Page 14 of How Not to Marry a Duke

It took him three attempts to write her name without his pen faltering.

Chapter Five

The Invalid

Florinda woke to blue.

Blue wallpaper. Blue bed hangings. Blue coverlet tucked up to her chin by someone who was decidedly not her. She stared at the canopy above her head—also blue, with small embroidered flowers that blurred and sharpened as she blinked—and attempted to recall how she had come to be surrounded by so much unfortunate décor.

Her leg provided the answer. Loudly.

"Ah," she said to the ceiling. "That."

The pain was extraordinary—a deep, throbbing ache that seemed to emanate from somewhere below her knee and radiate outward in waves of increasingly creative agony. She attempted to shift position and was rewarded with a spike so profound that she heard herself make a noise usually reserved for small animals caught in traps.

"You're awake. Excellent." A woman's voice, brisk and unsentimental. "Please don't move, my lady. Your leg is splinted, and the surgeon was quite firm about keeping it still."

Florinda turned her head—the only part of her that seemed willing to cooperate—and found a middle-aged woman in a housekeeper's dress rising from a chair by the window. Mrs. Pritchard. She remembered the name from... somewhere. A voice outside a door. A hand on her forehead. The edges of memory were unhelpfully blurred.

"Where am I?"

"Carthedge Hall, my lady. The blue guest chamber." Mrs. Pritchard moved to the bedside with the air of a woman who had managed crises before and found them all tedious. "You've been unconscious for nearly two days. Do you remember what happened?"

Florinda closed her eyes and attempted to think through the fog of pain and what she suspected was a heroic quantity of laudanum. She remembered the road. Dawn. Her mare shying at what had probably been a rabbit but might have been a shadow or the general malevolence of the universe. The wall rushing toward her with vindictive speed.

And then⁠—

Arms. Someone lifting her. A voice in her ear saying things she couldn't quite⁠—

Frederick.

She opened her eyes with what she hoped was an appropriate lack of alarm. "I fell off my horse."

"You did, my lady. His Grace found you on the Ashbourne road. Your leg was badly broken—compound fracture, the surgeon called it. His Grace carried you here himself. Nearly two miles." Mrs. Pritchard's tone carried the particular disapproval of a woman whose employer had created a tremendous amount of extra work. "The surgeon says you're fortunate to be alive. You'd begun to grow cold from exposure. Another hour, and..."

She did not finish the sentence. She did not need to.

Florinda stared at the blue canopy and considered her situation with the detached horror of someone watching a carriage accident in which they happened to be the carriage.

She had fled the palace to avoid being married off. She had redirected her carriage to Ashbourne House to claim some small measure of independence. She had gone riding at dawn to prove to herself that she was a woman of action and self-determination.

And now she was lying in the blue guest chamber of the Duke of Edington's country estate, unable to move, wholly dependent on the hospitality of a man she had kissed in a stable nine years ago and his perfectly pleasant fiancée.

"Marvellous," she informed the canopy. "I appear to have wandered directly into the pages of a Gothic novel. Am I to expect sinister monks? A mysterious manuscript? Perhaps a crumbling abbey with suspicious sounds in the night?"

"My lady?"

"Nothing. I am merely congratulating the universe on its impeccable sense of timing." She turned her head back toward Mrs. Pritchard. "How long must I remain here?"

The housekeeper's face arranged itself into the particular grimace of someone about to deliver unwelcome news. "The surgeon says eight weeks before you can stand on the leg, my lady. Possibly longer. The bone was quite badly damaged."

"Eight weeks."

"At minimum. He's forbidden travel until then—says the jolting of a carriage could undo all his work and leave you with a permanent limp. Or worse."

Eight weeks. Two months. Sixty days of lying in this aggressively blue room, unable to walk, unable to leave, unable to do anything useful whatsoever.

Florinda had spent four years making herself indispensable—caring for children, managing household crises, being the sister who could be relied upon when catastrophe struck. And now she could not even get out of bed without assistance.