Page 28 of Wedded to the Loveless Duke
The next morning, Eleanor struggled to rouse herself from her bed, a splitting headache making her every movement seem unusually difficult. She clutched her head with a low moan. She should never have had the second drink Phillip had gave her.
A knock at the door startled her, sounding like a gunshot to her overly sensitive ears. Then, the door opened, and Phillip walked into her bedroom pushing a silver tray set on a small stand. He smiled sympathetically as she forced herself to sit up with a grimace. Bringing the tray over to her, he settled the stand over her legs and picked up the glass of orange juice. “Drink this. Annie prepared it specially to help with the hangover.”
Eleanor sniffed it suspiciously. On closer examination, it was thicker than normal. “What is in this?”
“An egg. Annie claims it does wonders for headaches caused by drinking too much wine. How do you feel? Besides the headache, that is.” He sat beside her on the bed, plucking a piece of toast from the tray and taking a bite.
“Tired…” She eyed him, blushing when she realized she was in nothing but a thin linen nightgown with him sitting there in her bedchamber. “Perhaps… I should dress before I eat.”
Phillip raised an eyebrow. “We are husband and wife, Eleanor. You are not required to adhere to such strict proprieties whenit is only I who has entered your bedchamber. Besides…” He reached out to finger the lace along her neckline. “It looks fetching on you.”
“Now you are merely flattering! I am nearly undressed, my hair is a disaster, and I am dealing with a dreadful headache. I cannot look fetching.”
“Of course you can, and you do.” He polished off his toast and brushed off the crumbs to the wooden floor below her bed. “But when I asked how you feel, I was referring to how you feel about what happened last night?”
Eleanor frowned, digging through her memories for what he was talking about. Then, the memory of their kiss last night flooded back, and her cheeks burned. “I…” She had enjoyed it, and she wouldn’t mind a repeat, but it didn’t seem quite appropriate to say so. “What do you want me to say?” she asked.
“I want to know the truth.” Phillip lifted a grape to her lips.
At first, she kept her mouth closed, embarrassed and unsure if he really meant to feed her. When he did not remove the fruit and merely quirked an eyebrow at her, she finally opened her mouth and let him feed her the grape. His smile told her he was enjoying it, and despite the embarrassment, she found a strange thrill in letting him feed her. It felt wrong, elicit in a way, but that only made it more exciting.
“What is the truth, then, Eleanor? How are you feeling?”
“C-confused,” she stammered.
“About what? How much I want you? Or about why I want you?”
After last night, she had no doubts at all about how much he wanted her or why he wanted her. It was clear that money had been only a very small fraction of his purpose in marrying her, and that both relieved her and frightened her. “About how I feel about it all,” she admitted with a whisper.
He offered her a small chunk of apple next. “Why?”
She chewed on the fruit long enough to think about a response. Why was she confused? Because she should hate him, maybe? Or maybe because she had never wanted a man, and now here she was, wanting him? Because she had wanted him to take that kiss much further the previous evening and now was terrified of what that would have entailed. “I… I should not want this.”
Phillip gave her a gentle smile. “Why not? We are married, regardless of how it came about, are we not?”
“Well, yes, I suppose so.”
“There is nothing wrong about this, Eleanor. It does not have to be complicated.”
“If it does not, then why did you stop at the kiss?” She found, to her surprise, that she really wanted to know and was not merely using it as a point of argument.
“Because I did not want to hurt you, my sweet bride. If I had gone further in the state you were in, you would have been hurt and resentful as well as confused this morning. I want your first time to be perfect for you.”
Eleanor bit the inside of her cheek and lowered her gaze.
“I went through a great deal of difficulty to make you mine, Eleanor,” he murmured. “I will not risk the chance to have your love to satisfy a moment of desire. My plans for you require trust and love between us, and I cannot gain your trust if I take advantage of your vulnerability to satisfy the lesser desire of having you in my bed.”
A warmth bloomed in her chest and spread throughout the rest of her body. Did she really mean so much to him that he was willing to forgo his right as her husband in order to gain her heart and her trust? Perhaps he really did want her in every way, not just as his lover or as his means to pay off his debts. She wanted that so badly that it caused an ache in her chest alongside the warmth his gentle treatment had sparked.
“Is such a future possible?” she asked.
“Anything is possible when it comes to loving one another if we both work hard for it. Will you work hard with me, Eleanor? Will you fight for the chance to make more of this than an unwanted bargain?”
Eleanor picked up the glass of orange juice and drained it, grimacing at the taste. Then, she set it back down on the trayand met Phillip’s gaze. “If I trust you and discover you have been lying again, it will break me, Phillip.”
He heard the unspoken plea in her statement. Taking her hands in his, he nodded. “I know. Give me the chance to show you that I will not be the one to break you or clip your wings, my love.”
“Very well. I will work hard with you, Phillip.”
