“I’ll Show You How Nobles Make Babies,” the Duke Whispered to His Innocent Bride on Their Wedding Night — Then One Kiss Began a Lesson That Would Shatter His Legendary Composure.

PART 6

“It has been six months,” the Dowager Duchess said one afternoon, her needlework pausing pointedly in her lap. “Six months, and no news. I do not say this to distress you, my dear. I say it only because the family has expectations, and expectations unmet for too long tend to invite speculation.”

“Speculation about what, precisely.”

“About whether the fault lies with you.” The dowager said it with the particular gentle cruelty of a woman convinced of her own reasonableness. “No one has said so publicly. Not yet. But I am told there are physicians in town who specialize in such matters. Discreet men. It might ease everyone’s mind to have you seen by one.”

Genevieve set down her own needlework with hands that had gone unsteady. “I am not aware that anything is wrong with me, Your Grace.”

“Only that it would be prudent to determine the cause before the family begins to wonder in earnest.”

The dowager’s gaze flicked meaningfully toward Genevieve’s midsection, and Genevieve felt the color drain from her face altogether — felt reduced, in a single sentence, to precisely the thing she had feared becoming since her wedding night. Not a wife. Not a woman her husband had come to love. A vessel that had thus far failed to perform its single essential function.

She excused herself before the conversation could continue, and did not fully manage to compose herself before reaching her own chamber.

She did not tell Lucian at first the full substance of what his mother had said. She told herself she did not wish to trouble him with family gossip. In truth, she was afraid — afraid that if she spoke the words aloud, they would become somehow more real, more possible. That perhaps something truly was wrong with her.

She began instead to withdraw. Small retreats, scarcely noticeable at first — a held breath before entering a room where the family had gathered, a flinch at any mention of nurseries or the future of the West Haven line. She stopped joining him for coffee some mornings, claiming tiredness.

Lucian noticed, of course. He had made a study of her in the months since their wedding, as thorough as any he had once made of estate ledgers, and the change in her did not escape him for long.

“You have been distant,” he said one evening, finding her in the window seat of their chamber, her knees drawn up, her eyes fixed on nothing in particular. “Tell me what has changed.”

“Nothing has changed.”

He crossed the room and knelt before her, taking her hands in his. “I have learned your silences well enough by now to know when one is hiding something. Tell me.”

It was the gentleness of the request, more than anything, that broke through her resolve. She told him haltingly of his mother’s comment — the physician, the speculation, the pointed glance toward her own body as though it were a piece of machinery that had failed to perform as contracted.

She watched his expression harden with each word, watched the easy warmth she had come to depend on give way to something colder and considerably more dangerous.

“She said this to you directly.”

“She did not mean to be unkind. I think she believes—”

“I do not care what she believes.” He rose, and the fury in his face was unlike anything she had seen from him before — controlled, but unmistakable. The fury of a man who had discovered someone had wounded the person he loved most. “You are not a broodmare to be inspected for defects, Genevieve. You are my wife. Whatever this family believes it is owed, it is not owed an accounting of your body.”

He left the room before she could answer. She heard, some minutes later, raised voices from the drawing room below — his mother’s, sharp and defensive, and his own, low and utterly implacable.

When he returned, his color was still high, his jaw still tight, but his hands were gentle when he drew her against him.

“It will not happen again,” he said. “I have made that plain enough.”

“And if it does not change anything,” she asked quietly into his shoulder, “if there is never an heir at all?”

He drew back far enough to look at her, and something in his expression left no room for doubt.

“Then I remain married,” he said, “to the woman I fell in love with. This marriage began to secure the succession. It is not why I remain in it. I did not know, when I offered for you, that I would come to need your laughter at breakfast, or the sight of you riding out in the rain to see a tenant properly housed, or the particular satisfaction of losing an argument to you over the household accounts. None of that was in the settlement, Genevieve. And yet it is the whole of what I have come to treasure most in this house.”

Something loosened in her chest that had been drawn tight since the dowager’s first pointed remark — a fear she had never quite admitted, even to herself, that her worth in this marriage might yet be measured only in the currency his family had always intended it to be measured in.

“I love you,” she said, the words arriving with none of the hesitation she might once have expected of herself. “Far more than I ever expected to, for a marriage that began with a legal document.”

“I love you considerably more than any legal document has ever accounted for,” he answered, and kissed her with a tenderness that carried beneath it all the fierce protectiveness of the argument still echoing faintly from the rooms below.

The weeks that followed brought a quiet, careful peace. The Dowager Duchess said nothing further on the subject of heirs. But there were nights still when Genevieve lay awake beside her sleeping husband and found the old fear creeping quietly back — not the fear of failing a settlement, but a smaller, more private worry that perhaps her own body simply would not do what nature seemed to demand so easily of other women.

How soon everything would change, she had no way of knowing — nor that the news she carried would arrive not as relief from the family’s arithmetic, but as a joy gloriously, privately her own.