Page 59 of Tamed By her Duke

And then he just read the paper quietly until Grace’s nerves frayed and she left the room to pace and fume in the privacy of her own bedchamber.

“I should tell him,” she said around noon, not necessarily sure which thing she intended to tell her husband about.

There was, after all, that splinter, still festering. She really probably ought to tell him why he’d found her screaming at the edge of a cliff the night before.

But the idea of saying to him,Oh, Caleb, by the by, do you recall that gossip about how I was presumed dead for several years only to have been found alive, just kidnapped? Yes, it was in the mill we saw last evening. You probably gathered this from theto-do in the tavern yesterday, but just to confirm! Yes, that was memade her want to cast up her accounts.

There was also the bit about her virtue. That was worse, somehow.

Ah, yes, Caleb, furthermore, do you recall how my father tossed me in your lap like a sack of spoilt grain because my reputation was ruined? Alas, that was unfounded! I am yet a maiden! Surprise!

“I am never,evertelling him,” she said around two o’clock, pressing her face into the pillow so hard the words were inaudible.

“But won’t heknow?” she wondered at half three. This applied both to the abduction, as he was not a stupid man, and to the maidenhood bit. She’d always heard that there were ways for men to know such things, but she didn’t know if those tales were true or not. They seemed, somehow, both probable and improbable.

She managed to dither long enough about confiding in her husband that she made it past teatime before she started fretting about the act itself.

She did have something of a better education in such matters than most well-bred young women. She knew that the gentleman put his, ah, personal partsinsidethe lady.

But certainly, what she’d witnessed between farm animals (far more times than she cared to recall) wasn’tpreciselythe same as between a man and his wife?

Andthosefrankly horrifying images aside, she’d felt a certain, um, firmness about her husband’s lap when she’d sat upon it in the carriage, however briefly. That had to be a mistaken impression due to her skirts and his plaid and all that, hadn’t it? Surely the whole act was a bit more…modest.

“I’m sure it will be fine,” she reasoned as she dressed for dinner. “Plenty of people have done it. That’s how you get babies.Lotsof people have babies.”

This line of thinking, unfortunately, carried her to considering some of the stodgier people she knew who had managed to produce heirs, so she very quickly desisted in thinking about it before she could imagine something she’d never be able to forget.

When she went down to supper, she told herself that she was going to be brave and not ridiculous. Caleb hadn’t hurt her yet. It would be fine. It would bejust fine.

Alas, this turned out to be another splinter.

“I cannot believe,” she seethed into her soup, upsettingly aware that she’d done quite a bit of talking to herself that day, “that this Scottish lout is doing this to meagain.”

Because, again, Caleb had not come to dinner. And when she stormed back up to her bedchamber, he did not come to her there, either.

The only difference between this and her wedding night, she decided, was that tonight, it took hermuchless time to grow sufficiently furious to track down her husband.

And this time she remembered to put on a dressing gown before she stomped out of her room.

She found him—of course—in his study.

She didn’t bother with pleasantries; they were, she now knew, entirely lost on Caleb, and if she didn’t speak quickly, she’d lose her nerve.

“Why?” she asked, her voice shaking only the tiniest bit. “You know what day it is—I know you know. So why are you doing this?”

When he looked up—unhurriedly, as if determined not to give in to petty demands, no matter who gave them—he looked weary. This was, she supposed, fair enough. He, too, had spent last night traipsing about in the cold. And unlike her, he had, presumably, been awake for all of it.

Still, that look did sting. Men were meant to like having relations, weren’t they? And yet he persisted in putting heroff. She knew he hadn’t chosen her, but was she reallysounappealing?

“It’s fine, Grace,” he said, his voice, as always, catching in a rumble on the R in her name. “Go back to bed.”

She did not go back to bed. She walked further into the room. Enough was enough.

“You said two weeks,” she insisted, her chest rising and falling rapidly with her breaths. “It’s been two weeks.”

He let out a furious snarl. The sound made her gulp, but she did not retreat.

“Jesus Christ, Grace,” he said, shoving back from his desk with enough force that he nearly toppled the chair. “Honestly, what do ye take me for?”

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