Page 29 of A Baby for the Duke

“Yes, thank you. What’s your name?”

“Susan, Your Grace.”

“Susan.” Leonora sat down at the vanity and let the girl undo her hair, breathing deeply. “How long have you been in this house?”

“Four years.”

“Then you’ll know it far better than I do. I shall be asking you a great many stupid questions, and I should like you to answer them honestly. I promise not to be grand about it. I am not the least bit grand. My father made cloth.”

Susan’s hands paused half a second in her hair. “Yes, Your Grace.”

Leonora heard something in the maid’s voice that had not been there a minute before and thought, Good. That’s one.

The ivory silk came off. The stays followed. Susan brushed out her hair and asked which nightgown she wanted to wear, and Leonora heard herself say the black one quite calmly.

Then the maid stepped out and shut the door.

Leonora stood alone in a strange bedchamber, in a house she had never slept in before.

The black gown weighed nothing at all. That was the first thing she noticed. It moved when she moved. It lay against her like a held breath. She made herself turn and look in the long mirror, and for a moment did not recognize what she was looking at.

She looked like the woman in her story. The one who went to sea.

Colin had this made. He stood in a shop with three parcels under his arm and told the modiste what he wanted. He thought about me while he was doing it, and he has been thinking about it since Saturday.

She covered her face for the second time in three days.

Then she dropped them, rolled her shoulders back, pulled on the wrapper because there were limits, and began pacing up and down in front of the fire.

The clock on the mantel read twenty-two minutes past ten.

She had said things. That was the trouble. She had stood in a corridor and told him she would not marry him because she wanted to fall in love, and then she had married him six days later in front of sixty people. She had not the least idea what he believed about her now, and she had a horrible suspicion that he believed the whole speech had been a negotiating tactic.

It was not a negotiating tactic. I meant every word. I mean it now. I shall tell him so calmly, at once, before anything happens, and I shall be perfectly⁠—

A knock sounded at the green door.

Leonora drew to a halt, her heart flapping like the wings of a bird.

“Enter,” she called.

He had taken off his coat. That was what she noticed first and could not afterward stop noticing. He had taken off his coat, his neckcloth, and his waistcoat. He stood there in his shirt and breeches, with no shoes and no stockings. The top three buttons of his shirt were open. The fire was behind him. The candles were in front of him. She could see the muscles in his shoulders through the linen.

She looked him in the eye. She looked him in the eye with tremendous determination.

“Duchess.”

“Your Grace.”

“You’re not in bed.”

“I am not,” Leonora agreed. “And I should like to say at once that it was not polite of you to leave sixty people downstairs without a word to any of them.”

Colin shut the door behind him.

“The ton has never once been polite to me,” he said. “I’ve stopped keeping the account open on both sides.”

“They came.”