Page 8 of A Baby Delivery for the Duke

“Then ask,” said the Duke, “and I shall answer.”

It was, she thought afterward, the strangest negotiation of her life, conducted in whispers over the head of a sleeping child. How long would the engagement be? A week, or as short as the license could be got. What would be said of the baby? That he was the Duke’s ward, until they knew better. Did he mean to be a father to him? He meant to be everything he could. And the man who had left him? Each time she asked, he answered, plainly and without flinching, and each time he answered he seemed to have come half a step closer, until she looked down and found the toes of his evening shoes touching the hem of her gown, and the fire warm on one side of her, and the whole warm bulk of him on the other.

She looked up. He was already looking at her.

“Do you mean it?” she said at last, very quietly. “Your proposal?”

“I do.”

She nodded, slowly. “Then I will think about it.”

She had braced herself for anything: argument, persuasion, offense.

“You do that, Duchess.” He bowed, slightly, “I cannot wait to hear your terms.”

He was gone through the inner door before she could ask what he meant.

Terms.

In twenty-two years, no one had ever thought to ask her for any. She stood alone in the firelit library beside a sleeping child that was not hers, with a hundred people waiting on the other side of that door to see how she would come out, and realized that she had absolutely no idea what she was going to say.

CHAPTER 4

Gregory Welby had not been to bed.

He had lain down on top of the covers at some point after four, fully dressed, and stared at the canopy for an hour and a half while his mind ran through the events of the night.

At six he gave it up and climbed the stairs to the nursery.

It was a room that had been shut since his own childhood. Gregory stopped in the doorway.

The baby lay on his back with his arms flung wide and his attendant slept in the chair nearby.

He had not held him. Last night, in the library, he had asked for the child back and then let a stranger keep him. In earnest, he did not know how.

The girl in the chair woke with a start. “Your Grace!” She was on her feet before her eyes were properly open, cap askew. “I was only resting my eyes.”

“Right.”

“He’s not made a sound since two, Your Grace, not a peep, and Mrs. Glenn said I was to send for her if he so much as sneezed, and I said…” She gathered herself, smoothed her apron, and dropped a curtsy that nearly took her into the cradle. “Martha O’Connelly, Your Grace. Nursemaid since midnight.”

“Since midnight,” Gregory repeated.

“Mrs. Glenn found me in the linen cupboard and said, ‘Martha O’Connelly, you have younger brothers,’ and I said yes, six, and she said, Then you will do, and here I am.” She was perhaps twenty-one, sharp-eyed and freckled, with the look of a girl who had never in her life been entirely still. “I was the eldest of seven, Your Grace. There’s nothing about a baby I don’t know. Except this one, of course. Nobody knows anything about this one.”

That, Gregory reflected, was the most accurate summary of the night he had yet heard.

Martha hovered. She had the air of someone holding a very large parcel behind her back. “Your Grace, I do not want to pry. And I don’t listen to gossip, I would like that understood. I only hear it happening near me.”

“Naturally.”

“But Cook says the footmen say that you are to marry the lady from the library.”

“Does he?”

“Cook, and the boot boy, and Mrs. Glenn’s sister’s girl who does for Lady Whitcombe.” She lowered her voice with great sympathy. “Lady Whitcombe rang for the carriage at seven to call on the Dowager.”

“Then all London will know before I have finished my breakfast.”