Chapter 15 #3
She felt him feel it; she felt the change go through his arms, the sudden tension of a man who knows he has put his foot somewhere he should not.
“Forgive me,” he said. “If it is a sore place, I had no wish to—”
“My mother died birthing Arabella.”
The words came out flat, into the steam.
She had never said her true reasons for not wanting a child of her own out loud. Not once, not in eight years. She carried it alone for so long that saying it out loud felt like putting down something enormously heavy that she had forgotten she was holding.
“I was in the room,” she said. “They did not send me out. There was no one else to hold her hand. Papa could not be in there; he was on the stairs, he was— he was no use at all. So it was me. I was fifteen.” She looked at the water.
“There was so much blood. I did not know a person had that much in them. And she was screaming, and then she was not screaming, and that was worse.”
His arms had tightened.
“I do not resent my sister,” she said quickly.
“You must understand that. Not for one moment, not ever. Bella is the best thing that has happened to me in my whole life; she is heaven’s own gift, and I would not undo her for anything in the world.
” She stopped. Her voice had gone unreliable.
“But I could not — I could not go the same way my mother went. And leave her. She has no one. If I died she would have no one at all.”
She heard him breathe.
“And I heard the midwives,” she said. “Afterward. On the landing, when they thought there was nobody by. They said the women of my mother’s family always had a hard time of it.
That she had very nearly not survived having me.
” She laughed, and it came out wrong. “So there it is. It is in the blood, apparently. It waits for us.”
For a long moment there was no sound but the water.
“If such a fear lives in your heart,” he said quietly, “then why yield at all?”
Diana turned in his arms.
It was awkward, the water and the closeness of him, but she managed it enough to see his face, and the candles were behind him, and his eyes were on hers.
And it struck her, with the force of something falling: I was frightened of this face.
When she walked up an aisle toward that face, and her whole body had told her to run.
And now she looked at it and what she felt was warm and safe.
She looked at the face of the beast of Rosewood and felt safer than she had felt since she was fifteen years old.
“You have done so much for me,” she said. “How could I refuse you the one thing you have ever asked?”
His eyes did not leave hers.
“So it is a favor returned,” he said.
And Diana shook her head.
Because it was not. She knew herself, if nothing else—she had had to; there was nobody else to know her.
She understood perfectly well what she was and what she was not.
She was not a woman whose resolve bent. It had not bent for her father, nor for Octavia, nor for two Seasons of gentlemen, nor for the whole weight of the ton.
In three-and-twenty years exactly two people had ever moved it.
One of them was asleep at the end of the passage with her hand under her chin. The other one had his arms round her in a copper bath.
Although she was not quite in love, she was dangerously close to it, and getting nearer every single day.
“No,” she said. “It is not that.” She lifted her chin. “It is also that I cannot bear the thought of you giving another woman what you give me. I find I cannot bear it at all.” Her face was flaming, and she went on anyway. “I shall manage my fear. I want to give you a child.”
And underneath it, unsaid, the thing that had come to her tonight while she stood in the dark over her sleeping sister and had not gone away since:
I could have a family.
Him. And me. And Bella. And children.
And if the worst comes — if it takes me the way it took her — he will look after them. He will. He would not even have to be asked.
Perhaps that was naive. Perhaps it was the most naive thought she had ever had. She found she could not make herself doubt it for a second.
His hand came up out of the water and took her jaw and turned her face the rest of the way round.
He kissed her.
Her mouth fell open under his at once. There was no resisting it now; there had not been any resisting it for days. He took her lower lip and drew on it until she made a sound against him.
He drew back an inch.
“Then I had best make haste,” he said, “to ease the Duchess’s fears.”
His other hand slid down through the water.
Diana gasped, and the sound bounced off the copper and the ceiling, shocking her more than the touch did. Her head went back against his shoulder, and he caught her ear between his teeth, and after that she could not have said anything sensible at all. His fingers had gone deep inside her.
“Your Grace,” she gasped. “Your Grace—”
And somewhere far off, underneath the heat and the water and the mouth at her ear, some small clear part of her understood the truth of it.
Her body had stopped wanting anything in this world but him.