Chapter 20
Norman was drifting off to sleep two nights later when a soft knock at his door brought him back to wakefulness.
For a moment, he was frustrated. He didn’t like to be disturbed after he had gone to bed. The staff knows better.
But wait a moment—the staff did know better. If someone was knocking…
He got out of bed and put on his dressing gown. Whatever this was, it couldn’t be ignored. He pulled open the door.
Susan stood on the other side, fist raised, ready to knock again.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry. Were you… you were going to sleep.”
“Well, it is the middle of the night,” she pointed out.
Her cheeks went red. “Right,” she said. “I know. I mean—I’m sorry.”
“What brings you here?” If she was going to offer him an heir again, he didn’t know what he would say.
It couldn’t be that—not after the story she had shared about her sister.
The last thing she would want would be to have a man take her to bed out of any sort of obligation. He wouldn’t do it. And yet…
There she stood in her nightclothes. Her soft hair spilled loose around her shoulders, and he wanted to bury his hands in it. He wanted to inhale the scent of her. He had never been hungrier for another person in all his life.
“The window in my room is broken,” Susan said.
His reverie shattered. “Broken? What do you mean?”
“It’s the storm,” she explained. “Something hit it. I didn’t see what—it might have been a broken tree branch. It just shattered. The sound woke me up.”
As if on cue, thunder clapped outside. The storm had been raging for the past day and a half, and Susan and Norman had been stuck in the house.
It was an odd set of circumstances, Norman had thought more than once.
They were supposed to be stuck in the house together right now, but for an entirely different reason.
It was as if the weather was trying to force them into observing the honeymoon neither of them had properly taken an interest in.
And now a window had broken. “I’ll have the staff move your things to one of the spare rooms,” he said, pulling the bell by his door. “You can stay there until the window can be fixed.”
She hesitated.
“Is there more?”
“I just…” she swallowed. “It frightened me. I’m sorry. Waking up to that crash… I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep now.” She shook her head. “This is embarrassing. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, it isn’t your problem.”
“Of course it is,” he countered. “You’re my wife.”
“I don’t know what that has to do with anything.”
“It means I’m responsible for your well-being.” He pursed his lips. “Would you sleep better in here?”
“But then where would you go?”
“I would be here too. On the settee.” He pointed quickly, not wanting her to get the wrong idea about his intentions. “I just thought you might be more at ease if you had someone in the room with you. But if not…”
“No,” she said quickly. “That… I think that would help, yes. Thank you.” She paused again. “Are you sure it’s all right? I wouldn’t want to put you out.”
“It will probably only be for one night,” he said. “I’m sure the storm will stop tomorrow, and then you can move back into a room of your own. But if you’re frightened, I don’t mind you staying here.” He gestured to the bed.
She came in and went over to it. “This really is very kind of you,” she said.
“I can be kind.” He plucked a pillow off the bed and tossed it onto the settee. “I wasn’t always a duke, you know. There was a time when I was just a man.”
“And kinder, by virtue of that?”
“And I learned kindness by virtue of that,” he corrected. “Growing up away from all this opulence and entitlement, you learn not to expect things given to you. You learn to fend for yourself in the world.”
She pulled the blankets up over her knees. Sitting upright, she gazed thoughtfully at him. “Is that what you think of me?” she asked. “That I expect to have things given to me?”
“No,” he admitted. “You’re… not what I expected. But most people in society are. There are very few surprised. You’ve been one of them.”
“I always assumed you were pleased to inherit your title. It does seem like it would be a good thing,” she said. “Not to have to worry about finances anymore…”
“You still have to worry about finances,” he told her.
“I have more money now than I did as a commoner, yes, but I have more responsibilities too. All of Heathmare is under my care, after all. I owe it to the people here to do a good job tending to the place. Before, if I mismanaged my money, the only person who would be harmed was myself. It was more difficult in some ways, but it was easier in others.”
“That makes sense,” Susan admitted. “And yet, you were so eager to marry, to show everyone that you belong to this role you’re not sure you even want.”
“I’ve accepted Heathmare,” he said. “Once a man makes a decision, he can’t waver. I can’t sit here and tell myself I feel uncertain about this course of action. It’s the course I’ve taken. The only thing I can do is to try to make the best of it in every way.”
She was quiet for a moment. “You miss it, don’t you?”
“I miss what?”
“You miss being… just a man,” she said. “Even though you’ve accepted this life, even though you’ve committed to it. You miss the life you left behind.”
“There was more freedom,” he said. “I could do what I liked without worry about how it would be perceived. I almost never thought about what people would think of me, because it didn’t matter—people didn’t think about me. I do miss that. Not being thought about.”
“That wasn’t isolating?”
“Not at all. I did have people in my life, of course. My good friend Reeves—the Duke of Greystone. He’s always been by my side.”
“You had a friend who was a duke, even then?” She wrapped her arms around her knees. “This life isn’t new to you after all.”
“I had exposure to all this,” he agreed.
“That’s a large part of how I knew I wasn’t going to like it.
Or at least, that there would be parts of it I wouldn’t like.
I saw everything Reeves put up with. It always seemed dreadful to me.
He insisted that it wasn’t so bad, of course, but he has always belonged to this world, just like you.
He doesn’t know anything else, so it wouldn’t seem bad to him. ”
“I don’t know about that,” Susan countered. “I’m able to perceive that there are things in my life I don’t like very much, even though it’s the only life I’ve ever known.”
He thought of the story she had told about her sister. He was sure she was thinking of the same thing, though he wasn’t going to mention it aloud. It seemed like the kind of thing that shouldn’t be named unless she was the one to name it.
“Is that why you agreed to accept the dukedom?” she asked him. “Because of your friend? You thought… I don’t know. Maybe you thought that you were equipped for this life because you knew him?”
“I’m sure that was part of it,” Norman agreed.
“And I’m sure I’m far less overwhelmed with it than I would have been without his influence in my life.
But no, he isn’t the reason. At the end of the day, I felt as though I would need a reason to refuse more than I needed a reason to accept.
Perhaps that’s foolish, but… it’s what I thought. ”
“And the person who left it to you. The old Duke. You don’t know him at all?”
“A distant cousin, apparently,” Norman said. “I didn’t even know I had a relative who was a duke.”
“That seems like something someone would have told you.”
He glanced at her. “You ask a lot of questions tonight. Are you sure you’ve had a fright?”
“Yes,” she said evenly. “I can’t sleep, and I’m trying to calm myself by talking. If I’m bothering you, you can tell me to stop. You don’t have to answer my questions. I can find another way to soothe my nerves.”
But he found he didn’t mind. “Nobody told me I had a relative who was a duke because there was no one to tell me,” he explained. “He was some distant relation of my mother’s. She died when I was young, so I had no way of knowing.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Susan’s voice was heavy with sympathy.
Norman shook his head, suddenly regretting having opened up. He never spoke about his mother. “It was a very long time ago,” he said quickly.
“I also lost my mother when I was a child,” Susan said softly. “She didn’t die, so it isn’t the same thing—I would never try to say that it was. Still, I understand what it feels like to have something that should be so certain ripped away from you. It’s terrible. I’m sorry you went through that.”
He was quiet for a long moment. He hadn’t expected her to be able to relate to his pain, and now that she had, he realized he had never experienced anything like it.
Everyone who heard the story of what had happened to his mother responded with platitudes.
They spoke of heaven, or they talked about how her suffering was at an end.
Norman was grateful for the sentiments, but they didn’t help.
This was altogether different. For her to say that she understood his pain, that she knew it hurt him, and just to leave it at that, was incredibly powerful.
“Thank you,” he managed. “I’m sorry about your mother too.”
He had only intended to give her an explanation.
An answer to her question. This wasn’t supposed to be a sharing of confidences.
But it had turned into that somehow. He felt closer to her than he ever had before—closer than when they had crafted a story together and conspired to lie to everyone they knew.
He looked over at her.
She had lain back on the pillow, and in the flicker of the lantern’s light, he saw that her eyes were closed. I have to let her get some sleep.
He was moved; he realized that she had come to him when she was afraid. He was even more moved that she was able to rest here—that she had so quickly fallen asleep in his presence.
I guess she’s more frightened of storms than she is of me.
Then again, that wasn’t so surprising. Susan had reacted to him in many different ways in the time they had known one another, but she had never struck Norman as frightened. She was too bold for that. Too audacious. Tonight might have been the first time she had ever shown him real fear.
He got up and grabbed the quilt that was draped over the armchair in the corner, then lay back down on the settee.
It was really too small for him to sleep comfortably—yet, as he closed his eyes, he found that he didn’t miss his bed at all.
It was better that she had it. It was the right thing to have done.
For the first time since the two of them had married, he felt like a real husband—and a good one at that.