Page 21 of A Baby Delivery for the Duke

“And...” she bit down on her lip. To say that she was curious about him would be understating it, “what happens when things do not go your way?”

“That never happens.”

“Sure..” she huffed, feeling at a loss of how to continue. He was stubborn, she will give him that. “But in the hypothetical scenario that it does, what then?”

“I suppose I will have to wait to find out,” he replied, smirking. “Why? Are you planning on going against me?”

“I wouldn’t dare,” she said, half jokingly. But in her head, it did appear as a concern of what would happen if they completely disagreed on something. Would she have to be the one to compromise? “But you never know, really.”

“I think your life will be much easier if you agree to the things I say,” he replied.

She glared at him then. “You’re expecting too much from me.”

“Oh, I’m not expecting anything,” he smirked. “I’m just advising you.”

There was something in the way that he said the words. It wasn’t exactly... well, she couldn’t call it a flirtation but there was something underlying in his tone.

“We’re here now.”

At the gate of Hewes Manor, he stopped and did not go in. He stood by the wall with his hat in his hand and waited until she had eased the garden door open, and slipped inside, and turned. He lifted one hand.

She raised hers in return, and shut the door softly, and stood with her forehead against it in the dark.

It was only then, standing in the sleeping house with a stranger’s greatcoat still warm about her shoulders, that Phillipa understood what she had really crossed London to find out. It was not whether she was ready to be the mother of a small warm boy.

She knew that now; she had known it from the moment his hand touched her cheek.

It was why, for one long moment in the dark of the drawing room, with his forehead against her shoulder and his hand on the door, she had wanted him not to let go.

CHAPTER 9

Phillipa had not been nervous at the last one.

That was what she kept coming back to, in the carriage, with her hands in her lap and the pearls cool at her throat. She had been many things at the last one, numb chiefly, and dutiful, and very well dressed, but she had not felt like this. She had gone through that morning as a woman goes through a dream, with a perfectly composed face and the sense that none of it was happening to her. She had let them fasten the buttons and pin the veil and arrange the flowers, and she had said, when asked, that she was very well. It was only at the altar that the dream had ended.

Today her hands would not stay still. They kept straying to the bodice of her gown, and the small satin ribbon at her waist, and the cold place on her sleeve where she had put her lace glove on and taken it off three times. She felt every single thing. It was very tiresome. It was, she supposed, what it was to be awake.

“Are you quite well?” asked her father.

He sat across from her, in his best coat, with his hat on his knee. He had been quiet since Hewes Manor. He had held the door for her, and handed her up, and said nothing at all, and she had been glad of it, and a little sorry.

“I am very well.” She folded her hands. “I did not sleep.”

He looked out of the window at Mayfair going past, wet and bright, and cleared his throat. “You will, ah. You will forgive an old man a foolish remark, I’m only worried for you.”

“I do not think any remark of yours could be foolish.”

“You have not heard it.” Lord Creighton turned his hat over. “I said a thing to you last week that I am not proud of. I said it because I was frightened, and I have found in the course of my life that the two are often the same. I do not say it to be forgiven. Only that I know what it was.” He met her eyes, and for the first time in years she saw in them not the tired, pressed look of a man carrying a great weight, but something older and gentler that she had almost forgotten. “If you should wish to turn the carriage around, my dear, I will do it. I will have the whole of the ton in a rage, and your mother in a fit, and I shall be very glad.”

She could not speak.

“I only wished you to know,” said her father, and cleared his throat again, and looked at his hat.

“Papa.” She leaned across the carriage and put her gloved hand over his. It was a plain, warm, work-worn hand, and it shook a little, and she held it. “I do not want to turn around. I wish to do this. I think I have been afraid I wanted it too much.”

He looked up.

“I did not think it possible,” said Phillipa, with a small unsteady smile, “to be so terrified of a thing one has chosen.”