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

Chapter 20

He walked into the conservatory on a Sunday afternoon in August, without the chair, without a cane, twelve steps from the door to the table where she sat.

Slowly. Badly. His hand found the back of a chair and held it the last few feet. His face was white with effort, and his breathing was hard, and his legs shook like a man who had climbed a mountain.

But he walked.

Lily did not move. She had learned, by then, when not to help.

“Well,” Charles said, when he had breath. “Eleven steps in a courtroom. Twelve to a woman. I am told the second counts for more.”

“It does.” She rose, and went to him, and took his face in her hands — the way he had taken hers, that night in the ballroom with the rain coming down. “You absolute fool. You could have fallen.”

“I could have.” He was smiling, that rare, startled, quickly-suppressed smile she had first seen over a vase of frightened flowers. “But I have recently discovered that I am extremely stubborn, and that there is one person in England who refuses to let me be anything else.”

“Two,” Lily said. “Elias Sterling counts.”

“Elias Sterling prescribes exercises. You prescribe hope.” He kissed her palm. “I have found hope considerably harder to take, and considerably more effective.”

That evening, in the light of the low sun coming across the lake, he asked her — properly, this time, with no contract and no solicitor — whether she wished to remain at Thornwick Hall.

“I have been here a year,” Lily said. “Ask me a harder question.”

“Very well.” He took her hand. “Do you love me?”

“Yes.” She said it without hesitation, which surprised them both. “I think I began to when you moved the flowers. No — I think I began to when I read the clause about separate quarters, and understood that you had already decided to protect me from yourself before you had any reason to believe I would need protecting. Nobody had ever been that careful with me before. Not once. Not in my whole life.”

Charles was silent for a long moment.

“I wrote that clause,” he said, “because I could not bear the idea of being tolerated.” A breath. “It did not occur to me that anyone would ever do anything else.”

“Then it is a good thing,” Lily said, “that you married a woman who finds being told what she may not do to be a personal challenge.”

He laughed — properly, unguarded, for the first time, long and low and young — and it carried across the conservatory and out over the water, and somewhere below stairs Mabel Fitzpatrick heard it and had to sit down on the kitchen steps.