Page 25 of Two Blessings For His Duchess
She swallowed hard, the silence between them suddenly feeling twice as loud as Georgianna’s shouts. Nathaniel was an intimidating man on his best days, but standing in the dim light of her hallway, his dark silhouette framing the path, he was entirely unreadable. Her mind began to race with frantic, uncomfortable questions.
Was he angry with her? Did he think she had done something to intentionally upset his daughter, or that she had somehow provoked the girl into such a state of panic?
She opened her mouth, intending to offer an explanation, to tell him exactly what had happened before he could accuse her of anything. But the words caught in her throat.
When she looked closely at his face, the anger she expected to see wasn’t there. Instead, he looked profoundly defeated. The stark worry she had noticed moments ago hadn’t completely vanished, it had simply settled deep into the lines around his eyes, making him look entirely exhausted.
He didn’t walk up to her immediately. For a long moment, he simply stood by the threshold, his gaze fixed on the space between them.
Then, he crossed the room.
He didn’t say a word as he reached out, but his movements were surprisingly deliberate as he took her hand, his fingers shifting to gently turn her arm over so he could inspect her wrist.
“You’re hurt,” he said gently.
The sudden, unexpected touch sent a strange, sharp spark through her chest, a sudden warmth that made her breath hitch. Her eyes fluttered as she tried to brush the feeling off instantly, pulling her focus back to the small cut on her skin.
“It’s barely anything,” she murmured, her voice sounding a little tighter than she intended. “A scratch, truly.”
Nathaniel didn’t let go of her hand. His eyes dropped down to the shattered porcelain pieces of the doll scattered across the floorboards, and then drifted back up to the thin trail of blood on her wrist. A dark, tight shadow crossed his features.
“Georgianna threw this at you,” he said. “I am sorry, Euphemia. I will see to it tomorrow that she understands that such behavior is entirely unacceptable.”
“No, please, you don’t need to speak harshly to her,” Euphemia said quickly, stepping slightly closer to him in her earnestness. “She was completely distraught. You should have seen her. This is completely understandable. She must have had a terrible nightmare to be wandering the halls at this hour. She wasn’t acting out of malice, she was just terrified.”
Nathaniel looked at her, his jaw tightening slightly at her defense of the girl, but he didn’t argue. He released her hand gently, though his presence still felt incredibly close.
“There should be an apothecary’s tin in your bedchamber to clean you up,” he muttered, his eyes scanning the room behind them. “In one of the washstand drawers, if the maids placed it correctly.”
“My bedchamber?”
He guided her toward the edge of the bed, indicating for her to sit down. Euphemia sank onto the mattress, her bare feet tucked slightly beneath her hem as she watched him move around her bedchamber. It was a surreal sight, seeing him down to his shirtsleeves in the middle of the night, opening and closing the drawers of her vanity and washstand, searching for bandages and salves.
“She has these nightmares often,” Nathaniel said, his voice echoing softly against the dark wood of the furniture as he searched. “It usually happens whenever there is a sudden change in her environment, or a shift in her daily routine. That is the reason the household keeps her so strictly to a schedule. Ihave noticed the episodes worsen whenever I am required to leave on an extended journey, or when Thaddeus comes to stay at the estate. Or any guest at all. Any slight alteration in the atmosphere of the house unsettles her.”
Euphemia listened quietly, the lingering sting on her wrist fading beneath a wave of deep sympathy. To think that a child carried such a fragile internal balance that a visitor or a broken routine could fracture her peace so entirely.
“I didn’t know,” Euphemia said softly, looking down at her lap. “I promise I will be exceedingly careful with her from now on. I will do everything I can to ensure I don’t agitate her or disrupt her comfort.”
Nathaniel stopped his search. From the bottom drawer of the washstand, he pulled a small, polished wooden box containing linens, spirits, and soothing ointments. He turned back toward the bed as he walked over to her.
Without asking for permission, he sat down on the mattress beside her, the weight of his body shifting the bed beneath them. He reached out, gently taking her injured hand in his once more, and began to open the tin to clean the wound.
The silence that settled over the room was heavy and suddenly charged with a strange, suffocating warmth. Nathaniel worked slowly, his head bowed as he dipped a clean linen cloth into the soothing spirit. Euphemia tried to keep her eyes fixed on the washstand, on the wall, on anything other than the man sittingmere inches away from her, but the sheer proximity of him made it impossible.
From this angle, with the candle casting long, flickering shadows across his face, she could see the sharp line of his jaw and the dark silk of his hair, entirely disordered from his hurried race down the corridor. Her gaze slipped downward, completely against her volition. His linen nightshirt hung loose and unbuttoned at the collar, revealing the smooth skin of his collarbone and the firm curve of his chest. He bore a small, faint scar just beneath the hollow of his throat, a pale line that she hadn’t noticed before.
Euphemia swallowed hard, a sudden, fierce heat rushing up her neck. She wanted to look away, told herself she should look away, but her eyes wouldn’t obey. She wondered, with a sudden spike of panic, if he were to lift his head right now, would he see the vivid color that had surely stained her cheeks? She was so entirely certain that he would notice the erratic rhythm of her breathing that she felt exposed, caught in a trap of her own making.
Desperate to fill the aching, awkward silence, she cleared her throat, her voice sounding small and breathless. “Was... was your work good today?”
The question felt ridiculous the moment it left her mouth. She didn’t actually want to know about his ledgers or his estate correspondence, she was merely trying to build a wall of words between them.
Nathaniel didn’t look up. His fingers remained steady as he carefully dabbed the cool linen against the thin cut on her wrist. “It was as it always is,” he replied, his tone perfectly flat, devoid of any invitation to continue.
The brief, chilly response was a gentle but effective reminder of exactly who they were to one another. They were not friends. They were not confidants. They were, in fact, two stubborn people who far more frequently preferred to bicker and trade wits. It was a subtle, grounding slap of reality, and Euphemia decided right then not to push him any further into polite conversation. She simply let him work in peace, waiting for the moment he would finish and leave her to sleep.
Yet, as she watched his long fingers press a clean strip of linen against her skin, the urge to fix the fractured dynamic of his household pulled at her again.
