Page 24 of Duke of Moonstone
The words were out of her mouth before she had fully decided to say them, and she felt the surprise of them in her own chest, a small jolt, as though her voice had acted independently of her judgment.
The Duke stopped, but he did not turn fully; he turned partway, his shoulder still toward the hallway. His profile was caught in the candlelight as he looked at her over it with an expression she could not read—that infuriating, composed, unbreachable expression that told her nothing at all.
“We can talk then,” she said. She kept her voice firm because it was the only thing she had left to keep firm. “Properly. Over breakfast. Like civilized people who happen to be married to each other.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“As you wish,” he said.
Three words. Three perfectly ordinary, perfectly polite words, and they went through her like something warm and unexpected, a shiver that started at the base of her neck and traveled the full length of her spine before she could do a single thing to stop it.
Then he was gone. The doorway was empty. The hallway beyond it was silent, and Frances stood in the center of her bedchamber, her dressing gown clutched around her, her heart beating so hard she could feel it in her throat.
She pressed a hand flat against her chest, as though she could hold the thing still by force.
It is anger. That is all it is. He was insufferable, and I am angry, and that is the entirety of it.
She stood there for a long moment, her palm against her breastbone, her breathing uneven, and she turned the thought over carefully, examining it the way one examines a coin to determine if it is genuine.
It was not anger.
She knew what anger felt like. She had been angry at him many times—in her sister’s drawing room, at the masquerade, in the gardens. Anger was hot, sharp, and clarifying. It made her think faster, speak more precisely, and hold her ground with a certainty that left no doubt.
This was not that. This was something that caused her hands to tremble, her thoughts to lose their sharpness, and her skin to recall, with a detail she could not explain, the exact path his gaze had taken when he looked at her.
He looked at my mouth.
She pressed her hand harder against her chest.
He apologized. He said he would never do anything against my will. He said “as you wish,” and he meant it, and none of that changes the fact that he is cold and rigid and impossible, and I do not, I will not...
She crossed to the bed, sat on the edge, and looked at her hands in her lap. They were still trembling slightly, just enough for her to notice, and she curled her fingers inward, gripping them tightly. She told herself she would be perfectly fine, that this was just the strange day catching up with her, and that any woman would feel unsettled in her place. It meant nothing more than that.
Nothing at all.
But when she closed her eyes, she saw it again—the moment his gaze dropped to her lips, briefly and unguarded, and how it returned to her eyes with something behind it that was neither cold nor duty nor anything she had seen on his face before.
Something about her husband’s presence affected her in ways she was not ready to acknowledge, and that realization was more unsettling than any discussion about heirs could ever be.
CHAPTER 11
Alexander groaned and squeezed the bridge of his nose.
His head felt as if someone had filled it with lead during the night, and his eyes stung with the rawness that came from lying awake for hours staring at the ceiling. He had not slept. Or rather, he had slept in the way of a man who closed his eyes and opened them again after an indeterminate amount of time, having gained nothing but a sore neck and the growing suspicion that his pillow was plotting against him.
He walked toward the breakfast room and told himself, with the same firm authority he applied to estate management and parliamentary correspondence, that he was perfectly well.
He was not perfectly well.
I have never had trouble sleeping.Not once—not through the inheritance of a near-bankrupt dukedom at twenty, not through his father’s death, not through the rebuilding of every estate andevery alliance and every reputation that had been left in ruins. He had always been a man who put his head on the pillow and slept because sleeping was the efficient thing to do, and Alexander Moonwell was, above all things, efficient.
And then one little chit had walked into his life and set fire to all of it.
He had not meant to insult her. That was the thing that kept turning over in his mind as he moved through the hallway, his footsteps measured, his jaw tight. He had been stating a fact. The purpose of a marriage—any marriage but certainly a marriage of convenience—was to produce an heir.
That was not an opinion but the core structure of the institution, the reason it existed, and why titles, estates, and bloodlines persisted from one generation to the next. He had spoken plainly because he believed straightforward speech was a kindness, and she looked at him as if he had said something monstrous.
“Is that all I am to you? A vessel for your heir?”
