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Dominic jumped down, thinking that he should bury the memory of his father mocking his dimples, along with the memory of everything else that benighted man had ever said.

He walked around the locomotive into a courtyard littered with paints and easels. His wife was standing before an easel, wearing a pinafore over her nightgown, hair in a messy plait.

He strode toward her, feeling an acute, sharp longing that would be with him for life.

“Hello, Dom,” Torie said quietly, putting her paintbrush into a jar.

“We have to—” he said.

“We must—” Torie began at the same moment.

They both stopped.

“My father often excoriated me for being a fool,” Dom said. “That is not an excuse for what I said to you. But I hope it is an explanation. I am more used to my father’s unkind language than the opposite.”

Her response was . . . a growl. She looked infuriated and understanding at once. He was already in love with her, but he tumbled even deeper, because she was still angry with him, but she was also livid at his father. Somehow, magically, he caught both those emotions in her eyes at once.

Dominic stepped forward and brought her hands to his mouth, the fragrance of turpentine making him irrationally happy. “I promised myself that I will not only try to do better; I will do better.”

“Perhaps we should just put our first marital fight behind us,” Torie said. She gently pulled her hands from his and slung her arms around his neck, reaching up to brush her lips over his.

A groan broke from his throat. “Darling.”

“Kiss me,” she whispered.

But Dominic felt anguished to his bone marrow, and kissing would merely delay the conversation they needed to have. “Do you remember what I thought was the bedrock of any relationship?” he asked instead, eyes searching her face. “The one attribute I hoped my wife would have.”

Her brows drew together. “Fidelity?” she guessed, stepping back. “I have never had the slightest improper thought about Langlois, Dom.”

“It was honesty. That replaced all my foolish notions of what I wanted in a wife.”

Chapter 39

Torie barely stopped herself from gaping at her husband. “I haven’t lied to you.” She realized she was tugging on her braid and looked down at her clothing in dismay. She had slept poorly, lying awake thinking of the moment when she told Dom that she could never love him.

That had been a lie.

Loving him was like breathing: she couldn’t stop doing it, no matter how much she wished she’d fallen in love with a gentle duke.

She wanted her ferocious, burly viscount, with his fiery eyes and even fierier rhetoric.

“Do you mind if we go upstairs?” she asked. “I don’t want to be caught in my nightgown by the duke, who rises early.”

Dominic glanced down at her bare toes, then nodded. He followed her silently into the huge, echoing entry hall of Huntington Grange.

“The duke roasted a wild boar in that fireplace,” Torie said, desperately trying to figure out why her husband was accusing her of dishonesty. She rarely lied. She’d had enough of prevarication in her first Season, while pretending that she could read.

They climbed the stone steps leading to the first floor of the old castle, then turned right and walked down a windy corridor and through a door that had been unceremoniously knocked in the stone, leading to a newer building.

Not new, since Torie thought it might date back to the current duke’s grandfather, but at least it wasn’t medieval.

Up another flight of stairs, then around a circular flight of stone steps leading to her bedroom. Their bedroom, if her husband recovered his temper.

Torie walked in. “I have no chairs.”

Dominic stood in the doorway, his eyes traveling from the cobwebby ceiling high above them, to the shuttered windows, to the huge bed that jutted from one rounded wall. The only other furniture was a rickety-looking table holding a basin and a soap dish.

“It is an insult to place my viscountess in this dusty attic,” he snarled, eyes flaring, clearly about to pull out his rapier and stomp downstairs to blast the duke for disrespecting his wife.