Page 63 of A Baby for the Duke

“That is my shift.”

“It is.”

“You are ruining it.”

“I’ll buy you nine.”

She lost track of most things after that, including the position of the fire, the state of her hair, the hour. She learned that a man who had spent his life with his hands on wood had a particular way of learning a shape, trailing his palm over her body as though he were reading grain, finding the spots that made her breath hitch and then going back to them on purpose.

She learned that she could take his composure apart by doing almost nothing at all. She got one hand free, pressed it against his chest, and felt his heart thundering. Then she moved it lower, slowly, all while watching his face, and had the satisfaction of hearing him groan.

She learned that she had been in this house for four days and had already become a person her mother would not recognize.

Most importantly, she learned that she wanted all of it, and that wanting all of it was going to cost her on Friday.

Her hands were warm now. That was the last coherent observation she made for a while: that her hands had gotten warm and her spine had not, that she had spent twenty-one years being told that a lady endured this and every single person who had told her so had been lying, and that on Friday she would be expected to stand in a room and be pleasant about him.

“Colin.”

“Mm.”

“On F-Friday.” Her stutter returned, and she pushed through it because she was not going to be stopped by her own mouth. “When the week is up, what happens?”

His hands went still.

She could have wept. She had had one whole minute of not thinking about it, one minute in a fortnight, and she had spent it on a question.

“Leonora—”

Suddenly, the door swung open.

“Your Grace. Begging your pardon, Your Grace, only⁠—”

Peg stopped in the doorway with a candle in her hand and her mouth gaping open, and the entire universe rearranged itself in about a second and a half.

Leonora scrambled off the table and got her gown back up onto her shoulder and her hands into her hair, none of which improved matters in the slightest. Colin turned to the fire. Peg turned the color of a brick and looked at the ceiling, the floor, the fire poker, and finally at a point six inches above her candle.

“I’m really sorry, but Mrs. Pike says to come. It’s the baby.”

“What about her?” Colin asked.

“She’s hot, Your Grace. She’s ever so hot, and she’s gone quiet. Mrs. Pike says it’s the quiet she doesn’t care for.”

They were out of the room before Peg had finished speaking.

And it was only hours later, sitting in a chair too small for her beside a cot at two in the morning, that Leonora noticed her own hands had started to shake again, and that the fire had been built up twice, and that she was still cold.

CHAPTER 21

Colin found her in the nursery at seven in the morning, in the same chair he had left her in at midnight.

He had known from the landing, because the house felt wrong. There was no singing in it.

Katherine was in her cot, her cheeks the color of brick and her breathing fast and shallow. Beside the cot, in a chair too small for her, sat his wife.

“She’s cooler than she was at four,” Leonora said, without turning around. “I’ve had the window open a crack, and she’s taken a little water. Mrs. Pike says that babies run hot over nothing at all, and I have decided to believe her. But I would rather somebody sent for a doctor anyway, and I would rather it were now.”

“How long have you been in that chair?”