“I think we should take her suggestion,” he teased, pulling Josephine back to him and spinning her back towards the dance floor.
“And I think that we should take some time after the wedding before having more guests,” Josephine muttered so softly that Henry wasn’t even sure she meant him to hear her.
“More and more similarities,” he teased, his chest warming at their shared sentiment.
Time for just the two of them was hardly something he would discourage when he had been considering it so often just in the last half hour.
Chapter 21
“Besides, you look happier than I think I’ve ever seen you.”
Her mother’s voice rang in her head long after having uttered that sentence, the words repeating over and over again until they almost didn’t feel real.
She was happy, Josephine realized. Well and truly happy.
Not because of the duke’s promise to take care of her parents. Not because of her future being so secure. Not even because of Lady Brisby being removed to London.
Those were all very good reasons, certainly. Perhaps even contributing factors. But Henry was the real source of her happiness. Henry and how he looked at her like she was the only woman worth looking at in the room. Henry, whose hand seemed to find hers anytime that he was able to let it. Henry, who had danced with her until her feet hurt, and she had had to cry off of participating in another number. Henry, who made her laugh until she felt like her ribs might split inside the confines of her corset.
Henry, Henry, Henry.
His name was like a salve filling in pieces of her that she hadn’t even known needed to be filled.
Her auburn hair gleamed from where she had taken it down, the boar-bristle brush gliding through the strands as she stared into the vanity she sat facing.
Her reflection looked like a stranger sitting across from her.
Surely, she hadn’t always smiled so widely. Surely, the pink in her cheeks had not always been there. Her eyes were too bright, too blue, and her smile tilted as if she held a secret in those key-shaped wells at the corners of her lips.
“You’re a silly fool,” she murmured crossly to her reflection, pulling a face as if it could make it look any more like her. But it didn’t. No matter what she said, her smile stayed.
“Don’t say it,” she muttered, shaking her head and brushing through her hair with more force. “Don’t even think it!” Because if she thought it, if she allowed that four-letter word to even so much as cross her mind, there would be no pretending that she didn’t know. And if she couldn’t pretend that she didn’t know, she would agonize over it and obsess until she could understand it.
Or try and talk herself out of it.
As if such things were possible.
“You silly, senseless girl.”
She’d said from the very beginning that she wasn’t going to do this. She’d promised both herself and the duke. And the duke–
Her thoughts skittered to a halt as knuckles rapped against her bedchamber’s door, the sound carrying and making her jump all in the same breath.
“Just a moment,” she said breathlessly, jumping up from the vanity to grab the dressing gown she’d laid across the back of the chair where she’d been sitting.
It was too heavy a hand to be her mother’s. Too heavy a hand to be a maid, even.
But who, at this hour–
The door opened before she could finish the thought, Henry’s large form ducking through the opening and closing the door behind him before she could even fully register what was happening.
“I – You – Your Grace,” she stammered, pulling her dressing gown tightly about her and fumbling to tie a knot to secure it. “I did not expect–” Well, of course, she hadn’t. She stopped mid-sentence as she realized how ridiculous that was.
Oh, Lord. Why did he look so much larger all of a sudden?
“I know this is peculiar,” Henry muttered. He looked almost as nervous as she felt, his eyes darting to the closed door behind him and then back to her before he went suddenly and fully still. His eyes darkened as they swept along her, moving up and down as he took in her obvious state of undress.
Josephine felt as if the dressing gown was rendered irrelevant, her throat closing up and heat flooding her at how hungry his expression suddenly became.
