Chapter 12 #2
“It is here,” he said, his voice soft but still managing to startle her a little as it punctured the silence that had settled into the room.
He gestured with two fingers to a twisting, lifted white scar that danced over the bone of his right shoulder, from the joint of his arm to the space just above his heart. “The skin broke when the bone did.”
“Oh,” she breathed, her hand coming up toward him before she’d given any leave for it to do such a thing. She stopped it, hovering in the air between them foolishly. “That must have hurt something awful.”
He nodded, a ghost of a smile sliding over his lips as his eyes slid from her face to her hand. “You want to touch it.”
“I …” she said, blinking, heat coming into her face.
He reached out gently and took her hand in his own, drawing it across the remainder of the space between them and pressing it into the scar. His skin was hot and smooth under her fingers, the lift of the bone beneath the odd, puckered give of the scar making her feel utterly faint.
Her breath caught up in a ball somewhere in her throat as his hand slid over the back of hers and dropped away, leaving her touch in place on his bare chest, on this site of an old hurt, healed and new and completely foreign to Rosalind in the most devastating way.
She tried to force a little bit of oxygen into her lungs and traced her fingers, a bit halting and jerky, over the line of the injury, nearly losing her nerve and pulling away when she heard his breath hitch.
He felt her pause and only leaned closer, as though to reassure her that this stutter of breathing, this shortening in his lungs, was not a bad thing. It was not any cause for her to stop her exploration.
As though to confirm this suspicion of his intention, he reached out for her other hand, pulling it from her lap with a lingering, stroking touch of her wrist, his thumb crossing the back of her hand and the dimple of her palm as he pulled it also across the space of the mattress and laid it on the other side of his chest, giving her the whole of him under her hands, silently and slowly and with the most monumental patience.
She truly could not breathe this time, no matter how hard she tried. She could feel his body beneath her hands, could feel his lungs breathing and his heart beating and the warmth of his skin and the softness of those little curls of hair.
She slid her fingers down, staring until her eyes burned, uncertain what she was meant to do or how to do it, until finally his hands came up and covered hers again, pulling them up to his lips, where he laid a gentle kiss on her fingers.
“You are my wife now,” he said softly. “It is all right.”
She blinked several times, rapidly, until her eyes stopped burning and began to water a little, and shook her head, giving an embarrassed little titter. “I know,” she said. “I know that.”
“You are overwhelmed,” he guessed, placing their clasped hands between them. “It is nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I suppose I am a little,” she confessed, giving a resigned little sigh and raising her gaze up to meet his. “I know that tonight is supposed to be … intimate. I know that … well, I know what it is supposed to be and cannot be because I am injured, and I am sorry for that.”
“You have nothing to apologize for,” he said firmly. “Nothing at all, Rosalind. I would wait a lifetime and be grateful for the honor.”
“Oh,” she said, her face heating, her eyes sliding to the side at the little curl of anxious misery that was awakening in her chest. “You are so kind. You really are such a good man. You were so sweet to me earlier today about the kiss, pretending that you had always wanted to and giving me that.”
“Rosalind,” he said, still firm and perhaps a little stern now too, “I do not pretend. Ever.”
She pressed her lips together, tossing him a sidelong look of skeptical impatience. “Everyone pretends sometimes,” she says. “Especially to preserve another’s feelings.”
“I do not,” he insisted. “You will learn that to be true over time, I think, but for now you simply must trust me. Everything I told you in the church today was true. I have been taken with you for a very long time.”
“Me?” she said flatly. “The country mouse in the silly, unfashionable dresses with too many ruffles and ribbons? The one who never knows what to say, who is not the cleverest or the bravest or the most charming? Why would that be true, especially when you only ever see me in the company of my far more impressive friends?”
He stared at her for a moment like she had stumped him with a mathematics question that was impossible to solve, a look on his face that appeared to be true bafflement.
“You do not see yourself like that,” he said after a moment. “You can’t.”
“I do not dislike myself,” Rosalind clarified, lifting her chin. “But I am not ignorant of reality either. I know that I am not like the ladies of London and that I pale in comparison to them. I have learned over time, but I am still very much behind in many, many ways.”
He scoffed, a look on his face almost like he wanted to laugh. He glanced around the room as though a person might appear to explain it to him with different words, and then back to Rosalind, still looking a bit dazed by it.
“I suspect,” he said after a moment, “that I will not argue you out of that mindset, no matter what I say or at what length, here tonight. Do you agree?”
She blinked, realizing as he said it that she had already braced to argue with him about this for some time. “I do,” she said.
He nodded. “All right. Then the subject must simply await an alternative approach. In the meantime, it is getting late, and I think, my dear wife, that you should like some dinner. Why don’t I run down to the public house on the corner and buy us a roast?”
She stared at him, startled by the rapid shift in the subject and his willingness to allow her her feelings on the matter without lecture or correction. “A roast what?” she said, not wishing to lose her footing in this rapport. “I do not care for duck.”
“No duck,” he said, nodding. “Chicken?”
“I like chicken,” she said. “You ought to put your shirt back on, though.”
He smiled then, a broad, easy smile that woke her heart right back up from its series of upsets and pauses that had put it into disarray over these last many moments.
It spread warmth throughout her chest, an odd, tingling warmth that she thought was rather nice, even if it came with a side of ambiguous, quiet buzzing that felt a little bit like alarm.
She waved away that last thing. There was no need for alarm.
None whatsoever.
And she really was in the mood for a nice roast chicken, after all.