She nodded slowly and ate a few bites of food. “Who was she?” she asked at last. “A sister?”
“No, Mrs. Huxley,” he said softly.
Her gaze flitted down to her plate and her voice caught as she asked, “A—a lover?”
“Imogen,” he rasped out because he couldn’t find his full voice.
He thought she might stop then. Her cheeks flushed and he could see she was uncomfortable with pressing and poking and prodding. But then she slid her hand out and covered his for the second time that day. Her skin was warm and soft, the weight of her fingers somehow…comforting.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I only ask because I’m wearing her dress. And you say she disappeared into the very brothel where I nearly lost my own life.”
“And you think you have the right to know,” he finished as he slid his hand away and rested it on his thigh beneath the table. He flexed it because he could still feel the weight of her palm on his knuckles.
“Perhaps not the right,” she said. “I suppose I don’t have the right. But at present I feel so raw about what I saw, what I experienced. Nothing feels normal or right or peaceful. I can’t even go home.”
“And if you crack my chest open and spill some of me out, that will make you feel that the scales are balanced?”
Her eyes went wide at the image and she shook her head. “No, I suppose it won’t. I’m sorry, Mr. Fitzhugh. You’ve been nothing but kind to me since I destroyed your peace by colliding with you last night. I won’t pry.”
She returned her attention to her plate, but Oscar couldn’t do the same. He stared at her face, her lovely face. Her kind face. Her troubled face. And in that moment, he wanted to give her what she desired. Anything she desired.
He cleared his throat. “Louisa was a courtesan.” Her gaze shot up and her dark eyes widened. “And for a while I was her protector. Her lover.”
“It ended.”
“Yes,” he said. “Long before the Cat’s Companion.”
“Wh-why?” she asked, and then she shook her head. “I’m sorry. That answer is certainly none of my affair. I shouldn’t have asked it.”
It wasn’t her affair, but he had studiously avoided speaking to anyone about Louisa for six months. He spoke around her, but never directly about her. Now that he’d opened those gates, it was like he was compelled to walk through them.
“She wanted more,” he said, trying not to think of Louisa’s tear-streaked face as she told him that she loved him. As she begged him to feel the same emotion. As she realized he didn’t. Couldn’t, he had told her. “And I couldn’t give it to her. So it ended. Badly.”
Imogen had shifted, leaning forward, entirely engaged with him. Her steady stare should have made him uncomfortable, but instead it was…comforting. Almost a beacon in a storm that he’d been navigating for months.
“She disappeared a few months later,” he said. “And I started looking for her. I heard she died. I know she died. And it is…my fault.”
“Oscar,” she whispered, using his first name for the first time since he introduced himself. No one called him that. Everyone called him Fitzhugh. Even Louisa had done so. Fitz, if she was being cheeky.
But hearing his real name, his given name, from this woman’s lips was…intoxicating. Some of the pain of the past slid away when she said it, replaced by far darker and more desperate emotions.
Needs.
“I’m so sorry,” she continued, completely unaware of what he was thinking.
She reached out and caught his hand again, this time with both of hers. She cocooned him with her warmth and his gaze slid to her lips.
Very kissable, full lips. He hated himself for noticing that in this moment of high emotion and tension. He hated himself for being able to divorce himself from what had happened with Louisa and instead focus on what his body drove for with Imogen.
“Be careful, Imogen,” he said, his voice rough with desire.
Her eyes went wide but she didn’t drop his hand. She just stared at him, her pupils dilating and her mouth slightly parted. She licked her lips before she said, “Why?”
He arched a brow. “You know why.”
The door from the kitchen opened again, and she dropped his hand and leaned back in her chair as the soup bowls, largely untouched by them both, were taken away and the next course was brought in.
He never stopped looking at her as this was done. Not when the servants left them alone, either. She held his gaze, too. That shocked him, truly. Most women he’d known in his life had been startled by his intensity. Few had matched it.
And yet this woman held her own admirably.
“Let’s eat,” he said softly.
She nodded. “Very well.”
Neither of them moved to do so, and he couldn’t help how his mouth quirked up a bit in the corner. He blinked first, not because he needed to, but because he chose not to have this erotically charged battle with her tonight. He swept up his fork and began to eat, and she slowly did the same.
He changed the subject to books and watched her shoulders relax. But whatever electric moment had happened between them was still there, throbbing like a heartbeat behind it all.
He wasn’t certain that could ever be forgotten.
After supper, Imogen stepped into the parlor with Oscar on her heels. She felt him there, watching her, circling her, and she had no idea what to do or how to feel about it. He had offered confession about the woman who had once been his lover and she recognized that was probably a rare thing. Something…oddly special to get a glimpse into the heart of a man like this.
But then everything had shifted, changed because she touched him. And even though they had spent the rest of the supper talking of books and music and food, she couldn’t pretend away the tension that arced between them.
He moved to the sideboard, and at last she could breathe because he was no longer marking and tracking her, like a hawk to her helpless rabbit. He poured them each wine, but as he pivoted and held out the glass, he frowned.
“I feel I owe you an apology,” he said, those intense eyes settling firmly on hers once more.
She took a sip of the alcohol, wishing it shored her up more than it did. “About what?”
“Louisa.” His gaze slid away and his frown deepened. “I think I may have been gruff about your questions. She is a…delicate topic.”
She tilted her head, watching him. This was not a man accustomed to discomfort and yet he was allowing himself to feel it in order to offer her an olive branch of some kind. One she wasn’t certain she was owed. After all, she had pried into a life that had nothing to do with her.
She smiled, perhaps the first real smile she had felt cross her face in weeks, even months. “Isn’t gruff part of your personality? Your magnetism?”
His brow wrinkled. “Is it now?”
She nodded. “It seems to be. I’m certain many a person has looked at you and thought, ‘what is that very gruff man thinking?’ and then you speared them with a glance and sent them skittering away in nervous terror.”
His eyes narrowed, and now she couldn’t help but laugh.
“Oh yes, that’s the glance.” She lifted a hand to her chest. “And my heart pounds, just as you intended.”