“Twenty minutes,” Jack piped up from the windowsill where she was perched like a cat, her eyes even bigger than Mara’s as she observed the proceedings.
“What did I say?” Kitty demanded, shooting her young charge a glare. “Be quiet or out you go to wait with the men.”
Jack mimed stitching her lips closed while Abigail positioned herself at the foot of the mattress.
“I am speaking about what I call earnest labor,” she explained, “when the baby lowers itself into the birthing canal. Do you remember the breathing exercises we’ve been practicing? In through the nose on a count of five, out through the mouth on a count of ten. Yes, just like that. Very good. I’m going to do a quick examination to see how far you’ve progressed. You can take your sister’s hand if it helps.”
“Yeouch!” Kitty yelped when Mara squeezed her fingers in a vicelike grip. “That hurts!”
“That hurts?Thathurts?” Her cheeks pink and puffed with air, Mara turned her head to scowl at her sister. “A tiny human is currently trying to make its way out of a part of my body that no tiny human should come out of!”
“I can see the head,” Abigail announced, the siblings’ bickering a minor vibration in her ear as her sole focus remained dedicated to the patient at hand. “Another deep breath, and when I tell you to push, you need to push as hard as you can. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Mara moaned.
“I think you snapped off my thumb,” Kitty said mildly.
“Let me look! I always wanted to see—no, no I don’t.” Jack clamped a hand over her mouth as she reeled away. “That’shideous.”
“PUSH!” Abigail shouted, and with a warrior-like cry that millions of mothers before her had emitted in the depths of their herculean effort to bring new life into the world, Mara did. Then pushed again. And again. And again. Until a new cry, tremulous and high pitched, filled the drawing room.
Working swiftly, Abigail cut the umbilical cord and cleared the squalling infant’s nostrils before placing it into Mara’s trembling arms. “Congratulations, Your Grace. You have a son.”
“A son,” Mara whispered tearfully, all of her pain and discomfort draining away as love, powerful and omnipresent, brought a warm, contended glow to her face. “I have a son. And he isperfect.”
While Kitty and Jack fussed over the baby and Mrs. Robbins went to fetch Ambrose, Abigail worked diligently to ensure that Mara finished the laboring process in its entirety before she gently cleansed the area and covered the duchess’s legs with a fresh sheet. She waited until the infant had latched to its mother’s breast, and then she left, her own body exhausted from the burned-away adrenaline of ensuring a safe, successful delivery for both Mara and her newborn son.
“Abigail.” Stephen was there to meet her in the hallway. One glance at her pale face and he wrapped his arm around her waist, steering her toward the solarium where she found hot tea and breakfast waiting. “Eat,” he said, pushing a plate in front of her piled high with buttered toast, roasted sausage, and buttered eggs. “Then you’re going upstairs to sleep. You’ve worked yourself to the bone these past few weeks caring for the Duchess of Southwick, and if those loud cries were any indication, it was a job well done.”
“A boy,” Abigail said between mouthfuls of toast. “She had a boy.”
A shadow flickered in Stephen’s gaze. “That’s wonderful news. I’m sure the duke will be quite pleased with an heir.”
“That’s what you would like, isn’t it?” She paused with a forkful of sausage halfway to her lips. “A male heir. You spoke of it before, briefly. But we’ve never discussed it in great detail.”
“What I would like is for you to be happy.” He rose from the table and went to the sideboard to put more food on his plateeven though, she couldn’t help but notice, it was already full. “Yesterday, you said that you’d like to remain at Summerwind House for a while longer. Why?”
Hearing the weight in his words, the somberness in his tone, she lowered her fork without taking a bite as a pit began to form in her belly. “I told you. I’ve been busy with the duchess—”
“You’ll always be busy, Abigail,” he replied stiffly, his back to her. “Such is the profession you have chosen, and I won’t ask you to change it. Not for me. Not for anyone. It is clear that helping people, healing them, is your passion, and you’re damned good at it. Brilliant, even.”
“Thank you,” she said, even though she wasn’t sure if it was a compliment... or an accusation. “Iama good doctor. It is a career I intend to pursue for many years to come.” Without warning, her mind suddenly flashed back to an office she’d stood in eight years ago.
“No doubt you have a bright mind, but being a physician requires an intelligence that a woman simply does not possess. If you wish to pursue a career in the medical field, might I suggest becoming a midwife or apprenticing with an herbalist?”
Dr. Bard had never come out and said that his first impression of her was incorrect, or that he’d been wrong to discourage a woman from pursuing the field of medicine. He was too arrogant for that. Too set in his own way of thinking. But she’d felt him watching her over the course of her education, the corners of his eyes crinkled in a way that might, if one looked close enough, be perceived as approval. Perhaps even admiration.
After leaving his office on that fateful day, she had run, quite literally, into Stephen. Or rather he had run into her. And her life had been irrevocably changed, a new path carved from therutted path of where she’d thought she was going to where she’d actually gone.
She had become a wife and then, in some ways and by her own choice, a widow. A doctor. A keeper of cats. A countess.
But who was shetruly?
She knew who Stephen was.
Who he’d always been.
A lord. A husband. A protector. A man who had hunted her and helped her in equal measure. One who had made her both grit her teeth and bite her lip. One she was falling—had fallen?—in love with, as much as love could be believed despite not being a provable scientific theory.
