Page 53 of A Baby for the Duke

It was not coldness. Leonora had seen his coldness and could have picked it out of a crowd.

This was something else. She had said his Christian name, twice, in a voice she had not known she owned, and he had heard it, and he was standing four feet away putting a lid on whatever it had done to him.

“Colin,” she murmured.

He turned away and picked up the rasp that did not need picking up.

“It’s getting dark,” he said. “We should go back.”

CHAPTER 18

Leonora climbed down the ladder first, because he had insisted, and stood at the bottom of it in the yellow light with her legs still not entirely her own.

“We should go back,” he had said up there. She had heard the we and decided to be shameless about it.

“We?”

Colin climbed down the last four rungs and turned round. There was sawdust on his shirt.

“You climbed thirty feet of rope one-handed to tell me you wanted my company,” he said. “I assumed the word wouldn’t come as a surprise.”

“It did come as a surprise. You have used it once in a fortnight.” Leonora put her hands behind her back. “And since we are surprising each other, there is a thing you must know about this marriage that nobody has yet told you and that I’m afraid I can no longer avoid.”

“Go on.”

“Every Tuesday of the summer, my family plays pall-mall.”

“Pall-mall.”

“On the lawn at Huntington House. All of us. My mother keeps the score, and my father disputes it.” She watched him. “We take it seriously.”

“And tomorrow is Tuesday.”

“Tomorrow is Tuesday,” Leonora agreed. “You are coming, and so is Katherine. My mother will snatch her out of your arms within nine seconds of the carriage stopping, and you will not get her back until we leave.”

“Am I permitted to refuse?”

“You are permitted to try.”

He looked at her for a moment. The light was dimming above the yew hedge, there was a leaf in her hair still, and she was standing in the garden with him, which she could not have predicted twenty minutes ago.

“Very well,” Colin relented. “Go back to the house. I’ll put the tools away and follow.”

“You have said that before and stayed up here until four in the morning.”

“I have,” he agreed. “I shall be down before the last feed, and you may send Mrs. Pike out with her cane if I am not.”

She turned to go, but then turned back, went up on her tiptoes, and kissed his cheek.

It was the first time she had ever touched him first.

She did not stay to see his reaction. She ran, undignified, all the way to the kitchen garden wall, and only when she was safely around the corner did she stop and press both hands flat against the warm brick and laughed at absolutely nothing.

Mrs. Pike was in the hall.

“There you are, Your Grace. You’re just in time for the last feed of the day, which I’m glad of because she’s had nothing since the pear and she’s in a mood about it.”

“I’ll come straight away.”