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“My wife will never take a lover,” he told her, keeping his voice even. No one—no one—sparked his temper the way Torie did. Those idiots in the House of Lords had nothing on her.

Torie shrugged, fanning his irritation. “It’s up to you. If you satisfy yourself in someone else’s bed, why shouldn’t I? It’s only fair. Logical.”

“That isn’t how it’s done.”

“I don’t give a damn how it’s done,” she flared. “When you tire of our bed and caper in some other woman’s chamber, you can be damn certain that I will issue an invitation to mine.”

“We will share a bedchamber,” Dominic snarled, his voice ragged. “You’ll sleep with me every night, so I know where you are.”

She scowled at him. “I’m not the unfaithful one. You are.”

Dominic was fighting the conviction that no wife should command her husband’s private life. It was shameful. Raw emotion caught him by the throat, an offensive experience.

“No one tells me what to do,” he stated.

Torie raised an eyebrow. “Maturity often brings new experiences,” she said coolly. “I am merely informing you of the consequences of your own actions, so you understand them.” She leaned forward and caught his eyes.

“If you ever humiliate me the way you did last night, flaunting your diamond-clad mistress before my acquaintances, you will never know who fathered your children. I am not my sister, reluctant to damage her reputation as a perfect lady. Think of me as more akin to your sister!”

Dominic’s face closed like a steel trap. “Humiliate you?” he repeated, his voice grating.

“Vauxhall?” she demanded.

His heart skipped a beat, curses rocketing through his head.

“Those gossip columns you claim to know nothing about?” she fired at him. “You and your Italian friend will be front and center in every single one this morning. Luckily for me, I can’t read them—but then, I have no need to. I’ve already heard from one friend, and I’m sure many more will give me their condolences. They will wait until tomorrow, at our wedding!”

Dominic digested that with a stab of remorse. No, a tidal wave of remorse. He’d been an idiot. Again.

“You were intentionally disrespectful of me and our impending wedding,” Torie said scathingly.

“I had no such intention,” he said, voice rasping. “I suppose people showed particular interest because of the wedding.” What in the hell had he been thinking? He hadn’t been thinking. Hadn’t thought clearly in days, to be honest. He had been too focused on Torie, which was ironic now.

“Precisely the same interest they paid us at the theater, so don’t pretend that you didn’t anticipate it,” she retorted. “I told you long ago that reporters dog your mistress.” Fury vibrated in her voice. “The fact that you bedecked that woman in diamonds and took her to Vauxhall—which is regularly attended by the fashionable world, including myself—was fascinating to all.”

Color had ebbed from her face, leaving crimson lips against skin that was the precise shade of wallpaper paste.

Gianna had summoned him to Vauxhall, and he had thought . . . well, it didn’t matter what he thought, because he hadn’t considered the consequence. Torie was furious, but more than that, she was shamed, her eyes raw with humiliation.

“Yes, this does feel worse than being labeled a silly butterfly,” she said, confirming his thought. “Oh God, I wish I had married Queensberry. He would never have done this.”

The longing in her voice shattered Dominic’s haze of self-condemnation. His brain snapped into cold calculations, precisely as it did when he was thwarted in debate. He’d fucked up. For a moment, he considered Gianna’s motives for asking him to meet her in Vauxhall—and pushed that thought away.

Torie was looking at him like an enemy. That skewered him through the gut. In the last few months, he’d felt as if he’d made a friend for the first time in his life. They didn’t agree on much, but he enjoyed skirmishes over the Odyssey far more than fights over moral issues in Lords that felt, to him, as if only one side was ethical.

Now that friend was justifiably looking at him with a combination of distaste, disappointment, and rage.

“We are due to marry tomorrow morning,” she told him. “I’ll offer you a choice. Either we break it off here, or we wait to consummate the marriage until you are finished with your other relationship and free to concentrate on your wife.”

His eyes narrowed. Choice? It was an order. That maddening thought battled with the equally maddening hunger for her that turned his bones to molten lead. The pulse of it beat in his blood, in his bones—in his groin.

At the same time, his pride was outraged. His manhood. He could hear his father’s harsh voice in his mind, squawking with laughter at any man who let himself be dictated to by a woman, especially by a wife.

“That is not a choice, but an ultimatum.”

Her chin took on the challenging slant that had grown familiar. Her willful mouth tightened in the corners.

“An ultimatum would be if I insisted you discharge your mistress before we marry. I am giving you a choice. At some point, you may become tired of champagne for breakfast and feel like joining your wife for a simple cup of tea. Or you may not. Until then, I shall remain your nanny, which is, by the way, how you treat me when you aren’t kissing me. There will be no kissing the nanny in dark corners.”