Page 57 of A Baby for the Duke

She went to her sisters first. The youngest one hit her about the middle at a dead run and hung there. Her twin grabbed her by both hands and spun her. The two of them stood forehead to forehead, saying something rapid and private that made them both laugh.

And Colin, who had been told a dozen times in a fortnight by a dozen different people that his wife was a wallflower, sat in a carriage twenty feet away with her stepdaughter on his arm and watched her light up like a bonfire.

That’s who she is when she’s not being careful. That’s what she has been damping down at my table for four days.

Then her brothers came out. Then her father, in his shirtsleeves, roaring about the gravel. Then her mother.

Then somebody said the word baby, and the entire family turned around and charged at the carriage.

Colin climbed down with his daughter and found himself, for the first time in his adult life, surrounded.

“Oh, the lamb!”

“Look at her hair, James. Look at it!”

“Is she always this serious? She’s terribly serious.”

“She has your eyes, Your Grace. Hasn’t she got your eyes?”

“Mama, let me, you’ve had her. Mama⁠—”

Lady Huntington had snatched Katherine from him in four seconds flat and was carrying her back to the house.

And just like that, Colin found himself standing with his arms empty in the drive of a house full of shouting people.

His wife appeared at his elbow. “I warned you.”

“You said nine seconds.”

“I was being generous to my mother, who has never been generous to anybody about anything.” She was laughing at him. “Are you appalled?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Come and see the lawn.”

She took his hand. She did it without looking, without ceremony, the way a person took a hand they had taken a hundred times before, and she pulled him across the grass while talking about the sweep of the grounds and where the hoops went and what her father had done to the border in 1811.

Colin looked down at their joined hands and said nothing about it.

“You’ll join us, will you not?” said the humorous brother.

Colin looked at his wife. “I suppose I must,” he replied, with a scowl he had been building since the drive.

Leonora clapped. “Now, husband, I must confess that I am not very good at this, but I have great hopes that you might win for both of us.”

“Have you told him the rules?” Marina asked.

“I know how to play pall-mall.”

Evan snorted into his sleeve. “Not our pall-mall.”

The party arranged itself with a speed that suggested long practice. The Marquess and Marchioness took two chairs at the top of the lawn with the baby between them, Augusta stationed herself beside them as the second judge, and a footman came out with a rack of mallets that had plainly been made for the family, since two of them had names carved into the handles.

“The hoops are for the look of the thing,” Marina explained, handing him one. “You may go through them if it pleases you.”

“Then what is the object?”

“The object,” Alexander said, “is everybody else’s ball.”