The Dying Duke's One-Year Wife Is a Nurse novel · Chapter 8 of 24
Chapter 8: The Glass House
By the end of the week he could walk to the glass-house on his own.
It stood at the bottom of the kitchen garden, an old long building with a curved roof of green-tinged panes.
The door stuck.
Rain drummed on the roof.
Inside it was hot and wet and smelled of earth.
Tall purple foxglove stood in rows in clay pots, each bell open and speckled.
Bett had spent four days digging out the burned bed and potting every living root she could find.
Rosalind had spent the same four days giving the Duke a pinch of dried leaf steeped in a cup.
She gave it three times a day, with her fingers on his wrist and the sand-glass turned.
His ankles were thin.
His breath no longer crackled.
His pulse at rest was eighty-two.
"I want to see where it grows," he had said at breakfast.
So she walked him down the gravel path under an umbrella, with his arm through hers.
She pretended not to count every step.
Now the door was shut behind them, and the rain made a roar on the glass.
Lysander stood between two rows of foxglove with his hair damp and a smile on his face she had not seen before.
It was a real smile, wide and a little crooked.
"It is the first time I have been outdoors in a year," he said. "Or nearly."
"It's a glass-house."
"I intend to count it."
She sat on the potting bench along the wall, with a trowel and a sack of soil beside her.
She watched him look at the flowers.
He touched a purple bell with one long finger.
"This is what you are feeding me?"
"A pinch of the leaf. A very small pinch. Any more and you'd be sick, and more than that and you'd die."
"A remarkable thing to put in a man's tea."
"It's the first thing that worked."
He turned and looked at her.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of The Dying Duke's One-Year Wife Is a Nurse are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
← Chapter 7 · All chapters · Chapter 9 →
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend