He had managed worse.
The corridor outside the ducal chambers was dark, the sconces unlit, and he navigated it by the candle and by memory. He had not sent word ahead. There had been no reasonable hour at which to send it, and besides, the kind of message that announced a man’s return at three in the morning was the sort of drama he found distasteful. He had simply come back, as he always came back from the mill, quietly and without ceremony, expecting nothing except bed.
He pushed open the door to his room and stopped.
The fire was burning. Low, but burning.
Someone had banked it within the last hour, and the grate emitted a pleasant amber glow that pushed the chill back from the air. He took in this detail with the slow deliberateness of an exhausted man processing an unexpected kindness.
Then he perceived the rest of it.
The bed curtains on the near side had been drawn back. A single lamp burned on the night table, turned low. And within that circle of light, tucked against the pillows with her hair loose and one hand open against the linen, Josephine lay asleep.
He stood in the doorway longer than was strictly necessary. She had waited for him, had built up the fire and lit the lamp and waited, and at some point, the waiting had become sleep, and she had not left.
He set the candle down and undressed quietly. Boots, coat, waistcoat. He was down to his shirt when the sound of him moving reached her.
“Alistair.” Her voice was thick with sleep, rougher than its daytime register.
“Go back to sleep,” he said. “It is nothing past three.”
She pushed herself upright anyway, pressing the heel of her hand against her eye. Her hair fell across one shoulder. In the lamplight, she looked warm and unguarded, so far removed from the gracious widow who navigated the corridors of Fortunestone Hall that he stopped and looked at her, his shirt half-unlaced and his shoulder aching and the mill’s troubles still running its tally in the back of his mind.
“How bad?” she asked.
“Manageable.”
She absorbed this with the direct attention she brought to everything, even at three in the morning. She nodded. Then she reached up and put her hand against his jaw.
He kissed her, which was not entirely what he had planned but was the only reasonable response. Her mouth was slow and warm with sleep, and she leaned into him without hesitation, all her weight trusting forward, and he held her with one arm around her back and kissed her with thoroughness derived from having been cold and wet and worried for twenty-two hours and finally arriving somewhere he had not known, until this moment, that he considered safe.
“The insurance assessors,” he murmured against her hair, because his mind would not stay quiet even now. “They will want someone from Leeds. Weeks before a payout, possibly months. I will need to cover the emergency costs directly. Materials, wages during the repairs.”
“You have the reserves for it,” she stated. It was not a question. She knew.
“I have the reserves.” He pulled back to look at her.
Something moved through her expression that was not quite amusement. “You are not as difficult to predict when it comes to your responsibilities.”
He was not certain that was true, but he lacked the energy to contest it. He was also sitting on the edge of his bed at three in the morning conducting a financial conference with his affianced duchess.
“I have a foot in two different worlds,” he said and heard the tiredness in his own voice plainly. “The estate. The mill. Neither of them will wait while I attend to the other.”
“Then stop for five minutes,” she said, “and sleep.”
He lay down. She settled the coverlet over him, and the mill’s arithmetic ran one final circuit through his mind and then, at last, fell quiet.
He was asleep before the clock on the landing could mark the quarter hour.
* * *
The firein the hearth had burned to cold ash before Josephine finally accepted that sleep would not return.
She lay motionless in the dark, listening. Beside her, Alistair’s breathing was slow and even, the deep, unguarded rhythm of a man in genuine rest … and that was what frightened her most. Not the sound of him sleeping, but the profound relief in it. He had not been himself this evening. Not the man she had come to know in the days since his arrival at Fortunestone Hall. That man who filled a doorway like a question no one had thought to ask, who moved through her dispirited household with the brisk, restructuring intelligence of someone who had never once entertained the luxury of doubt.
That man did not surrender to weariness. He did not wince when he turned his head.
She pressed her eyes shut and tried to reason herself calm, as she had learned to do in her year of marriage. It was a quiet, interior practice, like folding a frayed cloth before anyone could see its threadbare edge.
