Page 19 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

Octavia.

Diana’s hands began to shake with rage, pure rage, of a kind she had never in her life felt before and did not know what to do with.

She did not even trouble to have him write it. She has my sister, and she knows I can do nothing.

She put her face in her hands.

“Your Grace?” Mrs. Fletcher’s voice, near and careful. “Are you unwell?”

“No.” Diana did not look up for a moment. Then she did, and her face was perfectly composed. “No, I thank you. It is nothing.”

She stood. She folded the letter into four crisp squares and put it in her pocket, because a thing folded is a thing decided.

Very well. I will find another way in. Hen was watching. Betsy was watching. Between them the child was fed and warm and had somebody in that house who loved her, and that would hold for now. And if it did not hold, then Betsy would take her out of that door in the dark, and Diana would meet the consequences afterward, whatever they cost her, and gladly.

But she does not grow up under that woman. Whatever else happens. She does not.

Her hands were still shaking. She closed the ledgers and went up to bed.

CHAPTER EIGHT

She meant to sleep, and did not.

She lay through the whole long amber slide of the afternoon and turned over perhaps two hundred times, and when the supper tray came at eight she took two spoonfuls of something and had it taken away again.

Then she sat up in the dark and looked at the bed.

It was very large. It was very cold. And she was thinking. She could not seem to stop herself thinking of the sensation of him beside her, of the heat that had come off him in that carriage and in that church, of the hard severe face that had frightened her so badly four days ago and did not frighten her now. Diana got up. She put on her wrapper. She told herself she was going for a book. The study door was unlocked.

She stood in the doorway and breathed in. The whole room was him, soap and leather and old paper and that dark undernote beneath it. A feeling in her chest let go so suddenly that she had to put her hand on the frame.

She went in. She walked the length of the shelves without reading a single spine. She came to the table where the decanters stood, and the little rank of glasses beside them, and she picked one up because it glittered in the moonlight. It had a pattern cut into it, vines and small sharp leaves, quite beautiful. She was turning it in her fingers when a voice came.

“Duchess?”

The glass leaped out of her hands and burst on the floor.

Diana gasped. Something bit her, a sting across the top of her bare foot, and she looked down, and there was blood and glass everywhere.

“Are you hurt?”

And he came across the room to her, still in his greatcoat, road dust on him. Diana looked up at him and something in the middle of her gave way with relief at the sight of the man.

“It is nothing⁠—”

He did not let her finish. He bent and put one arm behind her knees and the other at her back and lifted her off the floor, and her arms went round his neck without asking her leave at all. She felt the whole strength of him take her weight as though she weighed nothing. She was near enough to see the dust in his lashes.

And close up, she thought, he did not look cruel at all. Perhaps it was only that his eyes had gone soft with concern. Perhaps she was imagining it entirely.

“The glass will cut you,” he said. “We cannot have that, Duchess.”

She let herself rest against his chest, and he carried her out.

He set her on the bed and looked down at her foot, frowning.

“It is a scratch,” she said. “Truly, Your Grace, it is nothing at all.”

He ignored her and put his head out the door. “A clean cloth and warm water. And send someone to my study; there is broken glass on the floor, and I want every splinter of it gone tonight.” A pause. “The Duchess is not to be hurt in this house again.”