Watching Sophie unswaddle the baby, Vim decided that was a good thing. This time tomorrow, he’d be across the river and headed for Kent, just as he’d promised Higgins.
* * *
Sophie hadn’t wanted Vim to see the collection of misfits she kept in the stables. She wasn’t ashamed of them by any means, but she was… protective. Each animal contributed somehow, to the best of its ability, but most people didn’t see that. They saw only the ridiculousness of a draft animal who turned to a one-ton blancmange at the sight of a whip, or a mouser who was hunting with half his weapons dulled by injury.
Vim hadn’t laughed.
She could not save every animal in the knacker’s yard, she couldn’t find a home for every cat yowling under the summer moon, but she could help those few in her care.
Vim finished getting out of his winter gear and peered down at the baby.
“I’d say stuff some nuncheon into his gullet and put him down for a nap.”
“I wanted to do some baking this afternoon,” Sophie said. “His nap would be a good time to do it.”
“His nap would be a good time for you to rest, Sophie Windham. He’ll keep you up half the night tonight too, you know, and I won’t be around tomorrow to spell you if you need forty winks.”
He gave her a fulsome look, as if willing her to acknowledge his impending departure.
“Then tomorrow Kit and I will practice napping at the same time. I boiled some apples this morning. Do you think he’d like to try them mashed into his porridge?”
Porridge had never disappeared more quickly, Sophie was sure of it, and it gave her a little dose of pleasure to think the apples had been her idea. While she fed the baby, Vim busied himself constructing a sort of sugar tit with a wad of clean sponge, a laundered handkerchief, and some sewing cord. Kit took to it easily, slurping away like he’d been doing it since birth.
Which he might have been, though Sophie couldn’t recall seeing anybody feed the child except Joleen, and that not often.
“It’s my turn to do a nappy,” Vim said. “You burp him, and I’ll bring his cradle down here then tend to his wardrobe, so to speak.”
“You think he’ll sleep in the kitchen?”
“It’s warm, and you’ll be here puttering about. He should sleep easily enough now that we’ve tired him out.”
Sophie watched Vim disappear up the back steps, wondering how she’d cope when he wasn’t on hand to discuss every little decision with her.
To add mashed apples or not?
To take the child outside or keep him in the house?
To put the cradle in the parlor down the hall or set it in the kitchen?
There had been a moment out by the back gate, when she’d been trying to explain about Elizabeth’s name, and the kindness had come back into Vim’s eyes. She’d wanted to trespass on that kindness, to beg the man to stay one more day. She could honestly say she wanted his help with the child, but the truth was, she’d almost gone up on her toes and kissed his cheek.
Or his mouth. She found the idea of kissing his mouth increasingly hard to ignore, as was the idea of running her hands over the muscles of his chest, or the thought of his bare skin under her fingertips.
She hadn’t kissed him, because he’d be kind about that, as well. Then too, several other homes backed up to the alley, and at least two had a clear view to the Windhams’ garden gate. Bad enough Sophie could be seen coming and going from the house on the arm of a strange man. How much worse if she’d been observed kissing him in broad daylight?
“The snow is trying to make up its mind,” Vim said, bumping down the back stairs with the cradle held under one long arm. “It’s coming down in fits and starts now, not as steadily as it did yesterday.”
“Then it’s sure to taper off soon.” Sophie injected as much false cheer into her voice as she could. Not only would she have to say good-bye to Vim Charpentier when the snow stopped, she’d have to accept her brothers’ escort out to Morelands and very likely turn Kit over the care of a foster family.
“What has put that look on your face, Sophie?”
“What look?” She laid the child in the cradle where Vim had set it near the hearth.
“Like you just lost your best friend.”
“I was thinking of fostering Kit.” And just like that, she was blinking back tears. She tugged the blankets up around the baby, who immediately set about kicking them away. “Naughty baby,” she whispered. “You’ll catch a chill.”
“Sophie?” A large male hand landed on her shoulder. “Sophie, look at me.”
She shook her head and tried again to secure Kit’s blankets.
“My dear, you are crying.” Another hand settled on the opposite shoulder, and now the kindness was palpable in his voice. Vim turned her gently into his embrace and wrapped both arms around her.
It wasn’t a careful, tentative hug. It was a secure embrace. He wasn’t offering her a fleeting little squeeze to buck her up, he was holding her, his chin propped on her crown, the entire solid length of his body available to her for warmth and support.
Which had the disastrous effect of turning a trickle of tears into a deluge.
“I can’t keep him.” She managed four words around the lump in her throat. “To think of him being passed again into the keeping of strangers… I can’t…”
“Hush.” He held a hanky up to her nose, one laden with the bergamot scent she already associated with him. For long minutes, Sophie struggled to regain her equilibrium while Vim stroked his hand slowly over her back.
“Babies do this,” Vim said quietly. “They wear you out physically and pluck at your heartstrings and coo and babble and wend their way into your heart, and there’s nothing you can do stop it. Nobody is asking you to give the child up now.”
“They won’t have to ask. In my position, I can’t be keeping somebody else’s castoff—” She stopped, hating the hysterical note that had crept into her voice and hating that she might have just prompted the man to whom she was clinging to ask her what exactly her position was.
“Kit is not a castoff. He’s yours, and you’re keeping him. Maybe you will foster him elsewhere for a time, but he’ll always be yours too.”
She didn’t quite follow the words rumbling out of him. She focused instead on the feel of his arms around her, offering support and security while she parted company temporarily with her dignity.
“You are tired, and that baby has knocked you off your pins, Sophie Windham. You’re borrowing trouble if you try to sort out anything more complicated right now than what you’ll serve him for dinner.”
She’d grown up with five brothers, and she’d watched her papa in action any number of times. She knew exactly what Vim was up to, but she took the bait anyway.
“He loved the apples.”
This time when Vim offered her his handkerchief, she took it, stepping back even as a final sigh shuddered through her.
“He loves to eat,” Vim said, “the same as any healthy male. What were you thinking of baking today?”
Another seemingly innocuous question, but Sophie let him lead her by small steps away from the topic of Kit’s uncertain future.
“I was going to make stollen, a recipe from my grandmother’s kitchens. I make it only around the holidays, and my brothers will be expecting it.”
“May I help?”
She was certain he’d never intended to offer such a thing, certain he’d never done Christmas baking in his life. “There’s a lot of chopping to do, depending on the version we make. Do you like dates?”
They discussed Christmas baking and sweets in general, then various exotic dishes Vim had encountered on his travels. Sophie had to brush the white flour off Vim’s cheek when he offered to take a turn kneading the dough, and Vim snitched sweets shamelessly. Sophie scolded him until he popped a half a candied date in her mouth, and when she would have scolded him for that, he fed her the other half.
While the baby, oblivious to the adult
s laughing and teasing and even getting some baking done around him, slept contentedly in his cradle.
* * *
“Now this is odd.”
Percival Windham folded the copy of The Times he’d been enjoying with his late afternoon tea and peered at his duchess.
“What’s odd, my love?” He topped off her tea and passed her the cup.
“Murial Chattell has written to say they just made it out to Surrey before the storm struck London, and the weather is being blamed for her daughter’s early lying-in.”
“Popping out another one is she? Old Chattell will be bruiting that about in the clubs until Easter.”
His bride of more than three decades gave him the amused, tolerant look of a woman who could read her husband like the proverbial book. “Don’t fret, Husband. Devlin and Valentine are both putting their shoulders to the wheel, so to speak. There will be more grandbabies soon.”
And Emmie and Ellen were mighty fetching inspiration for a man to pull his share of the marital load. Her Grace, as always, had a point.
The point she’d been trying to make belatedly struck him. “Sophie was supposed to be spending time with Chattell’s middle girl, wasn’t she?”
Her Grace took a placid sip of tea. A deceptively placid sip of tea. “That was Sophie’s plan.”
“That girl takes entirely too much after her mother, if you ask me.”
“Oh?”
What a wealth of meaning a married woman could put into one syllable.
“You, my love, are subtle. A braver man might even say devious when you want to achieve your ends. You agreed to Sophie’s plan to linger in Town with friends because the Chattells boast a houseful of empty-headed sons whom Sophie could wrap around her dainty finger, were she so inclined.”
“But Sophie is not with the Chattells, Percy.” A small frown creased Her Grace’s brow. Had they been anywhere but His Grace’s private study, she wouldn’t have given even that much away. “Muriel mentions how crowded the traveling coach was with the two younger girls and all their winter finery, and she goes on and on about the difficulty of traveling in such bad weather. She does not mention Sophie.”
His Grace enjoyed very much the machinations necessary for parliamentary schemes. He enjoyed advising the Regent on national and foreign policy when that overfed fellow deigned to listen. His Grace enjoyed very, very much the company of his grandchildren, and there was no greater joy in his life than his marriage.
He did not always precisely enjoy being a father, much less a father ten times over, much much less the father of five single females, all of whom were arguably of marriageable age.
“If Sophie were a boy, we would not worry,” he pointed out.
“Yes, we would.”
They’d buried two grown sons. Yes, they would worry. They would always worry.
“Shall I go back up to Town, my love? People always exaggerate descriptions of inconvenient weather. I’m sure the roads can’t be as impassable as all that when there are only a few inches of snow on the ground hereabouts.”
“No, you shall not.” Her Grace put a little scold in her words. “We have three strapping sons who are on their way to collect Lady Sophia as we speak. If Sophie is up to something unsound, better her brothers sort her out at this stage than her parents.”
“You’re sure?” Something had shifted in Her Grace’s relationship with their sons in recent months, possibly as a function of all three acquiring wives. If she was delegating management of Sophie to the boys, then it was only because Her Grace was well and truly not concerned about the girl.
“Percival Windham, you are proposing to go haring off in the dead of winter with a storm of biblical proportions raging just to the north and west, while I sit here and do what? Worry about you in addition to the four of our offspring who are not now under our roof ? I think not.”
“Just making sure, my love. More tea?”
She smiled at him, his reward for helping her make up her mind. If Sophie were up to mischief, His Grace was privately of the opinion it was about damned time, provided the mischief involved a suitable swain. Sophie was wasting her youth tending to the halt and the lame when she ought to be about snabbling a handsome specimen to help provide her dear parents with some chubby little… to help her fill her nursery.
His Grace opened the paper to the financial section. An attempt to read the contents thereof was about as soporific as a tot of the poppy, but it was a fine excuse to let his mind drift off to which young men of his acquaintance he might consider worthy of his most sensible daughter.
If any.
* * *
Some vital male brain function had been impaired during the few minutes Vim had held Sophie Windham in his arms. Badly impaired—impaired as if some part of him had been aching sorely for a long time, though it had taken the feel of that one woman in his embrace to make him aware of his own hurt.
And now he could not focus on much else.
He liked her, was the problem. Or part of it. The other part was he desired her, which made no sense. Of course he desired her the way any healthy male would desire any attractive woman, but this was… different.
Vim had been a sexual friend to any number of women, and they’d been happy to return the favor. Romping was merely… romping. A wink and a smile, and both parties could be on their way, an itch having been adequately scratched for the nonce.
Sophie was not a woman to romp with. She was a woman a man could spend years learning to cherish.
“You can put those in the batter now.” She gestured with her wooden spoon as if to remind Vim they were trying to put the baby’s nap to some use besides encouraging Vim’s rampant sexual fantasies. He picked up the cutting board and shifted to scrape a pile of finely chopped dates into the bowl of pale batter.
Baking was an activity designed to part a sane—and mildly aroused—man from his wits. Sophie had him pouring things into her bowls, standing right beside her, brushing arms and bodies and hands. She asked him to taste the batter, putting a spoonful of sweetness right into his mouth before he could protest or move away.
While they worked, she gently interrogated him, and he let her, because it gave him something to think of besides the sensation of her soft, full breast pressing against his arm when she leaned across him to retrieve the cinnamon.
“Didn’t you miss your family on all those long journeys?”
He accepted the tin of cinnamon back from her, their fingers brushing again as he did. “They are my half siblings, though we were all raised together. I missed them, but there was a sense too of not wanting to impose. The estate in Cumbria is theirs, not mine.”
She stopped stirring for moment and frowned at him. “My oldest brother and sister suffer from this same affliction. It’s as if Devlin in particular must always remind himself that he’s half our brother, and therefore half not our brother. He has nigh broken my mother’s heart with this nonsense. Nutmeg next.”
“Broken your mother’s heart, how?” He passed her the nutmeg, enjoying the little heat that sparked where their hands touched. He’d done it deliberately that time, and she wasn’t exactly storming off with indignation.
“Mama loves Devlin, but she’s not his mama, so she’s kept her distance out of respect for his feelings for his real mama. It’s gotten better since Dev married. Do you suppose there’s such a thing as too much spice?”
Interesting question. “I don’t know. We’ll have to have a little taste.”
Before his better judgment could interfere, Vim took Sophie’s hand in his, dragged her index finger through the batter, and brought her finger to his mouth. He swirled his tongue around the end of her finger and withdrew it slowly from his mouth.
“Seems perfect to me.” He kept her hand trapped in his own, abruptly aware that what he’d done was about as blatantly sexual as if he’d just dropped his breeches and started stroking himself before her very eyes.
She smiled at him, withdrew her hand, and passed h
im the nutmeg. “Then it’s time to put it in the oven. Tell me about your home.” She turned to pour the batter into a greased pan, and the moment passed, which was both a relief and a disappointment.
A relief, because her self-possession hinted she might have some experience, and an experienced woman was fair game—as housekeeper, companion, lady’s maid, or whatever she was, Sophie might have allowed herself some discreet sexual recreation.
And she might allow herself just a little more.
The disappointment was because he’d like at that very moment to sit her up on the sturdy counter and step between her legs until those legs were wrapped around his flanks, urging him into her heat. He watched her bending down to put the—what was it they’d been making?—into the oven, and yet more lascivious images crowded into his mind.
She’d asked him something, though. Something about…
“I’m not sure I have a home.”
She straightened and closed the oven door. “Surely you dwell somewhere when you’re not on your travels.” The look she sent him was far too serious for the concentration he could muster.
“I have properties. There’s a lovely old place in Surrey where I spend a few weeks most years. I suppose that qualifies.”
She began putting things away. “You travel all the time?”
Something in her manner suggested she wasn’t finding the topic pleasant.
“I used to spend some of my winters up in Cumbria with one of my sisters. I’ve occasionally bunked in with my brother here in Town, and I often check in with my younger sister wherever she’s governessing, but as I’ve mentioned, my sisters are married now and starting families.”
Vim brought a kettle of hot water from the pot swing in the fireplace and poured half the contents into the dishpan, then added some cool water as Sophie began stacking dirty dishes by the sink.
Standing beside her, he tried to fathom what emotion was radiating from her and failed.
“Then what is this travel to Kent about?” she asked. “You seem quite intent on it.”
Was that the bee in her bonnet?
“Kent is the family seat on my father’s side. When my mother remarried, I went with her to Cumbria. I’m not sure my uncle was comfortable with the arrangement, but he never protested. Shall I wash while you dry?”
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