“I have never thought of you as a monster.” She had said as much before, but he stubbornly refused to believe her. “I have always thought of you as a man.”
Quickly, before she lost her nerve, Isabelle stood on tiptoe and kissed Jonathan on the cheek. Or rather, where his cheek would have been, if not for the mask.
Isabelle felt Jonathan’s breath catch and immediately knew she had made a mistake. He slowly backed away from her as though she were a predator ready to pounce.
“I’ve offended you,” she said.
He turned his back on her, clenching and unclenching his fists repeatedly. When her father had done the same, it was always her signal to flee the house.
She would have given anything to take back her stupid, impulsive kiss.
He whirled around to face her, his fists clenched. Out of years of habit, Isabelle braced herself to take the blow.
“Marry me.”
“What?”
He moved closer, and now it was she who backed away.
“Marry me,” he repeated.
The second time he said it sounded less like a command, though it came nowhere nearer a request. Isabelle could only shake her head in disbelief.
He took another step toward her, warily this time, as though he feared she would bolt from the room at any moment.
“I have come to depend on your companionship.”
He came even nearer, until he was close enough to reach out and touch her. Isabelle glanced at his hands. His fists remained clenched so tightly that his arms shook with the effort.
“Surely we can come to some sort of arrangement. I can offer you financial security if you agree to stay.”
“Arrangement?” She couldn’t believe her ears. “You want to come to an arrangement?”
“Of course. I’ll have my attorney draw up the contract, so the terms will be clearly stated.”
A moment ago she had wanted to kiss Jonathan. Now she could barely resist the urge to slap him.
He paused, considering his words, then began slowly, enunciating each sound with great care. “Please don’t think I would ever . . . ever require you . . . to assume the . . . the . . . ”
He stuttered to a halt, obviously embarrassed, then took a deep breath and choked out the rest of the sentence, his words colliding against one another like the cars of a runaway train.
“To assume the more intimate duties of marriage.”
That he would actually say such a thing! Isabelle’s cheeks burned with humiliation. She was too angry to open her mouth to speak, afraid—no, certain that she would say something she would later regret.
“You may have whatever you wish, if you will only stay with me.” He bowed his head, finally unclenching his fists.
Jonathan looked the picture of dejection. At any other time Isabelle might have felt sympathy for him. No longer.
“Are you finished?” She spoke quietly, though her voice shook with the effort it took to restrain her anger.
He looked up at her without answering, like a man waiting for his executioner to lower the axe.
“You’re asking me to marry you for your money.” She hated the way he kept staring at her with that doomed look in his eyes. “Do you think me that sort of woman?”
Isabelle fought back her tears. His assumptions wounded her because they struck too near the mark. She raised her voice, lashing out at him and her past and all that she had been forced to become.
“You think I’m no better than a prostitute.”
“It was never my intention—”
She cut him off. “Keep your arrangements. I can never marry you.”
Isabelle did not want the added humiliation of Jonathan seeing her tears. She fled the room, calling out her final protest.
“I can never marry anyone.”
Chapter Thirty six
After searching through a dozen rooms, he found her in the place he should have thought to look first. She was sitting on the loveseat in the parlor, as she had been the day of their first meeting. That meeting had been a disaster, one for which he didn’t understand the cause, though he felt somehow to blame.
Today, however, he was unquestionably to blame, and this time he understood the reason only too well.
She looked up when he entered the room, watching him warily as he crossed to where she sat. Her eyes had turned a vivid green, a sure sign that she had been crying. And he was the cause.
He hated himself.
She turned away from him, twisting around to hide her face against the arm of the loveseat, and in a muffled voice ordered him to leave.
It was no more than he deserved.
Jonathan knelt and, taking his handkerchief from his breast pocket, touched her hand with it to gain her attention. “Please.”
She shook her head, refusing his token of peace.
He sank back against his heels, debating with himself just how a man goes about begging a woman for mercy.
“Have I ruined everything?” He brushed her hand with the cloth.
She angled her head around to look over her shoulder at him. Jonathan felt something like hope, though he knew better than to assume he had achieved a truce. Her fingers clutched the arm of the loveseat. He touched them with the handkerchief, wishing he could take her hand in his.
She slowly turned to face him, accepting the offered handkerchief, most likely because she was weary of his insistence. He remained on his knees, looking up at her like a supplicant before an altar.
“Please forgive me, Isabelle. I never meant to make you cry.”
He wondered, did she know how easily she could take her revenge? Did she know she could destroy him with a word?
Her lips twitched in an attempt at a smile, but the expression died in an instant. This short lived effort hurt him more than her tears. He remembered how often her smile had struck him like a cannon shot, because it was meant for him. He could not bear the thought that he might never see that smile again. Desperation drove him to persist in a way that hope could not.
“I wish you to know, I hold you in the highest regard. I have never considered you a . . . ” He looked down, unable to meet her eyes. “I could never think of you the way you said.”
“But one day you would.”
His head jerked back reflexively, as though she’d punched him in the face. He opened his mouth to protest, but before he could find his voice, she went on.
“If not tomorrow or next week or next year, one day you would. You would look at me and think, This is the woman who valued my wealth more than she valued me.”
He did not wish to question her reasoning. As much as he wanted to prove her wrong, this was not the time nor the subject to debate with her.
“Will you forgive me for my boorish behavior? Will you allow me to reclaim our friendship?”
Isabelle smiled, and though it was a mere ghost of the smile she had bestowed on him in the past, his heart leaped inside his chest, like a winged creature freed from its cage.
“Of course.”
She rested her hand on the cushion beside her in unspoken invitation for him to join her there. He rose, suddenly self conscious that he had been on his knees all this time, as though he meant to offer his proposal yet again.
“Thank you,” he said simply when he had seated himself next to her.
An awkward silence followed. Finally, he worked up his courage and, lightly touching the edge of her skirt, made a mild defense of his earlier behavior.
“It pleases me to see you in a beautiful dress.” He met her eyes, searching them for any warning signs that he should desist. “Is that so terribly wrong?”
Where she had been deathly pale before, the color now rose to her cheeks. She met his eyes shyly. “I suppose not, since it pleases me to see you so elegantly dressed.”
She looked down at her lap, while the color in her cheeks bloomed even brighter.
He was not a man who could be accused of vanity—obviously—yet he found her compliment stirred a
glowing heat in him as well.
“I wonder,” she said pensively.
She unfolded the handkerchief, then refolded it diagonally to form a triangle, smoothing out the wrinkles with her hand.
“I wonder,” she began again, still smoothing the handkerchief against her skirt. “If I were that other sort of woman, would you still value my company?”
The warmth engendered by her compliment died, replaced by a cold dread that slowly froze his entrails. Whatever it was she was getting at, the wrong response on his part could destroy their uneasy truce. He chose his words carefully. “I will always value your company. And your friendship.”
She bowed her head, folding and refolding the handkerchief until he wanted to place his hand over hers to make her stop.
“I believe if you truly knew me, you would not want to be in the same room with me.”
“Isabelle!”
She darted a look at him. When he tried to hold her gaze, her eyes slid away from his.
“If you knew me, you would find me repulsive.”
“How can you say such a thing? There is nothing I could know about you that would change my feelings for you.”
Jonathan realized with a sinking sensation that he had come dangerously close to an admission he could never allow himself to make.
She glanced at him briefly, then spoke with a bitterness he had thought foreign to her. “I wish I could believe you.”
“What can I do to convince you?”
She remained silent.
“Please, Isabelle. Tell me, how can I prove myself?”
He watched her fold the handkerchief over and over on itself. He wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake some sense into her. She was refusing to answer him, and it was driving him mad.
“First let me prove myself to you,” she said finally.
His reason had ceased to function. Or perhaps they had entered a realm outside of reason, where logic served no purpose.
“I don’t understand,” he said helplessly.
“Despite everything I’ve told you to the contrary, you continue to believe that I should find you—” She stopped abruptly, then began again, correcting herself. “That I should find your condition revolting.”
“My condition is a tangible fact of my existence. It cannot be compared to some intangible assumption you have made concerning my standards for judging your character.”
Isabelle laughed softly, shaking her head. “I don’t wish to debate philosophy with you.”
“Well, what are we debating?”
After avoiding his eyes during most of their conversation, Isabelle fixed him with a look so sharp and direct that Jonathan flinched.
“Trust. We are speaking of trust.”
She continued to skewer him with her look. Jonathan fought the urge to squirm like an insect pinned to a mounting board.
“Forgive me. You will have to explain your meaning.”
Isabelle nodded, then fell silent, looking down at her lap for such a long time that Jonathan began to think she had no explanation to offer him. After what seemed like an interminable wait, she finally spoke.
“There used to be an old woman in our neighborhood who sat near the grocer’s where I shopped. She had a cup full of pencils which she pretended to sell.”
Isabelle had answered with a non sequitur. Her story had nothing to do with the subject at hand. It was simply another way she had found to torture him to the point of madness.
She looked up from the handkerchief, which she had folded until it lay in a long, narrow strip across her skirt. “She was blind and too proud to beg outright. Whenever I had an extra coin, I would drop it in her cup and take a pencil. We always chatted for a while, then when I thought she wouldn’t notice, I slipped the pencil back into her cup.”
She paused. He kept his silence, sensing there was more she wanted to say.
“I think she knew my deception from the beginning.” Isabelle looked at him as if expecting a response.
“It was a well meant deception,” he offered cautiously. “A white lie.”
“Yes.”
Was this the terrible revelation that was supposed to send him running from the room?
“We became good friends.”
The point of her story made no sense whatsoever.
“Do you know what she said to me one day?”
He shook his head, afraid to attempt an answer.
“She said, now that we are friends, I want to see you.”
Isabelle paused expectantly, as though waiting for him to ask the obvious question, and so he did, though he had the uncomfortable feeling of a fish caught on a hook being slowly reeled in. “How could she see you if she was blind?”
“With her fingertips. She ran her fingers over my face, very slowly and carefully, and when she had finished, she said she would always remember me, now that she knew what I looked like.”
“Well,” Jonathan said, feeling as stupid as he had ever felt in his life.
Isabelle looked at him triumphantly, as though she had finally caught him in her net. She waited, giving him time to puzzle out her meaning. When he could not, she went on in a quiet voice.
“If you wish for me to trust you, then prove you trust me. Let me see you.”
His body flushed hot, then cold, all at once, while the room went momentarily dark around him. He thought for a moment he was going to swoon like some vaporish, over gusseted actress in a melodrama.
“Friendship cannot exist without trust,” Isabelle said firmly.
He shook his head. “I cannot. Ask anything of me but that.”
She lifted the folded handkerchief and stretched it over her eyes. Twisting around, she offered him her back, holding the ends of the blindfold behind her head. “Tie it tightly, please. I wouldn’t want you to think I cheated.”
“This isn’t a game, Isabelle. You ask too much.”
She dropped the blindfold and turned to face him. “I know it isn’t a game. If I am not to live in fear of the day you learn my secrets, then you must allow me to know yours.”
She started to get out of her seat. Without thinking, Jonathan grabbed her arm to hold her back. Isabelle turned on him with a vehemence that made him shrink against the cushions.
“Let me go, Jonathan.” She yanked her arm away. “You are not the only person with something to hide. We must hold our secrets to ourselves. They define us. They are all we have.”
She had finally succeeded in raising his ire. “Very well,” he said coldly.
Let her see him then. This once is all it would take. She would regret her ultimatum, because she would see his face the rest of her life—in her nightmares.
Jonathan plucked the blindfold from Isabelle’s lap and lifted it over her head. His hands shook so badly that he had trouble tying the knot. “Damn you,” he said under his breath, not certain whether it was his useless fingers he cursed, or her.
When he had finished, Isabelle reached up to test the knot. Satisfied it was secure, she groped blindly until she found his arms, then slid her hands along his sleeves until she found his shoulders. She leaned forward, pressing against him as she reached around his head to untie the mask.
Jonathan held his breath at her nearness, feeling her body against his, her arms around his neck. It was a scene he had played out in his fantasies, but never with such a purpose in mind.
She found the bottom tie of his mask and began to undo it. Her sightlessness slowed her efforts, but she eventually succeeded, moving up to the next tie, which she loosed more quickly.
“That’s enough,” he said. She had more than enough room to slip her fingers beneath his mask. If she insisted on removing his mask entirely, he could not endure. He would sooner stand naked in front of her unbound eyes than to be entirely without his mask.
Obediently, she let her hands drop to his shoulders, then waited, as if gathering her courage. God knew, he needed his own.
He braced himself for the ordeal, sending his m
ind elsewhere, to an imaginary Eden. It was a trick he’d learned during the long months of his convalescence, when the merest touch, no matter how careful or caring, seared him with white hot pain.
Of course, his retreat then had been aided by morphine. Out of mercy for his pain, they had practically embalmed him with the drug.
A sudden, sharp longing shot through him. More than physical numbness, he craved the psychic numbness that accompanied the morphine. More than anything, he wanted not to care.
Isabelle splayed her fingers around his neck, instantly transporting him back to the present. In spite of all his intentions to the contrary, he moaned. Why was he allowing her to do this to him?
“I felt your vocal cords vibrate,” she said.
She continued, moving up his throat to his jaw. He closed his eyes, unable to watch her inevitable expression of disgust when she discovered the devastated remains of his face.
She moved her hands in unison, following a symmetrical pattern, one tracing the contours of the unscathed half of his features, the other searching out the corresponding point amidst the hills and craters of his scars. He wondered, what sort of map would she conceive in her mind? Would she extrapolate from the half that still bore a semblance of humanity, or would the monster emerge with such irrepressible horror that she could never again envision him as a man?
Her fingers reached his lips and began to trace their outline. His scars blocked the sensation of her touch, which he felt as a light pressure, nothing more. But, oh god, the delicious agony she coaxed from the sentient portion of his lips. He’d never realized their acute sensitivity.
He gritted his teeth, fighting the urge to part his lips and suck her fingers into his mouth. How would her skin taste, he wondered. What would it feel like to circle each of her fingers with his tongue, to drag his teeth along the length of them?
He was aroused, goddamn it. He tried to will away his erection, but the damned thing grew harder, heedless of his wishes, until he was certain it would burst through his trouser fly.
At least the blindfold prevented Isabelle from seeing the evidence of his lust. Was he meant to be thankful for such a mercy?
A Bed of Thorns and Roses Page 30