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

Chapter 12

The candle guttered.

He drew her down and kissed her.

For one suspended moment Lily let herself be kissed. The rain hammered the glass. His mouth was warm and certain, and there was nothing of the invalid in it, nothing of the broken duke, only a man who had spent eighteen months forbidden to want anything and had decided, tonight, to stop obeying.

Then her eyes dropped.

They went past his shoulder — to the cane lying on the floor beside the empty chair, which he had left, which he had pushed away from himself to reach her.

And something cold moved through her chest.

She hesitated. A heartbeat, no more.

Charles caught her face between his palms and drew her back close, and whispered against her lips, “I’m still a man, Lily. You think I can’t do this?”

“I know exactly what you are,” she said. “That was never the question.”

“Then what is?”

Lily drew back — not far, just enough to look at him. “How long have you been able to stand?”

The silence that followed was the loudest thing in the room.

Charles’s hands dropped. His jaw tightened. For an instant she saw the whole architecture of eighteen months of lies rise up behind his eyes, and she understood that she had struck the one wall he had built to keep even himself out.

“A year,” he said finally. “Perhaps longer. Not well. Not far. Wallace says it is meaningless — residual reflex, nothing that will last, nothing that changes the prognosis. Each time I attempt it, the weakness returns worse than before, and he tells me it is proof.”

“He tells you it is proof that you are broken.”

“He tells me it is proof that I must not try.” Charles’s voice was flat. “And so I do not try where anyone might see. Not in the gallery. Not at the table. Only here, in a room no one enters, where no one can watch a duke crawl.”

Lily knelt on the floor beside his chair, in the rain-noise and the candlelight, so that her eyes were level with his.

“Stand for me,” she said.

“Lily—”

“Stand for me. Not to prove anything. Not to be seen. Just for me.”

He looked at her for a long, terrible moment. Then he set his hands on the arms of the chair, and pushed, and rose — slowly, unevenly, his weight coming forward onto legs that trembled with the effort, his breath ragged, his face white with strain.

He stood for the length of three breaths. Then his knees buckled and he caught himself on the chair, and the sound he made was not pain. It was grief.

“I cannot,” he said.

“You can.” Lily caught his face in her hands, the way he had caught hers. “You just did. Three breaths, Charles. That is not a broken man. That is a man someone has been holding underwater.”

Charles stared at her.

And in that moment, in the dark, with the rain coming down, Lily saw the exact instant he understood.

Someone had been holding him underwater. Deliberately.

“Wallace,” he said.

“Wallace,” Lily answered, “and whoever pays him.”