Page 30 of A Baby for the Duke

“They came to see the inside of the house, to look at my face, and to find out whether there was a baby.” He crossed to the fire and threw a log in it. Leonora watched the muscles in his forearm flex and determinedly looked back at his face. “They’ve had their evening. I’d rather not talk about them.”

“What would you rather talk about?”

He straightened up and turned around. “You.”

The room was very warm.

“I have nothing to report,” Leonora said. “I was married this morning to a man I have met four times, and I have spent every hour since being congratulated by people who would not once look at him.”

“You have a great deal to report. You’ve been in my house for half a day, and my housekeeper has told me your name four times.” He came a step closer and stopped. “You told the maid your father made cloth.”

“How did you⁠—”

“Because there are eleven servants in this house and nothing has happened in six years.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “Susan carried it down with your gown to be brushed, and it was round the kitchen before she had got to the bottom of the stairs.”

“And who carried it out of the kitchen?”

He stopped.

“You don’t go into your own kitchens,” Leonora pointed out. “You don’t know Susan’s face, and she’s been working here for four years. So nobody told you in passing, Your Grace. You specifically asked.”

The log popped.

“I shall have to be very careful what I tell Susan from now on.”

“You should be exactly as careless as you’ve been.” He was looking at her steadily. “They’ve been waiting a long while for somebody to be careless in this house.”

Leonora did not know what to do with that, so she said, “I liked your gift.”

The moment it was out of her mouth, she wished it back.

“I know.”

“You cannot possibly⁠—”

“You’re wearing it.”

His eye slid down from her face to her throat and down the whole length of her, unhurried. The wrapper was open at the front because she had been walking up and down for twenty minutes and had entirely forgotten. She felt the look land on her skin like a hand held an inch above it, and she could not move at all.

She pulled the edges of the wrapper together and held them.

“That,” she scoffed, “was not gentlemanly.”

“No.”

“You should apologize.”

“I should.”

“Are you going to?”

“No.”

Leonora discovered, standing on a hearthrug in a black nightgown in front of a man she had married that morning, that she was not frightened at all. She was a great many other things, but frightened was not among them.

The discovery made her reckless in a way that she was going to have to think about later, at length, in daylight.

“May I ask you a question, Your Grace?”