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

Chapter 15

London in February was grey and wet and smelled of coal, and the carriage ride south took two days.

They stopped at an inn the first night, and Charles, exhausted by the journey, allowed Lily to help him out of the carriage in the dark courtyard without a single word of protest — which she understood, by then, was the loudest declaration of trust he had ever made.

The second night they stopped again, and this time he sent the maid away and had a fire built in her room, and sat with her in the chair by the window long after the inn had gone quiet.

“If this fails,” he said, “you will be the wife of a man stripped of everything. You understand that.”

“Yes.”

“You could still leave. I would settle whatever you asked. It would be no shame—”

“Charles.” Lily set down her cup. “I did not marry you for the settlement, and I am not staying for it either. I signed a contract in a solicitor’s office because my family needed saving. That is true and I will not pretend otherwise. But that is not why I am here tonight.”

He looked at her. “Why are you here tonight?”

“Because three months ago I met a man who told me he would never lie to me, and he has not.” She stood, and crossed to him, and took his hands in hers. “And because I have discovered that I would rather be the wife of a broken man who tells the truth than the wife of anyone else in England who does not.”

Charles drew a slow breath. When he spoke his voice was not quite steady.

“I have not wanted anything for eighteen months,” he said. “I did not permit myself to. I thought wanting was a thing that had been cut out of me with the rest of it.”

“And now?”

“And now,” he said, “the wanting is the only part of me that has never once felt weak.”

He pulled her down and kissed her, and this time she did not look at the cane, and this time she did not hesitate at all.