Page 55 of A Baby for the Duke

He looked at the baby.

Katherine had gone still the moment he appeared in the doorway. She had her chin tucked down and her eyes on his eyepatch, exactly as she had at breakfast.

Colin stood there and did the arithmetic he had done a hundred times since January and always come out the same way.

She’ll cry. She’ll cry, and the whole thing will collapse. It will be my fault again.

“Colin,” Leonora pressed, as though he were a child refusing to climb the stairs.

He stepped into the room.

He was not going to sing. He resolved not to do that as he crossed the carpet.

But then Leonora handed him the spoon and said, “You are the captain, and the captain is extremely stern and has a giant hat,” and something happened that he was unable to account for afterward.

He affected an extremely stern expression, touched the tip of his fictitious hat, and informed the cat, in a voice that had frightened a bishop out of this house in the spring, that there were no cats permitted aboard this vessel, that he was overruled by the sea. At his wife’s insistence, and against his better judgment, he made the noise of a foghorn.

Leonora came around the last verse, lifted the spoon over her head and down, and delivered it straight into his mouth. It was pear. It was, as advertised, dreadful.

Katherine laughed.

It was a small sound, and it came out of her all at once, a startled wet crow of a laugh with her whole body behind it. Then she lifted both hands from the tray and clapped.

Colin and Leonora went still.

“Did she⁠—”

“Yes,” he said.

“Has she ever⁠—”

“No.” His voice was strained. “Not once. Not since she came. And never when I’ve been in the room.”

Leonora put down the bowl. Then she lifted Katherine out of the chair, turned around, and held her out to him.

Colin took a step back before he had decided to.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“She doesn’t⁠—”

“She just laughed at you,” she said. “Take your daughter, Colin.”

So he took her.

He had done it twice before and made a poor job of both, and this time she came up crooked again and then sorted herself out against him with a great deal of purpose, and settled, and stayed. That was the new part. She had never once stayed. She did not cry. She looked up into his face with her father’s blue eyes and studied him for what felt like a very long time. Then she reached up and pressed her small palm against his eyepatch.

Colin stopped breathing.

She patted it twice, the way one patted a dog. And then, having settled the matter to her satisfaction, she moved her hand down to his cheek and left it there, and rested her head against his shoulder.

Colin found he was smiling. He could feel it happening, and he had no notion what to do about it.

He looked up at Leonora. She was watching him, both hands pressed over her mouth, her eyes shining. There was nothing guarded in her face; whatever was in it was so soft and so vulnerable that he had to look away.

“Well,” Leonora said in a voice that was not quite steady, “Father and daughter have a great deal to discuss, and I have sawdust in my hair. I shall see you both in the morning.” She was already moving toward the door. “Don’t forget the pall-mall.”