Page 67 of A Baby for the Duke

She woke up because she was touching something hot.

It was not the baby. Her hand worked that out several seconds before the rest of her did.

It was something too large, too flat, rising and falling with a heartbeat in it. Under her palm, there was linen, and under the linen there was a great deal of muscle.

That is a chest. That is a man’s chest. How interesting.

Her hand went down.

Only for a hand to close round her wrist.

“Good morning to you too, wife.”

Leonora’s eyes flew open to sunlight, the blue room, the cot pushed to one side and empty, and her husband lying on his back six inches away with his shirt open at the collar and her own hand held against his ribs.

She got out of bed with a speed that no invalid should have been capable of.

“Where’s Katherine?”

“Mrs. Pike took her at seven to be bathed. She fed. She has no fever, she shouted at a footman, and I am reliably informed that she is furious about the whole business.”

Colin had not moved at all. He had one arm behind his head, and he was watching her with something akin to amusement.

“Your color’s better.”

“You stayed.”

“You told me to.”

“I told you to at eleven o’clock at night while I was feverish.” Leonora had backed up to the window and now had nowhere else to go. “And you stayed all night.”

“Yes.”

“But you said you didn’t want to care for me.”

“That is not what I said,” Colin said, “and you know it.”

“It is very nearly what you said.”

“Nearly is doing a great deal of work in that sentence.”

“Then say the true one.” She turned around.

“Which true one? I have a number of them, and none of them will please you.”

“Start with the cheapest.”

“Very well.” Colin folded his arms. “I stayed because you would have got up. You would have waited until the house was quiet and then you would have gone to that cot on your own two feet with a fever on you, and I would have found you asleep on the floor of the nursery at four in the morning. There. That is the cheapest one, and it is entirely true, and it is not a romance.”

Leonora stood very still.

“I have been in this house for six days, Your Grace, and you have told me that you cannot care for me and then carried me to my bed. You have told me you’d claim what’s yours at the end of a week and then washed my hair. You are the only man in England who says one thing in the morning and does the opposite in the afternoon and calls himself consistent. It is confusing, and I am not clever enough to keep up.”

He got off the bed. “What’s confusing you?”

“You are. All of it. You—” She was backing along the window seat, and she made herself stop, because she was not going to be a woman who backed along furniture. “You washed my hair.”

“You needed it washed.”