Chapter Thirteen
They passed mostof the first leg of the journey in stilted silence.
His bride kept her nose in a book.
He pretended to doze.
But Alessandro was not tired. He was aware. All too aware of each movement she made. Every rustle of her skirts. Every soft sigh. The turns of the page. Her scent.Dios, her scent. It filled the carriage.
It filledhimwith lust.
Base lust. Surely that was all he felt. A natural urge to bury his prick in her sweet, tight sheath.
She shifted again. Her slipper-shod foot caught his boot for the second time. He had to wonder if she was not intentionally jostling him. The traveling coach was well-appointed. Large enough. There was no need for her to crowd him, blast her. His legs were long, but hers were not.
He opened his eyes at last to find her looking at him. The force of her stare pierced him all the way to the darkness simmering deep within him. Her beauty hit him just as it always did, as a teeming wallop of remorse laden with desire.
“You wanted something, my lady?” he asked her formally.
Far better, he had decided since that morning’s folly, to keep her at a distance. Far safer and easier.
“Yes,” she said, her chin tipping up. The defiant spark he had noted in her eyes from the moment their paths had first crossed was back. “You snore.”
His eyes narrowed. “You are lying.”
He did not snore unless he over-imbibed, and he was reasonably certain of that fact. Moreover, he had not been truly sleeping.
She shrugged, and even the act of apathy was somehow elegant when performed by her. “I am not. You were snoring, and it was ruining my ability to concentrate upon my book.”
“The Silent Duke,” he read the title aloud, raising a brow. Feminine nonsense, he was sure of it. “Perhaps your concentration was ruined by the tripe within the pages you are attempting to read.”
“Perhaps the issue instead is with my company rather than the book itself,” she suggested, unsmiling.
He wondered if she had tapped his boot so she could have a row with him.
“Playing nursemaid to your brother has made me tired,querida,” he said dryly.
The devil was already tempting him today. His intention to keep her at bay had been broken like the waves upon the shore. His bid to maintain formality had been failed by his own inability to think of her as he must.
He ought to have continued to feign sleep.
But his wife was no fool, and he suspected she knew he had not been napping at all.
At his mention of Montrose, her shoulders stiffened. “If we are to be husband and wife, you might try to like my brother. He will be the uncle to your heir.”
He shuddered at the reminder. “I forbid my heir from associating with such a blighter. You will raise my son to be an impeccable gentleman, to do his duty to the succession.”
“Monty is a gentleman as well,” she defended.
In addition to having the loveliest pair of breasts this side of the English Channel, his new countess also apparently had a heart the size of London. When it came to her scapegrace brother, that was.
“Nevertheless, I do not wish for my heir to become a drunkard,” he said coolly. For it was true. “I am not enduring this marriage and getting an heir on you so the future Earl of Rayne is a reckless wastrel no better than my idiot cousin.”
His words were harsh, and he recognized it the moment they escaped him. They were dripping with bitterness caused by the untenable position in which he now found himself, a man with a wife he had never wished to take. A man who had enjoyed bedding said wife far too much this morning.
A man who was drowning in guilt.
Catriona flinched as if he had struck her, her already creamy skin going paler. “I had not realized marriage to me was so abhorrent to you, my lord, that you mustendureit. I know I am an unwanted duty, just as you are to me, but did it never occur to you that you might make the best of the time we will be forced to share?”
