“My what?” she asked him as she frowned deeply.
“Your letter.” Something in his tone made the room tilt.
She thought deeply and felt as though there had been an arrangement between them, one she had failed to honor.
“I do not know what you mean or what you are talking about.”
“Oh, I think you do.”
Iris opened her mouth, then closed it. Her mind moved backward until she remembered, and the blood left her face so quickly that her fingertips chilled.
“No,” she rasped as she spun around to face him.
Blaise did not move.
“No,” she said again, and this time it was not denial but horror. She looked around as if the letter might appear on the table through sheer force of shame. “I completely forgot I had written that.”
Iris felt completely humiliated. She had written what no respectable woman wrote. She had poured onto paper the things she could scarcely admit to Blaise and certainly not in daylight. She had addressed them to him, whose hands had already taught her how little she knew of herself.
“Iris.”
She shut her eyes, allowing his voice to roll over her. The letter seemed to unfold inside her skull, and each line was bright with disgrace. Her throat tightened.
“I did not mean—” she began.
“Do not lie to me and do not feel ashamed.” The gentleness in his voice made it worse.
She looked at him then. His face held no mockery. That unsettled her more than cruelty would have done. He stood before her as the Duke of Knoxford, black-haired, broad-shouldered, scarred and impossible, yet his attention had narrowed until there was nothing in the room but her. She had wanted that attention. She had written that too.
Even your voice haunts me, and I find myself looking forward to you praising me.
A terrible heat rose beneath her skin.
“You wrote something you are ashamed of.”
Her breath caught.
“You intended to give it to me, then lost your nerve or your memory, though I suspect both serve the same master.”
Iris could not tell him that it was not shame but the ever-growing humiliation that filled her.
“Do not pretend to see me so plainly.”
His fingers came to her hair and gathered one honey-colored strand that had slipped loose near her cheek. His touch waslight, and it reminded her body of the weight of his hand in her hair as she knelt before him. She remembered the heat of his gaze while he sketched her, and how cold his eyes could appear until desire lit behind them and made them almost unbearable to look into.
“Iris,” Blaise broke the overbearing silence, “would you like a taste of the red room?”
Her heart seemed to stop. The room around them lost its edges, and the faint shift of fabric under her own fingers competed with his breathing.
She stepped back.
Blaise let the strand of hair slip free, and he did not follow.
“I said a taste,” he murmured. “Not a sentence. Nor a trap. Nor anything you do not choose. All you have to do is say yes.”
Her back met the table. She had retreated only a pace, but it felt further.
“I cannot,” she said. “The week is not yet over.”
