Page 56 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

“Diana,” he said. “Is your father one of the reasons you did not want one?”

Something crossed her face. “Is it so obvious as that?”

“One cannot help but wonder.”

“I do not want a child who cannot be loved and defended fiercely by both its parents. Not one. Not either. You may see from my own case what comes of it. I had a mother who loved me and it was not enough. When she was gone there was nothing behind her but a man who could not be troubled to look up. One parent’s love is not enough. I have the whole of my life as proof.”

Valentine stood very still.

And what have I to offer against that?

He thought of a house with three hundred rooms and one small boy in it. Of a mother who had come to the schoolroom twice a year and once asked him his age. Of his father at the head of a table the length of a barge, saying sit up. He could not remember being held. Not once, not by either of them, not in thirty years and he had built a perfectly serviceable life on the assumption that this was ordinary and that a man did not require it.

I did not love anyone. Not my mother, not my father, not one living soul in this world until Diana.

I want to protect her. I want to put everything I own between her and the world. That much I know how to do.

But a child. A small helpless thing that will need me to be warm, every day, for twenty years. I have never once in my life been warm at anybody. I do not know that I have got it in me. And she is right. Half of it is worse than none.

And so he said the thing that surprised him more than it surprised her.

“Diana, we do not have to have a child.”

Her head came up.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“But—” She stared at him. “Your Grace, you will have no heirs.”

“We have Arabella.”

Diana’s lips parted and no sound came out.

“I shall adopt her as my own,” he said. “Not a ward. A daughter, in law and in fact, with my name upon her.”

“But—” Diana put her hand out and caught the bedpost. “What about your Estate?”

“Do not worry about that, Duchess. I will find a way.”

“Your Grace, you cannot⁠—”

“I am the man who decides what becomes of that estate,” said Valentine. “I have decided.”

She was quiet a moment. When she spoke again her voice had gone unsteady.

“Is this because of me?”

He looked at her.

At her mouth, still red from the wine and the cold and his own doing; at the question standing plain and frightened in her eyes. At the fire moving on her bare shoulder where he had unfastened the gown.

He leaned in.

“I find,” he said, “that I do not ever wish to see you sad, or bewildered, or afraid. I discover my heart has no arrangement in place for bearing it.”

And it came back at him as he said it, the look on her face across that ballroom when she turned to her father. He could have borne anger. It had been hope; she had looked at the man and hoped, one final time, and Valentine had watched the hope go out of her in front of four hundred people. He pulled her in and held on to her, hard, with his face in her hair.