She pushed aside her feelings on that subject and turned into a long hallway. There she stopped. It was a portrait gallery, and her heart leapt. She’d already seen Matthew’s miniatures of his parents and Ewan the previous night, little glimpses of the happy childhood he seemed to have experienced. But here she would see generations of the men and women he had come from. She would see his nose and eyes and smile on a dozen faces and trace them back to him.
She stepped out and looked up and down the high walls at each portrait. Some were serious faces, some were kind. There were men with medals pinned to their chests and ladies with dogs piled on their laps and children in their arms. She couldn’t help but smile at each one and wonder at their lives.
That smile fell when she reached the far end of the hall. There, in a place of honor on the wall, between a portrait of Matthew and another of Charlotte and Ewan…was Angelica.
She did not recognize the portrait. It was not the same as the one that hung in her uncle’s parlor as the centerpiece of his shrine to his late daughter. She tilted her head and examined her cousin’s face a bit closer.
“Isabel.”
She turned and found Matthew standing behind her. He had approached her so silently that she hadn’t even realized he was there. But now he stared too. Right at the woman he had loved. The only one he’d ever truly wished to marry.
“She was lovely,” Isabel said, returning her attention to the portrait.
“She was,” he said. “I had commissioned that as a gift for her, to be given to her after we wed. Of course, it…it never happened.”
She flinched at the life he had planned for her cousin. The one Isabel had now stepped into thanks to a series of deceits that hung between them. And questions. So many questions.
“What happened, Matthew?” she asked, voicing the one question that had launched everything between them. Everything her uncle had done.
“That night?” he asked, his tone stiff and cold.
She faced him and found he was standing ramrod straight and looked not at Angelica anymore, but at her. His face was unreadable, his gaze hooded.
“Yes,” she said.
“Wondering if I killed her?” he asked, turning away.
She watched as he started down the hall, and a sudden and irrepressible anger that he would dismiss her so callously rose in her.
She pursued him in a few long strides and caught his arm, turning him to face her by sheer force of will. His eyes went wide. “No,” she snapped. “Thatisn’twhat I’m saying and it is unfair of you to accuse me of such a thing and then walk away. You seem to forget that my life has been blown apart, just as yours has. I have a right to wonder why.”
He arched a brow. “Has it been blown apart, Isabel? You’ve married a duke. That seems an elevation.”
Her lips parted at the cruel jab. At the coldness with which he said it. She released his arm and backed away, shaking her head with every step. “How little you think of me. I already had a marriage with a man who did not desire me. Now I am with one who doesn’t like me, let alone want me.”
His brow wrinkled. “You think I don’t want you? You don’t know what I want, Isabel. For weeks all I’ve thought about is you. Even when I didn’t know your identity, I’ve never felt anything like it. Feral and hot, dangerous. And I hate it.”
She flinched and turned her face. “Hate me.”
“No, not you.” He moved closer, covering the distance she had created. “You enthrall me, interest me, captivate me. You slept in my arms last night and it felt right. And wrong.”
She stared at him. She’d never thought he would say these things to her. Passionate things, words that expressed a deep conflict within him. A conflict that gave her hope as much as it birthed pure terror in her soul.
“Answer me this,” she said. “Do youtrulythink I created this situation, either to further my uncle’s agenda or to improve my own situation?”
He swallowed. “You defended me passionately at our wedding supper, in front of a room full of people. I saw how humiliated you were by having to face off with your uncle in that forum. But there are times I just…don’t know.”
She moved closer and lifted trembling hands to his face. He let her touch him. When she did, he let out a low and ragged sigh. Like he’d been waiting for this moment all day. She had been, too.
“I didn’t have anything to do with what he arranged,” she said softly, then leaned up to brush her lips to his.
When she pulled away, he stared at her. His pupils were dilated and his breath short and unsteady. Then he caught her hand and dragged her up the hall, past Angelica’s staring portrait, into a room that she had not yet explored. Another parlor in a long series of parlors.
He pushed the door shut and tugged her into his arms. She fell against his chest, lifting her mouth to his hungry one as the heat between them, sharpened by their argument, swelled to an inferno. He tugged at her clothes, unfastening buttons, dragging fabric up and down as he shoved her onto the closest settee. She pulled him down on top of her, fumbling for the placard on his trousers and the cock that strained beneath it.
She opened her legs as he tugged her drawers off and tossed them aside. His fingers found her sex and he stroked there, opening her, spreading the wetness across her as his breath grew increasingly ragged.
With difficulty, she finally freed his cock and took him in hand. One stroke, two, and then he crushed his mouth to hers as he lifted her hips and thrust deep into her body. She cried out at the invasion, sweet and hot and animal. He pounded into her, taking and taking, claiming like it would leave a permanent mark. Perhaps it would. She started to shake as he ground harder, his pelvis stroking hers on every deep thrust.
