Page 32 of A Baby for the Duke

He kissed her again, slower this time. His palm slid up her thigh over the black gauze, and every sensible thought she had ever had flew out of her head like water out of a cracked jug.

It was the strangest discovery of her life.

She had read about this in books that would have gotten her sent to her grandmother’s, but the books had been wrong about all of it, because none of them had mentioned that a person could want a thing and be frightened of it in the same breath.

His mouth moved to her jaw, then under it.

I could let this happen. I could simply say nothing and let it happen. It would be perfectly proper because he is my husband, and nobody in England would say a word.

“Wait.”

He stopped instantly.

That was the part she would think about afterward, lying awake in a strange bed in a strange house. Not the desk, not his hand, not the sound he had made against her mouth. It was the fact that he stopped as though somebody had cut a rope, withdrew his hands, and stepped back. He stood there, his chest heaving, and waited.

“Explain,” he demanded.

“I can’t do this.”

“You’ll have to do better than that.”

“I know.” Leonora slid off the desk, pulled the wrapper closed, and made herself look at him. “I know we are married. I know exactly what I agreed to in the chapel this morning, and I know what every woman in the gallery believes is happening in this room right now.”

“But…?”

“But I will not lie with you as long as I’m not in love with you.”

Nobody spoke for a moment.

“Say that again?”

“I will not lie with you as long as I am not in love with you,” Leonora repeated. “And I am not, not yet, because I have known you for eight days and I have spent four of them frightened of you. So, no, not tonight.”

Colin turned away from her and put both hands on the back of a chair.

“I don’t need love in my life,” he said. “I’ve done without it for fifteen years and found it no great hardship. I don’t want it. I have a title to keep out of the courts and a child upstairs who needs a name. That’s what this is, and I’d be doing you a kindness if I said it plainly. I shouldn’t care for you, Duchess. I’d rather not.”

It should have hurt more than it did.

Leonora stayed where she was and found, to her surprise, that she did not believe him.

He has said that four times tonight in four different ways. A man who feels nothing does not have to keep announcing it.

“You don’t have to love me back.”

He turned around.

“I mean it. I’m not asking you for anything. I’m not going to weep at breakfast or leave you notes or ask you what you’re thinking.” Her voice came out steadier than she had any right to expect. “But I will not give my body to a man I don’t care for. I will not be talked into it, and I will not be bought into it with nightgowns, however beautiful they are.”

“That isn’t why I sent them.”

“I know. That’s the problem.” Leonora pulled the wrapper tighter, which did nothing at all. “A man who wanted only an heir and a name for his daughter would have sent me a sensible trousseau. You sent four nightgowns and seven words, and one of the four gowns was never in that shop, which means you described it to another modiste on Bruton Street out of your own head.”

Colin did not answer that.

“So no, Your Grace, I don’t believe you feel nothing. I believe you have decided to feel nothing, which is a different thing and a great deal more work.”

“You’ve known me for eight days.”