He Banned a Baby in Our Contract, Then Found His Daughter novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: The Bed

Millie's POV

There were thirty-one buttons down the back of my mother's wedding dress, and my husband undid every one of them with his mouth.

I stood in the middle of my old room under the eaves with my hands on the bedpost and my eyes shut.

He knelt behind me on the boards and kissed each place he uncovered, and he took his time.

Sadie was at the inn in Trinity with Nan and the retired nurse.

Nan had said she would not hear of me fetching her before nine, and had said it to the whole wedding.

The fiddle was still going in the Hall across the road.

It came faintly through the window, with the sound of the sea behind it, and my feet were bare on the floor.

My father had put a double bed into the room in April.

He had said nothing about it, and nobody had asked.

"Twenty-nine," Lorcan said against my spine.

"Keep going," I said.

"Thirty."

The last button gave, and the dress fell open from my neck to the base of my back.

He pushed it from my shoulders, and it slid down my body and lay in a heap of ivory silk around my ankles.

I stepped out of it.

I stood in my slip and the white stockings and the blue ribbon garter that had been my mother's, and I turned round.

He was still on his knees.

He looked up at me, in his shirtsleeves with his tie pulled loose, and his face was open in a way I would never forget.

"Mrs. Hann," he said.

"Say it again."

"Mrs. Hann."

"Take off your watch," I said.

He glanced at his wrist.

His cardiologist had come to the wedding in a hat, and she had stopped us both in the church porch.

"She said I'm cleared," he said. "She said I'm to marry you and not read the watch."

"Then don't."

He unbuckled the grey strap and laid it on the windowsill, face down.

I put my fingers in his hair.

"Now," I said. "Say it to me properly. Everything you promised in the church, but say it so I'm the only one who hears."

He was quiet a moment.

"I promised to stay for every day I've got," Lorcan said. "I'm going to keep that promise in every way I know. I won't count them."

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