His Favorite Mistake

by Aydra Richards

  But she had been up remarkably late chatting with Nora and Gloriana, and by the time she had made the journey back to her bedchamber, Mary had long since retired. Jilly had managed, if somewhat awkwardly, to disrobe and don a simple nightgown, but that had solved only half her problem.

  She could ring for Mary, but she hated the thought of rousing the girl from sleep simply so she could heft her mistress onto the bed. And that left her only one option.

  James.

  Which would be just as humiliating, but for different reasons. But it mattered little, given their circumstances. What was a little more humiliation, anyway? He’d already seen her at her worst.

  Mustering all her determination, she strode across the floor, clicked open the lock, and rapped her knuckles upon the connecting door. A moment later she heard a rustling, as of bedclothes being tossed back, and then the door opened and James appeared. He blinked in the light of the lamp, his hair disheveled. He’d thrown on a robe, of course, but he’d belted it only loosely, and it parted at his throat and revealed a swath of his chest. The room behind him was dark, but for a spill of moonlight that cut across the floor. She’d clearly roused him from sleep.

  He muffled a yawn in his palm and asked, guardedly, “Did you need something, Jilly?”

  She backed up a step and clasped her hands together, feeling a flush burning in her cheeks. “This is embarrassing,” she said.

  “Embarrassing? What’s embarrassing?” He scraped a hand across his face and rubbed the sleep from his eyes.

  “I can’t get into bed,” she muttered, wringing her hands.

  “I’m sorry?” With far more patience that she would have exhibited had she been the one roused from slumber, he braced his arm against the doorframe and stared at her.

  “I can’t get into bed,” she said, clearer this time. “I’m too—too–” Fat came to mind, but that seemed unnecessarily severe. “Round,” she settled on, rather peevishly.

  He blinked again, as if uncertain whether or not there existed a safe response to that statement. “Are you—would you like assistance, then?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind.” It came out a bit testier than had been strictly necessary, but she was easily driven to emotion just lately, and she rather thought James had looked amused by it.

  She had expected him to brace her as she scrambled up onto the mattress, but instead he swept her into his arms as if she weighed nothing, strode across the floor, and laid her down on the bed.

  “Thank you,” she managed, wincing as she shifted onto her side, hunting for a comfortable position. She muffled a groan in her pillow, and said, through her teeth, “I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”

  It was a polite dismissal, but he didn’t seem to have taken the hint. She felt the bed depress as he sat beside her.

  “You sound as if you’re in pain,” he said tentatively.

  “Of course I am,” she snapped. “My back aches constantly, and my ankles have swollen, and I’m as round as a…as a pumpkin.”

  He made an odd, strangled sound, that she suspected might have been a snicker, and she managed to turn enough to shoot him a killing look. It had been humiliating enough to have to solicit his help, and if he laughed at her…

  “I’m afraid I can do nothing for your ankles, and I must disagree with your assessment of your figure,” he said diplomatically, “but I can rub your back for you. If you like.”

  Oh. She pursed her lips, considering the offer, the nerve it must have taken to make it. Though they had exchanged no cross words in the past weeks, she had certainly taken no action that might have been construed as particularly welcoming. They lived in the same residence, shared the same table, but, like strangers, they offered one another only tepid conversation. The weather. News from London. Things that lacked substance, deliberately shallow and inoffensive.

  Perhaps he had been waiting for something from her, some sign that she might not rebuff an overture. The thought made her unaccountably sad. She thought she must have been unintentionally hurting him with each day that passed, and despite everything that had passed between them, that had not been her intent.

  But she had hesitated too long, and he murmured, “My apologies. I overstepped,” and made to rise.

  “No.” She caught at his wrist with something akin to desperation. “No, please—I would like that.”

  He froze, and she realized that it had been so long since she had touched him that he did not know how to react. But he recovered quickly enough, and said, “All right, then. Roll over.”

  She snorted. “You’re mad if you think I can manage that.”

  “Poor choice of words,” he acknowledged. And he waited until she released his wrist and shifted as much as she was able, turning her face into the pillow and giving him her back.

  His hands settled on her back lightly at first, his fingers curving over her ribs as his thumbs rubbed along her spine, ferreting out the knots of tension that had worked themselves into her muscles. He pressed gently, massaging the painful knots until they gave beneath the pressure of his hands, and she smothered her groan of relief in the pillow beneath her head. She had forgotten what it was like to be touched like this, to have someone’s hands on her in more than just an affectionate embrace, how it had warmed and soothed her, melting the icy barrier she’d encased herself within. Unfortunately it came with the consequence of revealing parts of herself she would have rather kept hidden, the raw and wounded parts that would never heal on their own.

  “We don’t talk,” she whispered, closing her eyes against the wave of pain that swept over her.

  His hands paused, the pressure lightened, and for a moment he was silent and still. “No, I don’t suppose we do,” he said at last.

  “We should do,” she managed, though her breath hitched on the words. “There’s—things,” she said, unable to find a word sufficient enough to suffice, “that need to be said. So that we can best determine how to go on.”

  For an instant his hands tightened over her, as if she had gone ephemeral as mist and he sought to keep her from slipping through his fingers and away from him. “I thought I would leave that decision in your hands,” he said. “It should be yours. I owe you that much.” And then, when her breath hitched again, he grabbed for the edge of the blanket with one hand, and blotted awkwardly at her eyes.

  “I don’t—I don’t want to spend the rest of my life filling the silence with nonsense chatter,” she said. “I don’t want to be polite strangers, with nothing to say to one another but idle remarks on the weather.”

  “I don’t want that, either,” he said, and his voice was a rasp of sound torn from his chest.

  She curled in on herself protectively. “I need to know if any of it was real,” she said. “How much was contrived.” How much of her love had been built on false flattery and artificial smiles. How much of her soul had been exchanged for his lies. How much gilt he’d given her in place of gold.

  “Except about my intentions, I never lied to you,” he said. “I gave you honest words and tried to convince myself that they were in service of my own ends. It was all real, Jilly. I just didn’t know it myself until it was too late.”

  She closed her eyes and for the first time forced her mind back. She thought of his shell-shocked expression the day he’d commandeered Nora and Robert for the theatre, how he had looked at her when she had questioned why he had traded a horse for something so small as her company for an evening. He had surprised himself with it, but perhaps not for the reasons she had thought. Every time he had shown that surprise—and there had been many occasions she had glimpsed it—it must have been for himself, for stepping beyond the bounds of what was necessary, for having found something real in his own deception.

  “I’m so afraid,” he confessed in low voice. “That you will leave me. That the most I’ll ever have is those few months when you didn’t know what I’d done. The only thing I have to give you is time to reach your own conclusion.” She thought she heard
a catch in his own breath, an unsteady hitch that suggested that he, too, was not unaffected by emotion.

  And she heard herself ask, in a thin little voice, “Will you hold me, just for a little while? I think I could forget it all for a few moments at least, as long as you hold me.”

  “Of course.” He moved quickly, as if he suspected the offer would be withdrawn if he hesitated, slipping beneath the covers with her. His arms slid beneath her and around her, drawing her into the curve of his body, and they were too tight, too heavy, but she didn’t care because they squeezed every other thought from her mind.

  Her back still ached, but the heat of his chest soothed it. Her ankles were still swollen, but his legs entangled with hers, and she suspected the very last thing on his mind was the unattractiveness of that particular feature. His arm draped over her belly, and the child inside her performed a somersault, thumping a foot against his forearm.

  He jerked in surprise, and then, almost guiltily, began to withdraw his arm.

  She surprised herself by reaching for his hand. “No,” she said. “Here.” She flattened his palm over the curve of her belly, pressing it there with her own, a gift she had never offered him before. A moment passed as she waited, and then, at last, came the flutter of movement, right beneath his palm.

  “My God,” he said, on a ragged laugh, and when she released his hand he left it there, pressed against her belly, searching again for the movement of their child within her. “My God, Jilly,” he said again. She felt his lips buss a kiss to the crown of her head, and heard him whisper, almost reverently, “I love you.”

  The words didn’t sting this time, didn’t spark a throb of a pain in her heart. Instead they slipped through the cracks that had formed in the protective shell she’d built around herself and eased into her heart. Like a balm, they soothed away layers of pain and grief, relieved the hurt she hadn’t known how to heal in herself. Though she hadn’t thought it possible, she believed it. Despite everything, she believed in those whispered words that he’d buried in her hair, that had burrowed into her heart.

  For the first time in many months, Jilly fell asleep in her husband’s arms.

  Chapter Forty

  Jilly had woken early for once, in the quiet of the dawn. She had never been a particularly restful sleeper, but somehow James’ arm thrown over her waist had kept her still through the night. He snored lightly, a quiet rumble that nearly resembled a purr. When she turned in his arms, they tightened around her in reaction, and he murmured her name like a plea.

  How different he looked in sleep, his face relieved of the tension that had plagued him. Absent the austerity he wore in his waking hours, the lines that etched his face with worry had softened. He had seemed to have aged over the past months, just as she had felt so much older than her own years, but now he appeared younger, freed from all concerns in the bonds of sleep.

  Of course it all came crashing back upon him mere moments later, when he woke. She watched it slide back down over his face like a curtain, watched his throat work convulsively, felt him force himself to release her.

  “Forgive me,” he said, his voice scratchy from sleep. “I didn’t intend to fall asleep.” As if he desired to disturb her as little as possible, he inched away from her. He had presumed nothing, she realized, and would continue to keep his distance unless she gave some indication she desired otherwise. And she was struck with the notion that her husband, for whom patience had never been in great supply, would wait forever.

  “Don’t go,” she said, catching at his arm. She saw surprise flit across his face, a flicker of hope that he quickly tamped down. He settled back down beside her, allowed her to readjust and lay her head against his chest, tucked beneath his chin. His heart beat beneath her ear, a steady rhythm that could easily have lulled her straight back into sleep.

  After a few moments his arms closed around her, and she felt his fingers dive into her hair, cradling her head the exact way he had done months ago. There was something so reassuring about it, to understand without words that this had never been a lie.

  Her life could always be this peaceful. But it would mean risking herself again, trusting that James would take care with her heart this time.

  “Tell me a secret, James,” she whispered, loath to disturb the tranquility of the morning with more than that.

  “I have no more secrets from you,” he said into her hair.

  “Then tell me something else,” she said. “Anything at all. Just…just talk to me.” Like they had talked before, back when she had loved and felt loved in return. She wanted so badly to slip back into those familiar patterns, to try them on once again and see if they fit still.

  Like a dam had burst, the man who had been so quiet and reserved over the past few weeks told her everything. Every thought that had crossed his mind, every feeling that he’d experienced in the past several months. Every fear he’d harbored, every hope he’d hidden away. “I hate it when you call me Your Grace,” he said. “I never want you to call me that again.”

  She’d known that already. It was why she had insisted on it, to put that indefinable distance between them.

  “I don’t want to call you Lady Jillian, or Duchess,” he continued. “My parents talked to one another in that fashion. When they deigned to talk to one another, at least. I don’t want that sort of cold, impersonal marriage. I don’t want to raise our children in the sort of home where affection is discouraged. I don’t want our children to become as cold and unfeeling as I have been.”

  Jilly would hardly classify her husband as unfeeling. He seethed with emotion long denied.

  “My mother died in childbed with Gloriana,” he said. “My father exhibited less reaction to her death than he did when his favorite gelding turned up lame.” The raw undercurrent of fear coloring his voice pricked at her conscience, that he had been bearing it alone, in silence.

  “I’m not going to die,” she said, in what she hoped was a reassuring tone.

  “You can’t promise me that. It happens all the time, Jilly. Every day, I collect a new set of worries.” He took a breath that shuddered in his chest, and his arms tightened to steel bands. “I couldn’t survive it. I’m not my father, and you’re not my mother—if you left me, Jilly, I could bear it. You’d still be alive, in London, perhaps, and just occasionally I might see you at a ball somewhere. So long as I stayed out of your sight.”

  She hid her smile against his throat. “Not so out of sight,” she said, hoping to distract him from his concern. “I always knew when you were there.”

  Her ploy worked. He dropped his head back onto the pillow and said, “Damn. I tried—I knew you wouldn’t want—” He released a great sigh. “I’m sorry.” Soothingly, his hand rubbed up and down her back as if he could rub his apology into her skin.

  She lifted her shoulders in a sheepish shrug. “I knew you would leave if you knew I had seen you,” she said. “So I just…kept myself from glancing in your direction. And so long as I did not, you stayed.”

  James absorbed that in silence. “I just wanted to be close to you,” he said at last. “I tried not to let you see me. I would never have approached you, if not for Lady Beatrice. That I could not abide.”

  “I know,” she said, and let her fingers light on his chest, tapping out the rhythm of his heartbeat with her fingertips. “At first, I thought that you might be upset that I had caused a scene. I honestly didn’t expect you to defend me. But you told the whole of the room that you had married me for love.”

  “I did.” His reply was disgruntled-sounding, impatient.

  “But that was the first time I believed you,” she replied. “You must understand, James, how hard it is to love someone who doesn’t love you. It’s devastating.”

  Silence stretched between them, and his fingers stilled on her back. Belatedly she realized that he did understand. They had both suffered, and while he had made every effort to restore himself in her eyes, to heal the pain he’d caused her, she had left
him stranded in a sort of limbo.

  “Oh, James,” she sighed. “Of course I love you. Even when I hated you, I loved you. And I hated myself for loving you, and—” Her tangled rambling was lost to his lips. He had flipped her to her back so easily, his arms crushing her as he dusted her face with fierce little kisses, as if every impulse he’d checked over the past few weeks in such close proximity had at last been unleashed. She caught only a few of the guttural words he murmured, but they made her toes curl all the same.

  It was like coming home after a long absence, and she let herself revel in the glow of his adoration, soak in the worshipful caresses he lavished upon her, as if he were learning her all over again. Like an old, comfortable pair of slippers, he fit her.

  “You can’t take it back,” he said, somewhat desperately, against her throat. “I can’t let you go now.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to,” she said.

  He lifted his head, a trace of anxiety darkening his eyes. It would take time for it to fade, she thought. They would no doubt have struggles ahead of them. Life was rarely simple, and there would be arguments and bickering, and times when they would hurt each other, though not, she hoped, intentionally. Love was so precious a commodity, and they had wasted so much time already mired in pain and resentment. She didn’t want to waste one second more.

  So she brushed her fingers along his jaw, loving the way that he turned his face into her touch. And she said, “James. Your child is sitting in a very uncomfortable position. I have to get up for a moment.”

  “Oh,” he said. And then again, as comprehension struck, “Oh.” He eased away and graciously helped her to sit up and maneuver toward the edge of the bed. But he caught her hand before she could leave and asked, “But you’re coming back?”

  She laughed—the merry, rich one that he had once professed to love so much, and said, “Yes. I’m coming back.”