Somehow, Alissende managed to maintain her composure in the moments after leaving Damien in the solar, but a jumble of feelings still roiled inside her. Chief among them was indignation. It gave her a kind of strength, though, and so she clung to it.
Her heart ached with what had just happened—with the realization that the man she’d met today was no longer the man she had once loved. This Damien was callous and unfeeling. By heaven, he had looked straight at her and pretended that the tender, magnificent lovemaking they’d once known with each other had never happened. Her own pride had prevented her from refuting him, but she had felt the pain of it nonetheless.
Brushing her hand across her eyes, Alissende finally approached her destination; pushing open the door, she entered the chamber that had formerly been the private domain of her late husband, Godfrey Claremont, Earl of Denton. The windows were shuttered, still, as they had been since his death. Surrounded by the gray atmosphere inside the chamber, she pressed her back against the wall and tried to slow her racing thoughts.
As she allowed her eyes to adjust in the paucity of light, her attention settled on the vast and ornate contours of the bed. It sent a pang through her, and she drew in a shaky breath, glad that she was alone now, as she confronted the old ghosts here. It was her first time in this chamber in nearly a year, and though she had hoped for time to have erased them, she could not deny that this place still brimmed with memories of Godfrey. The thorough cleaning and changing of all the linens, draperies, and bed hangings she’d ordered a few weeks ago before her return to Glenheim had helped, but the images in her mind refused to fade.
Pursing her lips, Alissende crossed the chamber and pulled away the lengths of cloth covering one of the mullion panes Godfrey had ordered fitted into the arched window holes. The glass had been an extravagant expense, but Godfrey had never favored denying himself anything he’d desired; in that respect he had been very similar to Hugh. It was one of the traits, Alissende imagined, that had drawn the two men to each other as friends…and one of the shared qualities that might well have led to Godfrey’s demise on the hunting excursion they’d taken together that fateful day last summer.
Stepping back from the window and the brighter light filtering through the milky panes, Alissende surveyed the chamber. As opulently furnished as it was, she hated this room more than any other in the castle, and since Godfrey’s death, she had taken to sleeping in one of the guest chambers just down the corridor. This was the chamber where she had spent her first night with Godfrey after the marriage her sire had arranged for them…where she had endured the painful consummation of their union—made more so by her own fear and by his careless, drunken groping.
She’d been relieved, afterward, that he’d been too deeply into his cups to notice much beyond the fulfillment of his own pleasure. The smear of blood she’d produced on the sheet by poking the tips of two fingers with her tapestry needle had satisfied him in regard to her virginity, come morn.
But it hadn’t changed the reality, for her at least.
For the bitter truth was that more than a year prior to her disastrous wedding night, Damien had made love to her for the first time. Over the course of the weeks that had followed, he had awakened her to unimagined bliss. In those secret, stolen moments, she had learned of seduction, of the give and take of sensual pleasure along with him; she had reveled in the breathtaking intimacies they’d shared, savoring the way Damien had played her body with all the skill and sacred concentration of an artist stroking free a masterpiece from his blank canvas.
Aye, Damien had learned to make her rise to the mere whisper of her name on his breath. What she had known with Godfrey could not help but pale by comparison.
That state of affairs had never improved throughout the four years of their marriage. Nay, if anything, much had declined with each month that had passed without the signs of a babe growing within her. Godfrey had become increasingly resentful and sometimes cruel, for it was common knowledge that childlessness was the fault of the woman—another curse to be traced back to the sins of Eve.
She could still see her husband’s face, red with disappointment and anger, as he’d accused her of her failings in the matter. If only she desired him more, if only she would remove all other thought but the hope of blessed fruitfulness each time they coupled, then a babe could not help but grow within her. God was punishing her for her shortcomings by giving her a barren womb.
And so Godfrey had taken matters into his own hands, during that last year of his life, insisting that she couple with him nightly; she’d only been released of that duty through the week of her courses each month, regardless of how her body had hurt from such constant and uninvited use.
It had been awful, demeaning, and painful. But as much as she’d come to resent the man she had married willingly and with her family’s blessing, she’d known that she couldn’t truly blame him.
He had been right.
She had not enjoyed the fumbled rutting that had comprised the lovemaking in their marriage bed. She had not desired him. Oh, at the beginning she had felt a kind of affection for Godfrey, and certainly she had tried to do her duty to him as his wife. But there had never been any passion. She hadn’t beenableto love him, for the bitter truth was that she’d still loved Damien de Ashby; she always had and likely always would.
Now Damien was back in her life, despising her as much if not more than Godfrey had, though for very different reasons—and she wanted none of it, ever again. She was sick unto death of men, with their demands, their needs, and their arrogant pride. It was why she had yearned to enter a nunnery. She wanted to live the rest of her life asshesaw fit, not answering any longer to the will of those, like Hugh or the other lords at court, who prized her for naught but her wealth or her cursed beauty.
Her mouth tightened, and she subdued the last of her disturbing memories as she moved to another set of windows. Pulling down their cloth coverings with a snap, she wiped away from the glass the fine layer of dust before crossing to the hearth to lay the makings of a fire. The hearth appeared to be fairly clean, but from a certain angle she could see what looked to be an old piece of charred wood near the back wall; it was just visible in the slant of shadow, and she paused, trying to decide if it would be wise, dressed as she was, to attempt to remove it herself as should be done before laying the new fire.
The alternative, of course, was to wait and call for one of the servants. It seemed unnecessary, though; if she was careful not to touch her hands to her gown when she was done, then completing the task should be simple enough.
Resolved to the action, Alissende threw down one of the window cloths to kneel upon and had just bent over, reaching into the recess of the sooty fireplace, when she felt a sneeze coming on. But she was interrupted by a noise at the doorway, followed by a low, masculine voice that, despite her best intentions, sent a not entirely unpleasant shiver through her.
“I did not realize you were so desperate to escape my company.”
Rocking back onto her heels, Alissende scrambled to stand, at the same time pinching her nose in an effort to make the tickling sensation go away. Then she turned to face Damien.
Leveling what she hoped was an unperturbed gaze at him, she said, “As I told you in the solar, I only wished to ready your chamber. There is no cause to think otherwise.”
“I was referring to what I saw when I came in here.” He nodded toward the hearth, his expression an enigmatic combination of jesting and bemusement.
Alissende bit back another retort when she realized what he meant, and how she must have looked from his perspective behind her, bent over as she was with her bottom in the air and with the top half of her hidden from view in the fireplace. To cover her discomfiture, she glanced at the hearth and coughed slightly, resisting the impulse to rub her nose again. Good heavens, but if she couldn’t find a way to stop feeling so—
“I cannot say that I found your position…unattractive, however.”
Alissende snapped her gaze forward, realizing too late that Damien had crossed the few steps between them while she’d been looking away. He stood less than an arm’s length from her now, and her breath caught with a choking sound in her throat. She forced herself to lift her face to meet his gaze, so that he would not think her intimidated by his nearness.
Sweet Jesu, but he was staring down at her in such solemn silence. All but for the heat in his eyes. There was no mistaking the intensity she saw there, and it caused her stomach to do a pleasurable little flip. He was so close that she could sense his warmth, and she could not help but breathe in his scent—a sensual blend of pure male and warm leather, along with the hint of clove and lemongrass from the herbs she knew he favored in his bath. It played havoc with her senses, sweeping her up again into memories so powerful that her knees might have buckled had she not reached a hand out to the small table beside the hearth to steady herself.
More than anything, she wanted to avoid the humiliation of sputtering incoherently, of letting him know just how much his physical presence affected her. And so she found herself pausing until she felt more confident that she could string words together in a reasonable way.
She had just mastered herself enough to form a suitable retort when he suddenly lifted his right hand to her cheek, freezing her into shocked silence once more. His long, elegant fingers slid up along her jaw, while his thumb brushed in a gentle stroke just above the corner of her mouth. And still he said nothing.
