Page 17 of The Truth About Myths
"Lady Dolores and I will have dinner in our bedchamber."
Henrique gritted his teeth. "Why deprive the girl of such simple pleasures?"
Isabel glared at him. "Lady Dolores, please accompany Sophie and the porter to our room. I will join you momentarily."
The girl dropped her shoulders and sulked. "If I must heed the curtain call, I bid you good night." With a parting sigh, she dragged her feet to the stairs.
"I would appreciate it if you stopped interfering in my household." Isabel's silvery voice could cut steel.
Someone opened the restaurant door. Upbeat notes of amodinhafloated to the reception, cheery and inviting.
Isabel gasped. "Must she make a spectacle of herself?"
Henrique followed her ominous stare, expecting to see an odalisque shedding her seven veils. Inside the restaurant, a voluptuous woman danced with a coarse man. What could've shocked Isabel? The poor lady's sin lay not with her choice of conduct but with her partner.
Cool, remember? "The lady is just dancing."
Pressing her lips into an unforgiving line, Isabel averted her eyes. "A woman need not lose her virtue to dance."
Perhaps it was the long day of hearing about modistes and fashionable gossip, or that his stomach protested its emptiness, or the minor detail that Henrique's whole life had been put on hold to accommodate Isabel's wishes—whatever the catalyst, he'd had enough.
"Here is a new concept for you. Some people enjoy having fun."
"Fun can be had in less public venues."
Henrique smirked. "I assure you, it can."
"Use as many innuendos as you please. Not every woman cares about the type of fun you flaunt."
Chill and detached, Isabel behaved as if she alone belonged to a different species, immune to the principle governing all beings under the sun—seek pleasure and avoid pain. But she was wrong. Evolution overruled a barely out-of-the-schoolroom princess.
"Don't you? And must you keep your ladies from life's pleasures?"
The top of her ears went fiery red, and her nostrils flared. "Leave them out of this."
A sore point if she had any. "Why, so you can continue bullying them into doing your bidding?"
She bristled like an eagle defending her chicks. "Dolly is perfectly content, I assure you."
He snorted. "Of course. Content as a nun in a convent."
"Nuns have higher callings. At least their lives are meaningful." She gave him a pointed look.
The innuendo hit him in the chest. So she thought life as a scientist was frivolous? Henrique locked his jaw. "You are right. The ladies are better off living in your household." He leered at her, his smile showing too many teeth. "Much worse to kiss the mother superior's hands than your royal rump."
Isabel speared him with a stare deadly enough to smite a lesser man. Her alabaster skin became as red as any common Douro wine, her eyes flashing like amethysts in a jackal's statue. "Viscount Penafiel, my brother made you my escort, but he could not make you a gentleman."
She tossed her beautiful hair and stormed past him.
Panting, Henrique watched Isabel climb the stairs. Somewhere, his ancestors were hooting at his atrocious manners. Good God, she had dropped the icy breastplate, hadn't she? What a sight to behold.
Clapping came from behind him. Dio sauntered to the light. “For a second there, I thought you had lost your finesse with the ladies. Old age and all…” He drawled, cleaning tears of mirth from his eyes. “But then you ended your couplets with ‘royal rump.’ You managed alliteration, consonance, and personification, all in two words. No wonder Isabel is so smitten.”
"Shut up."
Chapter 6
"We men are wretched things."Homer,The Iliad
