Page 59 of The Duke
Celine freed her right hand from under the covers, and very gently, she stroked the duke’s hair, smoothing it into place.
The duke started up, her eyes dull and bloodshot. Her face filled with emotion, and she said hoarsely, “You’re awake. Thank God. Oh,thank God,” and pressed her face into Celine’s hands.
Before Celine could make sense of what the emotion meant, the duke stood and leaned in, her large body suddenly very present and vital, and touched the back of her hand to Celine’s forehead.
The state of the duke’s undress was even more shocking up close. Without her coat, the shape of her breasts was well defined by her waistcoat; without her cravat, the shirt gaped, displaying the bare skin of neck and chest. A familiar, small pendant swung in her clavicle, the same pendant Lord Royston wore: a gold letter H that clutched a diamond between its feet. Celine had been looking right at this pendant when she experienced some of the most searing, intense feelings of her life.
The duke slipped her fingers over Celine’s cheek and down to the pulse point in her neck. “You’re not hot anymore. How do you feel?”
Wary, now that the duke was conscious and exerting her will. Shy, in a way she didn’t understand. This was the same woman she’d blackmailed and laughed at, lectured and teased. Why turn shy now?
“Like a mountain fell on me,” she said, her voice coming out in a whisper threaded through with squeaks.
Her whole body ached, but in a heavy, pleasant way. Even breathing was an odd pleasure. Her room had turned into a gardenwhile she slept, and she breathed the perfume in, with its disturbing threads of the duke’s scent.
The duke rang for tea, then sat back down and spoke with friendly concern. Whatever feeling had so agitated her on seeing Celine awake had been mastered, or perhaps imagined. “Miss Genet, the physician has said you must stay in bed another week at least, preferably three. You must rest.”
Anotherweek? “How long was I asleep?”
“It has been twelve days since you collapsed.”
Twelve days?She had thought she’d slept a night and day at very most. The idea that she’d lost so much time was frightening.
“The doctor claims you have suffered a severe exhaustion of the nerves. If you don’t rest, the illness may become endemic, plaguing you the rest of your life.”
“I didn’t want to acknowledge I was sick,” she said, aghast. “It was stupid.”
Adele entered then, carrying a tray with tea and broth, and fussed and clucked over Celine with all the warmheartedness she was capable of. “Miss, oh, miss, you’re awake!” The maid even cried a little, and Celine didn’t know what she’d done to deserve such affection. Adele helped her sit up and even kissed both her cheeks, at which Celine started laughing, and the duke asked curtly whether Adele was quite done. With one last happy flutter, the maid left the room.
The duke began making Celine a cup of tea. Celine asked, “Did Adele look after me while I was ill?”
The teaspoon paused in the cup, and then started stirring again. “Yes,” the duke said.
She drank the tea, feeling as though every parched cell in her body were opening, taking in the sweet nourishment. The duke stared intently at the cup—up to Celine’s mouth and back—as though accounting for every last drop.
The moment she was finished, the duke whisked the cup from her hands, raising the bowl of broth next. Celine made to take it from her, but the duke pulled the bowl away, just enough to communicateno. After Celine lowered her hands, the duke filled the spoon and raised it to Celine’s lips.
When I am married, I’ll have people who will come and sit with me when I’m sick, who will bring me broth.She blushed with a deep confusion.
The duke couldn’t mean to feed her? She had grown more accustomed to being waited on—allowing Adele to make a cup out of her stocking and, after she’d dipped her toes inside, to smooth it up her leg. She had accepted the performance of childish incompetence as an unusual luxury the rich enjoyed. But it was one thing to allow servants, whose paid work it was, to wait on her.
It was another to accept this act of service from a duke.
“Celine,” the duke said quietly, “let me.”
She shivered like velvet rubbed the wrong way, then opened her mouth. The spoon slipped inside.
Neither spoke as the duke continued to feed her: she, pliant and submissive; the duke, bringing all the focus to bear on feeding Celine that she would to bullying a bill through Lords or administering her enormous estate—the attentiveness she would bring to an audience with the king or the bed of a lover. Celine’s gaze and the duke’s collided occasionally, a shared consciousness of what was happening. Only the most fleeting glances could be borne.
In truth, what they were doing was very ordinary. But how awkward she felt, how vulnerable!
Perhaps because she was being cared for by someone who didn’t know how. And maybe, for all her longing, she didn’t know how to be cared for, either. Maybe that was why it felt so tender and embarrassing, a pleasure she had to hold herself inside of.
It couldn’t have lasted long—fifteen minutes at most—but when at last she had finished the broth, she felt blistered.
The duke put the dish aside, but still didn’t leave. Celine didn’t understand her continued presence. Casting about desperately for any topic of normal conversation, she asked, “Who turned my bedroom into a garden?”
It had taken some time for the observation to work its way intoher conscious mind as a question. Every flat surface contained a vase, and every vase was bursting with flowers. Riotous, gorgeous, colourful flowers. Where there was no flat surface, standing vases had been placed on the floor.
