When one is the rightful heir and the other wants everything just for himself. Josephine realised that she was caught in the middle of a succession war.
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She sat in a field surrounded by raspberry bushes in bloom, the tiny flowers calling to her. Her husband was stretched out beside her, his head resting in her lap. He plucked a flower free of the thorny bramble and handed it to her. Resting in her palm, she watched as it miraculously turned into a raspberry. She placed it against the lips of the man she loved...
Josephine fought through the darkness, her body aching as though someone had tossed her off a cliff. She shifted slightly, pain slicing through her side. She moaned.
"Shh, rest easy now."
She felt fingers combing her hair back from her brow. Opening her eyes, she saw the man sitting beside her bed, so much love and concern for her reflected in his eyes that she thought if a hundred men who looked exactly like him were lined up in a room, still she would be able to pick him out.
He'd been there each time she opened her eyes, giving her a reassuring smile, bathing her brow, spooning broth into her mouth, urging her to get well, as though the choice were hers.
"Hero?"
"Shh," he urged again, taking her hand, pressing a kiss to her fingertips. "You've been through a horrible ordeal. You need to rest."
He looked as though he'd been through a similar ordeal, and she couldn't imagine that hers had been any worse. He had several days' growth of beard, his hair was dishevelled, his eyes rimmed in red, his shirt unbuttoned at the collar.
"I know how to prove you're Hero," she whispered.
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"Dear God, Josephine, you almost died. Do you honestly believe I care about the damned dukedom?" he asked, his voice rough with emotion. "More than I care about you?"
She could see tears in his eyes, which he was furiously blinking back. His hand was trembling when he laid it against her cheek. "I spent eight years alone, but when I thought I might lose you, that I might never again see your smile, or that tiny little dimple, that I would never hear you laugh...loneliness is not a big enough word for what swept through me. Despair so deep that I would give up everything, my titles, my properties, my name, everything for one more moment of holding you. Just one more moment."
