He winced.
“It is important.”
“If you say.”
“I do say.”
“Is that all?”
“In fact, it isn’t. You do without.”
Another shrug. “’Tis nothing new to me.”
“To deprive yourself of worldly comforts and—” She hesitated on the next word. “Pleasures?”
He shifted and drew a distressed creak from the flimsy chair supporting him. At last, she had found a weakness in his armor. “You don’t wear the fine silk and linen of your rank. You don’t eat meat. Or sugar. Or cream. Or hardly anything, for that matter. You deny yourself like a Papist monk. Are you wearing a hairshirt, too?”
“You’ve certainly been observing me.”
“Oh, yes,husband, I have, and the way you live makes little sense to me.”
Yet another shrug. “I’ve fallen out of the habit of living like a lord.”
“When you were a spy for a decade?” Oh, why had she said such a thing, like she had the right?
The frigidity of the air had nothing on the coldness in his eye. “You shouldn’t speak of matters of which you know nothing.”
Isabel shook her head. He wasn’t wrong. She must return to the main conversational thread. If not tended properly, she had a feeling it would unravel in her hand before she understood the substance of it.
“It’s like you’re—” Understanding broke upon her like sudden dawn. “It’s like you’readdicted.”
Slowly, he uncrossed his legs and sat forward, elbows on his knees, his focus square on her. The very portrait of a wolf ready to spring into action. She swallowed. This hadn’t been her best idea.
Still, she would see it through. “You’re addicted toprivation.”
His brow knitted for an instant and released. Had she read confusion there? One second ticked by, then another, the room shrouded in a stillness that couldn’t hold indefinitely.
“I’m not sure,” he began, the words rough and low in his throat, “how you could be so right and yet so wrong at the same time.”
“Pardon?”
“You are correct in one regard. Iamaddicted.” He shifted back in his chair, which moaned its displeasure, and placed his hands behind his head as if taking a stretch. She wasn’t foolish enough to think he was relaxing.
“But I am most definitelynotaddicted to privation.” He spoke his shocking words casually. They were anything but. “Do you not suspect the true source of my addiction?”
“Should I?” Oh, that she could control the quiver in her voice.
“I’ve observed you to be a logical woman.”
“But what you’re saying makes no logical sense,” she countered. “A fact cannot be wrong and right at the same time.”
He smiled across the ten feet that separated them. The smile of a wolf fixed on his prey, primed for the chase. A shiver ran through her. “Can it not? Just as a coin has two sides, so, too, is my addiction privation’s opposite. You’ve simply been viewing it from the wrong angle.”
Breath held, she waited.
“It’spleasureI’m addicted to.”
Chapter 15
