Page 56 of A Baby for the Duke

Then she was gone, and the door clicked shut behind her.

The room fell quiet.

Something orange bolted out from under the sofa.

“You,” Colin said.

Mercutio, who had bitten a footman, a groom, and the vicar’s dog twice since January and was not sorry about any of it, crossed the carpet, put his front paws against Colin’s leg, looked up at the baby, and began to purr like a boiling kettle.

Katherine reached down. The cat permitted it.

“You’ve tamed him as well,” Colin praised. “That’s a huge accomplishment, Katherine. Grown men have failed.”

The baby patted the cat’s head and then turned her head and looked at the door Leonora had gone out of, her mouth turning down at the corners.

“I know,” Colin murmured, shifting her to the other arm. “She’s quite something, isn’t she?”

The baby curled her fist into his collar and did not answer.

He walked her up and down the length of the room for a while, because it seemed to be what she wanted, and Mercutio followed them at a distance of four feet like an escort.

Colin found himself doing something he had not done since before his mother died—talking out loud in an empty room.

“Your father is in Italy,” he chattered. “He is not coming back. I am not going to lie to you about that when you are old enough to ask, and you will ask. You will very likely be angry with me for a year or two about it.”

Katherine breathed on his neck.

“You are going to be told a great many things about me,” Colin continued. “Some of them by people who mean well. I will tell you now that most of them are true and the worst one is not, and when you are grown, I will let you decide which is which.”

The clock in the hall struck ten.

“She will tell you they are all false,” he murmured. “That is what she does. You will want to believe her, and I would not blame you in the least.”

Then he remembered that the next morning he was to be driven twenty-two miles to her family home.

CHAPTER 19

“Nine seconds,” Colin said.

“I’m sorry?”

“You told me your mother would snatch the child out of my arms within nine seconds of the carriage stopping.”

“I did.”

“I intend to time it.”

Leonora, sitting opposite him with Katherine on her lap and the baby’s fist wound into her necklace, gave him a look of such pity that he was briefly concerned for himself.

“Colin, you will not get to nine.”

He got to four.

The carriage had not stopped moving. There was a shriek from somewhere near the front steps at a pitch he associated with injured horses, and by the time the step was dropped, three women were hurrying across the gravel at a speed that gently bred no lady would have permitted herself in public, and his wife was out the door and gone.

Leonora had put Katherine into his arms without so much as looking at what she was doing, said, “Hold her, she likes the noise,” and was gone down the step before he had the child properly settled.

Colin watched the rest from inside the carriage, which he understood to be cowardice and did not care.