“Could we not come to Irwyn … the girls and I?” The question escaped before she could swallow it.
“My house there is modest by Fortunestone’s standards. It is not suited to ladies of title, and it would damage the girls’prospects considerably to emphasize the mixed class of trade and aristocracy. Thetondoes not forgive such things easily, and Seraphina and Arabella deserve every advantage we can provide.”
He paused, and when he continued, his voice was gentler, stripped of the businesslike cadence. “You are needed here, Josephine. The girls require a mother to guide them through what is to come. No governess or companion could fill that role. It must be you.”
He was right. She could not argue with any of it. She nodded, not trusting her voice. The rain filled the silence between them, drumming against the glass with relentless patience.
He must have read something in her expression because he pushed away from the desk and crossed the room to where she stood. The scent of wool and cedar reached her before he did, warm and masculine and nothing like the cloying pomade Jerome had favored, that sickly sweet oil that still haunted the corridors of the ducal wing.
“You should know,” he said, and his voice had dropped to a tone she had not heard before, “that I consider myself fortunate in this arrangement.”
She lifted her eyes to his, startled.
“You are a remarkable woman, Josephine. You have held this household together through circumstances that would have broken someone with less resolve. You have mothered four girls with grace and devotion under the eye of a woman who sought to diminish you at every turn.” He held her gaze without wavering, and the directness of it made her chest tighten. “I may not be here every day. But I will be true to you. You will not wonder where my loyalties lie or whether my attention has wandered. And when I am here …” The corner of his mouth lifted in a manner that was not quite a smile but contained a warmth thatsent heat rushing through her veins. “… we shall enjoy the full passions of the marriage bed.”
Sweet heavens.
Heat flooded her cheeks so swiftly that she felt light-headed. No man had ever spoken to her in such terms, not with that unhesitating confidence, as though pleasure between a husband and wife were a matter of course rather than a grim obligation. The notion that it might involve passion, that she might be desired rather than merely used, that her own pleasure might matter to the man in her bed was so foreign to her experience that the words struck her mute.
He lifted his hand to her jaw, tilting her face toward his with a gentleness that belied the size and roughness of his hands, and kissed her.
She went utterly still.
His mouth was warm and firm and unhurried, nothing like the dry, perfunctory press of Jerome’s lips on their wedding night, the only time he had kissed her at all.
Something fractured inside her. Some wall she had built with painstaking care over a year of loveless marriage, mortared with endurance and resignation, cracked down the center and fell.
Her hand came up to rest against his chest, and beneath his waistcoat, his heart beat strong and durable under her palm, a rhythm so vital and present that it made her own pulse quicken in answer. He tasted of strong coffee, bitter and bracing, and something deeper that she could not name but wanted more of. His free hand settled at the small of her back, drawing her closer with a care that acknowledged the gentle swell of her belly, and she yielded with a sigh that rose from some deep and long-neglected place within her, a place she had sealed shut and forgotten existed.
The rain drummed against the windows. The fire crackled to ash. And Josephine Oxley, who had believed herself incapable ofwanting a man’s touch, discovered yet again that she had merely been waiting.
When they parted at last, she was flushed and trembling, and her breath came in shallow catches that she could not quite control. He kept his hand at her jaw, his thumb tracing the curve of her cheekbone with a tenderness that made her eyes sting, and the look he gave her was warm and reassuring and contained none of the cold detachment she had come to associate with a husband’s gaze.
“Josephine.” His voice was quiet. Rougher than before. “Will you marry me?”
Her eyes burned. She blinked against it, determined not to weep, and felt the sting recede to a fierce pressure behind her lashes. She thought of the babe growing beneath her stays, the fragile new life that needed a father and a name and a future free from the dowager’s machinations. She thought of the girls, who deserved a world larger than the boundaries of this decaying estate. She thought of her mother and her sister in her father’s declining estate and of the distant cousin who would inherit the entailed property and turn them out when her father’s fragile health finally gave way.
She thought of all the people who needed her to say yes.
And then she thought of the warmth of his mouth on hers and the powerful drum of his heart beneath her palm, and she realized that she was not merely saying yes for them. She was saying yes for herself.
“Yes,” she said. “I will marry you, Alistair.”
He pressed his lips to her forehead, and she closed her eyes and breathed him in and allowed herself, for one unguarded moment, to lean into the solid wall of his chest.
“I shall make the arrangements. We will tell the girls at dinner. Together.”
She nodded, barely listening as he told her the arrangements for their vows, smoothing the front of her gown with hands that would not stop trembling. Then she gathered her composure along with her skirts and left him alone in the library with the rain still falling and the fire burned to embers.
The ghost of his kiss accompanied her through the dim corridor and up the stairs to the Duchess’s Wing, warm on her lips, persistent as a promise. Her fingertips drifted to her mouth as she climbed, pressing lightly where his lips had been, and the sensation lingered even as she pushed open the door to her bedchamber.
Clara was there, as she always was, mending a torn hem by the window where the light was strongest. Her wide hazel eyes lifted from her needlework with the alertness acquired from learning to read the mood of every room she entered.
“Your Grace?” She set aside the mending and rose to her feet, her gaze sweeping Josephine’s face as though cataloging symptoms. “You look flushed. Are you well?”
Josephine closed the door behind her and leaned against it, pressing her shoulders to the solid oak as though the wood might lend her its strength.
“He has proposed. We are to be married.”
