Page 48 of A Baby for the Duke

“You might have died.”

“I might have, but I didn’t. Is that the horse?” She was already past him, ducking under the beam that caught his shoulder every morning and going straight to the sill where the little ash horse stood with its head turned. “Oh.”

“Don’t touch it.”

“I’m not touching it. I am looking at it very hard, which is different.” She crouched down until her eyes were level with it. “Did you make this?”

“Yes.”

“With what?”

“A gouge, a rasp, three chisels, and eleven weeks.”

“Eleven weeks?”

“I ruined the near hind leg the Monday before the wedding and had to take the whole thing down to the hock and start again.”

She turned her head and looked up at him from where she crouched.

Colin, standing in the doorway of the only room in England he had ever considered his, was suddenly unpleasantly aware that he had just spoken to his wife more honestly than he had to anyone in six years.

“Why did you ruin it?” Leonora asked.

He looked down at the bundle in his hands to avoid answering. The letter on top of the pile was addressed in a fast young hand that sloped hard to the right.

He had been reading that hand since it was learning to make its letters at a nursery table with a sore wrist and a great deal of complaining.

“That’s from William,” he said.

CHAPTER 17

Leonora got up at once.

“Then I’ll go down. It’s private. I shouldn’t have brought it up in the first⁠—”

His hand closed round her wrist.

It was the second time he had done that, and it was nothing like the first. There was no hurry in it. He simply wrapped his hand around her wrist as she went past him and held on, not looking at her.

Leonora stood perfectly still and felt her pulse fluttering against his thumb.

“Sit down,” Colin said.

She sat down in the sawdust in her butter-colored dress, not caring in the least. After a moment, he sat down next to her with his back against the wall.

There was not a lot of room. His thigh against hers from knee to hip, warm through their layers, and stayed there. Leonora looked very hard at the opposite wall and thought about the Corn Laws.

“Read the others first,” she suggested. “Leave the one you don’t want to read for last.”

“Is that what you’d do?”

“It’s what I have done every day of my life. Ask my mother about the letter from my aunt in Bath that I left on the mantel for nine days.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. Then he opened the invitations.

“The opera. The races. An auction at the end of the month.” He looked up. “Three cards and a bill, and you have carried them up a rope ladder one-handed. Where are the rest?”

“On the hall table.”