Page 55 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

Three heads came round.

Valentine did not care for dogs. He disliked the noise of them and the smell of them and the way they arranged themselves across doorways expressly to be tripped over. He had kept none at Rosewood since his father’s old pointers were put down.

But he had been looking at his wife’s face when she pressed her fingers to her brow. She was tired. She was so tired that it had got past her guard at last, here, at midnight, in a nursery, where she had thought no one was looking. She had been about to take a puppy from a child because she was afraid of asking him for too much.

You have been in my house for weeks and you have not asked me for one thing. You asked for a room, and you have been living inside the walls of that room ever since.

Diana let out her breath. “Arabella, thank His Grace.”

“Thank you, Your Grace!”

Valentine inclined his head.

“There are conditions,” he said. “You will help Betsy see to it. You will feed it and walk it, and you will clean up whatever mess it makes. You will not leave that part to anybody else in this house. Do we understand one another?”

Arabella’s whole face lit like a window. “Yes, Your Grace!”

And she scrambled up, still clutching the animal, and padded across to her bedside table. She came back and pressed a boiled sweet in a twist of paper into his hand.

Valentine looked down at it.

“Thank you,” he said and put it in his waistcoat pocket.

Diana gathered up her sister and carried her to the bed.

“Good night, dearest. No more tricks.”

“Good night.”

Betsy dipped a curtsy as they went out, and looked, Valentine thought, rather as though she might weep.

Her chamber was dark but for the fire.

She went straight to the corner beyond the press and put both hands behind her, feeling along the row of hooks at the back of the gown. Her elbows came up, she twisted, and she got about a third of the way and stopped.

He crossed the room, took her wrists and set her hands gently down at her sides.

“Allow me.”

She went still.

He went down the row of them and it took some time, because the fastenings of a lady’s evening gown were not designed with a duke’s hands in mind but he seemed like he was in no hurry whatsoever. The silk parted. The line of her back came out of it, warm from the fire, and he could not have said afterward how long he stood there looking at it. Then he stepped up close behind her and put both arms round her, rested his face in her hair and breathed her in.

“My duchess,” he said. “You have not spoken a word since the ball.”

She turned slowly in his arms.

“I owe you a thank you,” she said.

His hands found her waist. “Do you wish to pay it?”

She smiled and it went through him like a spike. “This is our last night, Your Grace.”

He said nothing.

She lifted her chin the way she did. “I agreed to give you a child. I agree to it still.”

Valentine looked down at her for a long moment.