Page 75 of A Baby for the Duke

“My condition. The one I set on our wedding night.” She had her hands at her sides and her chin up. She had rehearsed none of this, which was the only reason why she could say it. “Seven days have passed since then, and it is Friday. So I have come to tell you that I withdraw it and that I shall do my duty. We can consummate our marriage tonight if that is what you want.”

Colin turned around. He crossed the room so fast that she did not have time to step back, and stopped six inches from her face. Her heart went off like a dropped tray.

“Your duty,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Say it again.”

“We can consummate our marriage tonight if that is what you⁠—”

“No.”

She blinked. “No?”

“The deal is off, Duchess.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means that I will not be claiming what is mine.” He said his own words back to her, and there was something in his voice she had never heard before. It took her a moment to identify it as disgust, and another to realize it was not aimed at her. “It means that a man made you a bargain in a corridor a fortnight ago that he had no business making, and that he has since had the opportunity to observe what he is, and that the bargain is over. You needn’t do your duty. There’s no duty. There’s nothing to do at all.”

“So I am to have nothing.”

“You are to have everything else. The house, the name, the child, the income, my absence whenever you’d like it.”

“That is not everything else. That is a list.” Her voice rose, and she did not care who heard it. “You cannot do this.”

“You finished it.”

“On Tuesday. The Tuesday you went to your mother’s.” He was standing with his back to the far wall and his hands at his sides. “I could not think what else to do with the afternoon.”

“You cannot win every single time!” Leonora protested. “Do you know what you are doing? You are taking every choice in this marriage into your own hands and calling it restraint. You wanted my desire, and you took it, twice. I gave it gladly, and I would give it again. And now that I’ve told you it isn’t enough for me, you have decided by yourself that I shall have nothing.”

“Because the alternative⁠—”

“You cannot want my body and refuse my love, Colin. Not when you are not ready to give either back.” She was crying, which infuriated her. “You may have all of me or none of me. Those are the terms. I did not set them. And they are not cruel; they are simply how a person is made.”

Colin stood utterly still.

“Get out of my room,” he said.

Leonora stared at him. “I beg your pardon?”

“Get out of my room, wife. Please.”

It was the please that broke her, because it came out of him cracked and quiet, and because his hands were shaking, and because she could clearly see that he was two seconds from reaching for her and had decided that reaching for her was the worst thing he could do.

If I stay, he will hate himself in the morning. Then he will sequester himself in the treehouse and not come down for a fortnight.

She went to the green door and put her hand on the handle.

“Thursday week,” she said.

“What?”

“The opera. We accepted the invitation, and half the ton will be there. If the Duke and Duchess of Thorton are not in their box together after everything the columns have printed, they will start again, and they will be worse. And this time, they will be right about something.” She did not turn around. “So you will put on your black coat, I shall put on my best gown, and we shall sit side by side for three hours and be extremely pleasant to one another, and everybody who looks up at our box will see a duke and his wife who cannot stay away from each other.”

“Leonora.”