Page 200 of Courting the Wrong Duke

“I will be there waiting for you. Wherever the path ends.”

Outside, the night stretched endlessly over the Welsh hills, and somewhere beyond Bryn Hir, Gabriel rode for the physician.

No one in the house slept.

Chapter 29

The first thing William saw was peach.

Not precisely peach, perhaps. Pink with a little gold bleeding through it, strange and hazy and far too bright against his half-open eyes.

For several confused seconds, he simply stared.

Then a deeply unpleasant thought occurred to him.

Perhaps he was dead.

William considered this possibility with what felt like admirable calm. He had never given much thought to what awaited him after death, but he was reasonably certain no clergyman had ever mentioned peach-colored skies.

Something shifted beside him.

William tried to turn his head and immediately discovered two things. The first was that he was lying in a bed.

The second was that being dead apparently hurt like hell.

Pain tore through his side, sharp enough to drag a breath from him, and the peach-colored haze above gradually sharpened into a perfectly ordinary ceiling.

So he was not dead.

Probably.

He lay still for another moment, waiting for the room to settle around him. The strange light came from the windows, where someone had hung a length of pink fabric across the glass. Morning sunlight filtered through it, bathing everything in a warm rosy glow that explained the peculiar sky he had awakened beneath.

Then he noticed the woman asleep in the chair beside his bed.

Rosalind.

Or at least, she had been asleep.

Her head lifted abruptly, and for one disorienting moment she merely stared at him.

William stared back.

She looked terrible.

Her hair had escaped whatever arrangement she had attempted and now hung in loose strands around her face. Shadows darkened the skin beneath her eyes, and her gown looked as though she had slept in it.

William opened his mouth. “You look exhausted.”

Rosalind made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob.

Of all the reactions he might have expected, that was not one of them. She covered her mouth, but the laugh escaped anyway, and tears appeared almost immediately in her eyes.

William frowned. “Was that offensive?”

“Extremely.”

“I apologize.”