Page 87 of A Baby to Seal the Duke’s Fate

Honora went still.

Cecily, sensing her attention had shifted away, wriggled in her lap and patted her chin.

Honora kissed her hair without looking down.

Lady Isolde Carrington had arrived.

She would stay a week, Martha had said, for an official courtship with all the propriety such an arrangement could require. Honora did not need to see her to know what that would mean. Flowers in the room. Tea in the drawing room. Guided walks. Observations by his mother. Leopold was required to be charming at intervals and silent at others.

She had no right to feel what she was feeling.

That did not stop it.

Sometime later the laughter reached her from downstairs.

Women’s laughter.

Not faint, not polite, but real enough to carry. Honora paused with a folded blanket in her hands and listened before she could stop herself.

Her Grace and Lady Isolde.

The kind of laughter that belonged to women who understood each other.

Honora stood in the nursery doorway for a moment, Cecily resting against her shoulder, and felt the odd sharpness of it.

She had thought, perhaps foolishly, that if Leopold were forced into this, there would be resistance visible to anyone with eyes. There was none she could hear from upstairs. Only laughter. Smoothness. Ease.

She turned back to the room before she could think too hard about it.

***

That evening, Lady Isolde came to the nursery with Leopold.

Honora had just finished settling Cecily when the door opened, and she looked up to find them both in the doorway.

Lady Isolde Carrington was tall, beautifully dressed, and composed in the way of a woman who had never once been uncertain of where she stood in a room.

Her gown was pale and well cut, her gloves immaculate, and her dark hair arranged in a style that looked effortless only because it had clearly cost time. She moved with the ease of someone who had been in Belgrave before, or at least somewhere like it, and intended to belong wherever she entered.

Leopold stood slightly behind her.

Honora’s hand tightened once at her side before she made herself still.

Lady Isolde smiled at her at once. “Miss Redmond, I believe?”

“It is Phoebe Redmond,” Honora said.

Lady Isolde’s smile did not change. “Of course. How fortunate I am to meet you.”

There was no threat in the words.

That was part of what made them dangerous.

Honora inclined her head. “My lady.”

Lady Isolde’s gaze moved to Cecily at once. “And this must be the baby everyone has been talking about.”

Cecily, bright-eyed and curious, stared back at her with complete indifference.