Page 7 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

She turned her head and made herself look at him, and that was harder by far than looking away had been.

“I do not know why you chose me, Your Grace. I cannot think what recommended me to a man who might have had any bride he pleased.” Save that no one else would have you, whispered some traitor voice within her, but she did not say it aloud. “But I will tell you plainly what I ask of this marriage, and it is very little. A room. One room, for myself and for my sister, that she may be brought to me and kept safe. I do not ask for your kindness. I do not ask your affection, nor look for it. I ask only for dignity, mine, and hers, and in return I will do all that lies in my power to be to you a virtuous and dutiful wife.”

The words ran out. Her heart was beating so hard that she was half certain he must hear it, there in the small close space between them. And in the ringing quiet that followed, she became of a sudden aware of him, of how very near he sat, of the breadth of his shoulder a hand’s span from her own, of the fact, which she had somehow failed to reckon properly until this very moment, that the cold monster she had married was also, past all denying, devilishly handsome. Every line of him was hard, and male, and assured. It was—unfair.

“You have a great deal of nerve, wife.” His eyes turned dark and Diana recoiled. She swallowed as his eyebrows flared up. But she willed herself to be still. She must not show her fright, at least not so quickly.

“Striking bargains with your husband not ten minutes wed, in a moving carriage, in your wedding gown.”

Heat climbed her throat. “I—forgive me. I did not mean to presume, I only⁠—”

“Do not.”

She stopped.

“Do not apologize for it.” He regarded her with those blue eyes, and there was something behind the cold in them now. “I prefer it. I have no patience for affectation, and less still for a wife who would simper at me, hide her wants, and leave me to guess at them. You have told me what you are, and what you would have. That is more than most contrive in a whole lifetime of marriage.”

He turned toward her fully then, and their eyes met and held, and Diana forgot entirely how a person breathed.

“You have laid out your terms,” he said, low. “I have heard them. In good time, I shall bring you mine. Should we find ourselves of one mind, then we shall proceed. Does that content you?”

“You are—” Her voice came thread-thin; she gathered it up. “You are benevolent, and gracious, Your Grace. I thank you.”

He inclined his head, and looked away at last, out through the window at the passing gray of London.

And Diana, who had just won very nearly everything she had dared hope to win in that carriage, found that she could not do the same. She sat with her hands knotted in her lap and her heart still misbehaving beneath her stays, and she looked at the hard, handsome profile of the husband she had sworn to keep at arm’s length, and could not, for the life of her, make herself look away.

This, she thought, with a slow cold curl of dread quite unlike any fear the day had brought her yet, was never any part of the plan.

“See her to her room.”

The words came from somewhere behind her shoulder. A woman near the top of the steps dipped a curtsy in answer before Diana had even turned her head. And she understood, standing there in her dirt-hemmed silk, that she had been handed over a second time that day, as easily as the first, and with rather less ceremony.

She had not moved since the footman set her down. For a moment upon climbing out of that carriage she had forgotten, entirely, to be afraid.

She had believed her father’s house a fine one. She had believed she understood what wealth looked like. She never in her life saw anything to set beside what rose before her now. A great pale sweep of stone three stories high, its wings thrown wide to either hand, its windows past all counting, a huge flight of steps climbing to doors that would have swallowed a farmhouse whole. And ranked upon those steps in two silent rows stood the household, four-and-twenty strong at the least, liveried and still as chess pieces, every last eye upon the new mistress standing below them with her hem ruined and her hair coming down.

Merciful heaven, she thought. A person could lose herself in such a place and never once be found.

The Duke stepped down behind her. He did not offer her his arm. He had cast one glance over the assembled staff, and though he raised his voice not at all, the whole yard had seemed to lean toward it.

Now he turned his head, and his dark eyes came to rest upon her just once more.

“I shall see you tonight, wife.”

And with that he was gone, up the steps and in through those great doors and away into the depths of the house, leaving her with her heart knocking and no notion under heaven of what he meant.

They filled a copper bath with water gone soft and cloudy, perfumed with a scent she could not name. Diana stood in the middle of a chamber larger than the whole of the nursery wing at home. At the same time, three maids divested her, with brisk and cheerful touches, of the ruined wedding gown, the stays, the shift, every stitch she owned, until she stood bare and shivering and was handed down into the steaming water before she had gathered the wit to protest. They washed her hair and combed it through with their fingers. They pressed rose water to the pulse of her throat and the insides of her wrists. They rubbed some sweet oil into her shoulders until her skin glowed, and all the while they chattered over her head like starlings.

“Such lovely hair, Your Grace, and no trouble at all to it⁠—”

“—wants only a proper dressing, you’ll see⁠—”

“I confess I don’t understand,” Diana said at last, gripping the sides of the bath. “Why all of this? Why now, at such an hour?”

The maids exchanged a glance. The eldest of them, a broad, kind-faced woman, laughed.

“Why, for your wedding night, Your Grace, what else?” She wrung out a cloth. “Did you not mark how eager His Grace was to have you home? I shall see you tonight, says he. And a bride wants preparing for tonight, don’t she.”