Page 4 of A Wicked Duke's Arranged Marriage
Without a word, Catherine stepped into him, wrapping her slender arms around his waist and hugging him tight.
It was inappropriate, given both the setting and their lack of a chaperone.
But for a moment, Henry didn’t care.
She was soft, warm, and smelled faintly of patchouli and lavender, just like Martha. And she was a married woman. His sister-in-law. So he embraced her back, allowing his arms to wrap around her and give in to the comfort she was so freely offering him.
Out of everyone else in the world, only she could know to any extent what he was going through.
Martha had been her whole life before her marriage, the pair thick as thieves.
Henry bent his head, closed his eyes, and inhaled as he tried not to wish it was Martha in his arms instead of Catherine. As he tried not to imagine their places traded.
“‘What is life without laughter’?” Catherine quoted her sister again, driving that knife even deeper into Henry’s heart.
His ragged chuckle was anything but amused.
What was life without her?
“Martha would want to know that you were moving on,” Catherine whispered, her words hot against his chest even through the layers of fabric he wore. Her hands shifted, her palms flattening out against the small of his back as she spread her fingers as wide as they would go. “She would want to know that you were taken care of …”
Henry couldn’t argue with her. He knew she spoke the truth.
But he didn’t quite grasp what she was doing.
She stepped in even closer to him, even embracing as they were. A half-shuffle forward until he could feel every bit of her pressing into his front, her slender frame fitted to his in a way that was no longer just breaching protocol but entirely doing away with it.
And he froze.
“Catherine?”
Her hands slid slowly up his back, her face lifting as her dark eyes flashed up at him.
“I could be your wife, Henry,” she whispered fervently. “I could take care of you. I could do that for her. We could do that for her. To honour her memory, to let her know that you were going to be fine.” She pressed her chest into his until he could feel the rapid beating of her heart through both their clothes. “You could marry me.”
Her words were like pointed spikes driven into his spine, forcing him to let go of her and step back so abruptly that she teetered on the verge of falling over.
But he didn’t dare reach out to steady her.
Instead, he stared at her as if he couldn’t quite make out what he was seeing.
“You are married already, Catherine.” The words were the only ones he could think of to answer her.
Everything else was too obscene.
She couldn’t possibly have just been suggesting what he thought she was …
She was clearly driven by grief just as much as he, though hers had taken an odd, twisted turn that he didn’t think he could stomach.
“Henry–”
“You had better see yourself to your carriage,” Henry cut her off in an abrasive monotone. “I need to be returning home.”
Despite how much he didn’t wish to.
Anything was better than standing in that space with Catherine for longer or allowing her grief to give voice to any other insane suggestions.
He strode away from her without waiting for a reply, heading for his carriage with the full intent of just sitting in it until her own had pulled off.
