“It is not strange at all. For three years, I was not allowed to feel anything. Now, I have felt everything in the space of ten minutes. I think I am owed a moment on the floor.”
He almost smiled. “Take as many moments as ye need.”
“I intend to.” She paused. “Edward?”
“Aye?”
“Thank you. For not asking permission.”
“I asked three times.”
“You asked if I was sure. That is different from asking permission. Permission implies I need to justify myself. You were checking that I wanted to be here. I did. I do.”
He said nothing. But his hand found hers on the carpet, his painted fingers lacing through hers. They lay there like that,connected, quiet, while the fire burned down and the clock ticked.
Then she turned to him with a look on her face that he had not seen before. A look caught between mischief and confession. And he knew, before she opened her mouth, that whatever she was about to say was going to change everything.
CHAPTER 17
“Imight give you an heir after all, if that is what it feels like.”
He became serious immediately. The warmth left his face, and a wall came down behind his eyes.
“Do not say that. I do not want one. And ye should never say that again.”
She rolled her eyes. “Do not worry. I am not a woman, so I cannot give you one anyway.”
He looked at her. His fingers, the same fingers that had just been inside her, rose to his mouth. He tasted them slowly while holding her gaze the entire time.
“Ye taste plenty woman to me, Duchess.”
Heat flooded her face, neck, and every other part of her.
He raised an eyebrow. “It does not make any sense,” he added. “What ye told me about the physician. About yer courses.”
She looked at him. She could not help it. The smirk came out of its own accord, rising from wherever it had been hiding for three years, surfacing like a fish that had been waiting at the bottom of a deep pool for the right moment to break the surface.
It was the full smirk. The one that used to make her father groan, her brothers hide their valuables, and Caroline lock her bedroom door.
“That is because it was a lie,” she confessed. “I told Gordon I was barren, so he would never touch me. Mary helped me hide the truth. Nobody knew. That is how I remained a virgin, even though I was married for three years.”
He stared at her.
She watched it sink in. The truth. The scope of it. Three years of performance. A fabricated medical condition. A maid recruited and trusted with a secret that could have gotten them both punished. A husband who controlled every aspect of her existence, deceived by a nineteen-year-old girl who was smarter, braver, and more ruthless than he had ever imagined.
He blinked. And then he laughed.
Not the short, controlled laugh she had heard from him before. Not the almost-laugh that moved the corner of his mouth. But a real laugh. Full, startled, and warm. It transformed his whole face.
The hard lines softened. His eyes crinkled at the corners. He looked younger, like a man who had just been presented with the most extraordinary piece of intelligence he had ever received and who could not decide whether to be impressed or terrified or both.
“Ye lied to him,” he chuckled. “For three years.”
“Every single day.”
“And he believed it.”
“He had no reason not to. I was nineteen and terrified. I was shaking when I told him. He assumed the shaking was from shame, but it was not. It was a performance.”
