The Dying Duke's One-Year Wife Is a Nurse novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: Not in the Contract
After a night watch he breathes lying upright for the first time in a year; they marry at his bedside, and on the wedding night she does what the contract never asked.
He was not dead by morning.
Rosalind sat in a hard chair by the bed until the window went grey, with two fingers on his wrist and a sand-glass from the mantel turned on the bedpost every minute.
At midnight his pulse was a hundred and twelve.
At three it was a hundred and four.
At dawn the crackle in his chest had gone quiet, and the Duke of Ardmoor was asleep sitting up, with his head tipped against five pillows.
He had not slept sitting up in a year, the kitchen maid told her in a whisper when she brought tea.
The maid was a small freckled girl in a stained apron, with a red-brown braid and swollen eyes.
"Your Grace, I'm Bett," she said. "I scrub his pots. Lord Corbin's people don't let me carry the tray up anymore, but I came anyway."
"Then you're the one who carries the tray," said Rosalind. "Salt-free broth, no wine, and nothing from the cook Lord Corbin hired."
Bett stared at her, and then she grinned through the tears.
At noon a priest in a rumpled surplice married them at the foot of the bed.
The Duke was awake for it, pale and propped up and dry as a bone.
"Do you take this man for a year?" the priest asked, reading from a card.
"I take him for as long as he stays upright," said Rosalind.
Lysander's mouth twitched.
Afterward, while the priest packed his book, she held out her hand for the pen.
"One more line in the contract," she said.
"I have already signed everything you've put in front of me."
"Then sign this too. Nothing in this house is owed in bed by either of us."
He looked at her for a long moment.
"You think I'd demand it," he said.
"I think you'd feel you owed me for the money, and I'd rather you didn't."
"I could not stand up to demand anything, Duchess."
"Sign it anyway."
He signed.
Her father had left an hour before, with his twenty thousand crowns in a locked case and a face that wouldn't look at her.
That was fine.
She had a patient.
By evening the swelling in the Duke's ankles had gone down a finger's width, and he had eaten four spoonfuls of broth without coughing.
She sent the footmen away and drew the bed curtains back.
"Time for your bath," she said.
"I was washed on Tuesday."
"With a bowl of cold water and a cloth thrown at you. I'm going to wash you, and you'll lie still."
She had a basin of warm water, soap that smelled of lavender, and a stack of linen.
She had eight years of washing bodies that were not her own, and not one of them had ever made her pulse do what it did now.
He lay with the blankets folded to his hips and watched her roll up her sleeves.
"This is not a thing duchesses do," he said.
"This duchess does it."
She started at his hands.
They were long, with strong knuckles and a pen callus on the right middle finger, and the nails were clean.
She washed each finger, one at a time, and she felt the pulse in his palm go quick.
"You're the one counting," he murmured. "Am I allowed to know the number?"
"Ninety-eight."
"Is that good?"
"It's very good for a man having his hand washed."
She moved up his arms.
She went gently over the forty-one scars, one under each of her thumbs, and said nothing about them, and he watched her not say it.
Then the shoulders, then the ribs, with the cloth warm and slow.
His skin had gone pink under it.
He was a wreck of a body, hollowed out at the belly and collarbones, with every rib showing.
But there was a long clean line to him, and wide shoulders under the thinness, and the dark hair on his chest was fine and soft.
She found she liked the weight of his breath under her palm.
She lowered the blanket to his thighs to wash his legs.
And then she stopped, with the cloth in her hand.
He was hard.
It was a long, flushed, thick cock lying against his hip, and it twitched under her gaze.
The Duke stared at the canopy.
"I beg your pardon," he said, in a strangled voice. "That has not happened in two years. I assumed it had died before I did."
"It's a good sign," said Rosalind.
"Is it?"
"It means blood is getting where it's going."
"Duchess, I'm mortified."
"I'm not."
She set the cloth down.
Her heart was thudding in her ears, and her body was awake in a way it had not been for a very long time.
She had been a nurse for eight years in a city where nobody slept, and she had not been touched in three.
She had been tired, that was all, and now she was not tired.
"Lysander," she said.
His eyes came down to hers, grey and wary, and his name tasted strange in her mouth and right.
"I want to do something," she said. "It's not in the contract. It's not owed, and you don't have to do anything back. I want to."
His throat moved.
"Tell me what it is."
"I'm going to get on this bed, and you're going to lie exactly as you are."
She climbed onto the mattress beside him, in her white nightgown, and knelt at his hip.
He watched her.
She leaned over him and kissed him.
His mouth was dry and warm and astonished, and then he made a low sound and kissed her back, slowly.
His hand came up, shaking, to her jaw.
"Good," she whispered against his lips. "Stay like that. You don't move anything but your hands, and only when I put them somewhere."
"My hands," he repeated, hoarse.
"Give me your right."
She took it and brought it down under the hem of her nightgown.
His fingers were cool against her thigh, and she felt him freeze.
"Higher," she said, and moved his palm up the inside of her leg until his knuckles brushed the wet heat between her legs.
He drew in a breath that shook in the middle.
"You're wet," he said, stunned.
"Yes. That's you."
She shifted over his thigh, settling astride it, and pressed his fingers where she wanted them.
"Two fingers. Here."
He found her clit with the pad of his middle finger, and she gasped, and his eyes went wide.
"Slow circles," she said. "Not hard. Like that."
He obeyed.
He did it carefully, with his brow furrowed and his lips parted.
The pleasure ran up her spine, warm and heavy, and she rocked once against his hand.
She laid two fingers of her own against the side of his throat.
His pulse was fast and strong under the skin.
"A hundred and four," she said, a little breathless. "Don't you dare speed up."
"I'm trying to be a good patient."
"You're a very good patient."
She turned the sand-glass on the bedpost with her free hand and went back to his throat.
His fingers slid lower, and she grabbed his wrist.
"There. Inside. One finger first."
He slid one finger into her slowly.
She whimpered.
It was long and blunt and perfectly steady, and he curled it up when she moaned, and found the place without being told.
"Yes," she said. "Right there. Don't stop."
"I will not stop," said the Duke, low and rough. "I would sooner die."
"Don't say that."
"I am not dying at this moment, Duchess. I find I'm in excellent health."
She laughed, and the laugh broke into a moan as he pressed.
She rode his hand.
She couldn't help it.
She braced her palm on his chest and moved her hips against his fingers, and her nightgown rucked up around her waist.
He added a second finger, thick and deep, and she cried out, loud, with the bed curtains shaking.
"A hundred and eight," she gasped, with her thumb on his throat. "Slow. Slow, don't push, let me."
"You are beautiful," he said, in a wrecked voice. "You are the most beautiful thing I have ever been permitted to look at."
"Keep looking."
"I can't look anywhere else."
The heat pulled tight in her belly.
She dropped her forehead against his collarbone, and her breath came in sobs.
"Lysander. Lysander, I'm going to..."
"Come on my hand," he said.
She did.
It broke over her in long hot waves, with her cunt clamping down on his two fingers and his name in her throat, and she shook against him until her knees gave out.
He held still the whole time, as ordered, with his fingers buried in her and his pulse hammering under her thumb.
When she could breathe, she lifted her head.
"A hundred and twelve," she said unsteadily.
"Is that dangerous?"
"It's the edge."
"I see." His eyes were dark and fixed on her face. "And what is the cure, Nurse?"
She slid his hand out of her with great care, and he made a hungry sound that went through her.
She wiped her palm on the sheet, took the sand-glass and set it upright.
"Lie back," she said. "Breathe slowly with me."
She waited until his pulse dropped to a hundred and four.
Then she pushed the blanket off his hips and wrapped her fingers around his cock.
He jerked and cursed softly.
He was hot and heavy in her fist, the skin silky over the hard length, with the head already slick.
She stroked him from root to tip, slowly, and he groaned and shut his eyes.
"Look at me," she said.
His eyes opened.
"That's it. Keep them on me. I'm going to make you come, and you're not going to move your hips, do you understand?"
"I understand," he whispered. "God, I understand."
"Say it."
"I won't move."
"Good."
She twisted her hand at the top on each stroke, the way she felt him shudder to, and watched his face come apart in front of her.
His lips opened.
His breath went short and uneven, and she checked his throat with her thumb and loosened her grip.
"Not yet. Breathe."
"Rosalind, I can't."
It was the first time he had said her name.
It went through her harder than the orgasm had.
"You can," she told him, steady, tightening again. "You're doing so well. Slow, in and out. Let it come when it comes."
His hands knotted in the sheets.
His thighs shook under her arm.
She stroked him faster, then slower, then faster again, and the sound he made was raw and low and desperate.
"Now," she said. "Come for me."
He came with a ragged cry, and hot cum pulsed over her fist and across his belly in thick ropes.
His whole body bowed up and fell back, shuddering.
She worked him gently through it until he went limp, and then she laid her palm flat on his chest.
His heart was racing, and then it began to slow.
She sat listening to it for a long time.
At last he opened his eyes.
"At noon," said Lysander, hoarse and dazed, "you made me sign that nothing in this house is owed in bed."
"Nothing is," said Rosalind, and began to clean him with the warm cloth. "I'm taking."
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