Page 7 of A Baby for the Duke

“Stop pulling at it,” her mother chided.

“I’m not pulling.”

“You are pulling it about like a fishing net. Sit up. Chin. Marina, your gloves.”

“I have my gloves.”

“You have one glove.”

The carriage stopped. Leonora heard the step drop down and her father thank the footman in his ordinary voice, which was too loud for the front of a house like this, and she was suddenly painfully glad of it.

Then they were escorted into the hall.

It was cold, and there were far fewer candles than there ought to have been. A footman took their cloaks, and behind him, waiting with her hands folded, stood an elderly housekeeper leaning on a black cane.

Leonora had one moment to notice that the cane was beautifully made, the grip carved in a spiral and worn pale with handling, before she felt it.

She was being looked at.

The Duke was standing at the bottom of the stairs where the shadows were deepest. He had been standing there, she understood, since before they came in. He was very tall and wore black, and his hair was too long. Over his right eye, there was a patch of black silk. His left eye flicked from her to her sister and back again. Once. Twice. Narrowing.

Nobody had thought to tell her that he was handsome.

That was the part that undid her. She had come out here braced for a monster, because London had spent six years building one up, but the man at the foot of the stairs had a hard, striking face that would have stopped conversation in any ballroom in England, if he had ever consented to stand in one. The patch did not spoil his looks. It only made him more appealing. It pulled her gaze straight to his face and then left her nowhere polite to put it.

They warned me he was cruel. They warned me he was a murderer. Not one of them thought to warn me about this.

Leonora looked down at the floor. When she raised her head, he was still looking between her and her sister.

She knew exactly what he was doing because everybody did it. The same height, the same long light brown hair, the same green eyes. Then they found the brown of Marina’s arms above her gloves and the whiteness of her own, settled, and stopped.

“Your Grace,” her father greeted cheerfully. “Please allow me to introduce my wife, the Marchioness of Huntington, and my daughters, Lady Marina and Lady Leonora.”

“Sit down,” the Duke directed.

And that was the whole of the greeting.

The dining table could have seated forty people but had been laid for five, all of them gathered at one end with room enough to bowl on the other. The food was excellent and arrived without a sound.

Her mother, who dealt with silence the way a bellows dealt with fire, talked for eleven minutes without stopping.

“Leonora is an avid reader,” she was saying. “Poetry, chiefly. And she sings, though she will tell you that she doesn’t. And Marina rides. Everybody says that she rides better than her brothers, but I do think a young woman ought to have something of her own, don’t you agree, Your Grace? Some accomplishment, something to show for herself at one-and-twenty.”

“Certainly,” the Duke said. He had not touched his wine. “Did either of your daughters do anything of note about six months ago?”

Leonora’s fork stopped an inch above her plate.

The room did not change. Her mother laughed and said that Leonora had been at her aunt’s in November, and her father agreed twice. Marina, who was sitting on Leonora’s left, continued eating with the steady deliberateness of a woman who had heard the question perfectly well and was not going to give anybody the pleasure of watching her react.

Leonora set her fork down before it could rattle.

He knows. He knows, and he has sat us all down at his table to watch me find out that he knows.

She lifted her head and made herself look straight at the Duke. He was already looking back, his expression unreadable.

“Your Grace,” she said. Her voice came out light and pleasant, which astonished her. “Might I be shown something around the house? My mother has spoken of it since we received the invitation, and I confess I have been curious.”

“Nora!” her mother gasped, delighted and scandalized at once.