Page 111 of A Baby for the Duke

“Mm.”

“Say it again.”

“I love you,” Colin said to the ceiling, with her hand in his. “I have loved you since the lake. I intend to say it out loud in front of your entire family Tuesday week, so that Evan may hear me do it.”

“He will be appalled.”

“He will be delighted. He will pretend to be appalled, and then he will attempt to buy something off me.”

Leonora laughed until the boards shook.

“Wife.”

“Yes?”

“Let’s get down,” Colin said. “There is a bed in the house that I have been avoiding for five weeks, and I should like to see what it is for.”

Leonora laughed. “In a moment.”

“Duchess, it is midnight, and there is a splinter in your shoulder.”

“There is. You may take it out downstairs, and I shall be extremely brave about it.” She rolled onto her side and put her hand flat on his chest, where his heart was still beating faster than it had any business to. “In a moment. Nobody has ever been up here except you, and tomorrow there will be a house and a child and a housekeeper and a county. I would like eleven more minutes of the only room in England that has only ever had the two of us in it.”

Colin put his hand over hers and held it there.

“Eleven minutes,” he relented.

They took forty.

CHAPTER 40

She woke at eleven in the morning, in a bed, for the first time in her life.

That was the first fact she established, lying still with her eyes closed and the entirety of the previous night flashing back in pieces. The second was that the room was full of light because nobody had come in to draw the curtains, and nobody had come in to draw the curtains because somebody downstairs had ordered it. The third was that there was a warm weight across her middle and that it was an arm.

She opened her eyes.

Colin was asleep. Properly asleep, flat out on his front, with his face turned toward her and his scar plain in the daylight and his hair disheveled. He did not look thirty. He did not look like anybody the county had ever been frightened of.

Leonora lay there and looked at him for a long while.

Five weeks. Five weeks in this house, and I have never once seen him sleep past six. He has not slept past six in fifteen years.

Then he said, without opening his eye, “You are staring.”

“I am.”

“You have been staring for some time.”

“I have been staring for twenty minutes, and I intend to go on staring for another twenty. You may either submit or get up, but if you get up, I shall be extremely disagreeable.”

Colin opened his eye.

“Good morning, wife,” he croaked.

“Good morning.”

“It is not morning. It is eleven.”