Page 68 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

She turned and went toward the passage.

“Diana.”

She stopped. She did not turn round.

“I am sorry,” Octavia said. “For all of it. For every single thing.”

Diana stood in the doorway with her hand on the frame.

“I shall accept your apology,” she said, “when you are yourself again.”

And she went out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“You may stay here until the child comes. If that would make you easier.”

Diana turned her head.

Her father stood a few feet off with his hands behind his back, looking out across the lawn where Arabella lay on her stomach in the grass conducting a war between the puppy and the wooden horse. The puppy was winning by improper means.

He cleared his throat. “You need not see anybody you do not wish to see. Including me. I only thought — if you would be more comfortable here, until it is over, then here you shall be, and there is an end to it.”

Diana nodded.

She did not say anything. It was a decent offer, decently made. A month ago it would have undone her. Now, she barely cared.

They stood there and watched Arabella lose the wooden horse to the enemy.

“She is a good child,” her father said.

The puppy went past at a dead run with the horse in its mouth and Arabella after it, shrieking.

“I never thanked you,” her father said. “In eight years. I never once said it to you.”

Diana watched her sister go.

“Your thanks are coming rather late, Papa,” she said.

He did not argue. That was the worst of it. He simply stood there and took it, and after a moment he nodded, as at a fair valuation, and looked back out at the lawn.

A week, Diana thought. I have been in this house seven days and he has said more to me in it than in the eight years before.

And I cannot find anything to do with any of it.

A door opened behind them, and Octavia came out onto the terrace.

She had done as she was told. The gray silk, the hair dressed but the effect was not what it had been, because there was no performance running underneath it. She simply looked like a well-dressed woman who had not slept.

“My lord.” Her voice was perfectly steady and perfectly quiet. “I am going down to the market with the maids. Is there anything you would like brought back? The Spanish wine you had at Michaelmas — I could send for a case, if you⁠—”

Levi Fernside set down his hat.

He walked past his wife, down the two steps onto the grass, and out toward the child.

“Bella! Bella, mind — you shall have that horse in pieces⁠—”

Octavia stood where she was.