Page 51 of A Baby for the Duke

“Perhaps not. But I know exactly what you’re doing.”

“Ah, do enlighten me.”

“You’re hiding.” She had started now, and she could not have stopped for money. “From the world, from your tenants, from your own gallery, from me, from a six-month-old baby who has done nothing to you. You sit in a treehouse from four in the morning, and you send down word that nobody is to disturb you and you call it your nature. But it isn’t your nature. It’s a habit, and you’ve kept it up for fifteen years because⁠—”

“Because what?” His voice sharpened. “Go on. What do you think you know about me? What story have you invented to make me look less like a beast?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Leonora scoffed. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have come.”

She turned for the ladder, and he caught her arm.

“No,” he said. “If you’re going to be a hellion, you must finish what you’ve started. Tell me.”

So she told him.

“You cannot vanish for two days and then call yourself part of this family. You cannot let your housekeeper explain the rules of your own house to your wife over the toast. You cannot stand in a gallery and tell me to ask you anything and then walk out of the room the moment I do.” Her voice was shaky, but she pushed through it. “And you cannot tell me you’ll come and claim what’s yours at the end of a week and then not spare me a single glance in the days between, as though I were a debt falling due. That is all of it. That is what I think about you.”

The silence afterward was thick.

“You think,” Colin said slowly, “that I need to spend time with you to make you burn for me.”

“I think⁠—”

“Such little faith, wife.”

Then he pulled her in and kissed her.

It was nothing like their first kiss.

That had been a question, held out and waited on. This kiss was an answer, and it arrived with two days of silence behind it.

Leonora’s back hit the wall, and his hand slid behind her head to keep it from knocking against the boards.

She should have stopped it. She thought about stopping it for perhaps a second and a half, before his mouth left hers and trailed down her throat, muddling her mind.

“Tell me to stop,” he murmured against her collarbone.

“No.”

“Say it, and I’ll stop.”

“I know you will.” She grabbed a fistful of his hair and could feel her breathing growing ragged. “That’s the problem, Your Grace. You keep doing exactly as I say, and it is making it extremely hard to keep refusing you.”

He laughed.

It was the first time she had ever heard it, low and surprised and entirely against her skin. She would remember it longer than anything else about that afternoon.

Then he went down on his knees in front of her.

Leonora looked down at the top of his dark head, at the hands gathering the butter-colored muslin, and understood what was being asked. She had one clear moment to consider it as a gently reared woman.

“Your Grace, that isn’t⁠—”

“You said you would not lie with me.” He looked up. In the dim light, his eye was almost gray. “I’m not asking you to lie with me, Duchess. I’m asking you to stand exactly where you are and let me do something you’ll think about all the way through the opera.”

“That is a wicked thing to say.”

“Yes.”