“Give Me an Heir and You’ll Be Free,” the Ruthless Duke Told the Stranger He Married — He Never Guessed She Had Loved Him for Seven Years, or That Her Ruined Physician Father’s Forbidden Knowledge Could Save His Life

PART 3

They were married eleven days later in the private chapel at Edshot, on a morning so cold the water had frozen in the font and the old chaplain had to break the skin of ice with the butt of a candlestick before he could wet his thumb.

The Duke stood at the altar rail in his dark blue coat and watched her come up the short aisle on the arm of his man of business—there being no one else to give her. He told himself he felt nothing, and very nearly believed it.

There were no guests. His aunt sat rigid in the front pew in gray silk, disapproving on principle of a match she had herself been forced to arrange. The housekeeper, Mrs. Harrow, sat behind her, and a handful of upper servants filled the pews out of duty and curiosity. The chapel smelled of cold stone and beeswax, and the lilies his aunt had insisted upon—hothouse lilies flown from the succession house at ruinous expense, white and heavy-scented as a funeral. It was, he thought, very like a funeral. His own, arranged early, that he might attend it.

Glenna wore a gown of dove-gray silk that his aunt’s dressmaker had run up in the eleven days—the first new gown, he suspected, that she had owned in years. She wore it as though she had been born to silk and lost the habit, and was only now recalling it. She did not look at the lilies, nor at the chapel, nor at the great carved arms above the altar. She looked at him steady the whole way up the aisle, and when she reached his side, and the chaplain began the words, she went on looking at him.

At the corners of his mouth. He realized it again. Always. As though there was something written there that only she could read.

“Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife?” the chaplain quavered.

“I will,” said the Duke of Edshot, and heard his own voice come out steady, and was glad of it.

When it came her turn, her voice was low, but it did not shake. “I will.”

And there was something in those two small words so plain and so unornamented, so entirely without the tremor of a woman getting herself a duke, that he looked at her sharply. For one unguarded instant, their eyes held. And he had the sudden, vertiginous sense of standing at the edge of something he had walled off long ago and forgotten was there.

Then the chaplain called for the ring. The Duke took her bare hand in his and slid onto her finger the heavy old Edshot betrothal ring—gold worn thin by four hundred years of dead duchesses, a great square-cut sapphire, dark as the January window. It hung loose on her thin finger. She closed her hand slowly so as not to lose it. The sapphire caught the candle flame and threw a splinter of light across her wrist.

The Duke thought, absurdly, of the blue at his own lips. And looked away.

“I pronounce that they be man and wife together.”

There was no kiss. He had not planned one, and she did not seem to expect one.

That first evening, they dined alone at the two ends of the long table—thirty feet of polished mahogany and silver branched candlesticks between them. They said perhaps a dozen words. The Duke had ordered it so. He did not want conversation. He had told her as much, and he was a man who kept his terms.

He drank his wine and ate little. His appetite had gone off badly this last month, another of the shadows. And he watched her down the length of the candles, and could not read her at all, and found the failure to read her more disturbing than any coquetry would have been.

Once near the end, he saw her set down her fork and look at his plate—at what he had left on it. And then at his glass, at the wine he had scarcely touched, and at his hand where it lay on the cloth. At the nails of it. She frowned a very small frown, so brief he might have imagined it, and picked up her fork again, and said nothing.

He did not know that she had counted his breaths across thirty feet of candlelight. Ninety-one to the minute. Too many for a man at rest. He did not know that she had marked the faint tremor in his hand, and the shine of the skin beneath his eyes, and the way he had winced once, pressing his fingers below his ribs when he thought no one watched.

He did not know that his wife was at that very table, taking his case. As her father had taught her to take a case. Quietly, and completely, and without the patient’s leave.

He knew only that she watched him. And that being watched should have angered him. And that strangely, it did not.