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

Chapter 8

The chair wheel was filed.

Lily found it herself, after everything else had been explained away.

They had been crossing the long gallery toward the trustees’ meeting room when one wheel of Charles’s chair locked and dragged sideways. The chair pitched. A tall, broad-shouldered man — Captain William Clark, his grace’s oldest friend and head of estate security, as she would shortly learn — caught it before it overturned entirely, his hands steady with the ease of long practice.

Dr. Benedict Wallace was summoned at once. He examined the wheel and pronounced it ordinary mechanical wear, nothing more.

Lily knelt afterward and examined the fastening herself once the men had gone.

The metal edge had not simply worn thin. It had been filed — deliberately, carefully, in a place no ordinary use would ever reach.

She said nothing to Charles that evening. He had asked tightly for the matter to remain quiet until after the trustees’ visit, and she respected the request, though it sat in her chest like a stone she could not put down.

That night, returning to her room, she found a letter she had written to Samuel missing from her writing desk. The drawer had been left very slightly ajar.

On her dressing table, in its place, lay a single white camellia.

The flower she would later learn that Lord Augustus Kensington invariably wore in his buttonhole.

Lily had never met Augustus Kensington. And yet somehow he had already found his way inside her room.

She spent that night composing and discarding a dozen ways of telling Charles what she had seen, and settled in the end on none of them. Suspicion without proof was a fragile thing, easily dismissed by a man already weary of being watched and questioned by physicians, trustees and cousins alike.

She resolved instead to watch quietly — the way her father had once taught her to read the mill’s account books: not by searching for what was wrong, but by noticing what refused to sit easily beside everything else.

It was a discipline that would serve her well in the weeks to come, though she did not yet know how dearly it would be tested.

The sound woke her past midnight. Low. Ragged. Unmistakably pain rather than sleep.

Lily rose and followed it to Charles’s chamber, where she found him feverish, a wound near his hip reopened and seeping through the linen of his shirt, the sheets damp with sweat despite the cold.

“Get out,” Charles ordered, his voice thin with fever and fury both. “I did not summon you.”

“No,” Lily agreed, already reaching for the basin on his washstand. “You did not. I came regardless.”

She worked with steady, practised hands, cleaning the wound, while his breath came shallow and uneven beneath her touch. His shirt lay open at the shoulder, his skin fever-hot beneath her fingers, and when she pressed too near the wound his hand shot up and closed around her wrist — not to stop her, she realized, but simply to hold on to something solid while the pain moved through him.

“You do not have to do this,” he said through gritted teeth.

“I know,” Lily said, her voice quiet and even. “That is precisely why the choice belongs to me.”

Something in him seemed to loosen at that. Not the pain. The fight against her presence. He let her finish the dressing without further protest, his hand remaining curled loosely around her wrist long after the bleeding had stopped — as though he had forgotten to release her, or did not wish to.

The candle beside the bed burned low, throwing gold across the sharp planes of his face, softened now by fever and exhaustion into something younger, more unguarded than the composed duke who ruled Thornwick’s breakfast table.

“Why do you stay?” he murmured, half lost to sleep, his voice thick and unguarded in a way it never was by daylight. “Randolph’s contract does not require this of you.”

“No,” Lily agreed softly, drawing the blanket higher over his chest. “It does not.”

She did not offer a further answer, because she did not yet trust herself to say it aloud — that she had begun, somewhere in the cold weeks since her arrival, to want to stay for reasons that had nothing to do with contracts at all.

Charles’s hand tightened once more around hers before sleep finally claimed him.

Lily sat beside him long after his breathing had evened, unwilling to surrender the strange, fragile tenderness of the hour.