Page 59 of A Baby for the Duke

“She does that about every eleven minutes,” Marina drawled at his shoulder. “You should hear him talk about the Corn Laws.”

“He wasn’t wrong.”

“He is never wrong. That is precisely the matter.” She swung her mallet up over her shoulder. “Are you going to tell my mother I ride astride?”

Colin studied her. “I have no idea what you mean.”

“Your carriage came up the drive at eleven this morning, and I was in the long meadow on Achilles with no saddle and my skirts round my knees. You looked straight at me out the window and then found something extremely interesting on the other side of the road.”

“I was looking at the hedge.”

“You were looking at the hedge,” Marina agreed gravely, and walked off to steal her brother’s ball.

I have somehow acquired an ally.

Somewhere in the middle of it, it stopped being an ordeal. His brothers-in-law stopped being careful with him. Evan told him, flatly and without apology, that the family had thought him a monster for six years. Colin said the family had been mostly correct.

Evan considered that, before saying that in this case he was a monster with a good eye, and asking whether he would consider coming again next Tuesday. Alexander asked, with enormous delicacy, whether the story about the bishop was true. Colin said that it was and that the man had been rude about the roses.

The whole while, his wife played dreadfully. She lost her first ball within two minutes and her second to her twin, and spent most of the game laughing too hard to strike anything at all.

Colin found that he had begun to position himself where he could see her without appearing to.

Then Marina sent the last ball into the lake.

It was an impressive stroke that elicited her siblings’ outrage. She maintained loudly that the lake had moved. The ball sat six feet out in flat brown water among the reeds, and the Belmont family stood along the bank and debated poles, rakes, dogs, and summoning a gardener.

Colin walked past them, down the bank, and into the lake. The shriek behind him came from the Marchioness. He waded into the cold water until it reached his thighs, grabbed the ball, and came back up the bank with his boots full of water and seven Belmonts staring at him in utter shock.

“Your ball,” he said to Marina.

“You’re drenched.”

“I’m aware.”

And then his wife was in front of him.

“You went into the lake.”

“It was in the lake.”

“You could have sent for a rake.”

“That would have taken twenty minutes, and your mother would have made everybody stop and have tea, and your sister would have claimed the lake moved for the rest of my life.”

Then he realized that he was standing in front of Leonora in a wet shirt, with his coat on the grass forty feet away, and every Belmont on that lawn watching him do it. Her mother had Katherine on her hip at the top of the slope and had stopped talking, which had not happened all afternoon.

“Hold out your hands.”

“Why?”

He put the wet ball in them. Then he put the two he had taken off Alexander on top of it. Then Marina’s. Then Evan’s, which elicited a noise behind him like a kettle boiling over.

“What are you doing?” Leonora asked.

“Conceding.”

“You cannot concede. You have won.”