Chapter 3 #3
“Give me five nights,” he said. “If, in five nights, I can bring you to yield to me of your own wanting, then you will give me my heir. Freely.”
“Your Grace—”
“One heir. That is the whole of it.” He looked down at her.
“One child, and thereafter you and your sister may live out all your days in every comfort and want for nothing to the end of your lives. The child need be no burden to you. It will be kept by nurses and by maids; you need trouble yourself no further than you wish.”
She stared up at him, mute. Then she noticed she was leaning incredibly close to him without even knowing.
She tried to pull back but his gaze seemed to hold her in place.
This was madness. And yet, set against everything, against the fear and the flight and the whole friendless dark ahead of her, it was not so terrible a madness as it ought to have been. That frightened her more than anything.
“I have no use for love,” he went on. “Nor for devotion, nor any of the rest of it. In that, you and I are of precisely one mind. Which makes us, I should say, very well matched indeed.”
He crossed to her, and put one finger beneath her chin, and drew it slowly down, over her lips, over the softness of them, so that her breath hung to her chest and would not come again. Tingles ran through her spine and yet again, she found herself fighting to focus.
“I will give you pleasure,” he said, “and freedom, and ease for the whole of your life. And all I ask of you is one heir.”
Her heart was beating so that she could hear it.
“If in five nights I have not brought you to long for me,” he said, “for all that passes between a husband and a wife, then I will do as you have asked. I will get my heir upon another, quietly, and you shall raise him as your son. I am not a monster.”
She shivered at the heaviness of his tone. Had she misunderstood him?
“But should you yield to me,” he finished, and the softness returned, “then every promise I have made you this night, I shall keep. Every one.” His gaze held hers fast. “So. What will it be, Duchess?”
Diana looked up at him, those deep, dangerous eyes, at the towering dark height of him, and behind the drumming of her heart she made herself think.
Five nights. Whatever else it is, it is five nights.
Five nights in which nothing need be decided, nothing done, and in five nights a clever woman might arrange a great deal.
Time. He is offering me time, and does not know it.
“I accept,” she said, “whatever Your Grace thinks best.”
Something moved across his face, satisfaction, and beneath it that same weighing interest she had seen in the carriage. His mouth curved.
“Five nights it is.”
He looked at her then, and let the silence stretch, and said, quite pleasantly: “Undress.”
Her head came up. “I—”
“We are husband and wife, duchess.” One dark brow rose. “I may look upon what is mine, surely.” He bent, bringing his face level with hers, and his voice dropped to something that stroked down the length of her spine.
His hand closed upon a fold of the fine white lawn at her knee.
She sat rigid and shaking, waiting for the pull, if she was truthful, a part of her ached for him to pull and find his way to her neck once more.
But he stopped suddenly and pulled away, instead she felt his lips come to rest against her brow.
The kiss was soft. She let out a gasp before she could stop herself, the kiss was soft.
Astonishingly soft, gentle past anything she could have looked for from a man such as him, and her foolish heart turned over in her breast at the tenderness of it, at the warm press of his mouth to her forehead.
His hand let go of her gown. He drew unhurried up the line of her cheek and came to rest at last with his lips against the shell of her ear.
“Have a care, wife,” he breathed, “these five nights. I cannot answer for my own restraint, if you insist upon being quite so tempting a thing to look at.”
And he caught the lobe of her ear lightly between his teeth.
She closed her eyes at the sensation and a gasp left her.
He lingered there for a while and he held her breath, waiting.
Her heart was rioting and growing hungry for more of his stolen touches.
Without warning, he drew back with the ghost of amusement about his mouth and rose to his full height and turned for the door.
“Have a good night, Duchess,” he said, without looking back.
“Oh,” she began, flustered. The door shut behind him, closed with a heavy and final sound that seemed to shake the very air of the room.
For a moment Diana did not move at all. Then breath rushed back into her all at once, ragged, and she pressed both hands to her burning face and found that they would not be still.
She held them out before her in the candlelight and stared.
They were shaking, terribly, helplessly shaking, and she could not tell, try as she might, whether it was fear that shook them.