Dukes By the Dozen

Penelope’s voice was too close for him to fully cover himself—he hastily flung a linen towel around his loins.

But she was already through the door. “Good Lord, Beech! What have you done?” She was looking not at his oozing face, but at the remains of his queue, sheared and lying discarded on the floor.

“Brought myself into the nineteenth century. Or at least tried to.” It had seemed such an easy task when he had conceived of it half an hour ago—to do away with his scruffy, piratical appearance for his wedding day.

“Why?”

“You said you thought I could do with a good barbering if I hoped to please.” The phrase had stuck in his mind like a pebble in his boot, urging him to take pains with his appearance on this day of all days.

“Not to please me—I rather liked you in the eighteenth century,” Penelope replied before she placed an offhand kiss on his bare left shoulder. “Where’s your man, Martins?”

“Gone for a bishop.”

“Dear Beech.” She tsked and ran her fingers through his uneven hair. “Here— If you’ll allow me?”

Marcus hesitated. He felt hideously exposed—she could see the stump of his arm, the ugly puckering of skin and scar that crossed the base.

But she wasn’t looking at his arm. She was looking at his face. “We’re to be married today, are we not, Beech?” she asked in answer to his silent disquiet. “If you can’t trust me now, when are you planning to do so?”

Marcus ignored the heat under his skin, swallowed the shameful fear in his throat, and handed her the shears.

“Thank you. I will strive to be worthy of your trust. If you would sit”—she directed him to a chair, as efficiently business-like as his steward ever was—“so you don’t loom over me. And here. You can keep watch”—she rearranged things on the shaving stand, angling the mirror to reflect into another large pier glass so that showed his profile—“so you can assure yourself that I’m doing you proud.”

She couldn’t do otherwise with her brilliantly straightforward demeanor.

Marcus relaxed enough to do as she advised and looked in the mirror.

And the image before him hit like a blow to the chest—there, in the prismatic trick of the reflection, was his arm.

He knew—he knew it was gone, and yet, there before him, he was whole again.

While Penelope took a turn around him, deciding upon her approach, making snips here and there, Marcus tried to keep his breathing calm and even. In and out. Drawing air evenly into his lungs.

But he could not look away.

Something—the omnipresent phantom itch that often clawed away his sanity—compelled him to scratch. To flex and rub his good right arm against his side and the edge of the chair as inconspicuously as possible while he watched the reflection in the mirror.

And miracle of miracles, it eased the prickling ache in his lost arm.

His heart filled his ears with a low pounding excitement.

Marcus took a deeper breath and did it again, rubbing his right elbow more purposefully, pressing harder against the wooden slat of the chair. And he felt it in his left arm—the phantom arm he watched in the mirror.

He did it again, and again until it must not have been inconspicuous at all, because the sound of the scissors had ceased, and Penelope was standing still behind him. Watching.

Shame warred with astonishment—with the miracle of discovery. “I—”

“Would it help if—?” And then she dropped the scissors and was rubbing his shoulders, pushing her thumbs into muscles made knotty by pain and tension and the sheer effort to hold himself up like a duke. Her clever hands rounded his shoulders and began massaging lower, down the full length of his good arm. Kneading deep with her knuckles and the heels of her palms, threading her fingers with his, rotating his wrist and letting him stretch out his fingers as he watched in the mirror.

The exquisite relief—the sheer totality of feeling—was so profound it was nearly cataclysmic. His breath was sawing in and out of his chest as if he had raced up a masthead, or fought in a battle, or made insanely pleasurable love to his wife.

“Does it help?”

“Aye.” He had no other answer. “Aye.” He tried to ease his breathing. “How did you know?”

“I didn’t, really. I saw you and thought—” She shook her head. “Just luck, I suppose.”

Just luck. The same sort of luck that had preserved his life instead of his arm. The same luck that had brought him to Warwickshire when he might have stayed in London. The very luck that had brought her to the library, so he might talk and drink and walk and dance and fall in love with her.

He pulled her down onto his lap. “Just so.” He kissed her in the knowledge that he was the luckiest man in the world.

“We’ll do it again with the mirrors, whenever you feel the need,” she suggested between kisses.

“Aye,” he agreed. “But I can think of a few other things we might be able to do with some mirrors.” Because when he looked down at just the right angle, her perfectly round breasts were just there, served up as soft and steamy as a fresh pot of porridge. “Pease Porridge Sweet.”