Lady Sophie's Christmas Wish

Five

It wasn’t a mews, it was a menagerie.

As Sophie introduced Kit to the end of Goliath’s nose, Vim’s gaze scanned the interior of what should have been ducal stables. For some reason, Miss Sophie held sufficient sway over the household that she could command space in the barn for a little brindle milk cow with one horn, another hulking draft horse which looked to Vim to be blind in one eye, and a small cat missing one eye, part of an ear, and all of a front paw. Vim had no doubt if he inspected the rest of the premises, he’d find yet more strays and castoffs in her keeping.

“Kit likes Goliath,” Sophie said, taking the child’s tiny fingers and stroking them over the largest Roman nose in captivity. “But then, who would not love my precious, hmm?”

She leaned over and kissed the horse’s muzzle, a great loud smacker of a kiss that had the baby chortling with delight. Kit swung a fist toward the horse, but Sophie leaned away before the child could connect.

“Come meet wee Sampson, my other precious.” She moved off down the shed row as Higgins came shuffling up to Vim’s elbow.

“She’ll be in here half the morning, dotin’ on them buggers.”

“Where does she find them?”

Higgins hitched his britches up and frowned. “She just does. She come upon Sampson at the smithy when they was blinding him for work at the mill. Miss Sophie wouldn’t have none of that, no matter the colonel tried to explain to her a half-blind horse is worse than one with no sight at all.”

“A horse that size could turn the millstone handily.”

“Not if he’s got sight in one eye, he can’t. He’d fall down dizzy after an hour in the traces.”

“Who’s the colonel?”

“Her oldest brother. Good fellow with a horse. Was in the cavalry all acrost Spain and at Waterloo.”

Sophie was making every bit as big a fuss over the second horse as she had the first. She held the baby up on the side of the horse’s good eye and spoke quietly to horse and baby both.

“Why did she name her tom cat Elizabeth?” It was a silly question, but some part of Vim wanted to know this detail.

“Ye’d have to ask her. It’s something Frenchified.”

She knew French, and she had a brother who’d made the rank of colonel—not an easy or inexpensive feat.

“Mr. Sharp-an-tee-air?”

Vim glanced down at the little man standing beside him. “Mr. Higgins?”

“I know Miss Sophie has took the nipper in, and that’s a sizeable task for any woman, much less one what hasn’t got any nippers of her own.”

Ah, the stable gnome was working up to a lecture. Sophie didn’t need to lecture Vim, she had minions assigned to the task. “She’s managing quite well, and it’s mostly common sense.”

“And lord knows, the girl has got common sense.” Higgins’s frown became more focused. “About most things, that is.”

“Spit it out, Higgins. Once she’s done petting that bedraggled cat, she’ll turn her attention on you and start ordering you to consume all those buns and refrain from shoveling snow and so on.”

“All I’m saying is her family sets great store by her, and they’d take it amiss did any mischief befall our Miss Sophie.”

“I’m coming to set great store by the lady too, Higgins. But for her, I’d be cooling my heels in some taproom, nothing to occupy me but watered ale, cards, and occasional trips to a privy as malodorous as it was cold.”

“Then you’ll be moving along here directly, won’t you, sir? Wouldn’t want the girl’s family to come to troublesome mis-conclusions, would we?”

Higgins’s rheumy blue eyes promised a world of retribution if Vim attempted to argue.

“Settle your feathers, Higgins. I stayed only at the lady’s express request in order to acquaint her with some basics regarding care and feeding of an infant. If you’re equipped to step in, please do, because I’m on my way as soon as the weather permits—tomorrow at first light, if at all possible.”

And he wanted to go. He just didn’t relish the idea of hours in a mail coach trying to slog its way through the drifts. Hours of cold, hours of the wheezing, coughing companionship of other travelers…

His gaze fell on Sophie where she was crouched in the aisle having some sort of conversation with the bedraggled little cat and the baby.

“Her hems will never come clean.”

He hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud until Higgins snorted quietly. “And she’ll never care a whit if they do, either. That is one smart bebby, that Kit. He’s made a good trade.”

“You didn’t think much of the mother?” For God’s sake, the girl had been only sixteen years old.

“She set her cap for young Harry, Joleen did, and damn the consequences. Their Graces turned Harry out, but they give him a character, see? He kept coming around here on the sly, meeting with Joleen and whispering in her ear, if you know what I mean. Last I heard, he was taking passage for Boston.”

Higgins meant a pregnant girl couldn’t get any more pregnant, so an enterprising and conscienceless young man would keep swiving her for his own pleasure.

“I seen Harry prowling around last week, that girl about shivering herself to death waiting for him in the garden. She’s run off to her Harry and left little Kit to shift for hisself.”

“He’s shifting quite well. I’m not sure a baby ever found any better care than Kit is getting.”

“Because Miss Sophie has a soft heart. Her family thinks she’s sensible, but she’s like Westhaven. They’re sensible because somebody in the family has to be sensible, but neither of ’em is as sensible as all that.”

Vim tried to translate what was and wasn’t being said.

“You’re saying sometimes one acts sensibly out of regard for one’s family, not because one finds it a naturally agreeable course.” And God help him, Vim could testify to the truth of that sentiment.

Higgins nodded. “That says it right enough. You’ll be leaving in the morning?”

“Come hell or high water, I intend to.”

Sophie was smiling at the baby, who was making a determined play for the cat’s nose. Vim expected the beast to issue the kind of reprimand children remembered long after the scratches had healed, but the cat instead walked away, all the more dignified for its missing parts.

“He must go terrorize mice,” Sophie said, rising with the child in her arms.

“You’re telling me that cat still mouses?” Vim asked, taking the baby from her in a maneuver that was beginning to feel automatic.

“Of course Pee Wee mouses.” Sophie turned a smile on him. “A few battle scars won’t slow a warrior like him down.”

“A name like Pee Wee might.”

She wrapped her hand into the crook of his elbow as they started across the alley. “Elizabeth gets more grief over his name than Pee Wee does.”

“And rightly so. Why on earth would you inflict a feminine name on a big, black tom cat?”

“I didn’t name him Elizabeth. I named him Bête Noir, after the French for black beast. Merriweather started calling him Betty Knorr after some actress, which was a tad too informal for such an animal, and hence he became Elizabeth. He answers to it now.”

Vim suppressed the twitching of his lips, because this explanation was delivered with a perfectly straight face. “I suppose all that counts is that the cat recognizes it. It isn’t as if the cats were going to comprehend the French.”

“It’s silly.” She paused inside the garden gate, her expression self-conscious.

He stopped with her on the path, cradling the baby against his chest and trying to fathom what she needed to hear at the moment. “To the cat it isn’t silly, Sophie. To him, your kindness and care are the difference between life and death.”

“He’s just a cat.” But she looked pleased with Vim’s observations.

“And this is just a baby. Come.” He took her gloved hand in his. “Kit has had his outing, and so have you. I was hoping the snow would stop, but it seems to be coming down harder again.”

She kept her hand in his and let him escort her back into the warmth and coziness of the kitchen. As short as the daylight was in December, between the child’s bath, the shoveling, and the excursion to the mews, the day was half gone.

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 adults 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 him 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?”

“I will not refuse a man’s offer to wash dishes in my kitchen.”

She still did not sound precisely happy.

“Tell me of your home,” Vim suggested, using a rag to start washing the mixing bowl in the warm, soapy water.

“It’s beautiful. Big but cozy. It will always be home.”

“Do you miss it?”

She accepted the clean bowl from his hand, frowning as she did. “There comes a point where the familiar can feel more like a prison than a haven, though in truth it’s neither. It’s a home, a place laden with memories, nothing more and nothing less.”

Vim stared at the water. “A place with obligations too.”

“What sort of obligations?”

Now why had he brought up this mare’s nest of unpleasant associations?

“My uncle is getting older, and he refuses to hire new staff. My aunt has never been a traditionally practical woman, and their daughters are no help whatsoever.”

“Do you worry for them?”

“Oh, of course.”

Something in his tone must have given him away. Sophie put a hand on his sleeve. “What aren’t you saying? If you worry about them, you must love them.”

“I hardly know them, Sophie. They’re my only paternal family, but I’ve never…”

She was standing right beside him, her big green eyes holding a world of compassion Vim did not want directed at him. He did not deserve it, certainly not from her.

“Sophie, I want to kiss you.”

He’d meant to state it as a problem, a small, troubling matter she needed to take into consideration when she stood so close. It came out sounding like a prayer, like the most fervent wish hoarded up in a tired, lonely heart that had long since lost the courage to wish.

She set aside the towel in her hand while Vim watched her mouth in anticipation of a gentle, even kind, rebuke.

And then the baby let loose with a loud, indignant squall.

Sophie didn’t want to kiss Vim Charpentier; she wanted to gobble him up like a holiday sweet, to gorge herself on the feel and taste and scent and sound of him.

Which was… disquieting. She’d been kissed before, fondled, groped, pulled into dark alcoves and promised all manner of outrageous pleasure when it became apparent she wasn’t entertaining offers of marriage.

Some of it she’d found… intriguing, but not intriguing enough to risk the consequences.

Thank God for fussy babies. They gave a woman time to recover her balance and assess what it meant when a man did not kiss a lady but announced that he wanted to.

“Let me try.” Vim took the small spoon from her hand—no flirtation there—and addressed himself to the baby. “If you refuse your victuals, young Kit, we will spank you soundly and send you to bed quite hungry indeed. I will eat them up myself, in fact. Yummy warm porridge with plenty of juicy apple mashed into it. How can a man—even such a wee man as you—refuse such ambrosia?”

“We will not spank you,” Sophie interjected. “Not until you are at least as big as Vim.”

When the baby spat out another mouthful of his dinner, Vim sat back, a puzzled expression on his face. “The boy is in a mood about something. We can try again later, and he’ll probably eat a double portion.”

He tried putting the baby back in the cradle, which provoked more fussing and kicking.

Sophie took Kit from Vim’s arms. “He wants cuddling.”

By the time darkness had fallen, they’d both had turns holding the infant, rocking him, and distracting him with trips to the window. While Sophie took the last of the cakes and muffins from the oven, Vim toured the kitchen with the baby in his arms.

“You never did tell me about your family seat,” Sophie said. Thanks to Kit’s fussiness, there had been no opportunity to revisit Vim’s startling pronouncement regarding that other business.

That business about kissing her. About wanting to kiss her.

“It’s a pretty enough place,” Vim said. “The main part is a Tudor manor with sprawling grounds. My aunt is quite the landscaper. Uncle likes to fish, so we have two ornamental lakes and several ponds.”

“And you will inherit this property?”

“For my sins, yes.”

She paused in the middle of wrapping the bread in muslin. “Do I take it you have bad memories of this place?”

He touched noses with the baby, which Sophie accounted a stalling tactic.

“I have few memories one way or the other. My father died when I was quite young, and then we removed to Cumbria. I spent a few holidays in Kent when I was at University, but my uncle didn’t issue many invitations. My siblings in Cumbria seemed to need some looking after, so I bided there more than anywhere else. That bread smells heavenly.”

“When it cools, we’ll have some. Kit seems quieter.”

“Shall we try to feed him again?”

It was a good suggestion. Sophie didn’t for a minute believe Vim had told her more than a superficial glossing over of the truth, but concern for the child won out over her curiosity.

Then too, if she pried too closely into Vim’s situation, he might feel entitled to pry into hers, which would not serve in the least. A man might announce a desire to kiss a housekeeper or other domestic, but he’d never risk offending a duke’s daughter with such forwardness.

Fortunately, the child ate prodigiously, as Vim had predicted. Sophie cut fat wedges of bread for her and Vim, added a dish of butter to the tray, and followed Vim and the child down the hallway to the servants’ parlor.

They put the baby on his nest of blankets, and while Kit seemed to enjoy the change of scenery, he made no move to get up on all fours but stayed on his belly or his back, content to watch as Sophie and Vim ate their buttered bread.

“I should have made you a proper dinner,” Sophie said. “I wonder how women with large families ever get anything done.”

Vim looked over from where he was letting Kit gnaw on his finger. “You’re from a large family.”

“My mother had scads of help. Does that child’s diaper need changing?”

Vim inhaled through his nose. “Not yet. Will you be all right when I leave tomorrow, Sophie?”

She was glad he’d brought it up, but she would not ask him to stay. Men of a certain ilk could sit still only so long before all around them suffered for it.

And what difference would one more day make? Whether Vim knew it or not, she was still Lady Sophia Windham, with a baby to find a decent home for, and he was a man whom she was convinced never bided any one place long enough to call it home.

“We’ll manage.” She started tidying up the remains of their meal. “My brothers will show up in a day or so, and two of them are parents.”

“I do believe His Highness is yawning.”

Subject changed. He’d wanted reassurances that she’d be able to manage, nothing more. Well, she wanted some things from him too.

“Let’s see if we can’t read him to sleep,” Sophie suggested. She went to the bookshelves and pulled down a volume of Wordsworth’s poetry. There was a copy in the library as well, but that version would not have dog-eared pages or a spine cracked and creased with frequent readings.

She didn’t realize Vim was standing behind her until she bumped into him when she turned around.

“Steady.” His hands closed around her upper arms then dropped away. “What have you found for us?”

“Poetry. Nice, calm, pastoral poetry to read a fussy young man to sleep.”

“What sort of household is this, Sophie, that the servants read poetry?”

“A proper English house. Bring My Lord Baby to the sofa.” She sat a little left of the middle of the sofa, so Vim would have to sit either near her or very near her. He scooped Kit up in a blanket and obligingly took the place to her left, right next to her, which allowed him to prop his elbow on the sofa’s armrest.

“I vote you read and we fellows will listen in rapt silence.”

“And thus Kit is indoctrinated into the conspiracy to which all males belong,” Sophie muttered.

“And you ladies don’t have conspiracies of your own?” He brought the child to his shoulder and started rubbing Kit’s little back. The sight sent odd tendrils of warmth drifting through Sophie’s insides.

“We women are cooperative by nature; that’s different from conspiratorial.”

She chose a poem at random, not so much to have the last word as to distract her thoughts from the man beside her. Vim was holding Kit with just as much affection and care as if the baby were his own child.

Which he was not. Kit wasn’t her child, either. She must not forget this. Sophie paused, blinked, and tried to recall her place. She had most of the book half-memorized, which meant it was little help when notions of parting from Kit came stealing relentlessly into her brain.

While she was making a pretense of choosing another poem, something warm settle on the back of her neck.

Vim’s hand. He’d said nothing. His body hadn’t shifted. He still held the child in the crook of his arm, but he was touching Sophie too. His thumb was making slow circles on her nape, sending a melting warmth down her spine and up into her brain.

“Read more slowly, Sophie. I think Kit’s dropping off.”

She nodded carefully so as not to dislodge the wondrous gift of his hand on her person. When she read again, she could barely focus on the words, so drunk was she with the sensation of Vim Charpentier’s touch on the bare skin of her neck.

She’d wished for things from him before he left, things no decent woman admitted to wanting, things she could never have asked for in words.

And this slow, sweet touch was part and parcel of what she’d wished for.

There was something fundamentally aberrant about a man who could sit with an infant propped in one arm and still have erotic thoughts about the woman encircled with the other arm. Though they weren’t truly erotic thoughts.

They were more the kind of thoughts that noticed the way firelight brought out red highlights in Sophie Windham’s hair, or saw how graceful the curve of her cheek was, or heard the sheer cultured beauty of her voice as she did Wordsworth proud. The poetry made Vim miss the Lakes, from whence the poet drew inspiration, where Vim’s younger siblings were gathering for the holidays.

A man could breathe in Cumbria. He could ramble for hours on the fells with no company but the land, the sheep, the gorgeous sky, and his own thoughts. Mental images of the Cumbrian countryside had sustained Vim on many a journey, but they filled him now with a peculiar kind of loneliness.

Beside him, Sophie fell silent.

“He’s asleep.” Vim whispered the words, unwilling to disturb the child or the moment. When Sophie made no move to leave the sofa, he stroked his hand along the side of her head, reveling in the feel of her warm, silky hair.

She put the book aside, and the next time Vim caressed her hair, she sighed and turned her face into his shoulder. They stayed like that for a long time, while the fire burned down and both thought of what might have been and what could never be.