His seed had been in her. Was painted all over her now. He had marked her. Claimed her.
“You are mine forever now, Bridget Carlisle,” he told her when he could at last force his mind to function, his lips to form words. From this day forward, she would never again be Bridget O’Malley. She was his duchess, his wife.
Simply his.
“Aye,” she agreed softly, as breathless as he was. But then she startled him by framing his face in her hands and yanking him to her for a long, slow kiss. Her way of marking him. “And you are mine, Leo. I’ll be keeping you as well.”
Christ, her brogue. He kissed her nose.
Smitten, that was what he was.
Chapter Sixteen
“You are smittenwith the Duke of Carlisle,” Daisy pronounced, the second time in the past sennight someone had accused Bridget of having amorous feelings for Leo.
Apparently, she was not as adept at hiding her emotions as she had fancied.
Her cheeks went hot. They had just withdrawn from the Duke of Trent and Leo at the dinner table, leaving the men to their port. Her bottom had not even yet grazed the gilded settee she had chosen for herself. As it was, she jerked and almost missed her seat.
She caught herself in time, passed her hands over her skirts as she settled in, attempting to force the telling flush on her skin to abate. “Nonsense. I do not even like him.”
“So you have protested before.” Daisy’s tone was smug.
Bridget studiously avoided her half sister’s gaze, looking instead at the carpet. Then at a picture hanging on the wall. Then at the hands primly folded in her lap. “I do not know what you are talking about.”
“I cannot credit it. When Sebastian first suggested the notion of you and Carlisle entering a marriage of convenience, I was convinced the two of you would eat each other alive,” Daisy continued, utterly unrepentant. “He is a cold fish, and you are the proudest woman I know. Two more opposite creatures could not be found. You are full of passion and convictions, while he is cool and methodical. Passionless as a cucumber.”
That description rather nettled. And though she did not wish to make herself the object of further scrutiny, her feelings for Leo had altered everything. She could not allow him to be maligned. Besides, she had firsthand proof there was nothing passionless or cold about the man. Good God, the wickedness he had visited upon her…the mere thought of it was enough to nearly send her up in flames right here.
Over the precious past few days, they had been lost in each other, closing off the outside world, existing in a charmed honeymoon, as if their problems and differences could forever be ignored. She had surrendered herself to that pleasure. To him. But she knew their time was limited. That it would end.
It was an inevitability.
“There is far more to him than the face he shows the world,” she defended him, continuing before she could think better of it. “And there is nothing cold or passionless about him.”
“I knew it!” Daisy crowed, clapping her hands together. “The way the two of you glanced at each other over dinner when you thought no one else was watching…I nearly caught flame myself just from observing.”
Bridget studied her nails. Examined the perplexity of her knuckles, those strange little whorls interrupting a finger’s otherwise faultless perfection. “I do not like him.”
It was a lie. Of course it was a lie. But even now, she was not ready to examine her feelings and what they meant. They existed. She loved him, and that love was an uncontrollable, untamable thing, as much a part of her as a limb. But it terrified her.
Because they came from different worlds, disparate beliefs. Because her brother needed her, and because to a certain extent, she and Leo would forever be two people existing on different sides of a very clear line. But when he touched her, when he kissed her, and Lord in Heaven, when he made such wicked demands of her in the bedchamber—when he told her she was his—she could forget.
Still, beneath it all simmered one ugly, horrible truth: she would have to betray Leo. She would have to leave him, regardless of how much she did not wish to do it. In spite of how deeply she longed to stay here with him forever and forget everyone and everything else.
The truth could only be avoided for so long. It lurked like an ugly, pulsing shadow waiting to claim its victims and return them to the ether.
“Bridget, look at me,” her half sister demanded.
Bridget pursed her lips, looking everywhere else. She could not shake the feeling Daisy would read everything she was so desperate to keep from her and more if she met her gaze.
“Bridget.”
Stubborn woman. She supposed it made sense. They did share blood, after all, and Bridget knew her own faults all too well. She flicked a glance to her sister, her face going hot all over again. “What would you have me say? He and I are enemies by definition.”
Daisy’s shrewd gaze plumbed hers. “No longer, I suspect. My dearest sister, no one knows better than I the conundrum in which you find yourself. Sebastian thought I was guilty of aiding the Fenian cause because of our father, when in truth, I was innocent. I thought he had betrayed me. When our misunderstandings were solved, and we allowed ourselves to love each other, everything changed.”
“But I am guilty,” Bridget blurted before she could still her foolish tongue.
