Secrets of a Viscount (19 page)

He didn’t seem to notice and just moved to the other breast as easy as you please.

Isabelle brought her hands to his shoulders and gave him a slight shove. “Sebastian, stop.”

He pulled away, his wide brown eyes, dark and full of heated desire. “Is something wrong?”

“What did you mean?”

He blinked. “When?”

“Just a moment ago when you mentioned when we get home, what did you mean?”

“
Just that. When we get back to London and you’re in my bed, you can make as much noise as you’d like. But it’d be best if we didn’t bring attention to ourselves here or we’ll have a scandal.”

“
Your bed,” she repeated, a thrill of excitement shooting through her. “A-are you proposing?”

He chuckled and leaned forward to drop a single kiss between her breasts. “No.”

A hostile wave of understanding came over her, bringing a sense of shame and coldness she’d never experienced before. She suddenly was mortified to be lying half naked in front of him and covered her breasts as best she could with her hands.

“
Don’t cover yourself,” he murmured, reaching for her hand.

She recoiled. “You may go.”

“Pardon?”

“
I won’t be your mistress.”

“
I didn’t ask you to.”

“
No, you just assumed that I would. Which is worse.”

He shook his head. “I never said that, either.”

“You didn’t have to. You said you weren’t proposing. That can only leave one option: you expected me to be your mistress.” She inclined her chin. “And I will not.”

“
Are you saying you would say yes if I were to propose marriage?”

She blushed. “I might.”

“I see.” Sebastian nodded slowly and idly ran his fingertips over the skin of her abdomen. “And what would you say if I told you that we were still married?”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“Wh-what did you just say?” Isabelle asked, attempting to move away from him. The edge of her nightrail was pinned to the bed under his elbow, but that didn’t deter her long, she slipped free and scampered up to the pillows. She grabbed the counterpane and crawled underneath it, holding it to her chin.

Sebastian sat up and ran his hand through his hair. “I never signed the annulment papers.”

“Why not?”

“
Guilt.”

She winced at his words and a bitter taste filled her mouth. “So we’ve been married this entire time?” she asked in disbelief.

He nodded sending a flood of betrayal through her very marrow. Her vision blurred and she wanted nothing more than to throw him out of the room, but now that she knew this much, she needed more answers.

“
Is that why your mother left me that money? Because I was her daughter-in-law?”

“
No. That was a ploy by our fathers to get me to return and sign the papers.”

Isabelle squeezed the counterpane until her fingers went numb and blinked back the tears that stung the back of her eyes. She was nothing but a pawn. “When exactly did you think you’d tell me this? When I was walking down the aisle to Simon?”

His face grew dark. “You won’t be walking down the aisle to Mr. Appleton, Belle.”

“
And just who do you think you are to make such a declaration?”

“
Your husband,” he said with a quick grin.

She wasn’t so amused and if she wasn’t naked, she’d take the pillow in her hands and beat him senseless with it. “I want that annulment.”

He shook his head. “I don’t see why. You’ve already admitted to having the same feelings for me that I have for you.”

“
Well, I don’t have them now,” she said ignoring the hot tears that slipped from the corners of her eyes.

Sebastian lifted a brow. “You’ve changed your mind in the last thirty seconds, then?”

Mortification burned in her cheeks. “It’s time for you to leave.”

“
No.” He crossed his arms. “I want to know what’s changed your mind. Two minutes ago you were gasping my name and letting me make love to you and now you want nothing to do with me. Why?”

“
First, I was not letting you make love to me—”

“
No? I seem to remember you lying underneath me naked with your breast in my mouth and my hand—”

“
That’s enough,” she burst out in a tone that bordered on hysteria.

“
I don’t think it is,” he countered. “Why are you so upset? I’d have thought you’d be relieved to know you were about to give your virtue to your own husband.”

“
You conceited, arrogant man!”

“
I’ll admit, I’m at least one of those, but not both,” he said, presumably in an attempt to defuse the tension.

It did not.

“
Get out!”

“
No, I want to know why you are suddenly having an attack of morals.”

“
I’m not suddenly having an attack of morals,” she fired back.

“
I suppose you’re right. You did seem far more willing to share your bed with me before you knew I was your husband.”

Isabelle gasped at his cold words and sharp tone. “I did no such thing! I would have stopped.”

“When? Just as I put my—”

“
Need you be so filthy?” Scorching flames of embarrassment licked her face.

He shrugged. “I didn’t say anything that isn’t true. You might not like to hear the words, but that doesn’t make them any less true.”

No, it didn’t. The truth was, what had started out as a quest to get him to kiss her had turned into far more. “Sebastian, I didn’t intend to let things go so far.”

“
Then what did you intend to have happen when you greeted me in a seductive nightrail and rubbed your body against mine?”

She swallowed. Hard. She couldn’t deny it, as much as she might want to. “To kiss.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“
Believe what you want, but you’re the one who’s the proven liar around here.”

Fire flashed in his brown eyes. “And you’re not? I seem to remember it being your lie that started this whole disaster between us.”

She nearly flinched at his word choice. But the truth was, he was right. Everything between them had turned into one disaster after another. “You won’t mind signing the annulment papers, then.”

“
The devil I will. I don’t want an annulment any more than you do.”

“
What makes you think I don’t?” She’d willingly brave the scandal that was likely to form when all of this came to light rather than be chained to Lord Deceitful for the rest of her life.

“
Because your other marital choices are the philanderer Lord Kenton or the awkward Mr. Appleton.”

A new round of tears stung the back of her eyes. “Those are not my only choices. I could marry Sir Michael or Giles. I understand he’s in want of a wife.”

“You can’t marry any of them. You’re still my wife.” The triumphant gleam in his eyes made her heart fill with dread. What if he didn’t give her an annulment?

“
Fine, I won’t marry any of them. I’ll just take a lover. Would you prefer that? Then when all of this breaks, it can be known that not only did I fraudulently trap you into marriage, but I cuckolded you, too.”

A hard, impassive look came over his face. “How do I know that you haven’t already? You seemed quite the seductress tonight.”

“You’d be the one to know.”

He crossed his arms. “What’s that to mean?”

She scoffed. “You’re the one offering lessons on how to get a man’s attention. Surely you don’t expect me to believe you are some sort of mastermind who just naturally knows of such things.”

“
I’ve enjoyed the flirtations of a number of women while on the continent, yes,” he said, pursing his lips. “But that’s where it ended. They could drag their foot all over my body for all I cared. It changed nothing. I was married and despite what anyone else might believe of me, I might not have made my vows in good faith, but I did keep them.”

She stared at him through her watery eyes. “You—you didn’t?”

“No, I didn’t,” he snapped as if taking her meaning. “When I make promises, I don’t break them easily. Even if it’s a promise I never meant to make.” He twisted his lips in displeasure, whether at her or himself, she’d never know. “I suppose I cannot hold you to the same standard since you didn’t know we were married all this time.”

She forced a smile and a stiff, lopsided shrug. “You’ll never really know, will you?”

Something fierce lit his eyes then suddenly it was gone.

***

Sebastian didn’t believe for one second she’d already lost her virtue. Not only had she admitted to him that she hadn’t actually shared a bed with Lord Kenton, she was too inept at the art of flirtations to catch the attention of someone as lovesick as Simon.

Even so, he couldn’t understand why the devil she was so upset. He wasn’t some lecher out to steal her virtue, he was her husband and he loved her, damn it all. He froze. Love?

His heart squeezed. Yes, love. He didn’t know when or how or even why, but he was undeniably in love with his own wife! What a tangle.

“
Belle, can we talk about this please?”

“
We already did, and now it’s time for you to leave.” The hurt in her voice hit him like a punch to the stomach.

“
I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I said some very cruel things and I didn’t mean them. Can we please start again?”

Belle let out a shaky laugh. “That’s what you said when you came to my townhouse a few weeks ago. You wanted for us to be friends and start over, then you...” She trailed off and swallowed convulsively.

“Then I?”

“
Then you encouraged me to act a fool!” she burst out unevenly; those once unshed tears that filled her eyes, flowed out of her eyes in rivulets.

“
Belle, I didn’t mean to make you look a fool.”

“
Yes, you did,” she said on a sob.

“
How?” He had a feeling he already knew the answer.

“
With Simon,” she said through her tears. “You—you made me flirt with him and encourage his suit all the while knowing that I couldn’t marry him.”

“
I think that’d be a relief considering his interest in you seems to be trumped by Giles.” He felt guilt for his blunt words as soon as he’d said them, but it didn’t make them any less true.

She swiped at the tears coursing down her cheeks with the back of her delicate hands and Sebastian clenched his fists. That was his job as her husband. He was the one who was supposed to dry her tears, not make them form. “I understand his interest in me is fleeting and temperamental, but the fact is, you encouraged me to humiliate myself by throwing myself at him and all along you knew I wouldn’t marry him.”

“That’s not true. I didn’t plan for things to work out this way. I intended to sign the papers when I knew you’d make a good match.” Not to mention he never would have imagined Simon would have acted so disinterested.

“
But until I found a match you just thought to keep lying to me?”

Her question brought him up short. “Is that what this is all about?”

“Yes, ‘this’, as you so casually refer to it is because you’re a liar.”

He pursed his lips to keep himself from once again reminding her of her own lie in all of this. “Would you have preferred then that it was your former husband you were about to share intimacies with? Would that have been better?”

“I wasn’t about to share intimacies with you,” she said through gritted teeth. “I would have stopped.”

He resisted his urge to laugh. “Oh, really? I had no intention of stopping. Is that your way, then, to tease a man until it’s almost too late?”

She blinked her glistening eyes. “No. I already admitted that things went further than they should have, but the fact remains that you lied to me.”

“
I don’t see why this is a problem, Belle,” he said in frustration.

“
You wouldn’t. Everything was just fine for you. You knew all the pieces to the mystery. Why don’t you try thinking about it from my position, Sebastian? I woke up from my accident without a friend in the world, then I spent the next five years trying to start over with a modest life in the country when suddenly a windfall comes my way and changes everything.” Her voice wavered and tears gushed from her eyes. “Only the fortune really wasn’t mine, and neither was the opportunity to marry.”

“
You don’t need to marry one of them, Belle.” He reached for her hand. “You already have me.”

She pulled her hand away. “And what a pity that is. I made a simple mistake of not revealing my identity to a stranger who entered my bedchamber when I was sixteen and I ended up with a man who despises me enough to abandon me after my accident, then lies to me and encourages me to make a fool of myself in front of the whole
ton
.”

“
Are you finished recounting my sins?”

“
I don’t know if I am or not. I’m sure you have more that I don’t know about...just like our marriage.”

“
That’s the only thing I lied to you about.”

She didn’t look like she believed him, but there wasn’t anything else he could say. She was right. He was a liar. His reasons for not annulling their marriage might have seemed honorable at the time, but his lack of explanation wasn’t.

He forced himself to stand and right his clothing. “Belle, can I ask you something?” He took her sniffle as an affirmative and took a deep breath. “Had we not been married this whole time, would you have considered my proposal had I made one?”

She closed her eyes and rested her head on her drawn up knees for a moment, then lifted her head and met his eyes with her bloodshot pair and said, “I don’t know.”

He’d take that. It wasn’t the ‘yes’ he was hoping for, but it wasn’t a ‘no’, either. With one last, long look in her direction, he took his leave.