Chapter Eighteen
Isabel paced through the halls of her new home, peeking into parlors and hesitating in music rooms as she explored her surroundings. She spent hours doing so. Well, to be fair, most of those hours had been spent cooing and fawning over Matthew’s fine library.
Still, her first day as the Duchess of Tyndale had been occupied, indeed. Just not by her husband, who had been all but hiding since they broke their fast together hours before.
She pushed aside her feelings on that subject and turned into a long hallway. There she stopped. It was a portrait gallery, and her heart leapt. She’d already seen Matthew’s miniatures of his parents and Ewan the previous night, little glimpses of the happy childhood he seemed to have experienced. But here she would see generations of the men and women he had come from. She would see his nose and eyes and smile on a dozen faces and trace them back to him.
She stepped out and looked up and down the high walls at each portrait. Some were serious faces, some were kind. There were men with medals pinned to their chests and ladies with dogs piled on their laps and children in their arms. She couldn’t help but smile at each one and wonder at their lives.
That smile fell when she reached the far end of the hall. There, in a place of honor on the wall, between a portrait of Matthew and another of Charlotte and Ewan…was Angelica.
She did not recognize the portrait. It was not the same as the one that hung in her uncle’s parlor as the centerpiece of his shrine to his late daughter. She tilted her head and examined her cousin’s face a bit closer.
“Isabel.”
She turned and found Matthew standing behind her. He had approached her so silently that she hadn’t even realized he was there. But now he stared too. Right at the woman he had loved. The only one he’d ever truly wished to marry.
“She was lovely,” Isabel said, returning her attention to the portrait.
“She was,” he said. “I had commissioned that as a gift for her, to be given to her after we wed. Of course, it…it never happened.”
She flinched at the life he had planned for her cousin. The one Isabel had now stepped into thanks to a series of deceits that hung between them. And questions. So many questions.
“What happened, Matthew?” she asked, voicing the one question that had launched everything between them. Everything her uncle had done.
“That night?” he asked, his tone stiff and cold.
She faced him and found he was standing ramrod straight and looked not at Angelica anymore, but at her. His face was unreadable, his gaze hooded.
“Yes,” she said.
“Wondering if I killed her?” he asked, turning away.
She watched as he started down the hall, and a sudden and irrepressible anger that he would dismiss her so callously rose in her.
She pursued him in a few long strides and caught his arm, turning him to face her by sheer force of will. His eyes went wide. “No,” she snapped. “That isn’t what I’m saying and it is unfair of you to accuse me of such a thing and then walk away. You seem to forget that my life has been blown apart, just as yours has. I have a right to wonder why.”
He arched a brow. “Has it been blown apart, Isabel? You’ve married a duke. That seems an elevation.”
Her lips parted at the cruel jab. At the coldness with which he said it. She released his arm and backed away, shaking her head with every step. “How little you think of me. I already had a marriage with a man who did not desire me. Now I am with one who doesn’t like me, let alone want me.”
His brow wrinkled. “You think I don’t want you? You don’t know what I want, Isabel. For weeks all I’ve thought about is you. Even when I didn’t know your identity, I’ve never felt anything like it. Feral and hot, dangerous. And I hate it.”
She flinched and turned her face. “Hate me.”
“No, not you.” He moved closer, covering the distance she had created. “You enthrall me, interest me, captivate me. You slept in my arms last night and it felt right. And wrong.”
She stared at him. She’d never thought he would say these things to her. Passionate things, words that expressed a deep conflict within him. A conflict that gave her hope as much as it birthed pure terror in her soul.
“Answer me this,” she said. “Do you truly think I created this situation, either to further my uncle’s agenda or to improve my own situation?”
He swallowed. “You defended me passionately at our wedding supper, in front of a room full of people. I saw how humiliated you were by having to face off with your uncle in that forum. But there are times I just…don’t know.”
She moved closer and lifted trembling hands to his face. He let her touch him. When she did, he let out a low and ragged sigh. Like he’d been waiting for this moment all day. She had been, too.
“I didn’t have anything to do with what he arranged,” she said softly, then leaned up to brush her lips to his.
When she pulled away, he stared at her. His pupils were dilated and his breath short and unsteady. Then he caught her hand and dragged her up the hall, past Angelica’s staring portrait, into a room that she had not yet explored. Another parlor in a long series of parlors.
He pushed the door shut and tugged her into his arms. She fell against his chest, lifting her mouth to his hungry one as the heat between them, sharpened by their argument, swelled to an inferno. He tugged at her clothes, unfastening buttons, dragging fabric up and down as he shoved her onto the closest settee. She pulled him down on top of her, fumbling for the placard on his trousers and the cock that strained beneath it.
She opened her legs as he tugged her drawers off and tossed them aside. His fingers found her sex and he stroked there, opening her, spreading the wetness across her as his breath grew increasingly ragged.
With difficulty, she finally freed his cock and took him in hand. One stroke, two, and then he crushed his mouth to hers as he lifted her hips and thrust deep into her body. She cried out at the invasion, sweet and hot and animal. He pounded into her, taking and taking, claiming like it would leave a permanent mark. Perhaps it would. She started to shake as he ground harder, his pelvis stroking hers on every deep thrust.
His mouth crashed against hers, demanding everything she had to give. She surrendered it, only breaking away when an orgasm hit her like wildfire. She gave a keening cry and he echoed the sound as he poured himself deep into her body and then dropped down against her, his hands gently smoothing over her arms, her fingers dragging through his hair.
And in that moment, there was peace.
“Someone should design a settee better suited for such things,” Matthew complained as he dragged Isabel half across his body and she settled her head against his chest.
She laughed, the tension that had started between them in the portrait gallery bled away by passion. “That is called a bed, Your Grace. You have a very nice one just upstairs.”
“A bed,” he repeated. “Fascinating. Perhaps we should move one into every room in this house. Just in case.”
She glanced up at him, her expression both laced with humor and interest. “An unexpected design choice that I’d hate to explain to guests.”
“I’m certain they would determine the use on their own,” he drawled.
She sighed, and for a moment both were quiet. The silence allowed him to relive their earlier argument once more. She had asked him about Angelica and his first reaction had been to push her away. To leave unsaid the painful topic of his last night with his former fiancée. But now, with Isabel’s hands smoothing over him, with the vanilla scent of her hair teasing his nostrils, he knew he was wrong to hide the truth from her.
Especially when it had impacted virtually every moment between them since.
He steeled himself and said, “Angelica and I had a sometimes…heated relationship.”
She went stiff and looked up. She was working to make her expression passive. “How could you not? You are irresistible and she was stunning.”
He shook his head as he realized what meaning she’d put to his words. “No, not like that. Not like…this. Of course, I was attracted to her, to be certain, but we—we never, that is to say we hadn’t…”
Her eyes went wide as she looked up at him. “No?”
“She was a lady and we were to be married.” He shrugged. “To do so seemed wrong at the time. I thought we had a lifetime.”
She nodded. “I suppose you did. But if you don’t mean heated in that sense, then what do you mean?”
He frowned. “She would occasionally get upset when I didn’t do as she liked. That was what happened that night. The last night. We were all at the estate in Tyndale and she demanded I go out with her onto the lake. She said something about the moonlight. I was in the middle of something. I considered it important, though to be honest, I don’t even recall what it was now.” He shook his head. “And she…she…”
“Had a tantrum,” Isabel finished, not cruelly but with certainty.
He glanced down at her. It was actually rather nice to talk to someone who had known Angelica so well. He could be direct where he was careful with others. Slowly, he nodded. “I suppose that is what you might call it.”
“She did that sometimes,” Isabel said with a shrug.
“With you too?” he asked.
“Yes.” She chuckled as if the memory pleased her. “With everyone. She was passionate, as I’m sure you know. She was fierce, in both how she loved and how she demanded. Just determined to change everyone’s mind to her way.”
He smiled faintly. “That is exactly right.”
“But she was never…cruel,” Isabel continued swiftly. “She was just as likely to use honey to get what she wanted as that big dose of vinegar. She’d smile and please and cajole and suddenly I was an ally on her side. Of course, the next time I needed one of my own, she was the first to jump up and link arms with me. She was a force of nature in that regard.”
“She was. And often I gave in, just as it sounds like you did. That night, I didn’t. We quarreled,” he said, trying to block out the images that had begun to fill his mind. “And a while later her maid came to me to inform me that Angelica had gone out without me. Of course, that was meant to make me follow, and I did, still fuming from the ugly words we had exchanged and her foolhardy devotion to doing exactly as she wished.”
He focused, trying to regather himself. It must have taken him a long while, for Isabel reached out and threaded her fingers through his. She squeezed his hand gently. “And what happened then?”
“She was in the middle of the lake by the time I reached it,” he whispered. “In this tiny little boat that was only meant for children. And when she saw me, she stood up, to prove to me that she would do as she pleased, I suppose. The boat rocked and…and…”
Isabel caught her breath. Tears had filled her eyes. “It capsized,” she said. “Oh, Angelica.”
He nodded. “It was so far out, so far away. I raced to her, fully clothed, pushing through the water. She went under again and again as her gown got heavier and heavier. By the time I reached her, she had been under for a while. I couldn’t find her in the dark. I was frantic, diving under to search for her. At last I touched her hand and there was this huge moment of hope. But when I hauled her to the surface, she was limp and cold. I kept saying her name as I took her to shore, but there was nothing I could do. Nothing I could do. She was gone.”
Isabel reached up, and it was only when she gently wiped his cheek that he realized he was weeping. For the life he had lost. For the guilt he had carried. For the woman who’d had her bright and vibrant light snuffed out over a foolish fit of pique. Isabel’s cheeks were also wet and her eyes sparkled with even more tears. For her cousin, but also for him, he could see. Not tears of pity, but empathy.
“I would have traded places with her, Isabel,” he murmured. “You know I never harmed her. I hope you know I never would have. I did love her.”
She nodded immediately. “I do. I can see it, I can feel it. And I’m so sorry, Matthew. Sorry you endured that loss. And so sorry that my uncle’s grief has steered him to blame you. But mostly I’m sorry that my presence in your life is a constant reminder of the future you wanted, the one that was stolen from you that night. Those comparisons must be devastating.”
She wrapped her arms around him even tighter, holding him close, and in that moment he realized she was wrong. He did not compare her to Angelica. Somehow, he never had. They did not look alike or talk alike or behave alike. That they were related was complicated, of course. Troubling when coupled with the manipulations and hatreds of her uncle.
But it wasn’t Angelica he thought of when Isabel touched him. And it wasn’t Angelica he wished to know more about as he lay in Isabel’s warm arms. But what to do about those desires?
That was something he was still figuring out.