An Earnest Favour

X

"A great marriage is not when the 'perfect couple' comes together. It is when an imperfect couple learns to enjoy their differences." Dave Meurer

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X.

Jack's back was throbbing, and he was fairly certain his neck was twisted in some sort of unnatural way. He had to resist groaning with fatigued pain so as not to wake his sleeping wife.

Wife.

That, perhaps, was the first time Jack had ever thought the word in its now correct context. The sleeping woman in his bed was his wife. He had a wife. He was married.

Claire had cried herself to sleep. She had thought she was being quiet, soundless even, but Jack could still hear her staggered breaths. He did not know what to do or say for fear he would make everything worse.

Jack had felt helpless, which was an entirely horrid experience. This whole arrangement was meant to help, and in hearing his new bride sob into the darkness, Jack felt like a cad. But why, when his only sin was that he was not the impudent blackguard who had compromised her so dishonourably in the first place. How could such a man have so blindly fooled Claire? Jack knew that were he ever to have a daughter, she would be so fiercely under his protection that she would never be so naïve.

Eventually she had stopped crying, and Jack had learned something he hadn't known about his wife. Claire snored. Jack wondered if she knew this. When she fell into a deep sleep sometime after midnight, soft, breathy snores reached him across the room.

In lying awake on the sofa, listening to Claire's attempts to soothe herself, Jack naturally began to have second thoughts about what had transpired. Perhaps this wasn't the solution. Perhaps Claire ought to have been sent abroad to a school somewhere for ladies to become accomplished debs. The sorts of places which discreetly covered themselves as institutions for girls in Claire's position. The child could be taken in by a couple in the country, and no-one need ever know. Ought that not better than to be miserable with a husband she clearly had absolutely no regard for.

Jack had very quickly learned during his sleepless night that such a union would not satisfy him. He would give her time, of course, but he wanted affection and regard. Claire was the woman he had married, and of course he would do right by her and the child, his child, now. But if she couldn't love him ... well, he'd endured enough in his life to know that he would go out and seek regard.

As so often he had done in the past as his reputation proceeded him.

Jack rose up off of the settee and stretched his arms, before twisting his torso back and forth, determined to try and click his back into place. He heard a few satisfying pops in his bones, before he yawned with exhaustion.

Jack quickly pulled on his breeches that he had discarded the night before and changed into a fresh linen shirt from the wardrobe. He walked quietly toward the bed, intending to wake Claire, but he found himself pausing at the foot of the bed.

Gone was the look of apprehension and worry from her face. Her pale skin was flawless. Her dark hair had come loose from the plait she had fixed, and it was now in disarray across the pillow. It was natural and beautiful, and Jack quietly acknowledged that he enjoyed Claire's hair down. Her pink lips were parted in thanks to her snoring, and her small hands were supporting the underside of her cheek.

Lord, Jack knew that he could love her well in time. Perhaps he had known it from the first time he saw her at the ball. What luck it had been that the first woman he had seen in an effort to spite his mother had been Claire Denham. She had been there, safely tucked away in the back of his mind, for all this time.