Eleanor swallowed.Her vocal chords seemed to have frozen.He looked the same, or the same as he had when she’d first met him.
Tanned again.
Tired, maybe.
She held out a hand.
He came over and took it.Real warm flesh, a little roughened, touched hers and convinced her he was real.He sat on the edge of the bed and waited for her to speak.His eyes moved from her face to the child in the cradle nearby.
“It’s a daughter,” she said eventually.It came out hoarsely and seemed an inadequate thing to say.
“Yes, I know.The servants were keen to congratulate me.Thank you for making up a covering story.”
Eleanor lowered her eyes and took up a study of their hands—his firm and brown, hers softer and pale.She remembered once thinking his was a hand to depend on.“I had to say something,” she murmured.
His thumb circled mesmerically against her skin.“I’m sorry if I gave you a shock,” he said.“It was obvious the staff expected me to bound upstairs to see you.It would have caused comment if I’d asked to be formally announced.”The thumb circled three more times.“You have only to say and I’ll leave.”
She looked up then.“No.This is your home.”
“This is your home, yours alone if you want it so.My home is where you are, if you will let it be so.”
They seemed to Eleanor to be talking in slow motion, with long gaps, but she could not alter it any more than she’d been able to alter the tempo of the birth.Perhaps this too must just be gone through.
“We are a family.But…”
“But I have a lot of explaining to do,” he completed.“You are generous, as always.”He studied her quizzically.“Do you not feel any temptation to throw a fit?”
“You know it’s not in my nature.Do men like to hold babies?You may if you wish.”
Without hesitation, and with a surprising amount of confidence, he lifted the tiny bundle from the cradle.Arabel yawned and opened her big dark eyes.She and Nicholas looked at one another intently.
“Do you think so?”he said at last, as if in response to a comment.“But if you had put off your arrival for a day or two I could have attended your birth properly.Beware, young lady.If you’re saucy, I’ll marry you off to a prosy old duke when you are but sixteen.”
Eleanor watched this with a small glow of happiness that swelled inside her until it was likely to light up the room.
She kept her tone casual, however, as she said, “Miss Hurstman would have something to say to that.She’s to be Arabel’s godmother and has pledged to bring her up in a spirit of independence.”
“Heaven help us all,” he commented with a wry smile.
The baby was trying to suck at his jacket buttons, so he handed her over.Eleanor was too concerned with accomplishing the strange task of feeding her child to be self-conscious about his presence.When Arabel was sucking happily and Eleanor had time to consider the matter she found she was not at all embarrassed.It felt so right that Nicholas be watching.
“Are you well?”he asked after a while.“You look it.”
“Very.It was an easy birth and I was only woken once last night to feed her.I’m told that won’t last.”Now she felt able to speak.“Where have you come from?”
“London,” he said.He read the look in her eyes and smiled ruefully.“Don’t be angry.I’ll give you the whole tale, but this doesn’t seem the time.It’s rather complicated.”
She shook her head.“Have you ever done anything that isn’t?”
He was too wise to attempt an answer to that, and so they sat in silence, watching the child feed.With a shiver of disquiet Eleanor knew he hadn’t lost any of his power over her.At a word she would lay her heart at his feet without even hearing his story.She was deeply grateful that he was making no particular attempt to charm her, making no demands upon her.
She needed to think and she needed to decide just what to do about their life together.The longer they were together like this, however, the harder it became.
“Do you not need some breakfast?”she said at last.
“Not particularly, but I suppose I should go and see to our guest.”At her look he explained, “I brought Francis with me for moral support.”
He still made no move to leave.
