Page 14 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

“No,” she said. “I have not.”

The corner of his mouth curved, but he said nothing, only watched her, and she felt somehow that the silence wanted filling.

And when, pray, should I have?

“My mother was a strict woman. My father stood ever at her back and echoed whatever she said, and between the two of them I was raised close and carefully watched. Then she was in the ground, and he was a stranger to me, and there was Arabella — a squalling, motherless scrap of a thing who wanted feeding and rocking and singing to sleep, and nobody left in that house to do it but me. I was mother to her from the age of fifteen.”

She looked down at her hands.

“There were no seasons of flirtation for me, Your Grace. No stolen dances. No love letters passed under a door, no breathless whispering behind the potted palms at somebody’s ball. There was a child to raise and a house to hold together, and I do not know that I had one idle hour in all those years to spend on the wanting of men.”

Valentine was quiet a moment.

“That must have been very difficult,” he said.

Something in Diana’s chest drew tight at the plainness of his words. How there was no polish on it, no pretty phrase, only the fact of it laid out. She lifted her chin and reached for her glass instead.

“And you?” she asked, to be free of his gaze.

“What of me?”

“You know very well what of you.” She surprised herself with her own boldness; the first sip of wine, perhaps, had loosened something. “Have you? Lain with women?”

“A few.”

He said it so easily. So carelessly, a few, as though counting sacks of grain into a cart. Something drew beneath Diana’s ribs.

A few. She thought of her own heart, beating too high and too hard. She thought of those few faceless women, and of the sort of man she had married, cold, and ruthless, and beautiful.

And she thought, how it must have broken them. He is not a man one walks away from whole. He would take what he wished and give nothing of himself back, and leave them ruined and pining, poor foolish things.

She stared at his face and realized she too would be easily fooled by his looks and build.

“You are thinking something unkind,” he observed, “and it is written across the whole of your face.”

“I am thinking nothing at all.”

“You are thinking I seduced and abandoned a parade of weeping maidens.” His mouth curved. “Ease your mind. It was not in London, nor with maidens of any station you would recognize. There are cities on the Continent, Duchess, where these things are held a good deal more than physical among them. No hearts were broken. No one wept. It was a bargain, on both sides, freely made.”

“My turn,” he said. “Why have you never once considered taking a man to your bed?”

She had braced herself, from the moment the game began, for a different question, why will you not bear me a child, and had her silence ready for it. This one caught her wholly off her guard, and it was, in its way, the worse of the two.

For the true answer was her father.

I have seen what it does, she thought. I have watched it work with my own eyes. Her father had loved her mother past all sense, had sworn himself to her, one woman for the whole of his life, and when that woman died, the love did not die decently along with her. It curdled. It turned. The devoted husband became a thing Diana barely knew: a man who came home with the dawn stinking of drink and of other things, who gamed away what he ought to have kept for his daughters, who was seen where no gentleman ought to be seen—years of it. And then Octavia came, and he had changed again, all at once, into her creature, and that, Diana understood now, was only the same disease in a prettier coat. Love had cost her mother her life. Love had cost her father his soul, twice over. Whatever else she wanted from this world, she did not want that.

But she would not say so, not to him, not to anyone alive. She lifted the glass instead and drank, drank the whole of it down, because it was that or speak, and the wine was far stronger than anything she had ever tasted, and it went down like fire and bloomed hot and swimming behind her eyes almost at once.

The Duke’s brows rose. He inclined his head, accepting her forfeit, and said nothing.

Diana set down the empty glass with exaggerated care. The room had gone pleasantly soft.

“My turn,” she said, and her own voice reached her from a little distance. “Have you a woman you fancy?”

He leaned toward her, slowly, so slowly, until his face was scarcely a breath from her own, and she could see the firelight caught in his dark eyes and feel the warmth coming off his skin. Her heart stumbled. She wondered if he would touch her like he did last night. They were so close to each other but he had made no attempt to touch her. She felt a pang of disappointment that she quickly pushed away.

“Why,” he said softly, “is my Duchess so very curious?”