Page 72 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

“I am fine.” She caught his wrists. “My back is black and blue and my head aches. But the surgeon says the child is perfectly well. I am fine. Look at me.”

He looked at her.

And then he pulled her in and held on to her so hard that her bruised shoulder complained. But she did not say a word about it as he put his face into her hair.

They stayed like that for some while.

“Why did you leave me so long?” he said into her hair.

Diana went rigid.

“Why did I—” She pushed back off his chest. “Why did you not come? Eight days, Valentine. Eight days and not a letter, not a word, not so much as a servant sent to ask whether I was alive⁠—”

“I was told to give you space.”

“You were what?”

“Mrs. Fletcher,” he said it flatly. “The night you went. She stood in my own hall and told me I was not to come chasing after you. She said you would only close up if I did, and that I should give you the days you asked for, then come and fetch you home properly.” His jaw moved. “I have never in my life taken advice about anything from a servant. I took hers because I could not think of anything better. I was afraid of making it worse.”

“I did not want space.” Her eyes had filled and she let them. “I wanted you to come and console me. I wanted you here.”

He looked at her for a long moment.

“So that you might tell me to my face,” he said, “that you do not want our child?”

Diana’s mouth opened.

“What?”

“You never wanted this marriage. I have never once held it against you.” His voice had gone low and rather rough. “And you did not want a child, and I gave that up. I meant it and I do not take it back. But I thought⁠—”

He stopped.

“I thought that your heart had warmed toward me a little,” he said. “That is all, perhaps you might want this one. Even a very little.”

Diana stared at him.

“Is that why you were so cold?”

“You looked as though you had been handed something spoiled. You looked sick to your stomach at the thought of it, and you asked what you were to do. Not what we were to do. I was angry and I was hurt. I said the coldest thing I could reach, because it was that or say the true thing. I could not say the true thing.”

He was angry.

You cannot be that angry about a person you do not want.

“Why on earth,” she said, and her voice came apart in the middle of it, “would I be disgusted at carrying your child? You are the man I love.”

Valentine heard the words perfectly clearly and did not believe he had heard them.

“What?”

“I am in love with you.” She was crying now and did not appear to have noticed. “I was shocked, and I was frightened. It came a great deal sooner than either of us intended, and I did not know the first thing about how to be anybody’s mother. That is all it was.”

She caught his hand and gripped it. “I was never going to be rid of it. Not if you had ordered me. It is the only piece of you I have ever been given that nobody arranged.”

He could not make his mouth work.

“You love me,” he said.