The Duke's Wife Woke From a Fever Believing He Loved Her — He Could Not Bring Himself to Tell Her

For three years the Duke of Hartsell and his wife Meriel had been polite strangers, her trunk packed to leave him. Then a winter fever took the memory of those years from her. She woke reaching for his hand, asking why he looked so frightened when he loved her, and Rainald could not bring himself to say that he never had. His physician warns him not to contradict her, so Rainald becomes the husband she believes she married: he drinks honey in his tea, lets her loosen his cravat at breakfast, sits close by the fire instead of at the end of a cold table. His mother tells him a marriage built on something untrue cannot stand, and he must tell Meriel himself before the truth finds her another way. But every day she grows happier than he has ever seen her, in a marriage that was never truly hers. How long can a man keep loving a lie he did not invent, before it becomes true? A Regency story about a cold duke who is finally given the wife he never let himself want, and the fever that gave her to him. This is original fiction: every person in it is invented and a grown adult. Subscribe to The Loosened Cravat for more Regency stories.