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He thought of the way she looked at him when she believed he was being preposterous. That look was a marvel. It said, quite clearly, you are a very silly man and I have decided to bear it, and it made him want, more than anything, to be preposterous at her for the rest of his life.

He thought about the way she had held his nephew. How naturally. How unthinkingly, like someone catching water in her hands.

Gregory finished the whiskey and set down the glass.

She is going to marry you tomorrow, and you have hardly spoken to her in a week. That is a man who has clearly no idea what he is doing.

Someone knocked.

It was a small knock, timid and hurried, at the front door, two floors down. He sat where he was and waited for it to be a mistake. It came again. His butler, had retired at ten, and the footmen were abed, and no one whom Gregory knew knocked at a duke’s door at a quarter to two in the morning, so he got up, and lit a candle from the fire, and went down himself.

He had not expected to find her.

She stood on the step in a gray cloak, with her hood half back and her hair coming down at the side, her cheeks bright with cold and her slippers in her hand. There was a smear of dirt on the hem of her cloak. She looked as though she had run the last hundred yards. When she saw him, her chin went up, in that way she had, as though bracing for a blow.

“I need to see the baby,” said Phillipa.

“At this hour?” the Duke gave her a weary look. “I’m not sure if you’ve looked at the time, but it’s two in the morning.”

She rolled her eyes at him, as though she was put off by his comment.

“I am aware of that as well.” She stepped past him into the hall, glancing over her shoulder at the empty street, and he shut the door behind her without quite deciding to. She hovered, in the dim light of the candle, and looked at him with fierce and unhappy determination. “I need to see him. I know it is absurd. I know I should not have come. But I have to see him, Your Grace, tonight, before…”

“Gregory,” he corrected with ease, and took some satisfaction in the way that her eyes widened.

She blinked once, and then bit down on her lip, as though she was contemplating what he was suggesting.

“It’s only fair, don’t you think?” he continued, still observing her closely. “If you are going to break into my house, I think you might call me Gregory. One would imagine that the act requires or perhaps even necessitates being on a first name basis.” His voice came out gentler than he had intended. He put the candle down on the hall table and studied her face.

She was very pale and there were noticable shadows under her eyes.

“Fine, then. If I agree to this demand, will you agree to mine?”

“I didn’t say say I was offering a barter here,” he shrugged his shoulders.

“You cannot keep having everything your way,” she said, a hint of frustration seeping into her tone. It made him wonder what it would take to make her tick.

“Come upstairs to the drawing room. There is a fire. I will ring for the nursemaid.”

“There is no need for that, I’ve only come for a short while,” she tried to brush it off but he was having none of it.

“You are freezing, I can see it from here. Come.”

She followed him.

He did not touch her, though he had a strong and unaccountable desire to put his coat around her shoulders, and he installed her on the sofa before the embers and stirred them to life with the poker while a footman he had roused by the simple expedient of ringing three times fetched Martha, muffled and bewildered, from the nursery. By the time he turned around, Phillipa had risen again and was standing at the window with her arms wrapped around herself.

“Sit,” he said. “I beg you.”

“I cannot,” she shook her head.

“Then have a drink.”

He was rather ashamed of it afterward. He had only meant to give her something warm, and the decanter was to hand. He poured her a small measure of whiskey and put it into her fingers, and she looked at it as though it were a live thing, and then, with the air of a woman putting her hand to a hot stove, she drank.

Her face did something extraordinary.

It went scarlet. Her eyes watered as she made a small strangled noise, and pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth, standing there for several seconds with her shoulders shaking. Gregory stared at the wall with fixed attention and bit the inside of his cheek.