Page 45 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

Because it was not. She knew herself, if nothing else—she had had to; there was nobody else to know her. She understood perfectly well what she was and what she was not. She was not a woman whose resolve bent. It had not bent for her father, nor for Octavia, nor for two Seasons of gentlemen, nor for the whole weight of the ton. In three-and-twenty years exactly two people had ever moved it.

One of them was asleep at the end of the passage with her hand under her chin. The other one had his arms round her in a copper bath.

Although she was not quite in love, she was dangerously close to it, and getting nearer every single day.

“No,” she said. “It is not that.” She lifted her chin. “It is also that I cannot bear the thought of you giving another woman what you give me. I find I cannot bear it at all.” Her face was flaming, and she went on anyway. “I shall manage my fear. I want to give you a child.”

And underneath it, unsaid, the thing that had come to her tonight while she stood in the dark over her sleeping sister and had not gone away since:

I could have a family.

Him. And me. And Bella. And children.

And if the worst comes — if it takes me the way it took her — he will look after them. He will. He would not even have to be asked.

Perhaps that was naive. Perhaps it was the most naive thought she had ever had. She found she could not make herself doubt it for a second.

His hand came up out of the water and took her jaw and turned her face the rest of the way round.

He kissed her.

Her mouth fell open under his at once. There was no resisting it now; there had not been any resisting it for days. He took her lower lip and drew on it until she made a sound against him.

He drew back an inch.

“Then I had best make haste,” he said, “to ease the Duchess’s fears.”

His other hand slid down through the water.

Diana gasped, and the sound bounced off the copper and the ceiling, shocking her more than the touch did. Her head went back against his shoulder, and he caught her ear between his teeth, and after that she could not have said anything sensible at all. His fingers had gone deep inside her.

“Your Grace,” she gasped. “Your Grace⁠—”

And somewhere far off, underneath the heat and the water and the mouth at her ear, some small clear part of her understood the truth of it.

Her body had stopped wanting anything in this world but him.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Idid not know my uncle had it in him.”

Her uncle’s letter had come on Tuesday. It was a great sprawling thing, three pages of it, and every page more delighted than the last.

He had found a new business partner. A Manchester man, cotton and canal shares both, and the terms were better by half than anything Levi Fernside had ever put his name to. And to mark the occasion, Mr. Edmund Fernside was giving a ball.

A ball, with an orchestra, and four hundred cards of invitation sent out across the whole of London — one of which had gone to his elder brother and his wife.

He means to make them come and watch, Diana chuckled, sitting on the edge of her bed with the letter in both hands. Her uncle invited her and the duke. She folded the letter and began to prepare to write to the duke.

She had not seen her husband in seven days.

That was not the ache it might have been, and she had noticed that too. He had told her he would be gone the morning after the bath. He was standing in the passage with his hat in his hand. He business in the north, ten days at the outside, and he would send word if it ran longer.

She was writing to him about the ball. Only to inform him. She read the note twice over, before she sent it, to be certain there was nothing in it that could be mistaken for a summons.

His Grace need not trouble himself; I shall go with my cousin and return before midnight.

He had a great deal to do. She had no wish to be one more thing on the list.