Page 68 of A Baby for the Duke

“You could have sent for a woman from the village.”

“At nine o’clock at night, four miles, in the rain?”

“You could have. Other men would have.”

“A woman dragged out of her bed at nine o’clock talks in a kitchen at seven,” Colin said, “and by Sunday it would have been in the gossip sheets that the Duchess of Thorton was too ill to stand a fortnight after her wedding, and your mother would have read it at breakfast. So I carried the water myself.”

Leonora looked at him.

“That is the most unromantic sentence I have ever heard,” she said, “and it is also the fourth time in a fortnight you have thought about what the gossip sheets would do to my mother, and you have not once mentioned it until this second.” She lifted her chin. “You have never once done a kind thing in front of a witness. Not one. Not the cane, not the special license, not the nightgowns. You do them where nobody can see, and then you stand there daring everybody to mention it. I have worked out why, but I don’t think you’ll like hearing it.”

Colin had come to a stop three feet in front of her.

“Go on, then,” he prompted.

“If nobody thanks you,” Leonora said, “then nobody has been given anything. And if nobody has been given anything, nobody can be disappointed later, when you turn out to be the thing you’re so certain you are.”

The room was extremely quiet.

“You’d have me believe I’m a good man,” Colin rasped, “on the evidence of a cane and buckets of hot water.”

“On the evidence of everything you have done since the third of May, and none of what you have said about it.”

“Then you have the order wrong, Duchess. The things a man does when it costs him nothing are not the test. Any man can carry water up the stairs. The test is what he does at the other end of fifteen years, in a bad month, when nobody is watching and he has had a great deal to consider.” He said it without any heat whatsoever, which was worse. “I have watched that test administered once. I know precisely how it comes out in this family.”

“You are not your father.”

“No. I’m his son. I have his temper, and I have my mother’s portrait in my gallery under a sheet because he is the last person who touched it.” He turned away and pushed both hands through his hair. “You want a true sentence? Here is one. I have wanted to be near you since the day you stepped around that screen in the modiste’s shop, and every day since I have gone up into the treehouse to distract myself from it, and I could not tell you which of those two facts frightens me more.”

Leonora stood absolutely still.

“Then that is two of us frightened of the same man,” she said, “and he has been dead for fifteen years.”

Colin let out a breath that had a laugh somewhere at the bottom of it, but none of the laugh reached his face.

“That is a great deal of theory for a woman who has known me for thirteen days.”

“Fourteen.”

“Fourteen.”

“And I have spent all fourteen of them watching you, which I have told you before, and which you keep refusing to believe.” Her voice was unsteady. “So, no, I don’t know what you meant about the painting, and I don’t know what happened when you were fifteen, and I don’t know why the second rung is loose. But I know that you have been kind to me every day since the moment you understood that I hadn’t done anything wrong, and that you have arranged your entire life so that nobody would ever be able to say so out loud.”

“Leonora.”

He had never once said her name that way.

Not at the altar, where the vicar had said it for him. Not in the corridor, not in the garden, not in the treehouse. It had been Duchess and wife and Lady Leonora for a fortnight. Now he had said it standing three feet from her, with the bed unmade behind them and the morning light filtering through the window, and it undid her more thoroughly than the rest of it put together.

“Yes?” she breathed.

“Stop being right,” Colin said. “It isn’t yet nine in the morning, and I’ve had no sleep.”

Leonora laughed, which was a mistake, because laughing meant her guard came down, and his hand came up and took her face, and after that there was no more conversation for a while.

He backed her into the window seat, and she went. Sunlight spilled through the glass onto both of them, and the small rational part of her thought that anybody crossing the lawn could look up and see the Duchess of Thorton being kissed within an inch of her life at nine o’clock in the morning. But she did not care in the slightest.

“You’re meant to be ill,” he growled against her jaw.