Page 76 of A Baby Delivery for the Duke

At this moment, she knew that she would have to trust her husband.

They moved through the crowded room at an unhurried pace that cost Phillipa every ounce of composure she possessed, pausing twice to exchange pleasantries with guests who wanted to tell her how lovely the ballroom looked, how generous the cause, how fine a notion the whole evening was, and all the while her eyes kept finding, and losing, and finding again, the fair head near the edge of the room.

He had moved and was no longer standing by the wall with his champagne. He had drifted, unhurried as they themselves were trying to appear, toward the doors that led out of the ballroom and into the rest of the house.

“He is leaving the room,” she said, very low.

Gregory’s hand closed hard around hers. “Stay beside me.”

They reached the doors only a moment behind him, and the crowd, which had seemed so thin and easy to move through only a minute before, now closed around them like water, dowagers wanting introductions, a gentleman wanting a word about the orphanage subscription, Lord Averley himself appearing out of nowhere to compliment her gown in a manner that made Gregory’s eyes go flat and dangerous.

“Lord Averley, you will forgive us,” Phillipa said, already moving past him, her hand firm in Gregory’s. “There is a small matter of the house that requires my husband’s immediate attention.”

“Surely it can wait a moment, Your Grace. I had hoped to speak with you about the spring subscription, and whether...”

“It cannot wait,” said Gregory, with a curtness that would, on any other night, have cost them a week of gossip, and steered Phillipa bodily past the startled young lord without so much as slowing his step. By the time they had extricated themselves and come out into the main hall, Dornet was nowhere in sight.

“Where has he gone?”

“The stairs.” Gregory was already moving, fast now, propriety abandoned, and Phillipa kept pace with him though her slippers were entirely the wrong shoes for it. “I saw him on the stairs, you stay here and I will go looking for him.”

“No!” she said, louder than she had intended to. “I don’t wish for you to go alone.”

“Phillipa…” Gregory warned her.

“Let me come with you, please,” she plead. Partly, she was worried that if he were to go alone, he would not give him the benefit of the doubt.

But another part of her also worried for his safety. She knew, given her small frame, she wouldn’t be able to help much if he was in trouble but the thought of him going alone was unacceptable to her.

“Please, let me come,” she plead again.

He must have seen something in her expression that made him change his mind.

“Fine. But you stay behind me. Do you understand? I’m not certain of what we are dealing with here.”

“Just let me come,” she said.

They took them two at a time, Phillipa’s skirts gathered in one fist, and reached the first landing in time to see a flash of fair hair and a dark coat disappearing along the upper corridor.

“That is not the way to the sitting room,” Phillipa said, breathless. “That corridor leads to the nursery.”

Gregory went white, “He is coming for Theodore!”

CHAPTER 25

“Stay back, all of you. I will not ask you twice.”

Michael Dornet’s voice, when they reached the nursery door, had none of its pleasant orphanage warmth left in it at all. It was flat and hard, and it carried over a sound that stopped Phillipa’s heart entirely, Theodore crying.

Gregory did not slow and went through the door at a dead run, and Phillipa, a half step behind him, took in the whole scene in the space of a single frantic heartbeat.

Martha and Mrs. Glenn and Drummons were arranged in a rough half circle before the crib, their arms spread, their bodies between the child and the man standing in the middle of the room with a small, wicked blade caught in the candlelight. Dornet’s fine coat was torn at one shoulder where someone,

Drummons probably, had tried to catch hold of him on his way through the door.

“Get away from him,” Dornet said, to the three servants, though his eyes had already gone past them, straight to Gregory. “This is not your business. None of you. Get away from the crib.”

“You will not touch that child.”