Chapter 22
She woke up because she was touching something hot.
It was not the baby. Her hand worked that out several seconds before the rest of her did.
It was something too large, too flat, rising and falling with a heartbeat in it. Under her palm, there was linen, and under the linen there was a great deal of muscle.
That is a chest. That is a man’s chest. How interesting.
Her hand went down.
Only for a hand to close round her wrist.
“Good morning to you too, wife.”
Leonora’s eyes flew open to sunlight, the blue room, the cot pushed to one side and empty, and her husband lying on his back six inches away with his shirt open at the collar and her own hand held against his ribs.
She got out of bed with a speed that no invalid should have been capable of.
“Where’s Katherine?”
“Mrs. Pike took her at seven to be bathed. She fed. She has no fever, she shouted at a footman, and I am reliably informed that she is furious about the whole business.”
Colin had not moved at all. He had one arm behind his head, and he was watching her with something akin to amusement.
“Your color’s better.”
“You stayed.”
“You told me to.”
“I told you to at eleven o’clock at night while I was feverish.” Leonora had backed up to the window and now had nowhere else to go. “And you stayed all night.”
“Yes.”
“But you said you didn’t want to care for me.”
“That is not what I said,” Colin said, “and you know it.”
“It is very nearly what you said.”
“Nearly is doing a great deal of work in that sentence.”
“Then say the true one.” She turned around.
“Which true one? I have a number of them, and none of them will please you.”
“Start with the cheapest.”
“Very well.” Colin folded his arms. “I stayed because you would have got up. You would have waited until the house was quiet and then you would have gone to that cot on your own two feet with a fever on you, and I would have found you asleep on the floor of the nursery at four in the morning. There. That is the cheapest one, and it is entirely true, and it is not a romance.”
Leonora stood very still.
“I have been in this house for six days, Your Grace, and you have told me that you cannot care for me and then carried me to my bed. You have told me you’d claim what’s yours at the end of a week and then washed my hair.
You are the only man in England who says one thing in the morning and does the opposite in the afternoon and calls himself consistent.
It is confusing, and I am not clever enough to keep up. ”
He got off the bed. “What’s confusing you?”
“You are. All of it. You—” She was backing along the window seat, and she made herself stop, because she was not going to be a woman who backed along furniture. “You washed my hair.”
“You needed it washed.”
“You could have sent for a woman from the village.”
“At nine o’clock at night, four miles, in the rain?”
“You could have. Other men would have.”
“A woman dragged out of her bed at nine o’clock talks in a kitchen at seven,” Colin said, “and by Sunday it would have been in the gossip sheets that the Duchess of Thorton was too ill to stand a fortnight after her wedding, and your mother would have read it at breakfast. So I carried the water myself.”
Leonora looked at him.
“That is the most unromantic sentence I have ever heard,” she said, “and it is also the fourth time in a fortnight you have thought about what the gossip sheets would do to my mother, and you have not once mentioned it until this second.” She lifted her chin.
“You have never once done a kind thing in front of a witness. Not one. Not the cane, not the special license, not the nightgowns. You do them where nobody can see, and then you stand there daring everybody to mention it. I have worked out why, but I don’t think you’ll like hearing it. ”
Colin had come to a stop three feet in front of her.
“Go on, then,” he prompted.
“If nobody thanks you,” Leonora said, “then nobody has been given anything. And if nobody has been given anything, nobody can be disappointed later, when you turn out to be the thing you’re so certain you are.”
The room was extremely quiet.
“You’d have me believe I’m a good man,” Colin rasped, “on the evidence of a cane and buckets of hot water.”
“On the evidence of everything you have done since the third of May, and none of what you have said about it.”
“Then you have the order wrong, Duchess. The things a man does when it costs him nothing are not the test. Any man can carry water up the stairs. The test is what he does at the other end of fifteen years, in a bad month, when nobody is watching and he has had a great deal to consider.” He said it without any heat whatsoever, which was worse.
“I have watched that test administered once. I know precisely how it comes out in this family.”
“You are not your father.”
“No. I’m his son. I have his temper, and I have my mother’s portrait in my gallery under a sheet because he is the last person who touched it.
” He turned away and pushed both hands through his hair.
“You want a true sentence? Here is one. I have wanted to be near you since the day you stepped around that screen in the modiste’s shop, and every day since I have gone up into the treehouse to distract myself from it, and I could not tell you which of those two facts frightens me more. ”
Leonora stood absolutely still.
“Then that is two of us frightened of the same man,” she said, “and he has been dead for fifteen years.”
Colin let out a breath that had a laugh somewhere at the bottom of it, but none of the laugh reached his face.
“That is a great deal of theory for a woman who has known me for thirteen days.”
“Fourteen.”
“Fourteen.”
“And I have spent all fourteen of them watching you, which I have told you before, and which you keep refusing to believe.” Her voice was unsteady.
“So, no, I don’t know what you meant about the painting, and I don’t know what happened when you were fifteen, and I don’t know why the second rung is loose.
But I know that you have been kind to me every day since the moment you understood that I hadn’t done anything wrong, and that you have arranged your entire life so that nobody would ever be able to say so out loud. ”
“Leonora.”
He had never once said her name that way.
Not at the altar, where the vicar had said it for him.
Not in the corridor, not in the garden, not in the treehouse.
It had been Duchess and wife and Lady Leonora for a fortnight.
Now he had said it standing three feet from her, with the bed unmade behind them and the morning light filtering through the window, and it undid her more thoroughly than the rest of it put together.
“Yes?” she breathed.
“Stop being right,” Colin said. “It isn’t yet nine in the morning, and I’ve had no sleep.”
Leonora laughed, which was a mistake, because laughing meant her guard came down, and his hand came up and took her face, and after that there was no more conversation for a while.
He backed her into the window seat, and she went.
Sunlight spilled through the glass onto both of them, and the small rational part of her thought that anybody crossing the lawn could look up and see the Duchess of Thorton being kissed within an inch of her life at nine o’clock in the morning. But she did not care in the slightest.
“You’re meant to be ill,” he growled against her jaw.
“I’m better.”
“You’re better.”
“Miraculously.” She fisted both hands in his shirt. “Ask me anything, and I shall answer it in Latin.”
“Sit down, Duchess.”
She sat in the window seat with her heart beating like a drum, and he knelt on one knee in front of her, which put his face lower than hers. Her breathing grew ragged before he had touched her at all.
“You told me a week,” he said.
“I did.”
“There are two days left of it. I want you to know that I’ve stopped counting them.”
“When did you stop?”
“Somewhere in the lake.”
She started to say something clever, when he slid his hand under the hem of her shift and up her calf, and whatever it was left died on her lips.
He did not hurry. That was the trouble. His warm palm slid over her knee and up the inside of her thigh and stopped there, until she made a small mortifying noise, and he moved on as though she had answered a question.
“Wider, wife.”
“That is not something a person says.”
“Wider.”
Her whole face was on fire, but she opened her legs wider anyway. His hand went where it had been going all along.
This time, she watched him.
In the treehouse she had held onto a beam with her head back and the roof beams swimming above her, and had barely seen him at all.
Now the sun was shining down on them both, and she looked at him the whole time—at the sawdust still in the crease of his rolled sleeve, at the pale scar rising from under his eyepatch, at his mouth.
She saw him watching her back, and understood with a lurch what he was doing.
He was learning her. Every sound she made, he was filing away.
“Colin—”
“Say that again.”
“Colin.”
“Again.”
Her head fell back against the windowpane.
He used two fingers and the flat of his thumb and took his time about it, and this was where the difference lay, because in the treehouse she had not been able to see anything at all.
Now she could watch him work: the set of his jaw, the sawdust on his wrist, the way his eye went from her face to his own hand and back again as though he were checking a measurement.
He went slower than he had in the treehouse. A man taking something apart to find out how it worked and refusing to be hurried.
He learned in about a minute what made her hips buck off the window seat, and having learned it, he did it again, and again, and then took his hand away entirely for long enough that she said his name in a tone she would be ashamed of at breakfast.
“Please.”
“There it is,” Colin murmured, sounding thoroughly pleased with himself.
His other arm came across her hips and held her down. She could feel the hot sun on one side of her face, the cold glass against the back of her skull, and his mouth on the inside of her wrist where he had pinned it to the cushion all at once, and she could do nothing about it.
By the end of it, she had one hand fisted in his hair, the other flat against the cold windowpane, and no dignity left anywhere in England.
She cried out his name when climax crashed over her, quivering.
Afterward, he stayed where he was with his forehead pressed against her knee, and she sat in the sun with her hand in his hair, and neither of them said anything for the better part of a minute.
“Somebody must have heard us,” Leonora said eventually.
“Yes.”
“Mrs. Pike must have heard us.”
“Almost certainly.”
“I shall have to go down to breakfast.”
“You shall.”
“I hate you,” Leonora muttered, and felt him laugh against her leg.
She looked down at his dark head and thought quite calmly, the way one notices the weather: I care for my husband.
It happened somewhere between a lake and a bowl of broth.
I do not yet know what it will lead to. I am not going to say one word about it, because if I say it out loud, he will remember what he thinks he is and put himself out of the room.
“Colin.”
“Mm.”
“What day is it?”
“Thursday.”
“Then the week is up tomorrow.”