His smile turned rueful. “You wound me, wife.”
“I speak only truth.”
“As do I.” The lightness faded from his voice entirely. “You did well today, Penelope. With Rose. With everything. I know I said it at luncheon, but—” He stopped, and sighed. “I wanted you to hear it again. To know that I see what you are doing here. The care you are taking. The strength it requires.”
The praise moved into her bones like warmth, refusing to be dismissed or minimized. She looked up at him, this man who was her husband in name and scandal and little else, and felt something shift between them. It terrified and thrilled her in equal measure.
“Thank you,” she whispered, the words inadequate but all she could manage past the tightness in her throat.
He reached up again—and this time his hand did not fall away. His fingers brushed her cheek, so gentle she might have imagined it, there and gone before she could react.
“Sleep, Penelope,” he said softly. “Rose is safe. Lottie is capable. And you—you need to rest before you collapse in the corridor and force me to carry you to your chamber in a manner mostinappropriate for a husband and wife who are still learning to… understand one another.”
The image his words conjured sent heat flooding through her. “I would not—that would be?—”
“Scandalous? Improper?” His smile turned wicked. “All the more reason to seek your bed now, whilst you still possess the strength to walk there under your own power.”
She should be offended. Should deliver some cutting remark that would put him firmly in his place.
Instead, she found herself smiling. “You are impossible.”
“Yet another thing you have mentioned already.” He stepped back, restoring the proper distance between them. “Goodnight, Penelope.”
“Goodnight… Alastair.”
She moved toward her chamber door, painfully aware of his gaze following her. She paused with her hand on the latch, glancing back despite every instinct screaming at her to simply retreat.
He remained where she had left him, watching her with an expression she could not decipher in the candlelight.
“Sleep well,” he said quietly.
Then he turned and disappeared back into the shadows from which he had emerged, leaving her alone in the corridor with her racing heart and the ghost of his touch still warm upon her cheek.
Penelope slipped into her chamber and closed the door, leaning against it as she pressed her fingers to the place his hand had been.
You did well today.
The words echoed in her mind, settling into the spaces between her ribs where loneliness had lived for so long.
He had seen her. Truly seen her—not as a convenient solution to scandal, not as a duchess performing her duty, but as a woman fighting to do right by an innocent child thrust into impossible circumstances.
She crossed to her bed, slipping beneath the covers still fully aware of every place they had stood too close, every word that had felt too intimate for mere politeness.
This was foolishness. Reading meaning into simple kindness. Letting herself believe that the concern in his eyes meant something beyond basic decency toward the woman he had been forced to marry.
Yet as sleep finally claimed her, pulling her down into dreams she would not remember come morning, one thought persisted above all others.
When he had touched her cheek, when he had looked at her with such unguarded honesty?—
She had wanted him to do it again.
CHAPTER 11
“Imust say, I am rather impressed. The house looks positively respectable.”
Alastair glanced up from the correspondence he had been pretending to read as his sister-in-law swept into the drawing room with all the subtle grace of a small hurricane. Caroline—his closest friend’s wife and, by unfortunate extension, Penelope’s elder sister—paused in the doorway, her sharp eyes cataloguing every detail of the room with the efficiency of a general surveying a battlefield.
“Thank you, Lady Caroline,” he said dryly, setting aside the letter he had not absorbed a single word of. “Your faith in my ability to maintain basic standards of civilisation is truly heartwarming.”