The boldness of her—volleying back his own words—knocked the breath from his lungs.
“Been thinking excessively about that, have you?” The sentence, sardonic and tinged with derision, slipped out before he could stem it.
“The first rule of a good wooing, Your Grace, is to avoid saying arse-headed things.” She saluted him with her mug. “Something ye clearly are going to find a wee bit challenging.”
She was not wrong.
“I’m trying to do better,” he said, disliking the petulant growl in his tone.
Isolde gave him no reply. Instead, she sat back and nursed her mug.
Maddening woman.
Neither of them spoke for a long moment.
“I hate that the choice of who tae marry was taken from us.” Her voice drifted out from the depths of her chair. “That we will always wonder . . . what might have been.”
He snorted, soft and low.
What might have been.
Surely, he would wonder that as well, but not for the same reason. What if they hadn’t been forced to marry? What if he had never come to his senses?
“I believe we always had a choice,” he replied.
“Perhaps. But not good choices.” A pause. “I know ye would not have married me otherwise.”
In that, she was utterly wrong.
But even he understood she was not ready for the full truth.
“Do you remember our first meeting?” he asked instead, swirling the whisky in his cup.
“At my father’s house party two years past, when I was introduced tae yourself and Allie?”
“No.”
Though Tristan supposed that encounter had been momentous as well, seeing Isolde for the first time in six years. Her beauty and animation had bludgeoned his senses, rendering him a struck gong of longing and horror. He had stood stupefied in Hadley’s drawing-room, awash in the realization that his attraction to the earl’s daughter had dimmed not one whit despite time’s passage.
Isolde said nothing for a while. Coals collapsed in the grate with a rustle.
“Our first meeting,” she repeated, voice so hesitant he had to strain to hear. “Are ye referring tae our encounter at the Duke of Montacute’s garden party?”
“You remember?”
“Aye, how could I forget? I utterly mortified myself. But I am surprised you remember me. I assumed ye had forgotten all about it.”
Forgotten?! The irony. “I remember everything about you, Isolde.”
Naturally, she misunderstood his meaning.
“I suppose ye have always seen the worst of my behavior,” she said with a soft laugh. “Our first meeting was so embarrassing, mistaking ye for John as I did. My brothers teased me for months once they learned of it. Because, of course, I told John and, of course, he told Mac and James. Surely that was when your lowering opinion of me began. You must have thought me the veriest hoyden.”
Perhaps, later, he had thought her a hoyden in an effort to save his sanity. But at the beginning? “Not at all.”
“Nae?” she huffed. “Now I know ye bebammingme.”
Taking a deep breath for courage, Tristan told her the truth—
