“No,” Rowan replied, voice low. “He does not.”
The honesty of that struck something deep in her.
For a moment, there was no argument between them. Only the candlelight and the strange intimacy of being left alone with the man she had married, a man who could cut with silence and unsettle with a single look.
Then the Duke set down his glass.
“Your belongings have been taken upstairs,” he said. “The duchess’s chambers have been prepared for you.”
Emmeline’s hands went still in her lap. The words moved through her with a slow, spreading heat that began in her chest and descended lower.
She knew enough of great houses to understand what he meant. A duchess’s room often adjoined the duke’s. Sometimes separated by a sitting room. Sometimes by only a door.
She had to set her glass down before her hand betrayed her. “I see.”
The Duke studied her. “Do you?”
She looked up sharply, and the question changed in the air between them. It sounded like a challenge.
Her pulse began to beat too hard beneath her skin.
She thought of the wedding vows. Of the way he had looked at her in the carriage when Aaron slept against her side. Of every silent thing that had passed between them and had nowhere proper to go.
The idea of a wedding night should not have startled her. She had known what marriage meant and had prepared herself once for Foxdale with a kind of numb duty.
But this was different. The Duke was not an abstract obligation. He was real, close, and far too difficult to ignore.
“I understand the placement of rooms, Your Grace,” she said, forcing steadiness into her voice.
His gaze dropped briefly to her mouth again, and this time he did not look away quickly enough. Emmeline felt it like a touch.
“Good,” he said.
But nothing about his voice sounded simple.
The candle between them flickered, and in that brief trembling light, Emmeline understood with sudden, breathless certainty that the night ahead was not going to be quiet at all.
Chapter Twelve
It is my wedding night.
Heat flooded her chest so suddenly she recoiled from the bedside table. The prayer book lying there felt like an accusation.
Across the room, the adjoining door waited.
It was only a panel of dark wood with a brass handle that winked in the dying firelight. But to Emmeline, it felt like a living thing, a presence at her back that she could not ignore. On the other side was the Duke. Perhaps he was already undressed. Perhaps he was sitting by his own fire, his mind occupied by estates or his missing sister.
Or perhaps he was waiting for her.
She pressed a palm against her stomach, trying to steady the frantic fluttering there. But beneath the nerves, something warmer was taking root.
A reckless, forbidden curiosity.
A want so sharp it felt like a bruise.
She found herself wondering, with a vividness that made her skin prickle, what it would feel like if a man so terrifyingly controlled finally broke. She hated the wanting most of all.
Emmeline stood paralyzed until the silence of the room became unbearable. If she didn’t move now, she never would. She crossed the floor barefoot, the cool wood smooth beneath her soles, the silk of her nightgown whispering against her ankles.
