Page 27 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

“No.”

The child was quiet for a moment.

“That’s sad,” she said.

Diana watched something go across her husband’s face and vanish before she could name it.

“I’ll teach you,” said Arabella.

He looked, for the first time since Diana had known him, entirely at a loss. He glanced at her, as though asking leave, and Diana, who had no idea in the world what her own face was doing, gave him a small, helpless nod.

So the Duke of Rosewood took off his coat, and got down on the nursery floor.

He was terrible at it.

He knelt like a man being lowered by a rope. His hand was too big for the shot, and his knuckle would not sit down flat, and Arabella had to take his fingers and physically fold them into the right shape, tutting all the while, which she did without appearing to notice that she was touching him. He listened to every word she said. He did not once correct her, or hurry her, or look over her head at Diana with that indulgent expression grown men wear when they are humoring a child. When Arabella told him he was doing it wrong, he said, “Am I,” and did it again the way she said.

Diana sat back on her heels and watched them and felt something in her chest slowly come apart.

He is so careful with her. He was awkward. A man of thirty and six feet, with his shoulders hunched over a chalk ring, mouthing the rules back to himself, but every bit of it was gentle. He handled her sister like something breakable that he had not been given instructions for.

And in the lamplight, with his head bent and his hair falling forward and the hard lines of his face gone soft with concentrating on a marble, he was so handsome that it was actually unfair.

You would be a good father.

The thought arrived without permission, and she could not get rid of it. You would. You have no notion of it, and you would be terrible at the beginning, and you would be good. Somebody ought to have told you that.

He shot. The marble cracked out of the ring and rolled to the skirting board.

“Oh,” said Arabella, in real dismay.

He shot again. And again. When it was done there were four marbles on his side of the chalk, and one on hers, and Arabella sat back on her heels with her arms folded and her lower lip out.

“You cheated.”

“I did not.”

“You must have.” She scowled. “Beginners don’t win.”

“And what becomes of the winner?”

Diana laughed before she could stop it.

“Well, Your Grace,” she said, “in this house the winner tickles the loser.”

Valentine’s head came round. He looked at her with an expression of such total blankness that she nearly laughed again.

“Oh,” he began.

But Arabella had already got up and gone to the corner and was rummaging in a wooden box, and came back with a boiled sweet in a twist of paper, sticky at the edges, and held it out to him with both hands.

“You won,” she said.

He took it.

“Thank you,” said the Duke of Rosewood. And smiled.

The window had gone dark. Diana knelt and smoothed her sister’s hair back off her forehead.