Page 62 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

Phillip fetched a bigger glass, and filled his own besides. He down opposite with the decanter set companionably between them like a third party to the discussion.

The fire had been made up twice.

“I do not understand it,” Valentine said. “That is my difficulty. I have turned it over the length of this bottle and I cannot make it come right. She looked sick to her stomach at the thought of it. I have seen her frightened, I know what that looks like on her. She looked like she felt sick. As at something spoiled.”

“Forgive me.” Phillip turned his glass. “But did you not tell me, a fortnight since, and at some length, that you had made your peace with having no heir at all? That you had settled it upon the little girl? I recall being told to mind my own business about it.”

“I did tell you that.”

“Well then.”

“It was true.” Valentine put the glass down. “I did not want a child at that price. I was not prepared to buy one with her terror. She has watched her mother die of it and she believes it is waiting in her blood. I would sooner have handed Rosewood to a stranger in the street than have her lie awake nine months in fear of it. That is what I gave up. Not the wanting.”

“Ah.”

“I want a child with that woman, Stone. I did not know it until she said the words.” He heard his own voice change and could do nothing about it. “It has come about against everything either of us intended and I cannot for the life of me see why that is so terrible a piece of news. Surely — surely it cannot be nothing but a calamity. Surely there was room in it for one moment of⁠—”

He stopped.

“Perhaps she is only confused,” said Phillip. “It is a great deal to have arrive in an afternoon.”

“She was not confused. I have seen her confused.” He shook his head. “She was miserable. Simply and entirely miserable, and it was my child doing it to her. Even carrying something of mine causes her pain.”

Phillip drank.

“And what did you say to her?”

“I told her the child was our agreement and it would stand.”

Phillip set down his glass. “Tell me you did not.”

“I am a straightforward man.”

“You are an ass,” said the Duke of Kingsell.

Valentine turned the glass slowly on the arm of the chair.

“And the woman I love,” he said, “is disgusted at the notion of carrying my child. So there we are.”

The fire cracked. Phillip picked his glass back up and took a considered mouthful.

“So you love her,” he said.

Valentine did not answer. He drank instead, which was an answer, and knew it, and drank anyway.

Phillip began to laugh.

“Oh, this is very fine. This is worth the whole evening.” He wiped his eye with his knuckle. “My dear Rosewood. There are a number of things a man is obliged to leave outside the door when he loves somebody, and the very first of them, before his money or his temper or his good sense, is his pride. You have brought yours in with you and set it in the best chair, now you are astonished that there is no room left for anything else.”

“Do not preach at me.”

“I shall preach at you a very great deal, because you have earned it.” Phillip leaned forward. “Go home, tell your wife you love her. Tell her you want this child and tell her she is not an estate to be managed, Valentine. She is a woman of three-and-twenty who has just been told she is with child by a husband she has known eleven weeks. She wants reassuring. That is all. It is the cheapest thing you will ever be asked for.”

Valentine stared into the fire.

“And if she rejects me?” he said.

Phillip’s brows went up.