Page 73 of Her Wily Duke

Grey morning light slipped through a narrow opening in the curtains when she woke from a dream.

Yet the dream somehow continued, for fingers gently stroked her brow, pushing the tangle of her hair aside. It took some minutes for her to be awake enough to realise that the sensation was real, that it was Benedict’s hand which touched her.

She pushed half upright, and her eyes met his.

“You’re awake! Thank the Good Lord!”

She reached out to touch his brow in turn, and found it to be of a normal temperature, with no trace of fever remaining.

“How long was I feverish? I can’t remember much, except you always being here…”

“A week. You’ve been in and out of delirium for a week. I wouldn’t let them give you too much laudanum, no matter what the physician said – my great aunt died that way.”

She leant forward and brought her lips to his, without hesitation or uncertainty. His lips moved on hers, and the hand that had stroked her brow tangled in her hair, pulling her hard against him. He groaned as her weight touched his shoulder, but kept kissing her, with a passion born of months of aching denial.

When he released her, her breath was uneven, and her heart beat faster than it ever had before in her life.

“Then I’ve a week to make up for, haven’t I? But… now that I’ve done the most important thing first, I find myself remarkably hungry – perhaps you could send for some food?”

Ariana laughed, and did just that, sure now that everything would be all right.

***

It was the end of the first week of February, and Benedict had been past the fever for three days now. Days in which his alarming weakness had begun to recede, in which movement had begun to feel mostly normal, although his shoulder ached continuously, but he didn’t care. That pain told him he was alive. Alive, and with a wife who declared that she loved him, as he loved her.

James had dropped into a chair at his bedside that first day after the fever broke, and warned him that, if he wished the good use of his arm for the rest of his life, he would have to move it, to cause himself pain, by steady and careful strengthening exercises.

Benedict had asked him where this wisdom came from, not liking the idea, and James had fixed him with that bright green gaze and simply replied ‘from the battlefield, where if you couldn’t move, you’d die’.

That was a sobering enough comment to make Benedict comply with the suggested exercises, despite the pain.

Now, apart from the pain of those exercises, he suffered another pain entirely – the pain of desire thwarted, not by Ariana’s unwillingness, but by his own need to heal. She wanted to explore all that they had not yet done, just as much as he did – but she refused to risk tearing his wound open again. At least another week, she had demanded, and he had kissed her hard, but agreed to that demand.

Now, as he sat beside her in their parlour, both of them writing letters, he far more carefully than she as his shoulder complained at every small movement, an idea came to him.

That idea arrived because, in answering a letter from his man of business with respect to one of his farms, he had consulted the almanac – and realised that, in barely a week, it would be Saint Valentine’s Day.

He closed the almanac, sanded the letter, and carefully put aside the small lap desk.

***

Ariana set aside her letter to Helena, in which she was laying out all that had happened, and how happy she was – all but for the fact of Benedict’s injury - and turned to him. He met her eyes and she smiled at what he saw there.

Carefully, he leant to kiss her, a kiss full of love, a kiss which explored the sensation of her lips, and spoke perhaps more than any words he had ever said.

“Let’s do it again,” Benedict said when they finally broke apart.

“Do what?”

“Let’s get married again – well, I know that’s impossible, but at least let’s ask the Vicar if he will guide us to say our vows to each other again, before God. I want us to say our vows in the knowledge that we’re both willingly and joyfully assenting. And then to start our marriage again from that moment and try to make a better effort of it.”

Ariana thought about the idea, and liked it. A broad smile curved her lips.

“Yes, let’s do that, please.”

“Ariana,” he asked, searching her face with his sad eyes, “will you marry me?”

“Yes, of course.”