Page 13 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

That evening she sat on the edge of the great bed, and this time she had seen to it that she was covered. The maids had wished to dress her as they had the night before, the thin white lawn, the bare shoulders, the roses, and Diana had refused every one and put on instead a nightgown of stout fabric buttoned to the throat, with a wrapper over it, and her hair in a plain braid down her back. If the Duke of Rosewood meant to spend his five nights unpicking her resolve, she would not be the one to hand him the needle.

A knock came at the door, and her whole body startled at the sound of it. She had not seen him once in the entire course of the day. He had gone out early, to his friend, one of the girls had said, the Duke of Kingsell, with whom His Grace was forever at some rough sport or other, and had not returned till dusk, and had sent her no word at all. And Diana, sitting alone in her fine strange room through all those empty hours, had been aware of his absence in a way that unsettled her a great deal more than his presence ever had.

Why should it signify to me, she thought, whether I lay eyes on the man or no? It does not. It cannot. And yet she had listened for his step the whole afternoon, and despised herself for the listening.

A second knock, and then the door opened a crack, and it was only a maid after all.

“Beg pardon, Your Grace. His Grace asks, if you would attend him in the study.”

The study. Not the bedchamber. Diana swallowed, rose, smoothed the wrapper down, and found she had half turned toward the glass to see how she looked before she caught herself and stopped.

What are you about? She let her hand fall. Since when do you care how you appear for him? Leave it.

She left it, and followed the maid.

The study lay at the end of a corridor she had not been shown, behind a heavy door of dark wood. The maid bowed and withdrew, and Diana stood a moment gathering herself, and knocked.

“Come.”

She had expected a study. She found a library, a great high room walled floor to ceiling in books, more than she had known were printed in all the world, ladders on brass rails to reach the topmost shelves. But it was not arranged as a library ought to be, all cold formality and chairs set at attention. There was a deep, worn settee drawn up close before a good fire, and an armchair beside it, and a thick rug, and a lamp turned low, and the whole of it had the warm, slightly disordered look of a room a man actually lived in. It was, she thought, the first honest room she had seen in all his proper, chilly house.

And there, in the midst of it, sat the Duke.

His coat was gone, and his cravat with it, and his shirt lay open at the throat in a way that drew her eye and made her wish it had not. She felt the shivers return. She barely looked at men let alone examine their bodies but she knew she never had seen a man as beautifully built as the duke. She shook off the thought. On the low table at his side stood a bottle of dark wine and two glasses. He did not rise as she came in. He only looked at her over the rim of the glass in his hand, and tipped his head toward the settee.

“Sit.”

She sat, her body trembling at being so close to him. And he rose then, and gathered up the bottle and the glasses, and came and settled himself beside her on the settee, near enough that his knee was a hand’s breadth from her own, so that she had at once to arrange her wrapper and her hands and fix her whole attention upon anything in the room but him.

“This is our first night,” he said.

The words went straight through her. “I—” She looked down at her hands. “I had thought it would be—that is, I assumed⁠—”

“In the bedchamber?” There was a thread of amusement in it. He leaned toward her, unhurried, and she caught the warm scent of wine on his breath. Immediately, the memory of his mouth on her earlobes returned “Is my Duchess so eager to yield already? We have scarcely begun.”

“No.” She said it too quickly, and felt the heat climb her throat. “No, I only—I was merely wondering. That is all.”

“I daresay you were.” He settled back, plainly enjoying himself, and reached for the second glass. “But I’ve no present intention of ravishing you upon the hearthrug so that you may unclench your hands. Tonight we shall only play a game.”

“A game.”

“A game of questions.” He filled the empty glass with dark red wine and pressed it onto her hand. “I shall ask you one, and you shall ask me one, turn and turn about. And whosoever does not care to answer—” he raised his own glass a little “—must drink instead. That is the whole of the rule.”

Diana looked at the wine in her hand, and then at him. “That is a very strange sort of game.”

“Most good ones are.”

“You need not make a game of it.” She lifted her chin. “If there is something you wish to know of me, you have only to ask, and I shall answer.”

“And where,” asked the Duke with the ghost of a smile, “would be the sport in that?” He refilled his own glass, though he had scarcely touched it, and set the bottle down, and turned toward her fully. The firelight moved along the hard line of his jaw. “Shall we begin?”

She did not in the least see what any of this had to do with his winning of their wager. But his eyes were on her, waiting, and she found she could not both hold them and refuse.

“Very well,” she said. “Begin.”

“Have you ever lain with a man?”

The wine leaped in her glass; a drop of it splashed cool over her wrist. She stared at him, her whole face aflame. Even Henrietta, who knew a shocking deal for an unmarried lady and delighted in it, spoke of such matters only in whispers, behind a fan, with much giggling and glancing over the shoulder. This man asked it plainly, in his ordinary voice, as he might have asked whether she took sugar in her tea.