Page 41 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

“Thank you, Your Grace,” she said.

Valentine sat back against the squabs and watched London go by and was, on the whole, extremely pleased with his morning.

And tonight, he thought, I collect.

He had several ideas.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Diana—”

The word came out of Arabella wrapped in an enormous yawn, and she got no further with it.

“Sleep, little one.”

Diana bent and kissed her forehead. Her sister was already going. She had fought it for the last half hour, sitting up in a bed that was still too new to be believed, asking questions about everything in the room as though she meant to hold on by talking, and now she was gone in under a minute, one hand curled beneath her chin.

Diana stayed a while with her hand on the child’s back, watching her breathe.

He said he would.

That was the part she could not get over. He had said it at the breakfast table with his napkin in his hand, in the tone of a man announcing he would look in at his club, and Diana had believed him. That was the extraordinary thing. She had not the smallest idea what he could do; she had turned it over all morning and found nothing, no lever, no argument, no piece of leverage in the world that had not already failed. Yet she had believed him anyway because he had said it. Because she was learning, God help her, that when the man said a thing, that thing happened.

And then the carriage came up the drive at four in the afternoon.

She had come out onto the steps, and he had turned to the whole assembled household — every one of them come out to look. He said, in that flat voice, “This is Miss Arabella Fernside. She lives here. You will see that she wants for nothing.”

Diana had not been able to move.

She had stood there with her hand over her mouth while twenty-four people bowed to an eight-year-old, and then something in her had broken loose. She had gone down the steps at a run, in front of all of them, in front of the staff, got on her knees, pulled her sister into her arms, and held on. She had not looked to see what he did after that. She had been rather occupied.

She rose now, slowly, and tucked the coverlet in at the child’s shoulder, and stood a moment longer in the dark of that small warm room with its fire banked and its new curtains and its one battered ring of marbles on the mantelpiece.

Then she went out and shut the door. And realized, in the passage, that she had not seen him since. There had been Arabella to feed and Arabella to bathe and Arabella’s room to finish. She and Mrs. Fletcher had gone at it like a pair of generals, hangings and linen and a nightlight and a chest for the marbles, and Betsy arriving at with two boxes and a face like thunder about what had been in them and what had not. Somewhere in the middle of all of it her husband had gone.

His study door was closed. She stood outside it a moment and did not knock. She went along to the bedchamber instead, and opened the door.

He was sitting on the bed.

Diana stopped with her hand still on the latch. She had expected—she did not know what she had expected. Not this. He was dressed for sleeping, his night shirt loose and open at the throat, his feet bare, sitting on the edge of the bed with his hands on his knees like a man who had been waiting some while and did not consider it worth mentioning.

“Duchess.”

“Your Grace.”

She came across the room to him.

“Thank you,” she said.

She had meant to say a great deal more than that. She had been assembling it all evening, something about what he had done and how he had done it and what it had cost him and what it meant, and every word of it went straight out of her head.

He smiled.

“Duchess,” he said. “I told you.”

And then his eyes went down her, unhurried, all the way and back.

“I did it for the reward.”