Page 35 of Wedded to the Beastly Duke
“Emmeline,” he snapped, and she realized she had been sightlessly staring into his face. “Wipe that expression off your face. And go inside before the sun does any permanent damage to your skin.”
Snatching up his waistcoat and coat, he stalked inside, leaving her little choice but to follow him.
* * *
Adam stared at his ravaged back in the full-length mirror in his bedchambers. Her face had said everything she had not. Shock, horror, perhaps even some disgust.
He had been foolish to assume he could ever be fully intimate with her. When he eventually visited her, he would have to keep his shirt on. Let her assume the Navy was the cause of his scars—it was better that way. Punishment within the Navy could be harsh, and although he had never been flogged, it was not outside the realms of possibility that he might have been, position and title be damned.
The scars ached with phantom pain, and he could almost imagine the rod being brought down, splitting his skin. For weeks, he had been unable to sleep on his back. Servants had bound the skin together, changed his dressings, and given him salves.
His mother, too, had cared for him, excusing his father in ways he hated to think about. She had always loved him, or at least the man she had wanted him to be. Too soft-hearted for his own good.
At least Emmeline is in no danger of loving me.
There was no chance any woman could love him after the way he had treated her.
He shrugged on a robe, crossed to the bed and climbed in, wondering if Emmeline was under the covers in her bedchamber. Knowing she was there, just one room away, was proving to be a temptation he was hard-pressed to resist.
Today, after she had seen his scars and he had lost his temper in the garden, was not the right time. But he would have her soon.
He just had to wait a little longer for her to be ready for him.
ChapterEleven
In the three weeks Emmeline had been at the Duke’s house, she had gone out of her way to prove to him that she was unsuited to being his wife. Nothing had worked.
Now, with his constant disappearances and the scars on his back, she found that not only did she want his attention so she could persuade him to send her back home, but she wanted to know more about him.
When she found herself in the east wing, she told herself that the only reason she was breaking one of his rules was to push the bounds of his temper and finally convince him to send her packing.
Part of her, however, was curious about what secrets he was hiding. Perhaps she would find a mad wife hidden away somewhere, or his dead brother still alive in some attic room, chained up so Adam could inherit.
No, she didn’t believe Adam was capable of that. But there were some secrets hiding in this expansive house, she was certain of it, and she would find out what they were even if it killed her.
Not, of course, that she expected Adam to kill her for trespassing. But he would likely be very angry. This was one of the rules—one of the only rules, in fact—he had established when she had become his wife.
But one of the conditions of joining his household was that shenotbreak his rules, so surely that, for him, would be a deal-breaker.
She came across the door on the second floor where Adam had found her the first week she had come to the castle. Then, she hadn’t known what she was doing, but now she pushed it open with an air of trepidation.
This part of the castle felt older than the rest, as though it had been the first thing built and everything else had been constructed around it. The wooden floor underneath her feet was uneven, her feet catching on the protruding floorboards, and there was a hushed air in the corridor. The walls were largely plain, only ever adorned by the occasional portrait of a lady Emmeline stopped to look at.
She was beautiful, undeniably so, and many of the portraits displayed her wearing clothes that were twenty years out of fashion. She had blonde hair, unlike the Duke’s, but she had the same blue eyes that appeared to pierce Emmeline from the canvas.
This was, undoubtedly, his mother.
She knew little of his mother, save for the fact she was now deceased, but the regular portraits made her wonder. This entire wing felt a little like a shrine to her. Perhaps she had once lived in this section of the house, sewing by the fire, speaking with the servants and bearing her children in one of the upper bedchambers.
Curiosity, now, more than her plan, had Emmeline moving forward. This wing, this part of the house that felt more like a castle than a manor, held the secrets to her new husband’s past.
But she would have to be quiet, or else she would attract his attention before she had finished her exploration.
When she came to a set of stairs that were now stone, she didn’t hesitate a moment before taking them. Like the wooden floor, they were old and worn, dipping in the middle where footsteps had worn them down. She rested her hand on the banister as she climbed up.
The next floor was dimmer, the windows smaller and the walls thick. There was some evidence here that there had been some restoration work done, the paint and plaster here fresher than it had been in the rest of the house.
No wallpaper. Odd, given how the rest of the house had been papered over, as matched the current style. This part of the house felt separate from time, as though it existed outside of it.
