milk on his own, he’d become twice his original size.
Christian reached down and rubbed the dog’s scruffy head. He’d not realized how rudderless he would feel without Calvin.
Christian, alone, was the head of the family now. He was responsible for Bernadette, Horace, and the dukedom.
And now Lillian.
Which was why he faced this most unusual predicament today. He was to bed a woman, a beautiful woman who was also a lady, who’d married him out of nothing more than compassion—pity?— and a desire for future independence.
She was willing to help him. She was willing to marry him and then wait for him to die.
Christian glanced down at the timepiece once again. Ten minutes had passed since she would have been expecting him. He grasped his knee to stop it from bouncing and yet still he couldn’t force himself to get up. What the hell had he done?
Lillian had sent Becky away nearly half an hour ago. Where was he? Had he changed his mind? A handful of maids from the kitchen had delivered several trays laden with food and wine that now sat waiting, untouched, on a low table adjacent to the velvet settee that made for a small sitting area just opposite her bed.
Lillian glanced in the mirror again. She’d not had time to buy any sort of trousseau, and so she’d brought with her the prettiest cotton night rail that she owned and had donned a pale pink dressing gown with lace at the wrists and hem to wear over it.
Her eyes looked larger than normal against her complexion, which seemed to alternate between looking either more pale than usual or unusually flushed.
She glanced at the door that she knew opened up to his suite. She hadn’t heard any movement at all since before the food had arrived.
Was it possible he’d decided to spend the afternoon in the tap room? Joined his servants downstairs rather than bed a woman who’d married him for such mercenary reasons as she had?
Lillian bit her lip. That did not seem like something he’d do. Was it possible she’d been wrong about him? He had withdrawn from her after the attack. but he had been injured. She was not wrong about his character. She was certain of it.
What if he’d fallen ill? This explanation was far more likely than the first.
More worried for him than nervous for herself, she tiptoed across the room and pressed her ear against the door.
Nothing.
She knocked three times softly, and then three more times, louder and with more urgency. When met with only silence, she turned the latch and pushed it open.
“Christian?” She spoke his name, expecting to discover an empty room.
It was not empty.
Not ten feet away, illuminated by just a few candles, Christian sat still as a statue upon a high-backed chair. Horace shifted a matter-of-fact gaze in her direction, but his master did not move. The vibrant man she’d married barely an hour before now appeared almost as though he’d been hypnotized.
“Christian?” Lillian padded across the plush carpet. Only after she stood directly in his line of sight, did he realize he wasn’t alone. He blinked, and then seemed to struggle to focus on her from behind his spectacles.
Horace circled to the side of the chair, allowing Lillian to kneel on the floor before this man that she’d married—this man who was dying.
Scared that something had happened, that he’d had an attack of some sort or that his illness had progressed, she took hold of Christian’s hands and rubbed them between both of hers. They were cold as ice. The timepiece he had been clutching dropped and then swung from its chain. “Are you unwell? Christian?”
He was shaking his head. “You should not have married me so quickly. A lady such as yourself…” He frowned. “Am I late?” His voice came out little more than a whisper. His foot started tapping. “Lillian? Forgive me.”
“But there is nothing to forgive, Christian,” she reassured him as her heart slowed to its normal pace once again. “Are you ill?” she asked again, touching his forehead, the side of his face, fearing the wound from the boar might have become infected after all. If anything, his skin was cool.
Confused, she clasped his hands in hers again.
As though emerging from a deep sleep, he slipped one hand out of hers and scrubbed it down his face. “I—“ He swallowed hard.
“Are you in pain?” she asked more urgently this time, although he seemed to be coming back to himself.
“I ought to be.