Page 44 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

Her heart was going so hard that she was certain he could feel it through her back.

And is that all it is?

She turned it over honestly, sitting there in the warm dark with his arms round her. The horror had not left her. It was still in there, the shuttered room and the smell of iron and her mother’s voice. But something had happened to it over these days with the Duke; it had gone quieter. It had stopped being the only thing in the room. Perhaps it was only that she had spent every night since her wedding aching for a man in the dark and had learned, at last, that her body was not merely a thing that things were done to. Perhaps it was that he had kept her safe. He had kept his word every single time, without exception, when nobody else in her whole life ever had. It seemed to her a cruel and shabby thing to deny a man the one thing he had asked for, when he had given her everything he had promised and a great deal he had not.

And there was another thought, further down, quieter, which she did not much care to look at directly.

That she could not bear it, the idea of some other woman, somewhere, in the dark, being given what he gave her.

“The Duchess is wise,” said Valentine. “And fair.”

His hands slid down and closed round her waist under the water.

“May I ask you something?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you so set against it? A child.”

Diana went still.

She felt him feel it; she felt the change go through his arms, the sudden tension of a man who knows he has put his foot somewhere he should not.

“Forgive me,” he said. “If it is a sore place, I had no wish to⁠—”

“My mother died birthing Arabella.”

The words came out flat, into the steam.

She had never said her true reasons for not wanting a child of her own out loud. Not once, not in eight years. She carried it alone for so long that saying it out loud felt like putting down something enormously heavy that she had forgotten she was holding.

“I was in the room,” she said. “They did not send me out. There was no one else to hold her hand. Papa could not be in there; he was on the stairs, he was— he was no use at all. So it was me. I was fifteen.” She looked at the water. “There was so much blood. I did not know a person had that much in them. And she was screaming, and then she was not screaming, and that was worse.”

His arms had tightened.

“I do not resent my sister,” she said quickly. “You must understand that. Not for one moment, not ever. Bella is the best thing that has happened to me in my whole life; she is heaven’s own gift, and I would not undo her for anything in the world.” She stopped. Her voice had gone unreliable. “But I could not — I could not go the same way my mother went. And leave her. She has no one. If I died she would have no one at all.”

She heard him breathe.

“And I heard the midwives,” she said. “Afterward. On the landing, when they thought there was nobody by. They said the women of my mother’s family always had a hard time of it. That she had very nearly not survived having me.” She laughed, and it came out wrong. “So there it is. It is in the blood, apparently. It waits for us.”

For a long moment there was no sound but the water.

“If such a fear lives in your heart,” he said quietly, “then why yield at all?”

Diana turned in his arms.

It was awkward, the water and the closeness of him, but she managed it enough to see his face, and the candles were behind him, and his eyes were on hers.

And it struck her, with the force of something falling: I was frightened of this face. When she walked up an aisle toward that face, and her whole body had told her to run. And now she looked at it and what she felt was warm and safe. She looked at the face of the beast of Rosewood and felt safer than she had felt since she was fifteen years old.

“You have done so much for me,” she said. “How could I refuse you the one thing you have ever asked?”

His eyes did not leave hers.

“So it is a favor returned,” he said.

And Diana shook her head.