Page 66 of A Baby for the Duke

Then he put a screen up in front of the fire, turned round, and waited by the door with his hand on the latch.

“Call when you’re in.”

“I don’t think I can take off my shift,” Leonora said. “My arms are heavy.”

He came back across the room.

She would remember the entirety of the next quarter of an hour for the rest of her life.

He pulled the shift over her head like a man handling glass and put a towel round her shoulders before she was cold. He kept his eye on her face the entire time with the intense focus of a man doing a job. When she was finally in the water, he pushed his sleeves further up his forearms and knelt on the boards behind her and washed her hair.

Nobody had washed her hair for her since she was a child in a nursery.

His calloused hands were very careful as he lathered up the strands, then he rinsed them one cupful at a time, his free hand shielding her eyes.

Leonora sat in the hot water with her knees drawn up and cried silently so he would not hear. Not from unhappiness. She could not have explained it to anybody, least of all to him.

“Head back.”

“Colin.”

“Head back, wife.”

She tipped her head back.

Eventually, he pulled her out, put her in a dry shift, and tucked her into her bed. By then, she was past tired, and was only distantly aware of Katherine snuffling in the cot beside her and him moving quietly about the room, tidying it up.

Then he sat down in the chair by the window.

“What are you doing?”

“Keeping an eye on both of you.”

“In a chair?”

“I’ve slept in worse.”

“You have not slept at all this week, and I have it on excellent authority that you were in a lake yesterday.” Leonora patted the counterpane on the far side of the bed without opening her eyes. “There is space, plenty of space. My mother would have a seizure, and she is twenty-two miles away.”

“Duchess.”

“You have washed my hair, Colin. We are a long way past the point where anybody in this house would raise an eyebrow at a chair. I am too tired to argue, and if you make me get up and drag you over, I shall be extremely disagreeable about it.”

There was a long pause. Then the chair scraped, and the mattress dipped on the other side of the bed. The three of them lay in the dark in the blue room with the fire going down, the baby’s quick breathing barely audible.

Leonora fell asleep almost at once.

She woke once, hours later, with no idea what time it was and the fire down to embers, and lay still in that soft floating place where nothing was quite real.

Somewhere above her, her husband was talking very quietly.

“Take the week,” he said. “Take the month. Take as long as you want, and don’t ever let me tell you otherwise.”

Leonora did not move a muscle.

“I’ll not ask you again,” Colin added.

CHAPTER 22