Page 61 of A Baby for the Duke

Colin stopped with his hand on the newel post. “I beg your pardon?”

“My five pall-mall balls. They were in the carriage. I intend to put them somewhere prominent so that Evan can see them at Christmas.”

“You handed them to me at the door with the rugs, Duchess, and then Mrs. Pike began on my boots and you did not look back. They are in the gun room.”

“Why are they in the gun room?”

“Because it was nearest, and because I have been carrying five wet wooden balls about this county since four o’clock and I would like it noted.” He turned round. “Your brother tried to buy them off me at the carriage door. He offered me nine shillings.”

“He did not.”

“He offered me nine shillings and a spaniel.”

“That,” Leonora said, “is the most Evan thing I have ever heard, and I am going to be insufferable about it for a year.”

Colin laughed.

It was the second time. It came out of him low and unwilling, and he stopped it almost at once. But she had heard it, and she stood in the hall in her damp gown and thought that she would push a great many people into a great many lakes to hear it again.

“Go up,” he urged. “You’re standing in a hall in a wet gown arguing about balls.”

“I am not arguing. I am savoring. There is a difference. A very important difference.”

“Go up, Duchess.”

She went up.

She was out of the wet muslin and into a dry gown, and had her hair down her back before a knock sounded at the door. When she opened it, there was nobody in the corridor.

On the floor outside, in a neat row against the wall, were five wooden pall-mall balls.

Leonora stood looking at them for a long moment. Then she gathered them in the skirt of her gown, carried them in, and set them out along the mantelpiece in the blue room in order of size, where the first person through the door would see them.

The fire in the blue room had been going for an hour, and she stood in front of it with her hands out and could not get warm.

She had been out of the wet gown for half an hour and it had made no difference whatever. Susan had taken it away and brought her a dry one, and the cold had stayed exactly where it was, somewhere behind her breastbone, and her fingers had gone past aching into stupid. She was still standing there when she heard the connecting door open.

He had changed. That was all she took in at first: dry breeches, a dry shirt open at the throat, and his hair pushed back off his face and still wet.

“You’re shaking,” he noted.

“I’m perfectly⁠—”

“Give me your hands.”

She gave him her hands.

He took them and turned them over. His palms were rough and so warm that Leonora had difficulty taking a full breath.

“You’re cold like ice.”

“I have been cold since the lake and I cannot get warm, and I have had a bath and a dry gown and both of them were useless.” She looked up at him. “You left them outside my door.”

“I left what outside your door?”

“Five wooden balls. You knocked, and then you went away, which I would like to point out is a thing people do when they are leaving a note for somebody they are afraid of.”

“They were wet. I did not want them in the gun room overnight.”