I set the candle on a small table. I dropped my wool shawl. It pulled on the floorboards with a soft whisper. "I am not pretending," I said, walking toward him. "Turn around, Nathaniel."
He remained rigid for a long moment before slowly turning to face me. The fire light threw harsh shadows across the left side of his face. He flinched under my gaze, instinctively tilting his head to present his unscarred profile. I reached out and placed my hand flat against his chest. His heart was hammering wildly beneath the thin linen, betraying the stoic mask he wore.
"Look at me," I commanded softly. He turned his head back, his one good eye full of a desperate, guarded fear. I lifted my other hand. "I didn't hesitate. I didn't let my fingers tremble.
I pressed my palm gently against the ruined puckered skin of his left cheek. It felt hot, slick, and unnaturally smooth in some places, rigidly tight in others. Nathaniel gasped, a sharp, broken sound. He closed his eyes, his entire massive frame shaking under the feather-like touch of my hand. No one had touched the left side of his face in 5 years.
Not a doctor, not a servant, not a friend. It's just skin, Nathaniel, I whispered, sliding my fingers up into the hair at his temple. It is the skin of a man who survived. It doesn't frighten me. He reached up, his large, rough hand wrapping around my wrist.
I thought he was going to pull my hand away. But instead, he pressed my palm harder against his scarred cheek, leaning into my touch like a starving man finding bread. A ragged sobb tore from his throat. The walls he had built, the anger, the isolation, the monstrous persona of the rotting duke crumbled into dust. He fell to his knees in front of me, wrapping his thick arms around my waist, burying his face in the folds of my cotton night gown.
I stood there in the quiet room, staring down at the broad, trembling shoulders of my husband. I run my hands through his dark, thick hair. We were two people who had been sold, burned, and cast aside by the world. But standing here in the heat of the fire, I realized with a startling clarity that we were no longer broken. We had simply been remade.
"Come," I said gently, tugging on his shoulders until he stood up. "We have a contract to fulfill." He looked down at me, the fear gone from his eye, replaced by something fierce, hungry, and entirely devoted. He didn't carry me to the bed with a theatrical flourish. He took my hand, his fingers lacing tightly through mine, and led me there.
There was no poetry in the dark. There was awkwardness and the shifting of heavy blankets and the sharp intake of breath, but there was also a profound grounding warmth. When he kissed me, his mouth was rough and desperate. When his hands moved over my skin, they were careful, reverent, treating me not as a commodity to be used, but as something precious he was terrified to break. I pulled him closer, mapping the expanse of his scarred back with my fingertips, anchoring him to the present, anchoring him to me.
Spring did not arrive in Yorkshire. It invaded. The snow melted into a ferocious deluge of mud. But beneath the gray slush, the earth was violently green. The tenant roofs held against the rain.