Page 127 of A Mother for the Blind Duke’s Orphans

When she drew back, she did not go far.

“You did not win my heart all at once,” she said.

His chest ached.

“No?”

“No. That would have been easier to guard against.” Her fingers remained against his jaw. “It happened slowly. In pieces. When you listened to Aurora without making her ashamed. When you held Princess as if she had always belonged here. When you tried to be stern and failed because you were worried. When you asked instead of assuming. When you let me see the man behind all that silence.”

He swallowed.

“I was afraid too,” she said. “Not of you. Of wanting something I thought you did not want. Of mistaking kindness for affection. Of standing at a door you never meant to open.”

“It was open,” he said. “I was merely standing in the way.”

That made her smile, and the sight of it, blurred though it was, seemed clearer to him than anything else in the room.

“I do not want separate bedrooms,” she said.

He went very still.

“I do not want a wall between us at night. I do not want to count the days of a bargain neither of us wishes to keep.” She bent and kissed him once more, brief and sure. “Yes, Hector. We should share one bedroom from now on.”

His hand closed over hers.

“Forever?” he asked, the word quieter than he intended.

Poppy rested her forehead lightly against his. “Forever.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

Hector stood with his cane planted against the worn wooden boards, its polished handle fitted beneath his palm as if it had been made from the shape of his endurance. The room around him held the sounds by which he had come to know it: the low complaint of old timber under small feet, the softened scrape of a chair near the desk, the uneven breath of a child deciding whether to cry or argue, and Poppy’s quieter stillness, which had never been empty.

Princess had taken possession of two of his fingers and seemed determined to test their loyalty. She tugged once, released him, shifted her weight, then tugged again with solemn force. Her tiny fingers were warm and damp, and she murmured to herself in a language composed of insistence and triumph. From her cot, where she had lately been set and from which she had immediately escaped into half-standing indignation, she behaved as though every soul in Saint Catherine’s Haven had gathered for no purpose but to observe her judgment upon the day.

Her birthday was still half a year away. She could not have understood the nature of age, ceremony, or time’s private thefts, but she understood attention. She lifted her chin toward it. She accepted it as her due.

Hector bent his head a fraction, listening as she made another determined sound and patted his knuckles with her free hand.

“Yes,” he said gravely. “I understand you object to being overlooked.”

Princess answered with a bubbling noise that might have been agreement.

Across the room, Aurora drew in a breath large enough for a declaration.

“She refused to return my ribbon,” she said.

Hector turned his face toward the voice. He could make out her small, upright, vibrating shape with importance. Her color was a soft blur against the steadier tones of the room, and he knew from her tone that her brows were likely drawn together with the same severity she had once reserved for strangers and now spent on injustices of the household.

She is just like me.

“Was she expected to return it?” he asked.

Aurora hesitated. “I let her glimpse it.”

“That was generous.”

“But I did not say she can chew it.”