Page 86 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

The question was directed at George, and it arrived with the quiet weight of something Charlie had been turning over for some time.

George set down his knife. “I hope so,” he said. “I should like to teach it, when the time comes.”

“You ought to begin early,” Charlie said. “Before it can decide against it. That is the advantage of infants. They have not yet formed objections.”

Jonathan’s laugh carried from the far end of the table, where he had been engaged with Lord Barlington in a conversation that appeared to involve a wager, a horse, and a great deal of hand gestures. “I agree, Charlie. Objections are a dreadful affliction. I have spent thirty years accumulating them and regret the majority.”

Kenneth’s hand found Alice’s beneath the table. The contact was unhurried and deliberate and carried nothing urgent in it, only the steady warmth of a gesture that had become, over the previous months, its own language. His thumb pressed once against her knuckles and held, and she felt the imprint of it in her hand and her wrist and the quiet place beneath her breastbone where three words she had not yet said to him lived undisturbed.

She looked down the table. At Lucy, who was making Rachel laugh with a story that involved a botanical mishap and a viscount who should have known better. At Jonathan, who had commandeered the bread basket and seemed to be losing his negotiation with Lord Barlington about the horse. At Freddie, who was explaining to George, armed with seven years of strongly held conviction, why ponds were structurally inferior to lakes. At Charlie, who had produced a pencil from somewhere and was drawing on the back of the menu card, utterly absorbed.

At Kenneth, whose hand had returned to his glass and his gaze was sweeping across the table, his composure thin enough that she could see through it.

At Rachel, who was wearing their mother’s gown and carrying their mother’s grandchild beneath the cream silk, seated beside George, who loved her in the plain and uncomplicated manner that Alice had once believed existed only in the books she read by firelight when the rest of the house was sleeping.

The candles burned in their holders. The autumn light came through the windows and fell across the table in gold and amber, across the currant rolls and the scattered crumbs and the menu card where Charlie’s pencil was still moving.

Alice sat inside it all and did not move.

Chapter Twenty-Six

The carriage was ready to leave, with Rachel’s trunk secured to the boot and Alice’s hamper wedged beside the seat.

Kenneth had watched from the portico as Alice held her sister, her palm pressed flat against Rachel’s belly.

Freddie waved until there was nothing to wave at. Charlie stood close to Alice without touching her, close enough that the choosing was visible. George shook Kenneth’s hand at the step, his grip firm, his bow brief.

“The headmaster is a fair man,” Kenneth said. “If he proves otherwise, write to me.”

The wheels crunched over the gravel. The dust settled. Alice stood on the drive with her arms crossed and her face turned toward the empty road.

Kenneth did not go to her, because going required crossing through what he could not say, and the distance between what he wanted and what he could offer had been narrowing for weeks.

The house emptied around them.

By supper, he could no longer tell whether the quiet was the absence of guests or the weight of everything he was not saying.

Alice sat across from him in the small dining room, and the candlelight moved in her hair and along the line of her mouth.

Kenneth felt the treacherous warmth at the center of his chest, the pull that had not diminished since the attic.

“The baby will arrive before Christmas,” Freddie announced between bites of roast mutton. “I have calculated the weeks. Aunt Rachel said four months, and four months from now is December. I believe it will come on Christmas Day, which would be inconvenient for the baby because it would receive only one set of presents instead of two.”

“Babies do not receive presents, Frederick,” Charlie said.

“They ought to. They have done the most work.”

Alice’s mouth curved. The candlelight caught it, and Kenneth’s chest tightened, the pull of gratitude and hunger and something older than either.

“A cousin will be a fine thing,” Alice said.

“A brother would be better,” Freddie said.

Kenneth’s hand stilled on his glass.

“Or a sister,” Charlie added quietly. His green eyes held the measured attention that preceded his most precise observations. “You and Papa could have a baby, too. Could you not?”

Kenneth’s thumb pressed against the base of his wineglass, and the pressure registered in his knuckles and his wrist and the edge of his jaw. He held it there because it gave his body something to do while eight years of containment strained against its borders.