Page 71 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

“Do not cry. Bella, look at me. Look at me, dearest, I am perfectly well. I am well. It was only a great deal of noise and a great deal of fuss. I have a bruise the size of Kent, and that is all, I promise you. I promise.”

Arabella did not stop crying, but she stopped fighting it, which was better.

Beyond the bed, her father stood by the window with his hands hanging at his sides.

Octavia by the foot of it, still in the gray silk, which had a long dirty scrape down one side of it from the hem to the hip.

“Come along, Miss Arabella.” Betsy got her hands under the child’s arms. “Your sister wants quiet and you want your face washed, and I want both, so we shall all be satisfied. Come.”

She bore her off. The door shut.

Levi came forward a step.

“The surgeon has not been gone a quarter of an hour,” he said. “He says you fainted from the shock of it. You have taken a knock on the head and a bad bruise across the back but there is nothing broken anywhere. And the child—” His voice caught, and he cleared it roughly. “The child is unharmed.”

Diana let her breath out and shut her eyes.

Octavia sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Why,” she said, “did you go running out into the middle of a public road like that? Are you an idiot?”

Her voice was not steady at all.

“I—”

“Where is she?”

The voice came from the hall.

“Where is my wife?”

Diana’s whole body went still.

“I sent for him,” said Octavia. “This afternoon, from the market. Before the surgeon came.” She stood and shook out her ruined skirt. “Whatever is between the two of you is nothing to me. But a man ought to be told when his wife has been knocked down by a horse in the street. I would have wanted to know.”

The door came open.

“Diana.”

She had not seen him in eight days.

And whatever she had spent those eight days telling herself, all of it simply came off her at the sight of him standing in that doorway.

Levi looked at his wife, Octavia inclined her head. The two of them went out and closed the door.

Valentine sat, reached out and took her face in both his hands.

“What happened?”

His palms were cold from the road and warm underneath. She could feel them shaking very slightly against her jaw.

“There was a horse loose in the market square,” she said. “A trace broke, I think. There was a child standing in the road. I pulled her out of it and I did not get out of the way quite fast enough.” She swallowed. “It was an accident.”

“Are you hurt?” His hands went down — her shoulder, her arm, her ribs, quickly, not gently. “Where? Tell me where.”

“Valentine—”

“Where are you hurt?”