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He heard them as he and Zoe climbed the stairs.
He was aware—oh, very well aware—of his wife walking alongside him with all the light and life gone out of her, and he knew he’d killed her happiness and humor and delicious insouciance.
He told himself she was making too much of it. The trouble was, he knew why she made so much of it.
Her freedom was precious to her, far more precious than it was to other Englishwomen, who simply took it for granted, the way he’d taken his servants and his smoothly running household for granted.
He remembered what she’d said that first day, after she’d proposed to him and he’d declined.
I was married from the time I was twelve years old, and it seemed a very long time, and I would rather not be married again straightaway.
Yet she had married again, straightaway, because he’d lacked the will to resist temptation.
She’d never had a chance to be courted by other men.
She’d never had a chance to decide for herself which of them she truly wanted.
He’d wanted her, and he’d had to have her, and that was that.
Still, he’d hardly condemned her to a life of misery. Being married to him offered more freedom than most other women had, including other aristocratic women. No doors were closed to the Duchess of Marchmont. She would never lack for money to buy whatever she wanted. She could still flirt with other men and dance with them.
And she could go where she pleased, to a point.
Until tonight.
I want fun, she’d told him that day in Hyde Park after she’d raced with Lady Tarling. I want a life. In Egypt I was a toy, a game. I was a pet in a cage. I vowed never to endure such an existence again.
He watched her enter her apartments, then he walked on to his.
He told Ebdon he would not be going out this evening, and ordered a bath. The odor of Bow Street seemed to cling to his skin as well as his clothes.
The bath should have calmed him. It didn’t.
The new valet had laid out a clean shirt, pantaloons, and stockings. The duke stood and gazed at them for a long time. He felt so weary, suddenly, not in his body but in his mind and heart, as though he’d carried a great burden, inside, for an endless time.
“Give me my dressing gown,” he said.
He didn’t bother with the clothes readied for him, to be worn under his damask dressing gown: the full costume of “undress.” He shrugged his naked body into his dressing gown and slid his bare feet into his slippers. The maroon leather mules had pointed, upturned toes, in imitation of Turkish fashion.
Like a pasha’s. Like the men in another world, who kept their women caged.
“Plague take me,” he said.
“Your Grace?” Ebdon was obviously baffled. He bore his confusion like a man, however. No weeping or fainting or trembling. Merely a slight crease between his brows.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” Marchmont said.
He left the dressing room, crossed his bedroom to the connecting door, and walked in.
He found his wife in her bath, her face on her arm, resting on the linens draping the tub. She was weeping.
“Oh, Zoe,” he said.
She’d been so lost in misery that she hadn’t heard him approach—another bad sign. She was losing her old skills. She didn’t care. She was too wretched to care. She loved him, and she wanted to be a good wife. She knew he only wanted to protect her—but she couldn’t bear this, to have the walls close in on her again, so soon.
She wiped her eyes and looked up at him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know it’s mad to feel this way, but I can’t help it.”
He simply reached down and lifted her up, out of the bathtub. He grabbed a towel and wrapped it about her, then he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close. He buried his face in her damp hair.
“You’re all I have left,” he said. “You’re all I have left.”
His voice was hoarse, broken.
“Lucien,” she said, her face against his chest.
“You’re all I have left, Zoe,” he said. “They’re all gone—everyone I ever loved. Gone forever. You, too, I thought. But you weren’t. You came back from the dead—and if I lose you, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
She held him tightly, as tightly as she could.
His parents. His brother. Gone.
He’d had her family, but it wasn’t the same.
Everyone I ever loved.
You, too, I thought.
She was one of them, one of the loved.
Loved. He loved her.
It was as simple as that.
Her heart lifted, the way it always used to do when she caught sight of him, when Lucien came back from school to spend the summer with them. When he came, her world brightened.
“Lucien,” she said softly. She had learned Latin and Greek, and she knew lux was the Latin for “light.” Her heart lifted, because he was the light of her life and had been from the first day she met him. “Oh, Lucien, we’re both a little mad.”
“No,” he muttered into her hair. “You’re the mad one. I’m completely sane.” He lifted his head and drew away a little and looked down at her. “Let’s get you out of that wet towel.”
He got her out of the wet towel and dried her off with another one, in front of the fire.
He played lady’s maid, kneeling before her, the towel in his hand. He lifted one slim foot onto his thigh and gently dried it, and she shivered.
He looked up, and there she was, all creamy skin with touches of pink in the special places, and a dusting of gold between her legs. She was all curving womanliness, and she was looking down at him, her blue eyes filled with something he couldn’t put a name to. How could he, when he’d never troubled to read a woman’s gaze?
In her case, perhaps, he didn’t need to. Perhaps, after all, they simply understood each other. Perhaps they always had.
He slid his hands up from her foot, up along her calf to her knee and along her thigh, and up, to the downy place she had so many names for.
“Your Golden Flower,” he murmured, lightly drawing his hand over the feathery curls, still damp after her bath. “Your Palace Of Delight.”
“My Secret Abode,” she said. She slid her fingers into his hair. “My Hidden Treasure and my Throne of Love and my Lion’s Head.”
“Your Lion’s Head?” He caressed her so lightly.
She made names for the caresses, too: the Teasing Feather and the Gentle Glove and the Fire Touch.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “This part of me is very dangerous when hungry for lovemaking.”
She combed his hair with her fingers. “My lover’s hair is like silken candlelight,” she said softly. “My lover is the candlelight in the night and the first rays of the sun on the horizon and the last rays, too. My lover is my light.”
He looked up, his gaze locking with hers. “I had better be this lover you’re talking about,” he said.
She laughed and let go of him. She stretched her arms above her head, stretched like a cat, and he watched her beautiful breasts lift. She was completely at ease in her body, in her nakedness.
How could he think of stifling a soul so free?
“My lover leaps upon me, like a tiger,” she said.
He caught hold of her buttocks and pressed his mouth to her Hidden Treasure, and he felt her tremble.
He caressed her with his mouth and his tongue and felt her fingers tighten in his hair while her body vibrated with pleasure.
