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James hesitated, and for once his usual confidence seemed to desert him. "I have not held him," he admitted, rubbing the back of his neck. "Not since I brought him here."

Olivia looked at him in astonishment. "You have visited him many times and never held him?"

"I make certain he is well," James replied, lowering his gaze toward the baby. "I speak with the servants, make certain he has everything he needs, and check on him myself. But no, I have not held him."

"That is ridiculous," Olivia declared, shifting carefully in the chair. "Come here."

James gave her a skeptical look. "Olivia …"

"Come here," she repeated, holding the baby out toward him. "You cannot expect to raise him as your son without ever learning how to hold him."

There was something in her expression that made him surrender. James approached slowly, and Olivia guided his arms into position before placing the baby against his chest. He looked awkward for the first few seconds, as though someone had handed him an extremely valuable object with instructions not to drop it.

Yet the baby seemed completely unconcerned by his father's uncertainty. He settled against James's broad chest, one tiny hand curling into the fabric of his shirt, and within moments his little body relaxed.

Olivia watched them with an unfamiliar ache. James looked down at the child with an expression she could not quite understand, and somehow the sight of the enormous duke carefully cradling a tiny infant seemed almost absurdly tender.

How can a man who appears to be so natural with children be so certain that he never wants one of his own blood?

There had to be a reason. People did not simply decide such things without something behind them, and Olivia was beginning to suspect that James's refusal concealed a story he had never told her.

I will discover it eventually. Not today, because today belongs to this sweet … baby.

"We need to give him a name," she announced, breaking the silence.

James glanced at her. "I thought you liked calling him little one."

"I do, but unless we intend to introduce him as Little One, we shall have to be more imaginative."

"Edward," James suggested.

Olivia wrinkled her nose. "Too pretentious."

James looked offended. "Edward is perfectly respectable."

"Precisely. He sounds as though he owns three estates and disapproves of laughter."

James considered that. "Very well. What about Beatrice?"

Olivia stared at him. "That is a girl's name."

"I was testing you."

"You are impossible." She smiled before suggesting Brawna only for James to reject it as sounding like "a medieval old lady who owns a castle and orders peasants about".

Olivia laughed so loudly that the baby startled slightly in his arms, and James immediately looked down at him with exaggerated concern.

"Perhaps Alexander?" he offered.

"That sounds as though he ought to be conquering something."

"Henry?"

"Too ordinary."

"Arthur?"

"Too legendary."