Page 19 of A Baby for the Duke

“It’s pears.”

“How long has this been going on?” Colin asked.

“Twenty minutes. I have another hour in me, and she knows it.” Mrs. Pike kept her eyes on the bowl. “Well?”

“Friday.”

“Friday.”

“Special license. In the chapel here. Her family will come.”

Mrs. Pike put the spoon down in the bowl. She sat for a moment looking at the far wall, and Colin saw, with some irritation, that her chin was not entirely steady.

“She’s beautiful,” she remarked.

“Yes.” He took off his gloves. “That’s the problem.”

“That is not what a problem is, Your Grace, and you’d know it if you’d ever had one that wasn’t of your own making.”

“Mrs. Pike.”

“There’ll be a duchess in this house on Friday, and I have a hundred things to do and no notion where the linen is.” She picked the spoon back up. “It’s the best day’s work you’ve ever done, and you’re standing there with a face like a wet Thursday.”

Colin crossed the room, which was his mistake.

Katherine saw him coming. He watched it happen, the way he had watched it happen twice before—her small head turning, and her eyes going up to his face and finding the black silk and the white line of the scar running out from under it. Her mouth opened, and she drew in a breath. Then she screamed into Mrs. Pike’s shoulder and stayed there.

Neither of them spoke.

“She’s tired,” Mrs. Pike sighed.

“She isn’t.”

“Your Grace⁠—”

“I’ll be at the treehouse,” Colin said, and went out.

Katherine had decided to have his breakfast.

Colin had been reading the same paragraph in a letter from his steward for six minutes, and the reason he had been reading it for six minutes was sitting in a padded chair to his left with a cloth tied round her neck, ignoring the bowl in front of her entirely and watching his plate with an intensity he had not seen since the last time he had been at a hanging.

“That is a coddled egg,” he said.

The baby leaned forward.

“You have no teeth.”

She leaned further, making a small businesslike grunt, and reached out one hand.

“You are four feet from your breakfast, which Mrs. Pike spent twenty minutes on, and which you have looked at once.” He turned a page he had not read. “You are also, I am told, six months old. This is a matter of physical possibility, not preference.”

Katherine’s fingers opened and closed.

There was a very long pause in which Colin was looked at steadily by an infant and lost.

He put down the letter, scooped a very small bite of egg on the tip of his spoon, and held it out. Katherine snatched it off the spoon with the concentration of an officer defusing a mine and made a face at him that was so like his brother’s at that age that something in his chest turned over.

“Don’t tell Mrs. Pike,” he said.