Page 116 of Pack Baby for the Silver Foxes

“That was a very loud nothing.”

He reached for my hand. “I like seeing you let yourself be cared for.”

My first instinct was to flinch. My second was to say something flippant. My third, apparently, was growth because I decided not to do either.

“I like it too,” I said, so quietly I could barely hear myself. I looked at the fire because looking at either of them was impossible. “But don’t be smug.”

“Never,” Lincoln said before his phone buzzed in his pocket.

He took it out with the distracted air of a man expecting a work message, then stopped dead.

Hudson noticed at once. “What is it?”

Lincoln looked at him, and whatever passed between them made the warmth in my chest fold in on itself.

“Lincoln?”

He cleared his throat. “It’s Damien.”

I made myself keep breathing. “What does he want?”

Lincoln looked at the screen again, jaw tightening. “He says he’s coming to England at the end of semester, next week. He wants to see us while he’s here.”

Hudson’s hand stopped halfway to his cup.

I looked at Lincoln’s phone as if the words might rearrange themselves into something less awful. They didn’t.

Damien was coming next week.

Chapter 20

Lincoln

Before Mary, I’d thought muslin was muslin. That was until I was standing in a baby shop in Chelsea, holding three different muslin cloths and trying to decide whether cream, sage, or pale yellow felt more like twins.

She walked down the aisle of strollers with her dark hair loose over a soft blue sweater, and my entire body went tight with the need to pull her against me.

Hudson stood beside me, reading the specifications card on a twin stroller with the concentration of a man reading the requirements of a ransom note.

“This one folds with one hand,” he said.

“So did the last one.”

Hudson flicked the stroller but it stayed in place. “This one lied.”

Mary looked over her shoulder. “Are you interrogating the strollers?”

“Hudson is,” I said. “I’m merely supervising.”

“You have three towels in your hand.”

“Muslins.”

“Congratulations on the vocabulary.”

I lifted them. “Which color?”

Mary came back down the aisle, slow because she’d been queasy that morning and refused to admit it until Hudson handed her a ginger sweet without comment. She touched the yellow cloth first, then the sage.