Chapter 5 #2
His coat was gone, and his cravat with it, and his shirt lay open at the throat in a way that drew her eye and made her wish it had not.
She felt the shivers return. She barely looked at men let alone examine their bodies but she knew she never had seen a man as beautifully built as the duke.
She shook off the thought. On the low table at his side stood a bottle of dark wine and two glasses.
He did not rise as she came in. He only looked at her over the rim of the glass in his hand, and tipped his head toward the settee.
“Sit.”
She sat, her body trembling at being so close to him.
And he rose then, and gathered up the bottle and the glasses, and came and settled himself beside her on the settee, near enough that his knee was a hand’s breadth from her own, so that she had at once to arrange her wrapper and her hands and fix her whole attention upon anything in the room but him.
“This is our first night,” he said.
The words went straight through her. “I—” She looked down at her hands. “I had thought it would be—that is, I assumed—”
“In the bedchamber?” There was a thread of amusement in it. He leaned toward her, unhurried, and she caught the warm scent of wine on his breath. Immediately, the memory of his mouth on her earlobes returned “Is my Duchess so eager to yield already? We have scarcely begun.”
“No.” She said it too quickly, and felt the heat climb her throat. “No, I only—I was merely wondering. That is all.”
“I daresay you were.” He settled back, plainly enjoying himself, and reached for the second glass. “But I’ve no present intention of ravishing you upon the hearthrug so that you may unclench your hands. Tonight we shall only play a game.”
“A game.”
“A game of questions.” He filled the empty glass with dark red wine and pressed it onto her hand. “I shall ask you one, and you shall ask me one, turn and turn about. And whosoever does not care to answer—” he raised his own glass a little “—must drink instead. That is the whole of the rule.”
Diana looked at the wine in her hand, and then at him. “That is a very strange sort of game.”
“Most good ones are.”
“You need not make a game of it.” She lifted her chin. “If there is something you wish to know of me, you have only to ask, and I shall answer.”
“And where,” asked the Duke with the ghost of a smile, “would be the sport in that?” He refilled his own glass, though he had scarcely touched it, and set the bottle down, and turned toward her fully. The firelight moved along the hard line of his jaw. “Shall we begin?”
She did not in the least see what any of this had to do with his winning of their wager. But his eyes were on her, waiting, and she found she could not both hold them and refuse.
“Very well,” she said. “Begin.”
“Have you ever lain with a man?”
The wine leaped in her glass; a drop of it splashed cool over her wrist. She stared at him, her whole face aflame.
Even Henrietta, who knew a shocking deal for an unmarried lady and delighted in it, spoke of such matters only in whispers, behind a fan, with much giggling and glancing over the shoulder.
This man asked it plainly, in his ordinary voice, as he might have asked whether she took sugar in her tea.
“No,” she said. “I have not.”
The corner of his mouth curved, but he said nothing, only watched her, and she felt somehow that the silence wanted filling.
And when, pray, should I have?
“My mother was a strict woman. My father stood ever at her back and echoed whatever she said, and between the two of them I was raised close and carefully watched. Then she was in the ground, and he was a stranger to me, and there was Arabella — a squalling, motherless scrap of a thing who wanted feeding and rocking and singing to sleep, and nobody left in that house to do it but me. I was mother to her from the age of fifteen.”
She looked down at her hands.
“There were no seasons of flirtation for me, Your Grace. No stolen dances. No love letters passed under a door, no breathless whispering behind the potted palms at somebody’s ball.
There was a child to raise and a house to hold together, and I do not know that I had one idle hour in all those years to spend on the wanting of men. ”
Valentine was quiet a moment.
“That must have been very difficult,” he said.
Something in Diana’s chest drew tight at the plainness of his words. How there was no polish on it, no pretty phrase, only the fact of it laid out. She lifted her chin and reached for her glass instead.
“And you?” she asked, to be free of his gaze.
“What of me?”
“You know very well what of you.” She surprised herself with her own boldness; the first sip of wine, perhaps, had loosened something. “Have you? Lain with women?”
“A few.”
He said it so easily. So carelessly, a few, as though counting sacks of grain into a cart. Something drew beneath Diana’s ribs.
A few. She thought of her own heart, beating too high and too hard. She thought of those few faceless women, and of the sort of man she had married, cold, and ruthless, and beautiful.