Duke of Desire (Maiden Lane #12)(20)

Perhaps because she felt the intimacy of this moment, just the two of them in the darkened room.

“No.” He sank back into the pillows and fixed his eyes on her, sitting there beside his bed. The awful blackness seemed to loom so close behind her, but she held it back. The single candle made a nimbus around her face, so bright he had to squint.

“Shall I read to you?” She picked up a book from the table beside the bed, a small volume, and turned to a marked page.

He nodded.

She began reading, but though he could hear her voice, the words tangled themselves around his brain and disintegrated into dust.

He should try to understand what she read, but the effort seemed too large at the moment.

So he simply watched her, sitting by him, her pink lips moving, her voice trickling through him like sweet light. The room was quiet. The demons at bay for the moment.

The feeling was very much like peace.

And then he fell back into the dreams …





Chapter Five




“Well, then, we must steal El’s heart fire back from the shades,” Ann said.

“Ah, lass, if it were such an easy thing, do you not think I would’ve done it afore now?” cried her father. “’Tis said that no one but the Rock King can venture into the land of the flinty shades.” “Then I’ll go and ask the Rock King,” said Ann.…

—From The Rock King





The shout startled Iris awake, her heart beating as if it would shake itself from her chest.

The duke was arched upon the bed, head back, arms spread, as if he were being tortured.

She stared at him wide-eyed. He’d been restless before—they’d had to straighten the coverlet numerous times—but it had been nothing like this.

That scream.

He’d sounded as if he were a soul in eternal torment.

His body suddenly slumped to the bed, his limbs relaxing, and he lay still.

She exhaled shakily.

The fire had burned down to embers. The bedroom was in shadows, quiet and dark now. She might’ve imagined that terrible sound.

Except she knew she hadn’t.

Iris winced as she straightened. She’d fallen asleep sitting in the chair beside the duke’s bed, and her neck ached.

Her book fell to the floor as she moved, and she glanced quickly to the sleeping man.

He didn’t stir, and for a moment her heart swooped.

Then she saw his chest move.

She picked up the book, straightening a page crumpled by the fall before setting it on a table by the bed. She rose and cautiously bent over Dyemore.

His black lashes lay against cheeks flushed from fever, his lips parted as he breathed heavily. Beads of sweat lined his brow. He looked the same as he had the evening before when he’d awakened for such a short time.

She bit her lip at the sight.

Just a day before, this man had been whole and strong, a vital, nearly overwhelming presence. It seemed somehow a sin against nature that he should be laid so low.

That she had laid him so low.

She closed her eyes, desperately praying that he might be well. That those strange, cold gray eyes might bore into her again while he argued with her and tried to order her about.

Abruptly she straightened from the bed and crossed to the fireplace. She knelt there and poked at the embers, adding coal to build the fire back up, and then she stood. By the clock on the mantel it was the middle of the night, but she was restless. Beside the clock was a candle and she lit it from the fire, then stood and glanced around the room.

Dyemore still slept.

The bedroom had two doors on opposite walls. One was the dressing room she’d bathed in. The other she’d not investigated yet.

She went to it now and tried the handle.

Locked.

Dyemore had told her on her first night at the abbey not to enter any locked rooms.

Iris bit her lip. The safe thing to do was to return to her chair. Forget about locked doors and whatever might lie beyond.

She darted another glance at the bed and the stranger lying there—her husband, who screamed in his sleep. She hardly knew anything about him or his motives.

She turned swiftly and crossed to the bedside table. A big ring of keys lay there—the ones that Dyemore had made Nicoletta give her after the wedding—and she picked them up.

She’d been so busy nursing Dyemore for the last day and a half that she hadn’t had time to use them.

Until now.

But she was the mistress of the abbey, wasn’t she? This was her house.

She tried key after key on the lock, wincing as the ring jangled loudly. The key to this door might not even be on the ring. Perhaps Dyemore had hidden it among his own possessions.

The lock clicked open.

Iris stared at it a moment before twisting the handle and pushing.

The door opened to reveal a sitting room, still and silent, as if waiting for someone to wake it.

Iris blinked and stepped into the room, nearly stumbling over a trunk sitting just inside the doorway. She frowned and held her candle high as she walked around the trunk.

Ivory-painted pilasters highlighted walls of the lightest pink imaginable, with a dainty carved bas-relief floral spray between each two pilasters. Gilt and moss-green chairs were grouped here and there. A small round table with gold inlay stood against one wall, and a painted fire screen was before the cold hearth. The windows were the same as in the bedroom—tall and narrow with pointed tops—but they seemed somehow to fit this room better.