No Family, No Friends, No Mercy: The Paralyzed Duke Waited for a Bride Who Never Cried Off

Chapter 2

The rector’s voice dropped into the silence of the church like a stone into deep water, phrase after phrase, and Adrian repeated what he was told to repeat with the flatness of a man reading a shipping manifest.

He watched her the entire time. She never once looked away from him — not at the altar, not at the candles, not at the great doors behind her, which any other woman in England would have been glancing at, waiting for late arrivals, for mothers, for friends. She looked at him as though there were four hundred people in those chairs and she wanted them all to see.

When the ring was asked for, he took it from the cushion himself. He did not trust his legs, but his hands still obeyed him, and that was a mercy he had stopped thanking God for months ago. It had belonged to his grandmother — a plain gold band, worn thin on one side, warm in his palm.