Chapter 24
The waltz came to its final, shimmering turn, and Blaise let Iris spin out to the last graceful step, her skirts whispering over the grass as her words stayed with him. The music stopped on a bright chord, and applause rose.
“Thank you, Your Grace,” Iris said, a touch breathless, and then she whispered, “At least you did not disgrace yourself.”
“I live to meet your exacting standards, my lady.”
Her mouth twitched. “You may yet manage it. If you can remain charming when surrounded by young ladies.”
“I have no experience in such harrowing conditions.” He glanced over her shoulder deliberately, toward the cluster of pale gowns, fan-feathers, and curious eyes. “You must lead the charge.”
“That was the plan.” A faint flush colored her cheekbones. “Where is your nephew?”
She looked around, but Blaise already knew the truth.
“He must be late,” he lied.
“Well, then we would have to speak on his behalf.” Iris led the way confidently.
They set off towards the gazebo, where the youngest ladies and their chaperones had gathered in a garden of white muslin and flowers.
Marcus, damn him, had not shown up, but Blaise would deal with that later.
“Lady Hentley,” one of the matrons simpered as they approached. “You are looking radiant.”
“You are kind, Mrs. Dalrymple.” Iris inclined her head. “May I present His Grace, the Duke of Knoxford. He has a nephew who is—”
The word “duke” did its usual, effortless work for Blaise. The circle moved as one, fans fluttering, and eyes widened toward him. Blaise offered a slight smile.
“Ladies.” He bowed just enough. “I have been pressed into service tonight.”
“Into service?” a pert blonde in white and blue asked. Lady Petunia, he believed, was her name.
“Yes, for my nephew,” Blaise said.
“Your nephew?” another girl said. “Is he here tonight, Your Grace?”
“He is not. But he will attend the next social event.”
“He is quite a charming young man,” Iris added.
But the young ladies began exchanging troubled looks.
“Which title will he inherit?” a dark-haired girl asked, leaning in. Her pearls glowed against her throat.
Blaise smiled easily. “Is it not enough that he is a duke’s nephew?”
His words dropped into the circle like a pebble in a shallow pond. The ripples were small, but he felt them.
“He will have no title then?” Petunia asked suddenly.
“A pity for him,” said a brunette with a pointed chin, her voice light. “What does he do, then?”
“He studies and reads at Oxford,” Blaise said.
“Does he have an estate?” another girl put in, brown eyes sharp. “Land of his own?”
“Not yet.” Blaise let his gaze drift toward Iris for the barest moment, a private reference only they shared. “But I intend to remedy that.”
There was a subtle recoil.
Iris held herself very still beside him. He felt the stiffness in her arm beside him.
He leaned his head closer to hers. “We knew this might happen.”
“I know,” she murmured without moving her lips, eyes on the young faces. “I thought… I thought the generosity of the offer might appeal.”
“They are young,” he said. “Generosity is not yet a language they understand.”
Her jaw flexed, a tiny movement. “You are uncharitable.”
“I am precise.”
“I am going to go get some refreshments.” Iris stormed off, and Blaise knew she was upset because of her failed plan.
He decided to go after her when someone spoke behind him.
“Your Grace,” a sharp, youthful voice cut through and stopped him.
Blaise turned. A dark-haired girl in rose-pink trailed slightly behind one of the groups.
“Yes?” he asked mildly.
“Oh, I was only wondering…” She toyed with her fan and glanced at her companion with exaggerated mischief. “Whether Lady Hentley will remain at Hentley once your nephew marries. It must be… strange, sharing a house with a gentleman to whom one is not related.”
“Lady Hentley has been mistress of that house for seven years. She has more right to its management than I, who have known it for seven weeks,” Blaise responded coldly.
“Oh, but it is quite scandalous, actually.”
The words hung in the air.
Several ladies listened in and whispered around him. One of the mothers raised her brows, then looked away with delicate haste, as if caught staring at a street accident.
Blood surged hot behind Blaise’s eyes. The girl’s gaze flicked behind him, and Blaise spun around to find Iris holding a glass of wine in her shaky hand.
“Iris—”
“Excuse me,” she said as she dropped a curtsy to the little group. “I find I am in need of some privacy.”
Before he could catch her hand again, she had turned and slipped through the crowd, a pale, contained figure moving with too much speed towards the wide doors of Knoxford House.
Blaise watched her back for a heartbeat. Then he turned to the girl.
“Miss,” he said in the tone he rarely used outside business, “if you wish to entertain yourself with gossip, I suggest you attend to matters that are true and that concern you. On the current evidence, you will need all your energies to secure a husband who can tolerate your tongue.”
She went white, then red. Her friend stared, completely dumbstruck. A murmur swept through the garden; he knew he had overstepped some rule about chastising young ladies in public, but he found he did not give a damn.
Blaise bowed briefly to the circle. “If you will excuse me.”
He left them and went after Iris, but was shortly stopped by her sister.
“What has happened to my sister?” Lady Margaret asked with her hands placed firmly on her hips.
Blaise cleared his throat. “Lady Margaret, I am sorting this out and currently searching for your sister myself. She will be fine. Now, if you will excuse me, I wish to continue to look for her and bring her to you.”
She frowned at him before allowing him to leave. Blaise wasted no time as he headed to the house.
Where would she go?
She must be away from the noise and witnesses.
“Iris?” he called out her name as he searched every hallway and opened every door.
Finally, he found her in the music room, standing alone at the tall window, her hands braced on the sill.
“Iris,” he said.
She did not turn. “I thought you would be approving a marriage contract by now.”
“Your faith in my speed is touching.”
“Your ability to demolish propriety never ceases to amaze.” Her voice wobbled on the word ‘propriety.’ She pressed her lips together, as if she could will them steady.
He crossed the carpet, slowly, giving her room to tell him to leave. She did not speak again until he was only a pace away.
“Do you know what is most intolerable about that girl’s little speech?” she asked. “It is not that she repeated what I already knew. It is that they are not entirely wrong.”
Blaise waited, unsure of what to do or how to comfort her.
Iris drew in a breath. “I did choose to remain at Hentley when you came to London. I knew, of course, that it was improper to share a roof with a man to whom I am not related. But I stayed, and I slept in that house, as though I had any right. Because I could not bear to let it go. Because if I did, then what have the last seven years been for? What have I been for?”
Her voice frayed on the last word. She bit it back with visible effort.
“You have been a woman keeping herself and her household afloat by will and intelligence alone. You have been a daughter shielding her father from the consequences of his naiveté. You have been—”
“Stop.” She finally turned to face him. Her eyes held some rage within them.
“Do not attempt to elevate me into some tragic heroine. It only makes the fall steeper when the world points and says, ‘Look at the widow who clings to a house that is not hers. Look at the woman who shares a roof with a rake and pretends she does it out of duty.’”
He heard it then: beneath the anger, there was a deep-rooted shame.
“Iris,” he said, more roughly than he intended. “I am tired. Very tired. Of hearing you talk of humiliation as if it is the only language you speak.”
Her brows snapped together. “You are tired?”
“Yes.” Anger gave his words a precise edge. “Every time you take a step toward what you want, you yank yourself back and flog yourself for daring. You live at the mercy of imaginary tribunals in other people’s heads.”
“You heard them. The tribunals are very real, Blaise.”
“They exist,” he said. “But you grant them power, and you could choose otherwise.”
She stared at him, breathing too fast. “Choose what? To be shameless? To become exactly what they say I am?”
He thought, very briefly, of Daniel, of his smug, careful manipulations. Of noblemen hiding their bastards and their sins behind wives of spotless reputation. Of Marcus, hating himself for a stain that was never his.
“No,” Blaise said. “To become something that has nothing to do with them. To live by a code that is yours. To decide that your worth is not bound up in a house, or in whether little girls in rose gowns gasp when they hear you sleep under the same roof as me.”
Her throat moved. “That is very poetic for a man who just humiliated that girl at his own party.”
“She deserved a lesson,” he said without apology. “And so, it seems, do you.”
Her eyes flashed, but she blushed a bright red. “I am not a girl.”
He took a step closer, invading the space she used as armor. “You are something much more dangerous than that.”
He saw the quick drop to his mouth and back, the way color rose in her cheeks even as her spine stayed taut. That dangerousness was not about gossip; it was about the way she reacted when he pushed her. The way a part of her leaned toward the darkness he offered as if it were warmth.
“Come with me,” he said.
She went still. “To where?”
Blaise did not touch her yet. He turned towards the door and walked. After a small infinity of heartbeats, he heard her footsteps behind him.
They walked through the corridors, up the side staircase that avoided the main sweep, until he stopped at a familiar door. Her shoulders tightened almost imperceptibly. Blaise opened the door without saying a word.
The red room greeted them with its familiar stillness. The lamps were low but sufficient, gleaming on polished wood, on metal, and on the inviting darkness of the bed. The faint scent of leather, beeswax, and something indefinably intimate hung in the air.
This was where he had first caught her, breathless and wide-eyed, fingers on the sketchbook that should never have been in her hands.
Blaise knew she would be unforgettable since then.
And now, as she stood there, he wanted to prove to her that she was not a woman who should suffer through humiliation.
The only humiliation she needed was that which ended with her cries of satisfaction.
She had offered a bargain in this very room that had changed everything, and he would see to it that it was fulfilled.
“The month is over, Iris.” he looked at her then, and she gulped as she stood at the entrance of the red room. “You can choose to stay out there, and you can keep feeling sorry for yourself.”
He motioned for her to come into the room, and she entered obediently.
“Or you can come in here, fully as yourself. With all your humiliation.”
Her eyes flew to his.
He held her gaze. “But you know that with me and in this room, you will not be small. You will not be silent. And you will not be alone.”
Silence stretched between them. He could almost see the battle flickering behind her eyes. The words held a deeper meaning that he only just then realized.
“Can you do that?” he asked softly. “Can you stop living for other people’s comfort and start living for your own freedom?”
Her throat worked. For a moment, he thought she would laugh in his face and walk out, back to the safe cruelty of the party.
“Yes,” she whispered.
He had to force himself not to close his eyes.
“Say it again,” he said.
“Yes.” Stronger this time, though her voice trembled at the edges. “I can.”
He let out a breath he had not known he held and extended his hand.
She looked at it as if it were a weapon and a promise. Then, slowly, she placed her fingers in his palm.
He curled his hand around hers and guided her, step by deliberate step, towards the mirror in front of the bed.