Page 10 of Bred By the Duke

“Last night I told you to go up to bed.”

“You did. But it was the tone of your voice that upset me. You talked to me like I was beneath you. Which I suppose I am.”

His head snaps up. “No,” he says. “I know exactly what voice I used.” He looks at the door, and then at me, and this time he doesn't dress it up. “If I had stayed on that floor another second, I would have carried you upstairs. And in the morning, I’d have to lie to everyone that I was single so that you didn’t get dragged over the coals.”

“So you were protecting me?”

“Yes. At least, I thought I was.” He frowns now, his eyes dropping back down to Nester.

“Lucas. You keep making decisions about my life and then handing them to me like a bill. I'm a grown woman. I've been organizing other people's disasters for a living since I was twenty-three. I can decide for myself whether I can handle what’s to come.”

He takes that. He doesn't argue, which surprises me, and he doesn't apologize either, which surprises me more, and I find I prefer it.

“Elsie came to find me before dinner,” I say. “In a state. She said she'd been sent to move my things to the yellow room, and then unsent.”

“Yeah,” he sighs as he says it. “I was so angry.”

“Why?”

“Because the blue room is yours.” He says it like a fact of the estate, like the drainage or the date over the stable arch.

“Who wanted the room?”

He doesn't answer straight away, and everything in me attunes to him the way it does on site when a supplier says ah before a sentence.

“My mother wanted it for Delphine Corvain,” he says. “She arrives tomorrow. Our families go back quite some time and my mother thinks it would be a good match.”

“And what is she to you?”

“Nothing.”

My eyebrows flicker. “Nothing doesn't get your mother's second-best bedroom four doors from yours.”

He shrugs. “I genuinely barely know her. I know as much as you do probably from whatever gets published on the gossip sites. I don’t know what she is like in person. The last time I saw her was a charity event in the city.”

“I’m going to be transparent with you,” I tell him, “because I don't think anybody ever really has been. I want the whole thing. I want a wedding, and children, and a man who is proud to be my husband in front of other people. I'm not embarrassed about wanting it. I've wanted it since I was small and I've never once gone off the idea.” Nester's head is heavy on my thigh, warm through the cotton of my pants. “So if what's happening here is just for this week or even less than that, tell me now and I'll be perfectly nice to you until Sunday, and then I'll go home and get on with my life.”

“It isn't a one off.”

“Then what is it?”

“I don't know yet.” He turns to me, and his voice comes down low and rough in a way I've never heard from him. “I know that I have thought about you every day for four years. I know that I came looking for you tonight and found you sitting on a cold floor with somebody else's dog, and I have never in my life wanted anything the way I want to be allowed to stay right here with you.”

I move Nester's head off my lap and onto the folded blanket, gently, apologizing to her under my breath. Then I get up onto my knees on the tiles in front of him and take his face in both hands, and I kiss him.

He makes a sound into my mouth. His hand comes around the back of my neck and holds me there like he thinks I might change my mind, and he tastes faintly of the port they had after dinner. I’m not thinking about breakfast, or bedrooms, or a woman I don’t know arriving tomorrow.

Bootsteps come down the back passage, unhurried, accompanied by whistling.

We come apart. Lucas puts his forehead against mine for half a second, which nearly finishes me off, and then the door swings wide and Peregrine is standing in it with a camping stool under one arm, a thermos, and a paperback.

“Ah,” he says, delighted. “How lovely of you to watch over my pupper. Things certainly do seem to be imminent…”

Chapter Six

Lucas

Peregrine stands in the doorway with the air of a man arriving precisely on time for something.