Page 70 of A Baby for the Duke

By the end of it, she had one hand fisted in his hair, the other flat against the cold windowpane, and no dignity left anywhere in England.

She cried out his name when climax crashed over her, quivering.

Afterward, he stayed where he was with his forehead pressed against her knee, and she sat in the sun with her hand in his hair, and neither of them said anything for the better part of a minute.

“Somebody must have heard us,” Leonora said eventually.

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Pike must have heard us.”

“Almost certainly.”

“I shall have to go down to breakfast.”

“You shall.”

“I hate you,” Leonora muttered, and felt him laugh against her leg.

She looked down at his dark head and thought quite calmly, the way one notices the weather: I care for my husband. It happened somewhere between a lake and a bowl of broth. I do not yet know what it will lead to. I am not going to say one word about it, because if I say it out loud, he will remember what he thinks he is and put himself out of the room.

“Colin.”

“Mm.”

“What day is it?”

“Thursday.”

“Then the week is up tomorrow.”

CHAPTER 23

They stayed in the window seat a long while afterward, in a heap that would have finished her mother. Leonora rested her cheek against his shoulder and thought that no Thursday had ever pleased her half so much.

“So, the week is up tomorrow,” she murmured.

“So you observed.”

“And I think we have made a great deal of progress.”

Colin looked down at her, at the shift twisted around her thighs and her disheveled hair, and raised an eyebrow. “Do you?”

“Stop that.”

“I said nothing.”

“You said it with your face, which is worse, and you know it.” She was laughing. But then she stopped laughing, because the question she had been carrying since the treehouse had bubbled up her throat and she had discovered that she was going to say it. “But…”

“But…?”

“But I don’t think I can fall in love with a man I know so little about.”

He did not move at all.

“You know what matters,” he pointed out.

“I know what you’ve let me see. It isn’t the same, and it isn’t enough.” Leonora sat up and straightened her shift, because she could not have this conversation half undressed and had a horrible suspicion that he was counting on it. “I know you have a cat. I know your housekeeper has a bad hip, I know your brother’s handwriting, and I know your daughter’s opinion of pears. I know that you go up into the treehouse at four in the morning, but I do not know why, and when I ask you about it, I get sent away.”