Page 132 of A Mother for the Blind Duke’s Orphans

“It is the only time any of us can act.”

He closed his eyes, though it changed little. “You will take the responsibility then?”

She did not pretend to consider. “Yes.”

Poppy’s hand rose to his face. She touched his jaw as though asking permission and giving it at the same time. “Thank you.”

He turned his cheek into her palm. “Do not thank me for what was owed. Saint Catherine’s Haven had once depended too much on the endurance of women with tired hands and the charity of those who liked charity best when it remained convenient. That would not be its future. Not while I hold the dukedom. Not while there are children sleeping under its roof.”

She said nothing, but her thumb moved once along his skin.

Outside the room, a child’s laugh traveled faintly from the direction of the chambers.

Poppy turned her face toward the sound. “Our girls will ask for us soon.”

“Our girls,” he repeated.

Her hand trembled against his cheek.

He had used the phrase before in thought, less often aloud. It settled differently this time.

“Yes,” she said. “Our girls.”

He covered her hand with his. “Then we had best make ourselves worthy of them.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The papers looked ordinary, and that was almost unbearable. Their edges were square. Their ink was dry. Their formality did not tremble beneath the weight it carried. A stack of official pages, nothing more, and yet Saint Catherine’s Haven had changed while resting under her hands.

Children who had gone to sleep uncertain of tomorrow would wake under a promise strong enough to outlast moods and gossip. Food would not depend on a donor’s passing tenderness. Repairs would not wait upon embarrassment. Those small bodies, those watchful eyes, would be held within a structure Hector had built from authority because authority was what he had, and he had never known how to give anything halfway.

Poppy watched Hector stand near his desk, tall and composed. He had turned slightly toward the corridor, listening, perhaps, for the children. His dark hair caught the room’s softer light. His pale gray eyes looked toward what he could not wholly see, and though others sometimes mistook that distance for coldness, Poppy knew better.

There is nothing cold about him.

There was fear, carefully governed. There was guilt, old enough to have learned manners. There was tenderness that often arrived dressed as instruction, provision, or command because naked tenderness cost him more. He had placed the care of Saint Catherine’s Haven into her hands because he believed she would not fail the children.

It humbled her more than praise.

She gathered the deed and set it properly in the center of the desk. Then she glanced toward the small parcel she had hidden beneath a folded cloth on a nearby chair before the children went off for breakfast. She had nearly lost courage twice that morning. Once when Aurora entered in indignation, and once when she saw the papers and understood that Hector’s gift was larger, more consequential, more worthy than anything wrapped in paper and hope.

Now she wondered if that had ever been the measure.

“Hector,” she said.

He turned at once. “Yes?”

“I have something for you.”

His expression altered only slightly, but she had learned to read him in small revisions. His mouth stilled. His shoulders became attentive. The hand on his cane shifted, not tightening exactly, but preparing.

“For me?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I was not aware the occasion required an exchange.”

“It does not.”