Page 78 of The English Wife

Except that she knew that she had once desired Giles.

Was that why she was presuming guilt? Because she knew herself guilty? No. Bay had made her see that she was wrong. If she was guilty of anything, it had been unworldliness. And maybe that was all Bay had done as well, had blundered into what he thought was a friendship.

Sir Hugo winked at her from a gallery in Paris. I cede him to you.

“Georgie?” Bay chafed her wrists, his brow furrowed with very real concern. “If you won’t confide in me, will you at least speak frankly to the doctor? Having come this far, I don’t want to risk losing you now.”

“I’m not sick,” Georgie repeated. Pushing herself upright against the pillow, she made her decision. She looked Bay in the eye and said baldly, “I’m increasing.”

Bay blinked at her. “Do you mean—”

He was looking at her as though she was all the angels and Mary rolled into one.

“It does happen, you know.”

Bay’s throat worked, but no words came out.

“It’s hardly the virgin birth,” said Georgie tartly.

“No. I—” He looked as though someone had just bashed him on the head with an oar. Georgie was tempted to hold up two fingers in front of his eyes and ask him how many he saw.

“You aren’t going to swoon on me, are you? Because that probably wouldn’t be good for the baby.”

“The baby,” Bay repeated, and Georgie saw that his eyes were suspiciously bright. He drew in a ragged breath. “Our baby.”

And before Georgie could say anything else, her husband seized her in a fierce embrace, his head buried in the crook of her shoulder, his hair tickling her neck.

“Our baby,” he breathed, making her squirm as his breath went down the back of her neck.

“The lobster mousse,” Georgie croaked, and Bay let go, his hair mussed, his face glowing with wonder, glowing so that she couldn’t help but smile back at him, helplessly, just for a moment, before there was a discreet knock at the door and a voice said, dubiously, “I was told someone was in need of a doctor?”

“Yes,” said Bay, standing and becoming Bay again, at ease and in charge, overriding Georgie’s no. “Yes, we are in need of a doctor.”

* * *

It was amazing how all-consuming he or she came to be, this person they couldn’t yet see or hear, although by December, Georgie had begun to feel movements, movements like a sea monster undulating under the water.

“It’s not nice to refer to our child as a sea monster,” Bay said when Georgie expressed that opinion.

“How do you know?” said Georgie, shifting uncomfortably on her chaise. She had been fitted with a special corset for her condition, but it seemed to poke even more than the ordinary kind. “We haven’t met him yet. He might be beastly.”

“With you as a mother?” said Bay gallantly.

Georgie stuck out her tongue at him. “If Dr. Greeley keeps me on a decreasing diet, I refuse to answer for the consequences.”

Her husband set down the papers he was reviewing, not legal documents, but blueprints, plans for the house they were to build on a plot farther uptown, all the way up in the east Seventies. Georgie might have been more enthusiastic about the plan had it not adjoined an empty plot already purchased by her mother-in-law.

“Didn’t I sneak up half a ham last night?” said Bay virtuously.

“Hardly half a ham.”

But that wasn’t the point. They shouldn’t have to sneak. Dr. Greeley was Mrs. Van Duyvil’s doctor, the decreasing plan his decreasing plan. Georgie was sick of decreasing, and she was particularly sick of Mrs. Van Duyvil, who had planned their lives to the minute. Every day, Bay went dutifully to the office, of which the senior partner was Mrs. Van Duyvil’s brother, Peter Bayard. Every evening, he attended his mother and sister at one of the many events that marked the season. While Georgie, by virtue of her indelicate state, was confined at home to a chaise longue.

Without ham.

Georgie swung her legs over the edge of the chaise, moving cumbersomely to a sitting position. With Christmas approaching, the whirl of gaiety was reaching frenzied proportions, a fact to which Georgie could only attest by the increasing carriage traffic outside her window. “Couldn’t we go somewhere? Somewhere away?”

“The mountains of the moon?” suggested Bay. Georgie gave him a look. Bay settled back in his chair. “We could go to Florida once the season is over.”