Nick’s cheek—even her scent helped Nick breathe—then took her leave.
Nick started on the sad, predictable questions. “When?”
“Late last night,” Ethan said, making no move to eat. “He just slipped away, Nick. He was breathing one minute, and then he did not breathe again. Nita and I were there, and he was asleep.”
“You rode here from Belle Maison,” Nick observed, stupidly. Of course Ethan had ridden from Belle Maison.
Ethan’s arm circled Nick’s shoulders. “I’ll go back there with you. I promised you I would.”
“I’ll need to send word to the others,” Nick said, lowering his forehead to his folded arms. “The funeral can’t wait.”
The practicalities, Nick thought vaguely. Leah had foreseen a need to deal with the practicalities.
“We can have a memorial service next month if we can’t all be at the funeral,” Ethan suggested.
With a sigh, Nick nodded and pushed to his feet. “Eat, or Leah will know the reason why. Your horse can stay here, and you’ll travel with us in the coach.”
“If you wish,” Ethan said, regarding Nick.
“Leah did say she’d come with me?” Nick ran a hand through his hair, embarrassed to have to ask but needing the reassurance. Needing his wife.
“She did. You told her it was what you wanted.”
“I do want that,” Nick said. “Give me an hour to jot off some notes and confer with Leah and…” His voice trailed off, and Ethan waited. Eventually, Nick figured out something to say to his brother. “Thank you for bringing me this news, Ethan. I would not have wanted to hear it from anyone else.”
“Not that you wanted to hear it at all, and not that I wanted to bring it. I’ll meet you in an hour.”
What Nick wanted was to find his wife, bury his face against her neck, and let his sorrow overtake him. Instead, he went to the library and penned notes to his solicitors, to his siblings, and, after an attempt at deliberation that ended up being a spate of staring at a blank page, to Leonie.
Leah’s husband was being stubborn, in what she suspected was tradition for the earls of Bellefonte.
“Leah, I do not want to put you through this.”
What he clearly did not want was to burden his wife with further evidence of his grief.
“Nonsense.” Leah kept her voice down, though the corridor outside the small parlor housing the old earl’s remains was deserted. “I’ve seen bodies before, Nicholas, and I’ve also not seen bodies.”
He looked haunted, glancing up and down the carpeted hallway. “What does that mean?”
“My Charles wasn’t buried until I’d had a chance to hold him one last time,” Leah said, “though Aaron was taken back to his father’s house after the duel. I was not permitted to see him before they buried him. Both are equally dead, and I felt equal sorrow to lose them.”
Nick grimaced and scrubbed a hand over his face. “I have unpleasant associations with this sort of thing. When Ethan’s mother died, and my stepmother, and…”
He was not only stubborn and grieving, Leah suspected he was also… intimidated by the role he expected himself to fulfill. The idea that Nicholas, the most singularly self-possessed man she’d ever met, should face such a moment alone was untenable.
“What lies in the parlor is not your father, Nicholas. It’s a body that houses no life. You need not go in there.”
He searched her gaze, probably looking for tacit judgments. He would find none, not about this. He shoved away from the wall. “I’m his son. His heir.”
She took his hand, as he’d so often taken hers, and willed him all the reassurance and support within her. When Nick escorted her through the door, she saw that the parlor was rife with lilies, though thank God somebody had also opened the windows.
Nick’s grip on her hand was tight, probably tighter than he knew.
“He’s… dead,” Nick observed softly after a few silent moments. “There is no mistaking that pallor and that stillness.”
“He’s at peace,” Leah countered. “His body is dead.”
Nick’s grip eased, but she did not allow him to drop her hand.
While Nick made his final farewells to his father, Leah stood beside him and took courage from sharing the moment with him. For all their problems, they were man and wife. If Nick allowed her to remain by his side now, perhaps it boded well for their future.
“He would not want to be seen like this,” Nick said. He sounded so sad, so lost.
“He is disporting with his wives and mistresses, or so you told me.”
A ghost of a smile passed over Nick’s mouth. “Come, else I shall weep like a small boy missing the only person who could ever make me feel like a small boy, regardless of evidence to the contrary.” And yet he didn’t move and he didn’t give up Leah’s hand. “I don’t want to be Bellefonte,” Nick said softly. “I never wanted to be the earl.”
And maybe there was guilt here, for not wanting what his father would bequeath to him. That would be utter male nonsense, of course, but because it was Nick’s male nonsense, Leah shifted to embrace him.
“No loving son wants his father’s title, Nicholas, unless it’s to spare his father a greater sentence to a painful existence.”
Nick’s arms came around her slowly, maybe reluctantly. “Papa didn’t want the title either, and yet he was a fine earl, all things considered. A very fine earl.”
That was not nonsense. That was something Nick could hold close, as Leah held her husband close.
He shifted, so his arm was draped over her shoulders. “Come upstairs with me?”
As if she’d drift away from him now? “Of course.”
And yet, “upstairs” held a curious development. Being newly wed, Leah and her husband had been housed in Nick’s bedroom. Both of their trunks were empty and sitting open at the foot of Nick’s enormous bed. Well, they were married—and the earl’s chambers would require airing and possible redecoration.
Perhaps it simply hadn’t occurred to Nick to direct that Leah be quartered elsewhere. He was that distracted by his bereavement.
Leah sent up a silent prayer of thanks to the late earl.
“I’m of a mind to take a nap,” Nick said, sitting down and tugging at his boots. “If you’d join me, I’d appreciate it.” Leah glanced at the bed and then back at Nick, but she couldn’t fathom the motivation for his request.
Maybe it was as simple as Nick being tired and unwilling to be alone.
Or perhaps he was aware, as Leah was, of how close they had come to declaring their marriage over before it had begun.
“A nap sounds fine.” Leah crossed the room and sat beside Nick, turning her back only when he’d finished with his boots. His fingers made short work of the hooks and eyes on her dress and the laces of her stays, but then he slid his arms around her waist and held on, a shudder passing through him, then a sigh.
“Off to bed with you,” Nick said, rising and drawing her to her feet. “I’ll be along shortly.”
Leah stripped down to her chemise while Nick undressed himself, but when she saw he intended to come to bed naked, she paused. What was this, and what did she want to do about it?
“I’m just getting comfortable,” Nick said, climbing onto the bed. “You could fill this bed with naked women, Leah, and at present, I could do justice to none of them.”
He was both rejecting her—not that she’d offered anything—and accepting her. She decided to focus on the acceptance, whipped off the chemise, and joined Nick on the bed.
Though that left at least five feet of cool mattress and bedding between them.
“Meet me in the middle?”
He was asking her for something, or maybe admitting that in these circumstances, he was entitled to the comfort of having a loyal wife. After a moment’s hesitation, Leah crab-flopped herself over a couple of feet and lay back, letting Nick take her hand in his.
“Let me hold you, Nicholas,” she said. “I just… I don’t want you to be alone in this bed, not today.”
He was in her arms in a heartbeat, his cheek resting against her breast, his thigh hiked over her legs. He let out the sigh to end all sighs, and closed his eyes, his lashes sweeping against her skin.
