Well, now she had to find her voice, for it was clear he expected some kind of response beyond gaping at him like a fish out of water. She swallowed hard and forced herself to say, “I think you knew I would.”
“Drink?” he asked, motioning to a little table in his sitting room. There was a bottle of scotch there.
Normally she was not a fan, but in that moment, she needed liquid courage. “Yes,” she squeaked.
He moved to the table and poured them each a portion, then turned back to hand over the glass. When she’d taken it, he tilted it toward her in salute. “To tonight.”
Her scotch sloshed as she tried to make it reach her lips. She hated herself for revealing how nervous this made her.
“Katherine,” he said, setting his glass aside without drinking. He moved closer and took her glass, too, placing it beside his and taking her hands. “Relax.”
She blinked up at him, outlined in firelight. Standing in his chamber, he felt so big. So all-encompassing. All the emotions she’d ever felt toward him crowded in together, shouting for her attention and memory. And above it all was the loudest voice that screameddesireandwhoreat once.
When his hands gripped hers, when his thumbs smoothed over her flesh gently, the cacophony faded a little. She swallowed. “How can I?” she asked.
“Sit down, please,” he said, drawing her toward the settee in the middle of his antechamber.
She blinked in confusion. The door to his bedroom was in her line of vision behind his head. She could see the bed over his shoulder. And yet he wasn’t hustling her in there to get this job done. It was very confusing.
“You must be filled with regret asking a ninny such as me to come to your chamber in the middle of the night,” she said, turning her face.
“On the contrary, I am very happy you came,” he said. “I worried as the night went on that you had changed your mind.”
“I almost did,” she admitted. “I stood in my chamber for three-quarters of an hour after the party retired, trying to convince myself what to do. You can see my wanton side won out in the end.”
He frowned and his dark gaze searched her face carefully, closely. She tensed beneath the unexpected regard that had nothing to do with desire. There was something else there. Something she didn’t want to experience or see.
He drew a breath and touched her chin, tilting her face so she was looking at him. Then he asked her a question she would never have expected in all her life. A question she had been avoiding for months.
A question he had no right to ask and yet he did, his face close to hers.
“Katherine, what did he do to you?”
Beneath his fingers, Katherine jolted, and Robert watched as her facial expression went utterly flat. It was a defense mechanism, of course. He’d seen her use it in the ballroom the first night she reentered Society. Put up a shield to the pain.
But he knew from bitter experience that the shield didn’t soothe the underlying agony. It just kept the world out, for good or for bad.
“Why do you want to know abouthim?” she asked. He noted she didn’t seek clarification. There was only one him.
He shifted. It was a good question. This entire endeavor, the pursuit of this woman, it was for his pleasure. And his ego, if he recalled the wager that seemed so far away. He was not meant to dig deeper. He never did. And yet here he was, pressing her to develop the connection.
Thewhywas more complicated than he was willing to admit. Not even to himself.
“You want something from me,” he explained softly. “And I want to give it to you, more than you could possibly understand. If I understand your physical past better, then it will help me understand your needs, as well.”
“And use what I tell you against me.” Her chin tilted up, defiant, accusatory. “How could Ievertrust you?”
He bent his head closer, drawing in that cinnamon scent. Driven by a need to know more about her even if that scared the hell out of him. “I swear to you on—”
She interrupted him with a laugh that cut through the quiet. She backed away. “There is nothing you could ever swear on, Your Grace.”
He pressed his lips together. “My mother,” he said softly, letting the pain rip through him when he said those two tiny words. When he thought of the woman who’d loved him, just not quite enough that she’d stayed. “Gone for far too long and much beloved. I swear to you on my mother that whatever you tell me here in this chamber will die with me.”
Her lips parted and she looked at him with a bit of new understanding. He wasn’t sure he liked that. No one truly understood what he’d been through. Even his friends only knew snippets. Not the worst of it. Never the worst. He had never been able to say that out loud.
She sighed, the sound shuddering from her lips. He saw her soften in emotional surrender. It was better than the physical to watch her walls come down. Well, almost as good anyway.
She reached over to the table and took one of the glasses of scotch. She sipped it and then said. “I was forced to marry him.”
