This morning’s folly.
He spun back to her. “The only folly is you leaving here. There is far too much danger. Today, bombs were laid in Westminster and the Tower of London. Only one dynamitard has been captured thus far. It is entirely possible, indeed quite likely, that the men responsible for today’s outrages are the same as the men who took you outside your house yesterday.”
“I am so sorry to hear about the bombs,” she said, sincerity lacing her dulcet voice. “Was anyone hurt?”
“Unfortunately yes, and some of them gravely.” He hated to think of the cost of these actions of political violence in the name of achieving Home Rule for Ireland. “I was unable to protect them, but I will be damned if I allow any harm to come to you.”
“Surely you can see the necessity of my leaving here at once. I have no wish to make things more difficult for you than they already are.” She was speaking to him as politely as if they were strangers.
As if he had not just been inside her that morning.
“There is only one necessity I give a damn about at the moment, and that is your safety,” he told her. “You are safest here.”
“On the contrary, here is where I am the most in danger.” Her voice was soft.
Her words hit him in the heart as if they were a barb. “You are not in danger from me. I promise to take care of you.”
She shook her head. “I have already told you I will not be your mistress, Westmorland. Nor will I remain under your roof beyond tonight. The temptation is too great, and the risk to your sister’s reputation clear. She is my friend, and I have no wish to do her harm.”
He lost the fight to keep from touching her then. It had been hours since he had held her in his arms. Far, far too long. He clamped his hands on her waist, finding it deliciously soft and sweetly curved without the encumbrance of her stiffly boned corset. She fit against him as if her body had been made for his.
He was convinced it had been. No one had ever made him feel the way she did. “I do not want you to be my mistress, Isabella. I want you to be my wife.”
His revelation had the opposite of the intended effect, however.
Instead of softening, her resolve seemed to double in size. She wriggled from his hold, putting distance between them, her expression as unreadable as her gaze.
She wrapped her arms around her midriff, watching him. “You cannot be serious.”
He met her stare, unwavering, unflinching, more certain of this than he had been of anything. Even if it scared the hell out of him. “Utterly.”
“No.”
“Yes.” He closed the space separating them, taking her hands in his. They were cold, trembling. “Isabella, I would not jest about marriage. I do not find the institution amusing in the slightest.”
No, he found it as serious as the Great Fire of London.
He hoped to hell it would not ravage him in the same way the flames had destroyed so much of the city long ago.
“You are offering out of guilt, then,” she said definitively, as if she had just arrived at the only reason why he would wish to marry her. “You need not fear on my account, however. I have no intention of ever finding a husband. There will be no one to notice the loss of my virginity.”
“You have already found a husband,” he countered, pulling her back into his chest. “Me.”
But still, she remained rigid in his arms, a far cry from the wanton, seductive siren she had been that morning. “That is impossible. I am not of your class. Dukes do not marry the proprietresses of typewriting schools. They employ them.”
He could argue dukes did not take the maidenheads of proprietresses on a study desk either, but he did not. Best to direct his scorn inward, where it belonged. Shedding more light on the ugliness of his flaws could not help his case.
“This duke does,” he told her stubbornly.
“This particular proprietress has no wish to marry you, however.” Her full lips compressed.
In her high-necked night rail and her economical plaid dressing robe, she looked somehow innocently sensual. He wanted to peel her out of these ugly garments and give her the best of everything. He wanted to stop her from laboring on her own. He wanted her in his bed, in his life every day. And not seated at a damned typewriter. He wanted her without excuse, without apologies.
He wantedher, Isabella Hilgrove. And that was that.
Because he loved her.
Yes, he did. Damn his feelings to hell and back. This was a deuce of a time for them to emerge.
