He didn’t respond, just stared at her. His face was unreadable now. Not angry, not contemptuous, just…blank. Cool.
“My uncle is going to arrange a new marriage,” she explained, somehow unable to keep the words from cascading from her lips. “I’m certain it will be like my last.”
“What was your last?” he bit out.
Heat flooded her cheeks. “With an older man, a union for position, not passion. It was the lack of the latter that took me to the masquerade in the first place. Just to…see that passion. Just a little. And then you touched me, and suddenly it was a flood of passion. A wave that swept me away.”
“And so you stole my ability to chose what I would do in order to fulfill your own desires,” he said.
When he said it that way, she saw it for the violation that it was. And she hated herself for it. “Yes. I-I did. And it was very wrong of me. I wish I could take it back.”
“Do you,” he said, and he stepped forward.
The space between them closed in that long stride. He was almost touching her now, invading her space, his warmth curling around her like it had when he’d taken her to his bed. His breath steaming over her. His eyes boring into her.
She held those eyes, remembering what they’d looked like when he wanted her. Seeing a shadow of that same expression even now in this heated, emotional moment. And words fell from her lips without her ordering then to do so, “What would you have chosen if you had known?”
His cheek twitched again, but this time his expression was not of anger. It was something else. Something she had seen before, just the moment before he touched her, took her, in that hidden room at a forbidden masquerade.
She saw it and she knew what he would do even before he pressed his lips to hers. There was nothing gentle to the kiss. She still felt his anger in the way he demanded with his tongue and his hands that closed over her forearms and tugged her even closer.
But she felt his desire, too. She tasted it on his tongue as he drove it hard into her mouth. There was no denying that passion she had come to crave. No denying the man who inspired it so deeply inside of her. She made a soft sound in her throat and lifted on her tiptoes to get closer to him. Her tongue met his and the kiss deepened, widened, crashed like waves on the shore. Destructive and beautiful all at once. She wanted to be swept away.
He swore and broke away from her, setting her aside as he lifted his hand to his mouth like he’d been burned. He stared at her for a beat, two, until it felt like forever. Then he turned on his heel and walked away, leaving her alone in the chamber.
Alone and breathless and utterly confused.
Chapter Eleven
Matthew entered his study and closed the door behind himself. How he had gotten here, he didn’t know. Everything had been a blur from the moment he stepped away from the heated temptation of Isabel’s kiss to the moment he was currently in.
He’d left the Callis home, found his carriage, come back here…but the details of those actions? Indistinct at best.
Details of the kiss? Crisp and sharp and playing on a repeating cycle in his dizzy mind. Their background was a drum beat of guilt and shame.
He’d always been able to measure his emotions. He’d had good role models for that in his beloved parents. He didn’t let passions rise, he held them in check. Even when Angelica died, he’d turned his feelings inward, keeping them to himself because the world was bound to go on without him. Without her.
But now all that ability to control himself felt lost. All the feelings, the desires, the betrayals bubbled up, and with a curse, he swiped his hands across the top of his desk and sent papers and quills and ink bottles scattering on the floor around him. It wasn’t enough.
He thought of Isabel, looking up into his eyes. In a mask, then unmasked, with her uncle, then only with himself. He thought of how he wanted to run from her as far and as fast as he could, but also how he wanted to pin her against a wall and fuck her like a wild animal. His head throbbed with all the overwhelming and discordant desires and he strode to the sideboard. He poured himself a drink and lifted the glass to his trembling lips.
He downed it all in one gasping gulp and then pivoted to throw the glass against the wall. It shattered with a very satisfying sound, one that almost seemed to lessen the riotous emotion in his chest. He threw the next, then the next, and was about to throw a fourth when the door to his study flew open and revealed his butler, Portman, and behind him, Baldwin.
Matthew slowly lowered the glass to his side and looked around the room as they did the same. The destruction was clear and he was certain his own emotions were, too.
Baldwin stepped inside, but held up a hand to stay Portman. “That will be all for tonight.”
Portman looked past him, his face lined with concern. Matthew turned away from it, from the trouble he had created both in this room and in his life. He heard the butler murmur something to Baldwin and then the door shut.
“You left the party,” Baldwin said, his tone very careful. “It was obvious you were in a great upset. And I was the one sent to ensure you were well.”
Matthew laughed, though he felt no pleasure. “Is it not obvious? I’m right as goddamn rain.”
Baldwin sucked in a long breath. “Once upon a time, I might have expected this kind of reactionary behavior from say…Graham, or maybe Lucas? Perhaps I’d still look for it in Hugh given his mood of late. But in my friend Matthew? Never. So something very bad must have happened at that party, and I’m demanding you tell me what it is right this moment.”
Matthew faced him at last. Baldwin’s face was tight with worry. An expression he had not seen on his friend’s countenance since before he married Helena the previous year.
“You didn’t abandon your bride to come seek me out, did you?”
