Page 67 of The Scottish Duke's Deal

Ramsay frowned. “That’s not an answer.”

Belson’s voice came soft. “No one wants to be left alone, Your Grace. Not really.”

So, she didn’t want to be alone.Good.He’d show her what that meant.

He’d fill her bed, her breath, her nights—leave no corner of her untouched, no inch of her unclaimed. She’d forget what it was to ache without relief. And maybe, if he took her hard enough, often enough, she’d stop trying to pull away.

Ramsay didn’t speak again for a long while.

Eventually, Belson excused himself, and the room fell back into quiet.

The fire crackled. The scotch sat unfinished on the desk.

And Ramsay, Duke of Stormglen—the Highland wolf, who had once made peace with solitude as if it were an old friend—found, for the first time in years, that the silence didn’t suit him at all.

Seventeen

It had been two weeks since the wedding.

Eleanor sat before the mirror, brushing out her hair with long, even strokes. Forty-three of them to be exact. She had not meant to count, and yet her hand kept moving, and the number kept rising, and somehow, the brush felt like the only thing anchoring her to the room.

To the strange quiet of it. The too-still air.

Her bedroom was beautiful. Tastefully furnished, large enough to host a small assembly with a four-poster bed that felt far too grand for one person. The curtains were lavender. The hearth was marble. Her slippers were warming by the fire, and the scent of orange blossom clung faintly to her nightgown.

And still, she felt slightly absurd.

Married. Installed. Not quite spoken for and not quite free. She had moved through the day like a woman performing someone else’s role—smiling at the steward, nodding politely to the cook, asking Penelope about her drawing as if she had always belonged here.

But she hadn’t. Not really. And Ramsay?—

She shook her head and set the brush down.

What was she supposed to make of him? There was nothing clear about what he wanted. Nothing tethered. One moment he was speaking gently to Penelope, the next he was glaring at a biscuit as though it had insulted his honor. He barely looked at Eleanor across the breakfast table—except when he did. And then he looked too much.

She stood and crossed the room, tugging the ribbons at her waist loose. Her nightgown slipped over her shoulders like a sigh. She was halfway through unpinning her hair when a knock came.

“Come in,” she said without thinking, assuming it was Margaret with the lavender water.

The door opened.

And Ramsay stepped in.

Eleanor froze, hair falling in a silken curtain around her face, hands still half-raised.

He paused in the doorway, one brow lifted in faint amusement. “I must say,” he murmured, “I hadn’t expected to be greeted quite so intimately.”

Her stomach dropped.

She turned sharply and reached for the robe draped over the bedpost, tying it with slightly more aggression than was necessary. “What are you doing here?”

He shut the door behind him. “Curiosity.”

“That’s not an answer.”

He glanced around the room as if taking inventory of her furniture. “I wanted to see, in person, the room that keeps you so far from me every night.”

She gaped at him. “You make it sound like a prison.”