Page 37 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

Mrs. Fletcher inclined her head and went off toward the kitchens, and could be heard almost at once addressing the cook in the tone of a woman with news.

“Your Grace,” said Diana.

“Duchess.”

She sat down at the far end of the table, which was a great deal of table, and put her hands in her lap.

Valentine set down his paper and looked at her.

She is not sleeping enough, he thought, and she is beautiful anyway.

That was becoming a difficulty. She was beautiful every day of the week, that had been apparent from the first quarter hour in the carriage, but it was not that. It was that every time he took her apart in the dark and watched her forget herself, watched the whole careful, competent, guarded creature come to pieces in his hands and want without knowing how to want, something in him got worse. Not better. Worse.

It came back at him the following morning with interest, when she was fully dressed, perfectly proper, and pouring out coffee. He found himself looking at her mouth across a breakfast table and thinking things that would have got him thrown out of any house in England.

And it shows on her, he thought, with a satisfaction he did not trouble to examine. There was a mark on the side of her neck, low, just above the line of her collar. She had powdered it. She had powdered it very carefully, and it had not worked in the least; she plainly had no idea it had not worked. She was sitting at his table, drinking her coffee, with the thing showing like a signature.

He put it out of his mind. He did not entirely succeed.

“How did you sleep?” he said.

Diana went pink to her hairline.

“Very well,” she said to her cup. “Thank you, Your Grace.”

Valentine did not smile. It cost him something.

She had no notion. Not the smallest. He had known women who could have parried that with one eyebrow, making him regret asking. She went scarlet, looked at the tablecloth, and answered the question as though it were about the mattress. There was no sport in it whatever, and he found he did not care in the least, because she was the most artless thing he had ever encountered and it had begun to do something to him.

He folded his napkin and set it down.

“I am going to your father’s house this morning,” he said. “I shall come back with the child.”

Her head came up.

“Today?”

He nodded.

She was staring at him. Valentine stood.

He came down the length of the table, which took some seconds, and Diana watched him do it with her cup halfway to nowhere. He stopped beside her chair. He looked, with unmistakable deliberation, at the place on her neck that she had powdered.

Then he bent down.

“After this,” he said, quite close to her ear, “I believe I am owed a reward.”

Diana’s eyes flew round the room.

The girl at the sideboard had stopped moving. The footman by the door had developed a profound interest in the ceiling. And Mrs. Fletcher had come back in and was standing in the doorway with a plate in her hands and a look on her severe old face like the sun coming up over a wall.

“Your Grace,” Diana said. It came out strangled.

Valentine kissed her on the chin.

There was a small sound from the direction of the sideboard, hastily suppressed.

“I shall be back before dark,” he said, and went out.