Chapter 5 #3
And she thought, how it must have broken them. He is not a man one walks away from whole. He would take what he wished and give nothing of himself back, and leave them ruined and pining, poor foolish things.
She stared at his face and realized she too would be easily fooled by his looks and build.
“You are thinking something unkind,” he observed, “and it is written across the whole of your face.”
“I am thinking nothing at all.”
“You are thinking I seduced and abandoned a parade of weeping maidens.” His mouth curved.
“Ease your mind. It was not in London, nor with maidens of any station you would recognize. There are cities on the Continent, Duchess, where these things are held a good deal more than physical among them. No hearts were broken. No one wept. It was a bargain, on both sides, freely made.”
“My turn,” he said. “Why have you never once considered taking a man to your bed?”
She had braced herself, from the moment the game began, for a different question, why will you not bear me a child, and had her silence ready for it. This one caught her wholly off her guard, and it was, in its way, the worse of the two.
For the true answer was her father.
I have seen what it does, she thought. I have watched it work with my own eyes.
Her father had loved her mother past all sense, had sworn himself to her, one woman for the whole of his life, and when that woman died, the love did not die decently along with her.
It curdled. It turned. The devoted husband became a thing Diana barely knew: a man who came home with the dawn stinking of drink and of other things, who gamed away what he ought to have kept for his daughters, who was seen where no gentleman ought to be seen—years of it.
And then Octavia came, and he had changed again, all at once, into her creature, and that, Diana understood now, was only the same disease in a prettier coat.
Love had cost her mother her life. Love had cost her father his soul, twice over.
Whatever else she wanted from this world, she did not want that.
But she would not say so, not to him, not to anyone alive.
She lifted the glass instead and drank, drank the whole of it down, because it was that or speak, and the wine was far stronger than anything she had ever tasted, and it went down like fire and bloomed hot and swimming behind her eyes almost at once.
The Duke’s brows rose. He inclined his head, accepting her forfeit, and said nothing.
Diana set down the empty glass with exaggerated care. The room had gone pleasantly soft.
“My turn,” she said, and her own voice reached her from a little distance. “Have you a woman you fancy?”
He leaned toward her, slowly, so slowly, until his face was scarcely a breath from her own, and she could see the firelight caught in his dark eyes and feel the warmth coming off his skin.
Her heart stumbled. She wondered if he would touch her like he did last night.
They were so close to each other but he had made no attempt to touch her.
She felt a pang of disappointment that she quickly pushed away.
“Why,” he said softly, “is my Duchess so very curious?”
“Because—” She swallowed. The nearness of him made it hard to hold a thought. “Because if these five nights should come to nothing, and you must get your heir another way, it would be far better done with a woman you cared for than with some cold stranger. That is all. I only wish to be of use.”
She imagined him burying his face in another woman’s neck and the woman gasping just like she did. She felt a rise that she also pushed away.
“How considerate of you.” He did not draw back. If anything, the smile deepened, and something moved behind his eyes that she was too muddled with wine to read. “As it happens, yes. There is one woman who has lately been a great deal in my thoughts.”
And he let his gaze rest on her, full and unhurried, a moment longer than the words alone could account for.
Diana felt the strangest pang go through her.
Curiosity, she told herself; only curiosity.
Who could she be? What manner of woman could take up room in the thoughts of a man so cold and so guarded as this?
She must be someone quite remarkable. And Diana, swallowed.
He must love her deeply, she thought with unexpected heaviness.
“And you, Duchess.” His voice had dropped lower still. “Have you a man you fancy?”
“No,” she meant to say. What came out instead was soft and slurred and ran all together—“No, I—there is no—I have never—”—and her hand, when she raised it, would not hold quite steady.
The Duke reached over and took the empty glass from her fingers, and set it on the table beside his own, well out of her reach.
“You’ve no head at all for wine,” he said, and there was something almost tender in the amusement of it. His hand came up and caught her chin, and tipped her swimming face gently toward his own. “It seems I shall have to school you in that, along with a great many other things.”
She opened her mouth to tell him he need not trouble himself, and he leaned in, and kissed her.