She sucked in a breath at his brittle tone. But was it mournful or angry? She couldn’t tell. He hid that too well.
“I admit, I know a…little about what happened,” she said carefully as she thought of the cousin she had known and played with all those years ago. She tried to picture Angelica with this man and felt a stab of powerful jealousy that she shoved aside.
He shook his head. “I’m sure you do. Which is why I’m confused as to why you’d ask about Roseford’s comment. If I am being brought back from the dead, it is because part of me was buried with my fiancée.” He turned away. “Or so the story goes.”
“So the story goes,” she repeated, and stood up. She wrapped herself in the sheet and moved toward him. “Does that mean it is untrue?”
He continued to stare out the window in the chamber, his expression blank. “Sometimes it feels like more than a part of me died with her. And yet I am still here. And I get to live with the consequences of what I did.”
She gripped a fist at her side. What he did? That sounded like a confession. One that might prove her uncle right in all his accusations when he railed out his hate and his rage toward this man. Her stomach turned at the idea that Tyndale…Matthew…could truly be a killer.
“What did you do?” she whispered.
He straightened up and slowly faced her. “It is not a topic I wish to discuss with a stranger,” he said softly. “But it is what Robert referred to when he said what he said. I suppose that by coming here, by being with you…I’m getting better in his eyes.”
“And in your own?” she asked, meeting those very eyes now. Trying desperately to see if he was victim or villain in them. Unable to determine anything but that they were dilated with renewed desire as he let them flit over her. Unable to control her own reaction to that longing, despite the unsatisfying answers to her inquiries.
“I feel like I’m alive again when you touch me,” he whispered. “And I want that. Just as I want you.”
He took the hand that held the sheet and tugged it free so that the cover fell away and left her naked. “I suppose we must test how long they allow us to keep this room occupied.”
She smiled and set aside her questions. She just needed to get closer to obtain more information. And closer was exactly what she wanted right now.
“I do have one request,” she said as he moved in and pressed his lips to the curve of her collarbone.
“What’s that?” he asked, his tone muffled as he kissed her skin.
“This time I need you naked,” she said, shocked by how wanton her words were. Her tone.
“I would never deny a lady,” he said as he tugged her back toward the bed. “Not now, not ever.”
Isabel’s hands shook as she rode the last few miles to her uncle’s home. It was late, well after three, and her body ached with all the pleasures she had explored with Matthew that night. As a lover, he was gentle but passionate, demanding but giving. He tended to her pleasure over and over, and when he took his?
Well, his loss of control was a sight to behold. One that made her sex throb once more with need.
How she wished she could just focus on those wanton memories. The very ones she’d been wanting to create when she started going to the Donville Masquerade. The ones that were supposed to keep her warm and satisfied when she was forced to share a cold and perfunctory bed with whatever merchant or lower gentleman her uncle eventually matched her with.
Only the other topic of their night together kept interrupting her pleasant memories. And that topic was Angelica.
Her heart lurched at the reminder that her cousin had once owned this man’s heart. Certainly, she must have also enjoyed his body, as well. How could anyone have him and not want to touch him?
And yet Angelica was dead and Matthew’s answers hadn’t fully satisfied Isabel’s questions on the matter. When he spoke of her, it was with sharpness. But was that because he felt the unfairness of losing her so young? Or frustration that her death was always linked to him, so he could never leave those memories that haunted him behind?
Or was it what her uncle suspected? That a mention of Angelica set Matthew off because of a guilty conscience? A murderer’s hate?
That didn’t seem right. It didn’t settle in with truth in her heart.
She scrubbed a hand over her face. “Bollocks,” she muttered softly since no one could hear her swear.
Angelica. How stunning she had been with that honey hair and those huge blue eyes. She’d been a rare beauty, and Isabel had always felt somewhat plain beside her. Angelica had been made for all her finery, and she wore it all with enviable confidence.
As girls, they’d been close. But as Angelica took her place in Society, as she came out to the attention of dukes and earls and viscounts, Isabel had been less and less involved. Visits had dwindled, letters had gone from once a week to once a month…once in a blue moon. Angelica had found her place and it hadn’t included Isabel, who was by then married to Gregory and settling in to the life of the bride of a solicitor.
A very empty life that had been, while Angelica had captured the attention of…him. Matthew. Now Isabel’s heart pounded and she cursed herself for it. For what she knew she felt, what she’d been feeling over and over.
Jealousy. Strong and ugly.
The hack came to a stop around the back of her uncle’s home, and she paid the driver before she took a deep breath and looked up at the house. This was not her home. She didn’t remember the last place she’d truly felt was her home. With her parents, perhaps, years ago. A lifetime.
