Page 33 of A Baby for the Duke

“Four of which I have spent in a room with you, and I have watched you very closely in every one of them, because I was frightened of you, and being frightened of a person is remarkably good for the attention.” She lifted her chin. “I notice things. It’s the only accomplishment I have.”

“And what have you noticed?”

“That you have not once looked at the baby without checking first whether anybody is watching you do it.”

His eyes flashed.

For a moment, Leonora thought she had gone too far, and then she saw that she had not gone too far at all, that she had simply gone somewhere nobody had been in a long while and that he had no map for it.

“Ask me for something else,” he said. “Anything else. Ask me for the London townhouse. Ask me for a carriage of your own and horses to go with it, and I’ll have them at the door tomorrow.”

“I don’t want a carriage.”

“Everybody wants a carriage.”

“I want a week of you at the table in the morning,” Leonora said. “That’s all. That is the entire price, and it’s a great deal cheaper than horses.”

“That’s not a smaller thing than a carriage.”

“No,” she agreed. “It isn’t.”

She crossed the room and opened the connecting door for him, and stood holding it, and hoped very much that he could not see her hand shaking on the edge of it.

“I’m sorry, husband,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Colin did not move. “One week.”

Leonora kept her hand on the door. “I beg your pardon?”

“I’ll give you one week to prepare, wife.” His voice had gone flat and cold and absolutely certain. It was the voice from the corridor, the voice that had told her to sit down at his table. “And then I’ll claim what’s mine.”

She had a great many answers to that, and she said none of them because she had just seen his hand. It was still on the back of the chair, wrapped so tightly around the wood that it had gone white across the knuckles.

“Then you have a week to give me a reason,” Leonora threw back. “I would start at once, if I were you. You’ve used up rather a lot of tonight.”

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he went past her through the door, and she shut it behind him, and turned the key.

Colin did not sleep.

That was ordinary enough. He had not slept properly since a wicker basket had appeared on his doorstep, and before that he had not slept properly for a decade. He had long ago stopped considering it as a difficulty and started considering it as a fact about himself, like his eye.

What was not ordinary was that he could hear her.

The walls of this house were three feet of Elizabethan stone and had kept out weather and creditors and two centuries of unwelcome relations, but none of that helped, because the green door was no longer painted shut. He had ordered it eased. He had stood in his own hall four days ago and said Have it eased to a woman with a slate. Now, there was a quarter inch of air between his room and hers, and through it came the sound of her pacing up and down.

She’ll wear a track in the floorboards.

Colin got up and stood at the window in the dark.

He had handled it badly; he was aware of that. But being aware of it was no use to him whatsoever, because he had no notion of what handling it well would have looked like.

He had wanted her. He had wanted her from the moment she stepped around the screen in the modiste’s shop and probably a good while before. He had gone into her room tonight fully intending to have what he had been imagining for six days, but then she had said one word, and he had let go of her as though she had burned him.

That was what troubled him. He had stopped without deciding to.

Fifteen years he had spent making certain that nothing in this house moved unless he moved it. Every debt, every servant, every acre, every arrangement, all of it held in one hand and held tight, because the alternative was what his father had been—a man who loved a woman until it curdled and came out the other side as something with a knife in it.

Today, a lady of one-and-twenty in a black gown had said wait, and his hands had come off her before she finished speaking.