The Duke Is Mine - Eloisa James [80]
“I’m fat,” she blurted out.
“You are not fat. You’re the most beautiful, voluptuous woman I know.” His eyes moved down her body, deliberately, slowly, then back to her face. What she saw in them sent fire squirming through her stomach and lower.
“I want every inch of you,” he said, growling it. “I want to fall on my knees and worship at your hips.” He reached out, shaped her curves from breast to hips with a burning sweep of his hand that a man was allowed to give only his wife.
But Olivia couldn’t bear it if he found himself regretful later . . . if she ever saw the disenchantment in his eyes that she saw so constantly in her mother’s. She hurried on.
“I won’t make a very good duchess. I don’t think the dowager likes me very much. She would prefer that you marry Georgiana. In fact, I’m fairly sure that she would be appalled by the very idea of your marrying me.”
“That’s precisely why my estate came equipped with a dower house. I am not marrying my mother. I am marrying you.” Quin’s gray-green eyes were so . . . she’d never dreamed a man would look at her like that.
But she had a list, a mental list, of characteristics that disqualified her for the position of Duchess of Sconce. “I make coarse jokes. That is, my sense of humor is not very ducal.”
His eyes laughed, even though his face was composed. “I know only one such poem, which my cousin Peregrine taught me when we were boys. There once was a lady from Bude, Who went swimming one day in the lake.”
He paused, waited . . . an invitation. Olivia could feel herself turning pink.
“A man in a punt,” she said softly, “Stuck his pole in the water . . .”
He picked up the verse. “And said: ‘You can’t swim here—it’s private.’ The truth is that I never really understood it. Am I right in thinking that the lady is from Bude because she’s swimming in the nude rather than a lake?”
“Yes.”
“I do understand the pole. But once you have to explain it, the verse is not very funny. Are you certain that you want to be with someone who not only can divest every bawdy pun of its humor, but must, in order to see the point?”
“Are you certain you want to be with someone who doesn’t share your love of science? I’m afraid . . .”
“What, dear heart?”
“You’ll be bored with me.” She said it in a rush. “I can’t talk about the quality of light, and if you tell me about mathematical functions, I truly will fall asleep. I have a very trivial mind.”
“You understand emotion; I don’t. That doesn’t mean that my mind is worthless. We like different sorts of things. Why should I bore you with talking about mathematics? You can teach me to laugh instead.”
Something like a sob rose up in her throat.
“Will you teach our children bawdy verses as nursery rhymes?” he asked.
She considered. “Perhaps.”
“Then you will have to teach me some first. I’m sorry to say that Alfie never learned a single verse of poetry.”
His hands curved around her shoulders, slid up into her hair, teasing strands apart with his fingers. “Do you know that I find myself wanting to talk about Alfie for the first time since he died? I’ve said his name aloud to you and I don’t feel as if I were falling into a black pit.”
She swallowed hard.
“Perhaps,” he said delicately, “we might bestow one of our children with the miserable doorknocker of a name, Alphington? Just so that he’s . . . remembered?”
“Oh Quin,” she whispered. Then, because his question didn’t need answering, since he knew the answer as well as she: “Just how many children do you think we will have?”
“Many?” His eyes were steady on hers. “I always wanted the nursery to be full of children, so many that no one could be lonely.”
Olivia’s heart ached, for two lonely little dukes-to-be, Quin and Alfie. “Is that why you flew kites, so that Alfie wouldn’t be lonely?”
“Evangeline refused to have any more children. She was horrified by the way that her body changed. Even more so because I loved how she looked.”
“You did?”
“I thought she had never looked more beautiful; she thought she had never looked more repulsive. She wouldn’t let me touch her, or even see her