Page 46 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

On the night of the ball, she put Arabella to bed herself. And then she had come down the great staircase in her best gown with her gloves half on, expecting the footman and the carriage. The carriage door stood open. And in it, quite at his ease, sat the Duke of Rosewood.

Diana stopped dead on the bottom step.

Her heart did something so foolish and so entire that she was glad of the dark to hide it.

He had not shaved since the road, and his hair wanted cutting, and he was in black and looked precisely as he had looked at the head of an aisle; when the sight of him had emptied her lungs with fear.

She was smiling before she knew it.

“You are to be in Lancashire,” she said.

“I am and it has been most inconvenient.” He came down and held out his hand for hers. When she gave it he did not hand her up at all, he drew her in, close against him, one arm going round her waist. “I have missed you, wife.”

“Your Grace—” Her face was on fire. “We are outside.”

“Mm.” He bent his head to her ear, and she felt the smile in it. “Then perhaps the Duchess would prefer somewhere more private.”

“Stop teasing me.”

“Very well.” He did not sound in the least repentant. But he let her go, and took her hand properly, and turned toward the step.

“I thought you were busy,” she said.

“I am extremely busy.”

“Then why?”

“Because my wife is making her first appearance before the ton,” said Valentine, “and she will not do it alone.”

Something behind Diana’s ribs came apart very quietly.

He came back for that. He rode God knows how many hours.

She let him hand her into the carriage and did not trust herself to speak at all.

They had gone perhaps a mile before she said.

“Might I lay my head on your shoulder?”

He turned to her.

“It is only—” She stopped, and then decided, recklessly, upon the truth. “I have missed your scent.”

There was a pause.

“I must warn you, wife,” said the Duke, in an altered voice, “that you are making me lose my composure.”

“Then are you refusing me?”

“My dove.” He shifted, and drew her under his arm, and settled her against his chest as though he had done it a hundred times. “Were I fitted out with a thousand nerves, I could not refuse the fairest lady in London — whom it is the great good luck of my life to have married. My shoulder is yours. So is the rest of me, though I will thank you not to test the point before we arrive.”

What a dreadful, shameless, silver-tongued creature you are, Diana thought, and pressed her smile into his coat where he could not see it.

He stroked her hair. Slowly, and without appearing to think about it, the way a man strokes a cat that has settled in his lap. That, she thought, was the thing about him. Not the pretty speeches but the absent-minded hand.

“And the little one?” he said. “How does she go on?”

“She is very quiet.” Diana turned it over. “She has not broken a single thing, nor been late to a single meal, nor asked for anything at all in seven days. Bella has never in her life gone seven days without asking for something. I think she is playing good at us. I think she believes she is a guest, and knows that guests may be sent home.”