Page 34 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

Diana could not speak for a moment.

The door opened.

Henrietta was on her feet before Diana had turned her head, and down in a curtsy so deep and so hasty that she nearly went over.

“Your Grace.”

“Please. Sit.”

He had come in from riding. He was in a coat of dark red that Diana had not seen before, his hair disordered, the color of the ride still in his face, and the whole of him took up rather more of the room than seemed reasonable.

“Duchess?”

And Diana, with her cousin two feet away and a teacup in her hand, was undone entirely, because the sound of his voice saying that word did something to her now. What came into her head utterly without her permission was last night. His hand. What his hand had done. What she had done, and the noise she had made when she did it.

The heat went up her throat and into her face like a struck match.

“Your Grace,” she managed.

He looked at her a moment longer than he needed to.

“I shall leave you ladies to your visit,” he said, and went out.

Diana watched him go.

She was still watching the door when she heard it: a small, gleeful, wicked giggle from the other end of the sofa.

She turned around.

Henrietta was looking at her with her chin propped on her hand, her eyes dancing, and an expression of the purest triumph.

“You don’t even know it, do you,” she said. “Diana. My dearest darling fool. I think you are falling in love with your husband.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“In love with my husband?”

The words came out into the steam and hung there, and Diana sank a little lower into the copper bath and scowled at the ceiling.

It is absurd, she thought. Hen has read too many novels. She has always read too many novels; her mother said so when we were twelve.

Except that Hen had said it with such perfect confidence. Not as a tease, that was the trouble. She had teased for a full hour before it, about the Duke’s shoulders and the Duke’s coat and what precisely Diana had meant by good at a great many things, and Diana had swatted every bit of it away. And then she had said that one thing, quite quietly, with her chin on her hand, and it had not been a tease at all. It had been the way one tells a person something they ought to have noticed for themselves.

Diana put her head back against the rim.

But how should I know? That is the whole difficulty. I have never been in love in my life. I have never been in the neighborhood of it. I would not recognize the thing if it walked up and handed me its card.

“How would I know,” she said aloud, “what it even feels like?”

“Feels like what?”

“To be in⁠—”

Diana stopped.

Her whole body went underwater by about four inches before her mind had caught up with any of it.

He was in the doorway.