Page 73 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

“Have I not shown it?” She gave a wet laugh. “Valentine, what on earth have I been doing these eleven weeks?”

She leaned in.

“I love you,” she said. “I love you, Valentine.”

“There is something you must know first.”

His voice had gone rough. He held both her hands in his and made himself say it before he lost the nerve for it, because he had lost his nerve for a great many truer things in his life and did not intend to lose it for this one.

“When I told you it was our agreement, that you must have the child because we had bargained for it, that was a lie, and a cowardly one, and I have hated myself for it every hour since I said it.” He drew a breath. “I offered you a debt because I did not know how to offer you the truth. The truth is that I have wanted this child since the moment you told me of it, and I wanted you glad of it too, and when you were not I did not know what to do with the wanting, so I made it into a business arrangement instead, because a business arrangement cannot break a man’s heart the way the truth can.”

Diana’s eyes did not leave his face.

“I was raised by a father who believed a boy did not require warmth, only instruction,” he said. “And a mother who was gone before I was old enough to remember her voice properly. I do not think I was held more than a handful of times in the whole of my childhood. I grew up believing that was simply what a man was, a ledger of duties, kept and discharged, with nothing warm at the center of it. I built my whole reputation on being exactly that sort of man. It cost me nothing, because I had never known the other thing well enough to miss it.”

Her eyes looked at him with tenderness that felt like it would melt him. “Oh Valentine⁠—”

“Let me finish.” His hands tightened on hers. “I am telling you this so that you will understand what I am promising you. The house we build — you, I, and Arabella, and this child, and whatever children come after, will not be cold. I swear it to you. I do not know yet how to be the sort of father who gets down on a nursery floor without feeling a fool, though I have made a beginning of it with your sister and I mean to go on making it. I will learn. I will not stop learning it as long as I live. No child of mine will ever stand in a room not knowing whether he is wanted. I swear that to you on whatever is left of my honor after tonight.”

Diana looked at him for a long moment, and then she nodded. Her face came loose and gentle.

“I believe you,” she said.

He sighed. He had not slept a full night in eight days. He had lain in her bed with his boots on for the first three of them and worked through the days like a man doing sums in a burning house. And then a rider had come up the drive at four in the afternoon with a note in an unfamiliar hand.

Valentine had read, the Duchess has been struck down by a horse in the market square, and had been in the carriage before he had finished the second line.

He did not remember calling for it or going down the steps. He remembered a great deal of road.

“Diana.”

His voice had gone somewhere unreliable and he let it.

“I cannot live without you,” he said. “I have made the attempt for eight days and I am not able to do it. Come back to me. Come home — you, and Arabella, and the child, and the dog, and every last thing in this house that belongs to you.” He took both her hands. “And I will be with you. Every step of it. The whole nine months and the day itself and every day after it. You will not do one hour of it alone, I give you my word upon my honor and my name and anything else you would like to name.”

She was looking at him with the tears standing in her eyes.

“And you will never look at me like that again,” she said. “As you did that night. As you did on the day we married.”

“Never.” He said it as flatly as he had ever said anything. “That was a coward’s face and I put it on because I could not bear what was underneath it. You will not see it again as long as you live. I shall spend every day of the rest of my life loving you and that child.”

Diana laughed and it came out as a sob.

He leaned in and kissed her, mindful of the bruise, and drew back just far enough to see her face.

“I love you, Diana,” he said.

Her eyes spilled over.

“I love you, Valentine.”

EPILOGUE

EIGHT MONTHS LATER

“Lord in Heaven, be merciful to her. Be merciful. Lord, I have not asked You for one thing in twenty years and I am asking now⁠—”

It was Octavia praying.