Page 3 of A Baby Delivery for the Duke

Phillipa did not decide to go in but decided to inquire anyway.

After all, her curiosity was one of her most troublesome traits.

“Hello?” she called softly. “Is someone here? Is there a nurse?”

When there was no answer, she crossed to the sofa and looked into the basket.

A baby looked back.

A baby?

He was perhaps ten or eleven months old, wrapped in a plain, clean blanket, and he had gone quiet the instant her shadow fell across him. Round pink cheeks and a fuzz of brown hair. He looked back at her with eyes very wide.

“Oh,” said Phillipa, very softly. “Hello, you.”

His face crumpled and the wail started up again.

She had scooped him out of the basket before she had thought about it, as naturally as breathing. He fussed against her shoulder until she began to sway him. The fussing hitched, and slowed, and stopped. A small hand crept out of the blanket and closed around her little finger.

“There,” she murmured. “There. That is much better, is it not? Who leaves you all alone in a library, hmm? Who does such a thing?”

The baby cooed. It was a wet, delighted, entirely self-satisfied noise, and something in her chest felt funny.

She ought to look for someone, she knew and carry him back out to the terrace and inquire after his nurse.

A young lady discovered alone in a Duke’s library with an abandoned infant was a situation for which even her mother had not prepared her.

One minute, she told herself. Until his breathing evens.

For the first time all evening, nobody wanted anything from her at all. She was so absorbed in the weight of him, and his fist around her finger, that she forgot the ball, and her mother, and did not hear the footsteps in the corridor beyond the library’s inner door.

She heard only the door begin, very slowly, to open.

And Phillipa, with a stranger’s child in her arms, froze where she stood.

CHAPTER 2

“Oh, the evening has gone on long enough, really.”

“Truly. But the arrangements are top notch. I have to give it to the Duke. The man knows how to throw a lavish occasion.”

There was the murmuring of matrons, who were opening the door to the library. Their eyes found Phillipa. Slid to the bundle in her arms and then returned to her face.

“Well,” said the lavender matron.

Phillipa’s mouth opened but nothing came out. It was a most peculiar sensation as she had been trained in the art of conversation since the age of twelve, and could produce a pleasant remark on the weather for anyone at a moment’s notice, and yet her entire vocabulary had deserted her.

“What,” said Lady Whitcombe, “are you doing in here, Lady Phillipa?”

“I…”

The baby chose that moment to hiccup, and then gurgled, quite loudly.

A head appeared behind the matrons’ shoulders. Then a second. Then a gentleman, and a young lady, and another lady on tiptoe, all drawn to the doorway with the curious, heightened stillness of a crowd that has smelled something.

What is it? What’s happening? Is that…is that a child?

And then the shorter matron, Mrs. Aldous, put a hand to her bosom and said, in a voice that carried to the back of the room.