‘I have missed dinner. I thought I would have it up here and spoon broth into you in a suitably wifely manner. Unless you would prefer Flynn to do it?’
‘No, he looks appalling in muslin and lace and his wifely manner leaves a lot to be desired. Besides, I love you and I don’t want to let you out of my sight.’
Flynn produced a table, a laden dinner tray and Chef’s best beef broth. He propped Cal up on a pile of pillows and then tactfully took himself off.
‘This is thoroughly undignified,’ Cal grumbled between spoonsful of broth.
‘Look on it as practice for when you are ninety nine and doddering.’
‘I don’t feel like doddering. I feel like making love to you. It would work if I just lay here and you straddled me and we – ’
‘Will do no such thing. I am going to eat my dinner, put the tray out, lock the door and come to bed with you. And I will stay on one side of the bed and you will stay just where you are, and if you are so lively that you can even contemplate making love then we can talk instead.’
‘Are you going to be a domineering wife, Sophie my darling?’
‘Dreadfully,’ she said fondly and bent to kiss him.
As predicted, Cal was feverish the next day but to Sophie’s alarm the following morning she found him sitting on the edge of the bed, swearing under his breath as Flynn got a shirt arranged over his bandaged arm.
‘Go back to bed this moment!’
‘Sophie, I am the Duke of Calderbrook. I have a houseful of guests, a pair of relatives who are, doubtless, in a state of mental turmoil and a beautiful fiancée to make love to.’
‘Cal.’ But when she looked round Flynn had removed himself. ‘The guests are being perfectly well looked after by Mama and Step Papa who have firmly told Lady Peter to forget everything except her menfolk. If you want to talk to them I will tell them to come up to your sitting room, but if you think you are going to start prowling around this house – ’
‘Sophie, my love, come here.’
She did, all unawares, and was seized by a strong left hand, pulled down to the bed and very thoroughly kissed.
‘Do I appear to be at death’s door?’ Cal demanded when he fina
lly let her up for air.
‘No.’ Sophie considered fanning herself and decided it would make him too cocky. ‘But if you want to do that again today you will do as I ask and stay in your sitting room.’
His eyes developed the sensual, heavy look that sent shivers down her spine. ‘My sweet, I am entirely yours to command. When today, exactly?’
His uncle and cousin went in to see him, looking like aristocrats on their way to the guillotine and emerged an hour later looking shaken but relieved. Lady Peter, who had been on the receiving end of nerve-wracking confessions, wept all over Sophie, which was an alarming experience and Isobel ran her ragged with constant chatter and demands to be taught to create French knots in the two hours they spent together, despite being assured that they would make a very knobbly handkerchief.
‘I am exhausted.’ Sophie collapsed on the sofa in Cal’s sitting room. ‘I would like to take to my bed for a week and you certainly should.’
He felt as though someone had put him through the mangle in the washhouse, not that he would have admitted it under torture. But the steak that Flynn had smuggled past Sophie’s watchful eye was making up for a day on broth and he could, he considered, do almost anything provided he did it flat on his back.
‘I can arrange that.’ He picked up the folded parchment on the table at his elbow. ‘Marriage licence. We do not have a chaplain in the household, but the vicar has been round and we can get married in four days time, here in the chapel. I thought that was long enough to let Chef whip up a feast, Mrs Fairfax polish the place from attics to cellars and the gardeners to decimate the flower beds.’
‘Four days? Cal I haven’t a thing to wear. And stop looking like that.’
‘A man may dream. And do not tell me your mother let you come down here without a trunk full of new gowns.’
‘Yes, but… We were not going to get married yet.’
‘That was when we were not in love. Now we are.’ Which was such an unlikely miracle that he kept thinking he was dreaming. ‘Do you really want to wait?’
‘No.’ When she smiled at him like that he wondered how he stayed in his seat, when all he wanted was to haul her into his arms and kiss her senseless. ‘No, I do not. And we have an entire houseful of guests already. All my bridesmaids are here too. Who will be your best man? Hunt, I suppose.’
‘No. I talked to him about it this morning. I have asked Ralph.’
‘Ralph? But he…’ She broke off and he watched her face, enjoying the thinking going on behind those lovely blue eyes. ‘You could not send a clearer signal to the world that it was an accident and to the Thornes that you trust them both.’