“I’M STILL A MAN… YOU THINK I CAN’T DO THIS?” THE WHEELCHAIR-BOUND DUKE WHISPERED TO HIS BRIDE

Chapter 10

Charles’s anger was immediate and cold.

“You had no right,” he said, his voice low with fury. “My medical care is not a matter for your interference.”

“If obedience to your physician is what weakens you,” Lily said, refusing to back down, “then it is not discipline, your grace. It is surrender. And I did not marry a man who surrenders.”

They did not speak for two days.

She found him on the third evening in the conservatory, rain drumming against the glass roof overhead, the air thick with the green smell of damp earth.

He did not send her away.

“I released Adeline,” he said without preamble, staring at the rain rather than at her. “My former fiancée. Society believes she abandoned me after the accident.”

Lily said nothing. She waited.

“The truth is that I overheard her mother questioning whether I could ever give her children. And I decided, before Adeline could decide for herself, that her desire to remain with me could not possibly be real.”

“You decided for her,” Lily said quietly, “instead of allowing her to choose.”

“Yes.” The word came out rough, honest, unguarded in a way she had not yet heard from him. “Pity so often wears the same face as affection, Miss Goodwin. I have never learned to tell them apart until it is too late.”

Lily reached across the small space between them and offered her hand. Palm up. Open. Asking nothing.

Charles looked at it for a long moment.

Then slowly he covered her hand with his own and left it there while the rain moved steadily against the glass, and neither of them spoke again for a long while, because nothing further needed saying.

It was the first touch he had ever chosen freely.

In the days that followed, Lily noticed Clara Robinson — her own lady’s maid — speaking in low, urgent tones with Augustus near the servants’ stair. A page went missing from her correspondence book the same week.

Lily said nothing to Clara directly. But she began watching her with quiet, careful attention.

The unease came to a point on a cold afternoon when Lily, crossing the gallery above the entrance hall, saw Augustus unlock the door to the sealed north wing and slip inside.

Before he vanished through the doorway, he looked up — directly, deliberately — toward the window where Lily stood.

He had known she was watching.

And Lily understood, with a cold certainty settling low in her stomach, that whatever Augustus Kensington wanted from Thornwick Hall, he was no longer being careful about who saw him searching for it.