Page 110 of A Baby for the Duke

She cried out his name again.

She heard herself say a great many things after that, including a sentence she would think about with horror at breakfast, and Colin groaned something into her hair that she did not catch and would spend a week trying to reconstruct.

As it drew close, he cupped her cheek in his free hand and made her look at him, and she watched all of it leave his face: the arithmetic, the fifteen years, the carefulness.

“Colin—”

“I know.”

“I cannot⁠—”

“You can,” he said. “Hold on to me.”

She held on to him, and he got his hand between them, and it took almost nothing after that.

It went through her from the inside out, longer and deeper than anything he had done to her in daylight, and she heard herself make a sound she would not have recognized as her own. She felt him lose it a moment later, felt the whole strung length of him go, felt his mouth open against her shoulder and his hand close hard in her hair, and it was the first time in five weeks that Colin Walford had not been holding on to a single thing.

Afterward, neither of them could move at all.

Her hair was full of sawdust and would have to be dealt with. She had a splinter in one shoulder. There was a candle guttering on the sill that neither of them had the smallest intention of getting up for, and the beech was swaying slightly in the wind.

Colin found her hand and took it.

“Say something,” Leonora murmured.

“I cannot.”

“You must. It is the rule. You have made the longest speech of your life tonight and I have hardly said a word, and I am not going to be the one who talks us both down out of this tree.”

“I have no words at all,” Colin said to the ceiling. “That is the entire report. I am thirty years old, and there is nothing whatsoever in my head, and I should like to stay here until Thursday.”

“Colin.”

“Mm.”

“I want to say something, and I want you to let me say it without stopping me.”

“Go on.”

“I have thought about this since the day we got married.” She was looking at the candles along the beam. “Not the act per se—well, that as well, and you may be as pleased with yourself as you like in the morning—but what comes after. I have lain in the blue room for five weeks with a door on my left and thought about lying next to you afterward and having nothing to be careful about, and it turns out that is the part I wanted. The rest was extremely good, and I intend to have a great deal more of it. But this is the part.”

Colin did not say anything for a moment.

“I have been careful for fifteen years,” he rumbled. “I do not know how to stop.”

“You will learn. You have four days of practice already, and you are doing very well.”

“Four days.”

“You lit a path,” Leonora said. “That was you not being careful. It was the least careful thing anybody has ever done for me, and you did it with six lamps and no words.”

“Leonora.”

“Mm.”

“There is a nail in the doorframe.”

“I am aware. You told me about it in June, and I have thought about it a great deal since.” She turned her head. “Colin.”