Page 10 of A Baby for the Duke

“Do you like children, Lady Leonora?”

“I—what can that possibly have to do with anything?”

“Because I’m about to make you a bargain,” the Duke said. “Your secret stays in this house. Not one soul learns which unmarried daughter of a newly-made marquess wrote a love letter to the worst rake in England and sealed it with her father’s crest.”

“And in return?”

“In return, I’ll make you my wife.”

CHAPTER 4

She did not faint, she did not scream, and she did not run down the corridor to her father.

Colin had braced for all three. What he had not braced for, however, was that she would stand there with her back against the window and her chin coming up by degrees, like a flag going up a pole.

“Excuse me?” she scoffed. “What in heaven’s name makes you think I would accept?”

“The fact that you’d gain more than I would.”

“I cannot imagine what you think I’d gain.”

“My name. My title. My income. My connections.” He counted them off without any particular feeling, because they were simply the goods on the table and he had never seen the sense in pretending otherwise. “Your mother would weep for a week.”

“She would weep for a month, which is worse.” Leonora pressed her palms flat against the wall behind her. “And I didn’t know you had any connections, Your Grace. I was given to understand you had a tree.”

He looked at her.

She bit her lip hard and turned scarlet, but she did not take back her words.

“Everything I have said is true,” Colin said. “You have nothing to lose.”

“I have everything to lose.”

“Name one thing.”

“I want to fall in love.” She said it the way another woman might have confessed to a debt. Her voice had dropped almost to nothing, and she was looking at the floor between them.

Colin felt the words lodge somewhere below his ribs and stay there, which was not a thing he had any use for.

“No marriage in the ton is based on love,” he pointed out. “Not one. Not this year, not last year, not in recent history. If it isn’t me, it will be whichever man your father judges most useful. He will be forty and have gout, and you will smile at his friends across a table twice a week until one of you dies.”

“That is a hateful thing to say.”

“It’s an accurate thing to say. You’re free to find it hateful as well.”

“I would rather wait for something better than to take something certain.”

“Then you’re a romantic,” Colin said, “and I’m sorry for you, because the world is not arranged for romantics, and it will cost you more than it costs me.”

Her mouth opened. Whatever she had been about to say, he never heard it, because at that moment, a thin exhausted wail sounded somewhere above their heads and drifted down the stairwell into the corridor.

Leonora went still.

The door at the end of the corridor opened, and Bess stepped through it sideways, holding the baby at arm’s length like a saucepan that had caught fire.

“Begging your pardon, Your Grace, but she won’t settle. She’s been at it since eight, and she’ll not take the pap boat from me, and Sarah’s tried, and I don’t know what else I’m supposed to—” Bess got as far as Mrs. Pike, standing in the corridor with her cane, and stopped dead. “Oh. Mrs. Pike. I didn’t know you were down here.”

“Give her here,” Leonora cut in.