Page 69 of A Baby for the Duke

“I’m better.”

“You’re better.”

“Miraculously.” She fisted both hands in his shirt. “Ask me anything, and I shall answer it in Latin.”

“Sit down, Duchess.”

She sat in the window seat with her heart beating like a drum, and he knelt on one knee in front of her, which put his face lower than hers. Her breathing grew ragged before he had touched her at all.

“You told me a week,” he said.

“I did.”

“There are two days left of it. I want you to know that I’ve stopped counting them.”

“When did you stop?”

“Somewhere in the lake.”

She started to say something clever, when he slid his hand under the hem of her shift and up her calf, and whatever it was left died on her lips.

He did not hurry. That was the trouble. His warm palm slid over her knee and up the inside of her thigh and stopped there, until she made a small mortifying noise, and he moved on as though she had answered a question.

“Wider, wife.”

“That is not something a person says.”

“Wider.”

Her whole face was on fire, but she opened her legs wider anyway. His hand went where it had been going all along.

This time, she watched him.

In the treehouse she had held onto a beam with her head back and the roof beams swimming above her, and had barely seen him at all. Now the sun was shining down on them both, and she looked at him the whole time—at the sawdust still in the crease of his rolled sleeve, at the pale scar rising from under his eyepatch, at his mouth. She saw him watching her back, and understood with a lurch what he was doing.

He was learning her. Every sound she made, he was filing away.

“Colin—”

“Say that again.”

“Colin.”

“Again.”

Her head fell back against the windowpane.

He used two fingers and the flat of his thumb and took his time about it, and this was where the difference lay, because in the treehouse she had not been able to see anything at all. Now she could watch him work: the set of his jaw, the sawdust on his wrist, the way his eye went from her face to his own hand and back again as though he were checking a measurement.

He went slower than he had in the treehouse. A man taking something apart to find out how it worked and refusing to be hurried.

He learned in about a minute what made her hips buck off the window seat, and having learned it, he did it again, and again, and then took his hand away entirely for long enough that she said his name in a tone she would be ashamed of at breakfast.

“Please.”

“There it is,” Colin murmured, sounding thoroughly pleased with himself.

His other arm came across her hips and held her down. She could feel the hot sun on one side of her face, the cold glass against the back of her skull, and his mouth on the inside of her wrist where he had pinned it to the cushion all at once, and she could do nothing about it.