Page 8 of A Baby to Seal the Duke’s Fate

That, he thought, was going to be a problem.

Then he looked again at the sleeping child with her dark hair and grave face and the tiny hand curled against his coat, and he realized, with a reluctant chill, that it was already more than a problem.

It was a beginning.

At that moment, footsteps sounded on the stairs.

Leopold turned.

His mother, the Duchess of Belgrave, Verity Harcourt, appeared in the doorway, her gray gaze moving at once from the study door to Leopold, then to the basket, then to the little body asleep on the settee.

She stopped.

Leopold had never seen his mother’s face do that before.

She looked at the baby.

Then at the shawl.

Then at him.

Her hand tightened at her side

Her voice, when it came, was very quiet.

“Where did that child come from?”

Leopold swallowed once and said the only true thing he had.

“The front steps.”

His mother said nothing.

For one long second, the entire room seemed to hold its breath.

Then she turned without another word and walked back upstairs.

Chapter 2

Honora Bellamy woke with her hand already reaching. For one foolish second, before the room and the bed and the pale strip of morning all settled around her, she believed she could still feel her sister’s arm beneath her fingers. She turned her head on the pillow and found only the sheet, cool where a body should have been.

The dream clung to her in pieces.

The garden at home. The narrow path along the roses. Celestine sitting beside her with the kind of stillness she only ever had when she was braiding hair.

Honora could hear birds somewhere beyond the wall. She could hear Celestine’s voice, too, soft and amused, saying something that mattered terribly in the dream and had already begun to blur at the edges.

Then it was gone.

Honora lay staring at the ceiling.

Three months.

It had been three months since the coach went over on the Salisbury Road, since the driver shouted from the gate, since the men carried Tobias Ainsworth’s body in one direction and his wife Celestine’s in another and told her to sit down before she fainted.

She had not fainted.

She had held Cecily instead.