not before sending one more threatening glance in Sin’s direction. When he was gone, Sin and Callie stood alone, facing each other.
“How are you feeling today?” he asked on a rush. “Any dizziness? You have not swooned again, have you? Perhaps we ought to sit. Are you too warm? Too cool? Have you eaten enough?”
As the last question fled him, he understood how foolish he sounded. But it could not be helped.
“I am as well as can be expected,” she answered, her voice taut. Controlled. Distinctly unlike his fiery countess. “And I do not need to sit. I am perfectly capable of standing. I am not so fragile.”
He nodded, drinking in the sight of her. She was bloody ravishing. Her dark eyes were doing the same to him, he realized. But her expression remained guarded. They were eying each other like two prize-fighters attempting to determine which of them would land the first blow.
“You look well,” he observed, deciding it would be him. “Indeed, you look better than well. You are so damned beautiful, it hurts to look at you.”
Her cheeks went pink. She caught her berry-red lower lip in her teeth. “Thank you. I could say the same of you.”
He did not believe that for a moment. He looked like a man who had scarcely slept the night before. Who had paced the freshly replaced Axminster in his chamber, searching his mind for ways he could make amends with the woman he loved.
He itched to touch her, but there was still the matter of the manuscript in his hands. He thrust it toward her. “This is for you.”
She took it from him, their fingers brushing in the exchange, and Sin felt the shock of that touch—so simple—so innocent—in an electric pulse that shot up his elbow and landed in an ache in his ballocks.
Callie glanced down at the manuscript. “This is the last installment of Confessions of a Sinful Earl,” she noted, sounding surprised.
He nodded. “It is. Your former publisher returned it to me, at my request. But I want you to have it.”
Her brow furrowed. “Why?”
“Because it is yours.”
She gazed back up at him. “But why now?”
“It was wrong of me to keep it from you, just as it was wrong of me to get sotted at my club and spend the night at Decker’s townhome.” He paused, struggling for his words. Everything he had rehearsed on the carriage ride here dissipated in the wake of her glorious presence. “It was also wrong of me to abduct you. Wrong of me to blackmail you into becoming my wife. Hell, Callie, I have committed a great deal of wrongs in my life. But one I swear I have not committed against you—and never would, for that matter—is adultery. Whatever you think you saw between myself and the Duchess of Longleigh was purely friendship. Nothing more.”
“You were embracing her,” Callie said. “Holding her in your arms as if she were made of finest porcelain. Telling her you would always care for her and be there in whatever she needs. And this, after you were so protective of her. After you revealed to me that she had once been your mistress, and lest we forget, you had just spent the night carousing. Tell me, Sin, what was I to think?”
“You were to think that I spoke vows and intend to uphold them,” he countered.
“For how long?” she asked bitterly. “You were more than clear with your expectations. You told me you would bed me until I provided you with an heir, and then we could live our lives separately, however we wished. As soon as I was pregnant, you were gone all night long, and then I caught you in the arms of the duchess, making promises to her.”
Tilly’s story was complicated. He had promised her his utter discretion, but he could not keep the truth from Callie. Not when doing so could cost him his wife.
“Longleigh is a despicably cruel man,” he said, struggling to give voice to the ugliness Tilly had revealed to him yesterday. “He is unable to perform his husbandly duties, but he requires an heir. There was a time when he allowed Tilly to live as she wished, to discreetly take lovers. However, he decided he was no longer willing to take the chance that she would, as he phrased it, birth him a bastard that was not of his stock. He forced her into bed with one of his nephews.”