Page 2 of Married to the Forbidden Duke
“Well, they are probably concerned about your health.”
“They are, almost as much as they’re concerned about what people will say about me.”
Jenny said nothing, and Alice closed her eyes against the cold tears that coated them. She rarely cried now, but that didn’t mean she didn’t feel the thickness of tears in her throat, or the tightness of them in her chest. Just that crying never achieved anything.
This was her life. Trapped within these four walls, unable to go further than the wall that ran around the kitchen gardens. Limited by the stick she loathed and needed in equal measure.
“There now,” Jenny soothed. “Your bath, Miss.”
Alice sat up, narrowing her eyes at the bath steaming behind the screen before the fire. Only a handful of steps—nine, perhaps. She could make them without her stick.
Jenny stood back. This had become somewhat of a tradition. Alice would attempt it, and Jenny would be there to catch her when, more often than not, she fell.
Today, she was determined not to fall.
“Fetch the newspaper please, Jenny,” she said.
Jenny hesitated. “Are you sure it’s the right—”
“Please, Jenny.”
Her maid bobbed her head. “Yes, ma’am.”
Slowly, painfully, Alice rose from the bed and tested her weight against her twisted leg.
In the carriage accident that had taken her parents’ lives, she had fractured her leg in three places. The bone had puncturedthe skin. The doctors who attended her at the beginning said she would never walk again, but over the years, she had mastered some level of mobility.
Even so, her bones ached, and sometimes she had nightmares of those Early days: the searing, shattering agony; rough hands forcing shattered bone back into place; leather straps pinning her down; brandy poured between clenched teeth. It was a miracle she hadn’t become addicted to laudanum.
One step.Two.
Her leg ached. Her foot scuffed against the carpet, and she cursed, drawing the colorful word from the stable hands’ vocabulary—from back before the accident, when she had been permitted to ride, and often.
Three steps. Four. Five. Six, seven.
She was going to make it!
Her weight listed to the side, and she reached out a hand for the patterned screen, intending to support herself before the last few steps.
She managed one more, but twisted, and her full weight landed on her injured leg. A muffled shriek left her lips, and she toppled forward, colliding with the screen, which fell against the bath. Water sloshed against the floor.
Alice landed painfully. She lay there for a few moments, trying to get her breathing under control. Pain still burned through her limbs, and she had bruised her ribs from her fall. Tears, pointless and hot, filled her eyes, and she wiped them away with the back of her hand.
The door opened and Jenny rushed to her side. “Miss Alice! Let me help you.”
Exhausted, Alice allowed Jenny to wrap her arm around her shoulders and pull her up. Once Alice could support herself against the wall, Jenny righted the screen and helped Alice with her dress, letting it slip from her shoulders and onto the floor. Alice had a series of steps and supports to help her climb into the bath, and once that was achieved, she lay back in the hot water.
Steam billowed all around her. Some of the ache in her leg eased.
“Any announcements?” she murmured wearily, eyes closed. “Read them out to me.”
Jenny perched on a stool beside the bath and began to read all the announcements. When the scandal pages came, the maid read those aloud, too, both keeping abreast of the news and following the fortunes of a certain gentleman.
Alice had never met him in person, but she knew of him. The reckless Duke of Langford and the carriage crash that had changed the course of her life forever and allowed him to walk away unscathed.
Jenny’s low voice read out the announcements—engagements between peers of the realm and daughters of other peers. Deaths. Babies. The words blurred until Jenny stopped with a small gasp.
Alice cracked an eye open. “What is it?”
