of the stairs. I used to stay up past my bedtime to hear her play through the floor.” He stopped.
Took a breath and continued. “She was in the middle of something when he came through the door. I heard him go to the music room. I heard him shouting at her, about her music, about the men who attended her performances, about things he had invented.” The back of the armchair was still in his line of sight.
He focused on it. “She tried to talk him down. She was good at that. And then… there was a sound I hadn’t heard before. ”
He stopped, wincing.
“And then it was quiet.”
Annabelle’s hand came down over his, her warmth a comfort he did not realize he’d been starving for. He looked at it, his gaze blurring at the edges.
“I came downstairs,” he said. “Into the music room.” He had run it through his head thousands of times, and it had never come out of his mouth before, and in the room it sounded smaller than it did inside his skull, for all that it contained more.
“She was against the piano and there was…there was blood on the keys.”
“Heavens, Dominic…” Her hand did not lift from his own like he feared it would have.
“My father was standing over her. He was shaking, and there was blood on his hands, and when he saw me, he told me to go to my room.” He exhaled. “They called it an accident. A fall. No one had any reason to question it.”
He looked up. She was turned fully toward him. Her eyes were clear, and there was no flinching in them, and she was looking at him the way he had watched her look at James in the garden on the evening they had first met: like she was going to wait as long as it took.
“He locked the music room after that,” Dominic said. “And I understood… I could become him.”
“You are not him,” she said.
Dominic was shaking his head. “You can’t know that.”
“You stood in your own study,” she said, “and let Lucien hit you twice, and you did not raise your hand once.” Her thumb moved across his knuckle. “I was standing in the doorway. I watched it.”
He looked at her thumb on his hand. Then, he turned his hand over and closed it around hers, lifting his eyes to her face, and his other hand came up and settled against her jaw. Heart pattering against her throat, Annabelle leaned into his touch.
“There was nothing you could do then. You were but a child,” she said, her voice soft.
“He was my father,” he retorted, as if it explained everything, like that in itself was the key to the great awakening.
“Yes, he was, and though you share his blood, last name and title,” both of her hands cradled his face. “You are. Not. Him.”
Dominic’s thumb brushed the edge of her jaw, his grip tightening just a fraction as if trying to anchor himself to her words. “Blood has a long memory, Annabelle. Sometimes I look in the mirror and I see his eyes looking back at me.”
“Then look at me instead,” she whispered, her palms warm against his cheeks, forcing him to stay present. “Let me be the mirror. I do not see a monster. I see a man who’s fighting to be different.”
“You say it so easily,” he murmured, his voice dropping low. “With those beautiful, certain eyes.”
“I say it easily because I believe it. And so should you.”
Dominic considered her words as he watched her.
“Annabelle…” he uttered, her name feeling far too natural on his tongue.
She leaned in closer, and every cell in his body felt pulled in by her, burning to feel her nearer.
“You have entirely too much power over me, standing this close. What am I to do with you?” he added.
Annabelle gulped, then glanced down at his mouth.
“I…” she muttered, her eyes still fixed on his lips.
“I can’t do this anymore,” he breathed, his voice fracturing as his forehead dropped against hers. “You keep looking at my mouth like that and I am completely unraveled…”
He could no longer resist.
He kissed her.
She kissed him back without hesitation, her hand coming to his shoulder, her fingers curling in. He put his arm around her and pulled her closer, until she was warm against him and her mouth was open under his, and he had stopped thinking about Lucien, or challenges, or the morning.
He drew back enough to see her face.
Her eyes were open, and her color was up, and he reached past her to move the candle to the mantelpiece so it wouldn’t throw shadows where he needed to see clearly, and then he put his hand at her waist and lowered her back against the pillows.
He kept his eyes on her face. He intended to keep them there.
He worked the tie of her robe loose, and she helped, lifting her shoulders, her hands settling flat against his chest afterward, not pushing. Holding on. He could feel the warmth of them through the linen of his shirt.
He had been in this position, or something like it, more times than he was going to enumerate, but it had never once felt like this. Pushing the robe from her shoulders, he drew the nightgown up over her thigh, watching her jaw. She drew in a breath through her nose and held it.
“All right?” he said.
She answered by sliding her hand from his chest to the back of his neck and pulling him down.
He put his mouth to her throat and worked his way up—the curve of her neck, the soft place below her ear where he could feel her pulse against his lips—and she turned into it, her hand sliding into his hair.
Then he drew back and looked at her face, and his hand moved up the inside of her thigh slowly, and her breath caught.
And, holding her trembling gaze, he touched her.
She was warm and wet, and he shuddered, watching her jaw as he worked his fingers against her, watching the way her brow drew together and then let go.
When he found the right pressure, her hips shifted toward him, and she made a sound through her teeth, low and bitten off, that went through the whole length of him.
Her grip on his hair tightened. Then her hand slid from his hair to his wrist—not pulling him away—and he moved with her, watching her face because he simply couldn’t look away from the tension gathering in her, from the way her breath came shorter, her throat bared to him.
Her eyes were shut. Her lips were parted. Her hand had left his wrist and fisted in the linen at his shoulder.
“Look at me,” he said, voice tight, restrained with all the desire he did not feel he could safely let spiral out of control at this moment.
Her eyes opened—dark, very intent—and she held his gaze for as long as she could, mixing in with the desire was a warmth that made his heart feel too big for his chest.
“My God, Belle,” he groaned, the pet name falling from his lips not of his volition.
At the sound of her name from his lips, she shuddered, turning her head against the pillow in the same instant her voice broke on his name, low and stripped of all pretense.
He was hard, and had been for some time, but he made no move to press for more. He lay down beside her instead, pulled her against his side, and stayed there while her breathing steadied. She settled against his chest with the ease of someone who had already decided it was where she meant to be.
The fire went to embers. “Dominic,” she said, after a while, his name coming out drowsily.
“Mm.” He pressed a kiss to the base of her throat, even as the scent of her completion spiced the air and teased him mercilessly.
He had to grab on to fistfuls of the bedsheets to keep himself from ravishing her completely.
“In the entrance hall. Today.” Her cheek was warm against his chest. “You said you’d been trying to find the right time to say something.”
He had said that, because right in that moment, all the words had been bubbling on his tongue, battering to be let free.
Words of how beautiful he’d thought she’d looked when he laid eyes on her walking down the aisle towards him.
Of how much he ached for her, even more so now that she was here with him, but
“I’ll tell you when I’m sure,” he said instead, all the things he couldn’t say settling against his throat.
She was quiet for a little while before she said, “Mm, all right,” now sounding even drowsier than before.
He listened as her breathing slowed, evened out, and then she slept.
He lay in the dark with his arm around her and looked at the ceiling.
For the first time in a long time, he fell asleep quickly.