Page 17 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

He stood filling the doorway, and he was perfectly, maddeningly composed. There was nothing in his face at all, no smirk, no knowing glint, no trace whatever of the man who had held her by the throat not twelve hours past and kissed the sense clean out of her. He might have been greeting a stranger in a receiving line. He looked at her with mild, unhurried inquiry, and waited.

Of course, she thought, and something in her chest sank absurdly. Of course it is nothing to him. He told you himself, he is no green boy at this. Whatever it was to you, it was nothing to him. A few, he had said. She was, she supposed, merely one more.

“Your Grace.” Her voice came out thin, and she hated it. “I—forgive me. I did not mean to disturb you. I only wished—that is, there was a small matter—” She stopped, gathered herself, and began again with as much steadiness as she could scrape together. “Mrs. Fletcher gave me to understand that the household accounts have fallen to you, for want of a mistress to keep them. I wondered whether—if it would not be an imposition—whether you might permit me to take them up. She says it is a great deal of work for you, and it is a wife’s province by rights, and I should be glad to be of some use in this house.”

He regarded her a moment.

“Of course,” he said. “Come in.”

He stepped back and held the door, and Diana’s stomach turned over. To be shut alone in a room with him, this room, where it had all happened, when she could still feel the ghost of his hands on her. But she had asked, and he had granted it, and there was nothing for it now but to go in. She lifted her chin and passed him at the threshold, careful that not a fold of her skirt should brush him, and the warm scent of him reached her all the same and set her heart to knocking.

The library looked different by day. The fire was gone, the curtains drawn back, the settee where she had come undone sitting there in the morning light as innocent as any other piece of furniture. She fixed her eyes upon the great desk and would not look at it.

He crossed to a cabinet, drew out two heavy leather-bound ledgers, carried them to the desk, and laid them open. “These are the household books proper,” he said, turning the pages. “Wages here, tradesmen’s accounts here, the running costs of the house. Ainsley keeps the estate ledgers separate; you need not trouble with those. Sit.”

She sat. And he came round behind her chair and leaned over her shoulder to turn the pages and point out this column and that entry, and from that moment on Diana did not hear a single word he said.

He was too near. His arm came past her to lay a finger on the page, and the whole warm length of him bent close at her back, and she could not attend to any of it. She caught the clean scent of him, soap and linen and that dark undernote that was only him, the same she had tasted on his mouth, and it filled her head and drove out everything else. His voice went on above her, low and even, saying things about quarter-days and settlements and the butcher’s reckoning, and it was only a pleasant rumble to her, a warmth against her ear, entirely without meaning. She stared hard at the ledger and saw nothing but a blur of ink. Her every sense had gone to the man leaning over her, to the six inches of air between his chest and her shoulder blade, to the memory his nearness dragged up whole and shining, his hands, his teeth, the grip of his fingers at her throat⁠—

“—Duchess.”

She started so violently the chair scraped. “Yes—Your Grace.” She said it far too fast, and did not turn her head, and fixed her burning gaze upon the middle of the page.

He did not straighten. He stayed exactly where he was, bent close beside her, and she felt him look at her.

“Are you attending to me at all?”

“Yes. Of course.” She kept her eyes averted. “Every word.”

A pause. And then he leaned in closer still, so close now that his breath stirred the loose hair at her forehead, and said, very quietly, “Are you quite certain you are not distracted?”

A laugh escaped her, high and awkward and utterly unconvincing. “No. No, not in the least, I assure you—I am perfectly—no.”

“Good.” She could hear the smile in it, though she would not look to confirm it. “Because I have no intention whatever of repeating myself.”

He let the silence draw out, and Diana sat rigid, her heart going like a hammer, willing him to straighten up and be a duke and let her breathe.

“The keeping of this house is no small charge,” he went on, and his voice had dropped into something lower, something that curled warm down the back of her neck. “The accounts must be exact. An error in these pages is not a trifling thing. Mistakes, Duchess⁠—”

He bent the last inch, until his lips were nearly at the shell of her ear, and the word came soft and dark and unhurried.

“—will have to be punished.”

The shiver ran the whole length of her spine before she could stop it, and she knew, with a fresh hot rush of blood to her face, that he felt it.

And the worst of it was that it was not fear.

She wanted him to do it again. That was the plain and shameful truth. She wanted him to take her chin in his hand and turn her face up and put his mouth on hers as he had done last night, here, now, in the cold morning light with the ledgers open before her and the ink still wet on the butcher’s account. The thought went through her like a struck match. Her whole face flamed with it.

Diana stood up so fast the chair scraped back and nearly took her with it.

“I wish to write to my father.” She said it to the window. “Today. To tell him my sister is to come and live here.”

“Of course.” He straightened, unhurried. “It was part of our agreement.”

“Yes.” She gathered her skirts in both hands. “Yes. Thank you.”

“Duchess. Why are you scarlet?”