She moved around his chamber, her hands shaking as she looked at the miniatures on his table. He and Ewan, portraits his mother had done when they were boys. His mother. His father.
Then she turned and faced his bed. His big, comfortable bed that felt so bright and ready in the firelight. She reached out and touched the coverlet, dragging her fingers along the soft cotton fabric with a shiver.
“I am nervous,” she said at last.
He wrinkled his brow. “We have done this before, you know.”
“I know. But when we did, I wore a mask. And there weren’t so many questions between us. Just the desire, nothing more.”
He frowned. He wasn’t so sure she was right about that. There had always been questions between them. And always more than desire, even though the truth of it was hard for him to accept.
He stepped forward. “Would it make it easier for you if we talked about some of those questions before we…proceed?”
She jerked her face up and met his eyes. The moment between them seemed to stretch for an eternity and then she nodded. “If you want to ask them, please do.”
He cleared his throat. A thousand things rushed up in his mind, a thousand facts and lies he wanted to sort out. But the one that fell from his lips surprised even him.
“Why did you come to the Donville Masquerade?”
Isabel blinked at the question. She’d thought he’d ask about her uncle or her cousin. Or talk to her about the uncouth outburst she had created at his table not twenty minutes before.
“That is what you want to know?” she asked. “We have talked about it before.”
“But as you said, when we did you wore a mask. I’m not asking Miss Swan. I’m asking Isabel now. I’m asking because I want to know aboutyou.”
She let out a sigh. “Very well. Though it isn’t a very interesting story.”
He arched a brow. “How a gentlewoman ended up in a sex club in the underground? I think it is.”
She laughed despite the discomfort and uncertainty of the situation. Matthew had the unique power to do that, to bleed out some of the tension that always seemed to rise between them. And to make her comfortable when she ought not to be.
“My husband was very…old,” she began. “You know that, we’ve spoken of it before. My father wanted me to marry a man with means and position in our little Society, and Gregory had both. But he was not…gentle with me. Or caring. It was a flip of my nightgown and a few half-hearted grunts and that was all. Sometimes I got a flutter of something more, of some pleasure, but if I wanted that, I had to find it with my own hand. In secret.”
She watched as Matthew’s jaw set in anger. Not at her, she didn’t think. At her late husband. And why not? Matthew was a man who always tended to her pleasure before he thought of his own. In his mind, a man who only thought of himself was entirely ungentlemanly.
“You were alone, despite your marriage,” he said softly.
“Yes,” she said, her voice cracking with the painful truth of that statement. “And then he died. He’d been sick all along, but it was sudden. And I was free. Except not. Within a month or so, his heirs from his first marriage swept in and pushed me out. My uncle took me in.”
He stiffened. “For his own purposes?”
The question made her ponder that. Right now it was hard to recall if Fenton had always had his own goals in mind. But when she pushed past her pain, she could remember.
“Just as you are not what he thinks, he is not entirely what you believe,” she said gently. “He was very kind when I came to him. We could talk and spend time together. I tried to make him laugh, though I failed more often than I succeeded.”
She shook her head at the wave of sadness that overwhelmed her with those memories. Where had that man gone? Had his desire for revenge taken him entirely? Or was he still inside the shell of her uncle?
“You were happy there.” There was no censure in Matthew’s tone. She was glad for it. After all, he had every right to judge her uncle and her.
“I was, for a time. But the longer I stayed, the more he mentioned that one day I would marry again. That he would arrange for something. Something that would benefit me. Only I knew the kind of benefit he meant.”
“Financial. Positional,” Matthew said.
She nodded. “After months of a little freedom, I was slapped in the face by the prospect of another loveless, empty marriage. And I was terrified. I couldn’t sleep, I used to roam the halls, and that’s when—”
She cut herself off, for the next part of her story was the most scandalous of all. She’d never stated it out loud, not even to Sarah.
“Tell me,” he said, and he closed the distance between them. He reached out and took her hand, his warm fingers massaging her palm. Perhaps he meant it to be comforting, but it was not that. Arousing was a better word. As his thumb caressed her palm, she felt her body grow heavy and wet.
