A Duke by Any Other Name by Grace Burrowes Page 0,72
that as long as she addressed him as Your Grace, he’d observe similar proprieties and she’d responded with a purely amused laugh.
Robbie had regarded them both with a wary smile, then gone back to complaining.
“He should not be allowed to sleep the day away,” Nathaniel said, passing Althea the toast rack. They were eating on trays in his sitting room, the doors between Robbie’s rooms across the corridor and Nathaniel’s apartment open in case the patient should summon them. “Robbie believes firmly that a schedule is integral to his good health.”
“He should be allowed to sleep some,” Althea retorted. “We’re barely keeping our eyes open and he got little more rest than we did.”
Her bun was a frizzy mess, her dress wrinkled. She had long since turned back her cuffs, and one sleeve bore evidence of spilled willow bark tea. She was slathering extra butter on toast that had been liberally buttered in the kitchen, and she ate with unapologetic appetite.
This is the woman I was meant for. That truth clobbered Nathaniel as Althea passed him the toast rack and set the butter on his tray. He had learned as a very young man to manage lust. In recent years, he’d learned to all but ignore it, but the longing he felt for Althea was more complicated than physical desire.
“I will eat every morsel you put in front of me,” she said, licking butter from her fingertips. “You must not stand on ceremony now that we’ve spent the night together.”
Her smile was devilish and tired. She’d inflicted endless good cheer on Robbie too, sparing his modesty by flaying him with teasing. Roll over, Sir Slugabed, or the wrath of Rothhaven will befall you. She’d found excuses to leave the sickroom periodically, which allowed Robbie to tend to more personal needs without a female audience.
She had read Tom Jones by the hour, playing all the voices with uncanny skill.
Althea was a good woman, simply good. Kind to others, patient in the face of human foibles, loving in her brisk, practical way. Given her wealth and station, she could have destroyed Nathaniel, Robbie, and the whole tissue of lies holding the Rothhaven dukedom together.
Instead, she was yawning over her morning tea and covetously inspecting a plate of cinnamon buns.
“I’ll let you have first crack at the bed this morning,” Nathaniel said. “You’ve earned your rest.”
“We all have,” she said, stirring honey into her tea. “I would eat sweets all day, left to my own devices. We never had them as a child. Stephen once stole a currant bun. He dreamed about that currant bun, described it to me the way some boys would have described a sighting of Wellington on horseback. When a neighbor gave Stephen some jam and bread, he vowed to apprentice himself to a baker.”
This recollection had dimmed her smile.
“But what baker wants an apprentice who limps?” Nathaniel asked. What peerage wanted a duke who fell to the floor, twitching and shaking, then rose from his fit—assuming he survived it—as unsound of mind as the village sot?
Althea put the wooden spoon back into the honey pot. “You understand about brothers who are infirm in one regard and hale in others. Their lives are a difficult balance of ferocious independence and blatant need. Stephen was four when he was injured, old enough that he recalls what running and jumping and normal balance feel like.”
Nathaniel took her hand. “And nothing you can do, nothing you can ever do, will make your brother sound again.”
She leaned into him, the moment perfectly sweet and crushingly sad. “I will take you up on that offer of a nap, sir. Robbie will think himself in the pink by noon, but tonight he could well see a recurrence of the fevers, if not before.”
Right. Mustn’t forget dear old Robbie. Ever. “If you’d like to return to Lynley Vale, we can probably manage from here.”
“For me to leave now would not be wise,” Althea said, rising. She wrapped a cinnamon bun in a table napkin and stuffed it into a pocket. “Robbie argues with you, while he merely grouses at me. If I tell him to endure a sponge bath, he puts up with it. You ask him, and he refuses, and that’s an end to it. Now, when he thinks full recovery assured, he’d win all the arguments.”
Nathaniel stood as well, mentally reviewing the previous night’s activities, to the extent his recollection functioned at all.
“I am in the habit of respecting my brother’s wishes.”