Page 1 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

CHAPTER ONE

“Have you ever beheld such a creature? She is quite the loveliest thing in the room.”

“Lovely, I grant you, though I confess the whole affair strikes me as peculiar. A man does not commonly parade a second wife about as though she were his first Season’s prize.”

“Oh, but have you not heard? She is a widow, and of good blood, a country family, but a good one. He means only to see her properly established. One can hardly fault a gentleman for wishing his own wife received.”

Diana Fernside kept her place near the wall and pretended not to hear a word of it.

It was not difficult to guess of whom they spoke. There was but one woman in the ballroom tonight worth such a quantity of whispering, and she stood at its bright center with her gloved hand upon the arm of Lord Westleigh, Diana’s father, who had not, in the whole course of the evening, looked once toward the corner where his daughters stood.

A small hand tugged at hers.

“Diana.” Arabella’s voice was very low, the way it went when she was trying to be good and finding it hard. “Why does Papa not look at us? We have been here ever so long.”

Because he has forgotten he has daughters at all, Diana thought. Because for he has had eyes for nothing but her.

“Hush, dearest. Papa is only very busy tonight. He has a great many people to greet.” She drew her sister a half step closer to her skirts.

“But he said he was going away on business.” Arabella’s voice was small and quite bewildered. “He said himself that he should be back before the roses came. And then he came back with—” she faltered “—with her.”

Diana held her breath. Then it came.

“Who is she, Diana? Why have we never once heard of her?” The small hand tightened in hers. “He has been home a fortnight and he has not so much as—” She stopped, and her chin trembled, and she got the rest of it out in a whisper. “He never introduced us at all. She has been at his table every night, and I do not know her name to say it.”

Diana closed her eyes for the space of a breath. “He did not tell me either,” she said quietly. Her father had gone on a trip and returned with a woman and she had learned from a maid, Betsy, that he married her on his trip. She had not bothered to ask him, she learned that the answer, if it came at all, would only annoy her.

Arabella’s head came up.

“I did not learn it from Papa, Bella. I learned it from a maid.” She kept her voice very even, because the child was watching her face and would take everything from it. “That is how I came to know we had a stepmother at all.”

The child’s eyes had gone round. Arabella was quiet for a moment. Then, very low: “Is it because we did something wrong?”

Oh, my darling. Diana crouched down and took her sister’s face between her hands.

“Listen to me. It is nothing you have done. Nothing at all, do you understand me? Papa is being foolish, and grown men are permitted to be foolish, and it has nothing whatever to do with two girls who have been perfectly good all evening.” She smoothed a stray curl back behind Arabella’s ear and made herself smile. “And you needn’t fret over any of it, because you have got me. You will always have me. That has not changed and it never shall. Now stand up straight and stop chewing your lip.”

She rose, and set her hand on the small shoulder, and looked out across the ballroom at the bright center of it where her father stood.

It had been the maid, Betsy, who had pressed tonight’s gowns into their hands that very afternoon. The pale muslin for Diana, the white for Arabella because no one else beneath that roof had thought to see them dressed for the occasion of their own father’s celebration.

By rights Arabella ought to have been abed in the nursery; no child of eight belonged at a ton ball past ten o’clock. But word had come down that morning, in the new Viscountess’s own hand, that both Miss Fernside and Miss Arabella were to attend, prettily dressed, and were to be present without fail. Diana barely understood the command then. She was beginning to understand it now.

The music thinned and fell away. At the raised end of the room, her father lifted his glass, and the company turned toward him as one body, and Lady Westleigh clapped her hands once, lightly, as though she could scarcely contain her joy.

“My dear friends.” Octavia’s voice carried beautifully; it was trained to charm. “You cannot know what it means to me to stand among you tonight. I came to this great city a stranger, and I have found in it”—she pressed her free hand to her breast—“a home. A husband who is, I do not blush to say it, the very love of my life.”

A murmur of approval ran round the room.

“And more than a husband.” Here she turned her lovely face toward the corner by the wall, and her smile widened, and Diana felt every eye in the ballroom turn with it. “I have been given two dear daughters, whom I mean to love as my very own. Come, my darlings. Do not hide yourselves away. Come and let our friends see you.”

She has given us nothing, Diana thought, but cold looks since the hour she crossed our door. And now she names us darlings before the whole of London.

There was no choice in it, and Octavia had known there would be none. To refuse, to stand fixed against the wall while two hundred guests waited and watched, would shame her father and brand her a sullen, ungrateful creature before the entire ton. Diana wrapped her hand more firmly around her sister’s small fingers.

“Come, Bella,” she murmured. “Hold your chin up and smile. It shall be over soon.”

They crossed the floor together beneath the weight of all those eyes. Arabella’s hand trembled in hers.