Page 26 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

He had not heard a word of it. His eyes were on his wife, following her across the room, soft and vague and adoring, watching her arrange herself in her chair as though it were the only thing happening in England.

Diana turned and went up the stairs to her sister.

“Diana — stop — I shall be sick — Diana⁠—“

Arabella cried laughing. She was past speech and into shrieking, both hands clamped uselessly over her ribs, twisting on the nursery rug like a landed fish. “You are entirely at my mercy,” said Diana. “This is what comes of insulting my singing.”

“I didn’t⁠—”

“You said it frightened the dogs.”

“It does—,” and then she was gone again, gasping, kicking her heels, and Betsy in the window seat with a stocking over her darning hand smiled down into her work and said nothing at all. It was the first noise of that kind the house had heard in a fortnight. The door opened.

Everything stopped. Arabella scrambled up so fast she nearly took Diana’s chin off with her head, and got behind her, and gripped two fistfuls of her skirt, and went absolutely silent.

The Duke of Rosewood filled the doorway.

He cleared his throat.

“Forgive me.” He was, Diana realized, addressing the small pair of eyes at her waist. “I have come to make myself known to Miss Arabella. Properly. It seems I have married her sister without ever being introduced.”

Diana blinked.

You came up here for that? She could not fit it into any picture she had of him. A duke did not climb two flights to present himself to a child of eight. A duke summoned children downstairs to be looked at, if he thought of them at all.

She reached back and put her hand over her sister’s.

“Bella,” she said gently. “Come and say how do you do.”

The grip on her skirt tightened. Then, slowly, Arabella came out. One shoulder, then the rest of her, and stood in the open with her arms straight down at her sides and made the deepest, most correct curtsy of her entire life, staring hard at his boots the whole way down.

“How do you do, Your Grace,” she whispered.

Valentine smiled.

Arabella got behind Diana again.

“Well.” He inclined his head. “That is done, then. I shall leave you to⁠—”

“Don’t you want to play with us?”

He turned around.

Diana’s mouth came open. Bella! This child!

“What game?” said the Duke.

Arabella emerged a second time, cautiously, and pointed at the rug, where a battered ring of marbles sat scattered in a chalk circle. “Ring-taw,” she said. “You knuckle down there, and you shoot, and if you knock one out of the ring you keep it and you go again.”

“I have not heard of it.”

“You’ve not?” She forgot, briefly, to be frightened. “But everyone plays it. What did you play? When you were little like me?”

“I did not play.”

It came out perfectly level, the way he might have said the road was long. Arabella looked at him.

“Not — ever?”