Page 71 of A Baby for the Duke

“You don’t need love to want me, wife.” His voice had gone light in a way she had learned to distrust. “I should say we’ve established that by now. Twice.”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t be clever.” She twisted around on the window seat to face him. “Colin, you have had your mouth on me twice in daylight with my skirts round my waist and my hands in your hair, and I let you, and I would let you again this afternoon before the clock strikes. And I have never once seen your face without the eyepatch.”

The room’s temperature dropped immediately.

Colin got up and crossed to the fireplace, which put eight feet of Turkish carpet between them. He stood with his back to her and his hand on the mantel.

“That is a kindness to you,” he said.

“I don’t want it.”

“You’d want it if you’d seen it.”

“You have no notion of what I would want, since you have never asked me, not once.” Her voice was rising, and she let it. “What is under there that is so much worse than everything else? You told me you were responsible for your father’s death. You told me that on the floor of the treehouse as though you were reading the shipping news, because you wanted me to run, and I did not run. What could possibly be worse than that?”

“You might weep,” Colin said.

She stopped.

“You might look at it and start crying,” he continued, still facing away from her, “the way Katherine did every morning for a fortnight. And then you would tell me it was nothing, be very kind about it, and go on being kind about it for forty years, and I would have to watch you do it. That is what’s under there, Duchess. That is the whole of it.”

“But Katherine has stopped.”

“Katherine is six months old and has nothing to compare it to.”

“Katherine put her hand on it and then patted your cheek and went to sleep on your shoulder, and you smiled in a way I have not been able to stop thinking about since,” she reminded him. “If a baby can do it within a fortnight, then surely you can trust your wife to do it in a day.”

He turned around. “Have you forgotten what I told you? That I am responsible for my father’s death?”

“No. It has not left my mind since.” She stood up. “But that isn’t what you said, and I have gone over the words a hundred times. You said responsible. You did not say you killed him. So tell me what you meant, and I promise you on anything you want that I will not run, that I will not weep, and that I will not be kind about it afterward, because I don’t think you could bear that.”

Colin curled his fists at his sides.

“We were arguing,” he began.

“Yes?”

“He fell.”

“And…?”

“And that’s the whole of it, and it isn’t, and you can’t see why.” He took two steps toward her and stopped, as though there were something on the carpet hindering him. “Can’t you understand it, wife? Whatever was in my father is in me. I have his temper and his hands and his face, or half of it. I could not care for you and be certain. And if I were wrong, it wouldn’t be me who paid for it. It would be you. Or Mrs. Pike. Or a child who has just this week decided I am safe.”

“You would never⁠—”

“You cannot know that. I cannot know that, and I have had fifteen years to mull it over.” His voice cracked straight down the middle. “So, no, I can’t. I’m sorry, I can’t.”

A heavy silence followed.

Leonora stood there in her rumpled shift, with the morning sun all around her, and understood that she had lost, and that she was going to have to be extremely careful for about the next thirty seconds.

“I see,” she muttered.

“Leonora—”