Page 31 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

And he thought of her smile, this morning at the top of the stairs, which she had not known he had seen.

Valentine set down his glass.

“If I am to persuade her to bear my child,” he said, “I can hardly do it while she lies awake worrying over her sister. A woman must be satisfied in her mind before she is good for anything else. It is a practical measure.”

“Mm,” said Phillip. “I cannot argue with that.”

“Then do not.”

“I only observe.” He examined his wine against the lamp. “You are a great deal lighter of late. Do you know that? You have scarcely scowled all morning. I looked for it particularly. Twice, perhaps, and both times at me, which hardly signifies since everyone scowls at me.”

Valentine glared at him.

“There,” said Phillip, pleased. “You want the stepmother looked into.”

“I want to know where she comes from.”

He had turned the thing over a dozen times since the drawing room, and it would not sit right. The woman was too quick. She had come at him three times in a quarter of an hour, and every one of the three was a serviceable move. Flattery, then pity, then the appeal to propriety. She read the room and changed her line each time she was blocked. That was not a lady’s education. Ladies did not learn to fight like that, because ladies never had to.

And by way of contrast, he had his wife.

Diana was clever. He had no doubt whatever on the point; she had not said one foolish thing nor done one foolish action since she had entered his house. She knew when to speak and precisely when to hold her tongue, which was rarer by far. The household books had come back to him last Thursday balanced to the penny and in a hand like copperplate, and there had been an error in his own figures from the previous quarter that she had corrected without once mentioning to him that she had done it.

And underneath all of that, she was innocent. Not stupid. Innocent — sheltered, unmarked, the way even the sharpest women of the ton were unmarked, because the world had been kept off them by walls and money and other people’s hands.

Octavia had none of it. Not a trace.

“There is a kind of naivety,” he said slowly, “that comes of being kept from the worst of the world. Every gently born woman I have ever met has it, whatever else she has. It is not a virtue. It is simply a mark, like a callus.” He turned the glass. “She has not got it. There is not one place on that woman where the world has been kept off her. I do not believe she is of gentle birth at all. I do not believe she has ever been.”

Phillip was quiet a moment.

“I have heard of her, you know,” he said. “Since the ball. The word is rather good, in point of fact. Her manners are excellent, her table is excellent, and she is reckoned an uncommonly fine hostess. Lady Harcourt is quite taken with her.” He shrugged. “It is possible, Rosewood, that you have simply married into a family with a cruel stepmother in it. It has been known to happen. There are novels about it.”

“Possible.”

“But I shall look into it,” Phillip said, “since you will only sulk if I do not.”

He refilled both glasses.

“And how,” he added, “do the trial nights progress?”

“Mind your drink.”

“Ah.” Phillip settled back with the air of a man who has been paid in full. “Then I take it I am to expect a nephew or niece before very long.”

Valentine did not answer.

She didn’t reject him. That was what came to him, and it came whole. God help him, the sounds. Her face turned up to his in the lamplight and the small slow nod she had given him when he asked whether he might, when she might have said no and he would have gone. She had let him. She had trusted him enough to let him.

And it came to him, quietly and completely and rather too late to be prevented.

This is not about an heir.

I want her.

He shut it off at once, the way a man shuts a door on a room he has no business in.

Nonsense. He drank. It is Stone. It is Stone talking, and the drink.