Page 35 of A Duke in Disguise
She supposed that the reason it was different was that he thought she’d have to marry him if she got with child. That was about the last thing she wanted to think about when she was sated and happy. The idea seemed to take what they had—sweet and easy and good—and shove it into a shape that was familiar and wrong.
“None of that,” he said, as if reading her thoughts, and wrapped his arm around her. She gladly nestled against his shoulder, wanting the warmth and solidity of his body to chase away her thoughts. He smelled good, too, his usual scent of ink and soap overlaid with sex. But now dread of the future crept into her mind and she was reminded of all the reasons why she and Ash hadn’t done this years ago. “Stop thinking,” he said into her hair. “Go to sleep.”
“It’s not even five o’clock,” she protested. “The shopman tried to speak to me earlier. I have to see what he wants. And I need to make sure that the boys have theLadies’ Registertypeset.” And there were a dozen other small matters she had to attend to. She really could not spend all afternoon in bed, not even with Ash.
“All right,” he said, sitting up and groping for his trousers. “I’ll check on the boys, you talk to the shopman?”
“No, that’s kind of you, but it’s my responsibility.”
“And you discharge all your responsibilities admirably, even though without Nate here I have no idea how you’re managing it. I’m offering to help—which, I’ll remind you, is not unprecedented—and it’s not because I’m trying to get you back into bed as fast as I can. Not that I’d object if you felt so inclined.” He sketched a polite little bow, which would have made her smile even if he hadn’t been in the process of pulling on his trousers.
“It’s just—” She shook her head. She didn’t know how to make him understand. Her job was hers. She was proud that she ran the business on her own, that the men in the shop treated her little differently than they had treated her father and Nate, and she took pride in being a fair employer. But mainly she was so used to shouldering every burden on her own, that she feared accepting help would make her burdens feel heavier once the help was gone.
“How about I go fetch us some supper and then undo whatever mischief the cat wrought in my studio this morning,” he suggested.
“Yes, thank you,” she said, relieved, and they went down the stairs together.
Downstairs, though, it was not the shopman but Nan who stood in the shop waiting for her. “The lads said you’d want to see this,” said the older woman, handing Verity a newspaper.
Verity scanned the small type on the first page. Ash, looking over her shoulder, must have seen it first, because she heard his sharply indrawn breath.
Hone, the radical publisher who had been arrested for seditious libel, had been found not guilty. Nate needn’t have left after all. Verity had strong-armed her brother into going thousands of miles away for nothing. He had done it only for her, and now she bore the burden of her mistake. Every time she saw his empty chair at the table, she would be reminded of what happened when loved ones made sacrifices on her behalf—creeping knowledge of a debt that couldn’t be repaid, a burden that wouldn’t be lifted.
“I’m happy for Mr. Hone, of course,” she managed. “And pleased to see the courts have yielded a just result.” That was true. Of course it was. She did not wish innocent men to be punished in order to justify her concern; that was madness. But she was not thinking entirely clearly.
“Naturally,” Ash said. “But it was still prudent for Nate to go, especially since now Sidmouth will find other ways of cracking down on radicals.”
Verity dismissed this kindness with a wave of her hand. She was a shrew and a harpy and utterly incapable of the basic give-and-take of human relationships. She had bungled things with Portia, with her brother, and would soon do so with Ash.
She checked on the men in the workroom, answered her mail, tended the fire in her study, and only then did she notice a stack of papers on the small table by the window. She picked one up and saw that they were the first prints of the engravings Ash had made forA Princely Pretense. There was Perkin Warbeck beckoning to his bride, there was the pale and drawn Earl of Warwick awkward but laughing in his lover’s arms. Here were all the scenes, exactly as they would appear in the finished novel. And they were beautiful, each image a delicate arrangement of light and shadow. These were no crude woodcut images of naked women that a man could buy for tuppence. She felt a surge of fondness and admiration for Ash for having created this beauty, for having drawn these characters as people—there were no coy innocents here, but no villains either. He saw the best in people who the rest of the world dismissed, and Verity knew that included herself. He was good and kind, and he deserved better than her, but she was far too selfish to give him up now.
It was not ideal timing.
When Ash’s arm started to twitch, he just managed to pull the bell cord, so that was something. That it was Verity who appeared in the door of his workroom was regrettable; in a last moment of mad vanity before losing consciousness, he wished it had been Nan. But when he came to he had a pillow under his head and no obvious injuries. Verity assured him that it had been only a minute since he had lost consciousness. She didn’t fuss over him, thank God; she had, after all, seen this happen a handful of times and the fact that they had gone to bed together the previous night shouldn’t change anything.
“Nan will bring up tea in bit,” she said, smoothing a piece of hair off his forehead.
His limbs felt heavy and unreliable, and it would be several minutes before he could hold a teacup, longer still before his skull felt like it contained a proper brain rather than bits of eggshell and cobweb rattling around. He couldn’t even make a guess as to what month it was and only Verity’s presence gave him the clue he needed to remember where he was.
As a child, he had often woken terrified, bruised, utterly disoriented. Facts like his name and the names of people around him hovered frustratingly out of reach, and sometimes he would remain in that state of confusion for days, would be brought to a new house and new people and be called by a new name before the fog lifted. Each episode was like being reborn. Staring at the slanted ceiling of his workroom, he thought it was no wonder Lady Caroline hadn’t been able to find him. He had hardly been able to find himself. He hadn’t been abandoned so much as lost. He had thought he had found himself here, a name and a place and a life of his own, but he was going to be lost again.
His eyes started to prickle with tears, easy emotion being another effect of his seizure.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to sit here staring at you,” Verity said, getting to her feet. “I’ll sit over here by the window pretending that your cat isn’t planning my death, and you enjoy yourself on the floor over there.”
He made a sound that was the ghost of a laugh. Sure enough, the cat was perched on the edge of his worktable, shifting her baleful gaze between Ash and Verity.
“She probably thinks you’ve poisoned me,” he croaked.
“She’s onto me,” Verity intoned.
He tentatively dragged himself up onto his elbows. To his surprise, the cat leaped off the table and came to his side. She made a sound that he hadn’t heard before.
“Is that cat purring?” Verity asked, looking up from one of Ash’s art books.
Ash held his hand out and the cat rubbed her whiskers against it. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “Do you think she knows I’ve been unwell?”
“I daresay demons in feline form are typically quite intelligent.”
