Page 11 of A Baby for the Duke

Colin did not have time to say anything at all. The maid crossed the corridor and handed the baby to Leonora as though she had been waiting all evening for somebody to relieve her of it.

Leonora settled the baby against her shoulder in one practiced movement and turned away from both of them, toward the window, and began to walk.

The crying stopped.

It did not fade. It stopped, in the middle of a breath, the way a kettle stopped whistling when it was lifted off the heat.

Colin stood there and watched his brother’s daughter, who had screamed at the sight of him twice in one day, take a handful of a stranger’s hair in her fist, rest her wet red face on a stranger’s shoulder, and settle.

“Oh,” Leonora said softly. “Oh, look at you. Look at the state of you.”

The baby made a small hiccupping sound.

“I know. It has been a perfectly dreadful day, and nobody has explained any of it to you, which is the worst part, isn’t it? Nobody ever explains.” Leonora was swaying without seeming to know she was doing it, one hand rubbing slow circles between the baby’s shoulder blades. “There. There. You are very cross, and you are entirely right to be.”

Colin found himself holding the back of a chair.

“She doesn’t do that,” he said.

“Do what?”

“Any of it. She screams at me. She screams at the maids. She settles for Mrs. Pike, but Mrs. Pike has been holding infants since the Flood.” He heard his voice go flat. “You have had her for forty seconds.”

Leonora looked down at the small dark head under her chin before looking back up. Her eyes were strangely bright and wet at the corners.

“Who would give you up?” she whispered.

Colin did not answer, because he knew the answer, and because his throat had closed up.

Leonora stayed like that for a long moment. Then she drew a breath, squared her shoulders, and looked at him over the top of the baby’s head with an expression he was sure he would never forget.

“I can’t marry you, Your Grace.”

“You’ve said⁠—”

“I haven’t finished.” She lifted her chin. “I won’t marry you, but I will agree to a temporary betrothal. I’ll stand up with you in front of the ton and let them see that a respectable woman is not afraid to be in a room with you. I’ll help you with the baby, and I’ll do it properly, until you have found her mother or her mother is found for you. And then we will part ways as friends, and you will say the fault was yours. My reputation will survive it, and so will yours.”

“A betrothal you intend to break.”

“A betrothal I intend to honor for exactly as long as she needs it.”

“And when the ton asks why the Duke of Thorton could not keep a wife he never got to the altar?”

“Then they will say what they were always going to say about you,” Leonora said. “You’ll go back to your tree, and you will not have to marry a stranger to keep a baby, which I should think is worth something.”

Mrs. Pike had appeared at the end of the corridor with the pap boat in her hand and had come to a halt.

Colin looked at the woman in the claret gown holding his niece against her chest in the middle of a corridor where nobody had stood in six years.

“Very well,” he agreed.

Leonora had barely sat back down and unfolded her napkin before she felt it, the way one felt a change in the weather through a shut window.

Her mother was looking at the Duke.

Her mother was looking at the Duke, then at her, then at the Duke again. She had put down her wine, and Olivia Belmont had never in her life put down a glass of anything for a reason short of a fire.

“Lady Leonora and I have come to an understanding,” the Duke announced.