Page 111 of The Wedding-Crashing Duchess

Sarah, it transpired, had other ideas about being kept from her father’s sickroom. She appeared in the doorway not twenty minutes later, freshly bathed and in a clean nightgown.

“I only wished to see that you were truly mending,” she said, when Augusta raised an eyebrow at her. “I shall be very quiet.”

“You may sit with us a while,” Ronan said, before Augusta could send her off again.

She climbed into the great armchair beside his bed and curled herself small within it, one hand reaching out to find his, and there she stayed the whole of that long afternoon until she grew too heavy-eyed to protest any further and allowed herself to be carried off at last for her bed.

“I ought to go up to her,” Ronan said, once the door had closed behind them.

“You ought to stay precisely where you are,” Augusta said, though without much conviction, watching him already attempting to sit upright.

“I told her I would come and say goodnight properly.”

Doctor Fenwick, gathering his instruments, only sighed. “Slowly, then, Your Grace, and not a step further than her bedchamber.”

Sarah was drowsy when they came to her, propped against her pillows in a nightgown. She smiled when she saw them, a small, tired, entirely trusting smile that undid something in Ronan’s chest all over again.

“You came to say goodnight,” she murmured.

“We came to say goodnight,” Augusta agreed, settling herself on the edge of the bed while Ronan lowered himself into the chair beside it.

“Is your side very sore?”

“A little,” he admitted. “But it will heal a great deal faster knowing you are safe and warm in your own bed tonight.”

“I was very brave,” Sarah said.

“You were the bravest person in that wood today, Sarah, and I am prouder of you than I have ever been of anything in my life.”

“Braver than you?”

“A great deal braver than me,” he said. “I do not think I have ever seen anyone quite so brave.”

She smiled at that, drowsy and pleased, and her eyes had begun to drift shut even as Augusta smoothed the hair back from her forehead and pressed a kiss there, murmuring something soft about sweet dreams and safe houses and nothing at all left to be afraid of. By the time they rose to leave, careful to draw the door only half closed behind them so the corridor light might still reach her, Sarah was fast and truly asleep, one hand still curled loosely around the corner of her blanket.

They did not speak again until they had reached the small sitting room adjoining Ronan’s chamber, where a fire had been built up against the evening chill, and a tray of tea sat cooling, forgotten, on the low table.

Augusta helped him settle into the chair nearest the fire, and then sat herself down upon the low stool beside him, close enough that her knee rested against his.

For a long while neither of them said anything at all. The fire cracked and settled.

“I could not stop thinking,” Augusta said finally, her eyes fixed on the flames rather than on him, “that something terrible would have happened to you.”

She turned to look at him then, and her eyes were bright, not with the tears of the morning but with something else entirely, something warmer and far more frightening to say aloud than any of the terrors either of them had faced that day.

“I love you,” she said. “I love you, Ronan. Entirely.”

He reached for her hand, and found it trembling slightly in his own, and understood that this confession had cost her a great deal more courage than she was letting show in her voice.

“I love you more. I was so certain, when we married, that ours would be a marriage of convenience and nothing more; I do not know precisely when that certainty gave way to this, only that it did, entirely, and that I cannot now imagine my life without you in it. I love you with everything that I am.”

She made a small sound, half laugh, half sob, and closed the remaining distance between them, and he met her halfway despite the pull of stitches at his side, cupping her face in his free hand as she kissed him.

When at last they drew apart, both a little breathless, Augusta rested her forehead against his and let out a shaky laugh.

“I am happy we are able to say this to each other now,” she admitted. “I have never before cared so much about anything, Ronan, that the losing of it might have broken me entirely.”

He kissed her again for that, and might have gone on doing so a good while longer had Augusta not, quite suddenly, drawn back with an expression that was equal parts nervous and determined.