Page 91 of A Virgin to Tempt the Duke

You would have laughed, then felt sorry for him, which is exactly the right order.

He talked to her until his voice was low and hoarse, and the light through the curtains changed, and Anna, somewhere in the depths of the fever, turned her face very slightly toward the sound. He looked at her for a long time. Then he looked at the fire instead.

“The first time I saw you, you were standing in my entrance hall at two in the morning with your wedding flowers still in your hair.” He paused. “I thought you were the bravest and the most desperate thing I had ever seen. I thought… Well, I suppose I told myself it was duty. That anyone with means and a spare room would have done the same.”

The fire shifted. Anna breathed.

“It stopped being duty very quickly. I’m sure a part of you knows that.” His voice was low, stripped of its usual composition. It was three in the morning, and there was no one present to maintain appearances for. “You stayed in my mind. Through the annulment, through Rathbourne, through all of it. I watched you make friends with Percy, who has never once voluntarily made friends with anyone, and I watched you talk to Rachel as though you had known her your whole life, and I told myself…” He stopped. Began again. “I told myself a great many things.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“The cloth needs cooling.”

He quickly attended the task, wringing out the warm fabric, dipping it in the cool basin, and pressing it back on her head.He was grateful for the task, and had never done well with idle hands.

“When I saw your arms,” he started. “I saw the bruises. The day you arrived. I didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. But I knew what they were.” He looked at his hands. “I had seen them before. On my mother. In the same places, from the same kind of grip, left by the same kind of man.”

His jaw tightened, and he lovingly pressed the cloth onto Anna’s temples as he continued.

“I made a vow to my family,” Frederick said. “When I was young enough that I suppose vows don’t entirely count, and yet I have never stopped keeping it. To stand between my mother and my father when I was able. To keep Rachel from…” He stopped again. “I told my mother I would not let anything happen to her. To either of them. That it was my job now.”

He looked at Anna’s face, pale against the pillow, and felt the familiar weight he had carried so long it had become indistinguishable from his own body.

“That is what I recognized in you,” he said. “Not just the bruises. What’s underneath them.” He exhaled slowly. “I could not leave you to Birchall. I could not have done it for anyone in those circumstances, but I want to be honest, which I am finding rather more possible than I once did… It was not only duty. It was not only principle. It was you, Anna.”

He looked at her hand on the coverlet, and without fully deciding to, covered it with his own and squeezed gently.

“I can manage estates and legal matters and men who make inappropriate remarks at White’s with nothing more than a glance, but I cannot…”

He looked at her perfect face with the fever flush and the shallow breathing and the absolute stillness of her. He felt fear move through him, and so he held on tighter.

“I cannot control this. I cannot take responsibility for this. And that is the most frightened I have been since I was thirteen years old in a nursery holding an infant. But that is a story for another time.”

He did not move his hand. He did not intend to.

CHAPTER 34

“Anna.” He kept his voice low and even. “You’re safe. You’re in your own house. You’re safe.”

Anna began to stir sometime later, although Frederick could not have said how much later. Time had become approximate, and he had gone very still watching her. Her brows drew together. Her head moved slightly on the pillow, slow and confused. She was trying to focus; he could see the effort of it in her face.

“Frederick,” she said, barely audible.

He waited a moment longer to make sure it was real. Her eyes blinked open and looked up at his face, then lost it. She blinked them open again and something in her had settled, the confusion receding into something more lasting. Or at least he prayed.

“Frederick,” she said, a bit more clearly.

“Yes.” He didn’t move. “Are you in pain?”

A faint, unsteady breath. The smallest shake of her head.

“You gave me quite a scare.” He had intended this to come out dry, and it did not.

Her eyes were closing again. “What?—”

“You have a fever. You walked home in the rain last night.” He kept his voice steady. “You are going to recover. You will be fine, Anna.”

She seemed to accept this. A small, slow nod, and then her eyes closed entirely, and her breathing deepened back into sleep. Frederick sat in the chair beside her and held her hand and did not move. Rachel came in a few minutes later.