Page 53 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

They went, with considerable speed, and did not look back.

The ballroom, when they returned to it, had noticed nothing at all.

The orchestra played on. People went on eating, and dancing, and repeating whatever they had been repeating to one another before. Not one of them so much as glanced up to mark that a viscount and his wife had gone home early, or that a duke and duchess had stepped out and back in again within the half hour.

Henrietta squeezed Diana’s hand once, hard, and said nothing at all, which was somehow the kindest thing she could have done.

“Come along, Miss Fernside,” said Phillip. “Let us leave the pair of them to it.”

And then there was nobody there but him.

The music had begun something slow. Diana found she did not quite know what to do with her hands.

“I ought to thank you,” she said.

“Duchess.” Valentine took a step nearer. “I have told you how I am to be thanked.”

“Your Grace—” She went scarlet and put one hand against his chest. “People are watching.”

He tapped the end of her nose with one finger.

“Madam,” he said, “I am asking you to dance.”

He stepped back and held out his hand. Diana looked at it, and then put her own into it. He raised it and turned it over and kissed the inside of her wrist above the glove, in front of anyone who cared to see it.

“He is a very devoted sort of husband,” someone murmured, nearby, to someone else. “One does not see it so very often.”

He drew her in. His hand settled at her waist, and they turned into the music. Diana laid her palm against her husband’s shoulder and understood, for the first time in the whole of that evening, that she had not once needed to be brave.

He came back from Lancashire for me. He mended my uncle’s fortunes and never once told me of it. He took my father and my stepmother into a quiet room instead of a public one, because he knew — before I did — that I would not have wanted the whole of London to watch it happen.

Could he love me?

She looked up at that hard, once-terrifying face, and let herself wonder it for the first time.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“Duchess—”

Valentine stood with the carriage door still open behind him and the words simply would not come. Are you well?

He had faced down a committee of the Lords with less trouble. But she had come down out of that carriage with her face perfectly composed and her back perfectly straight, exactly as she had crossed her uncle’s ballroom. Something about that composure sealed the question in his throat like wax.

She was at the steps. Then she stopped, and turned back.

“I shall look in on my sister,” she said. “If Your Grace does not object.”

“I will come with you.”

She nodded, went in, and he followed.

He watched her go up the stairs ahead of him and thought that he had never in his life met anyone so entirely without the habit of being upset.

And now I know how you came by it.

Any other woman in England would have gone to pieces in that ballroom. Her name had been dragged through four hundred people; her stepmother had wept and lied in front of the whole of the ton.

She laughed, and made her speech, and did not shed one tear where they could see it.