Guilty Series (89 page)

Hill rose to her feet when he came in and bobbed a curtsy. He walked to her side and looked into the cradle. The baby was asleep in his white nightshirt, a plain one, and there was a linen cap on his head. Dark hair stuck out from beneath it, wispy strands of it over closed eyes with absurdly long dark lashes.

John stared at the infant for a moment, reached down and touched his finger tentatively to the baby's hand, then pulled back. “He's so small.”

“He'll grow, my lord.” Hill looked at him and smiled. “He's only a month old now, I'd say. Plenty of growing yet to do.”

The baby's eyes opened at the sound of their voices. Brown eyes stared up at him. Brandy brown, like his own.

“Hullo, James,” he said, and looked at the maid. “I want to hold him, but he seems so fragile.”

“No baby's that fragile,” she said, smiling with all the indulgence of a woman for male absurdities. “A baby's always ready to be held. It's just with a baby this young, you have to be sure to support his neck.”

He pulled off his coat and threw it aside. “Show me.”

He watched as the girl lifted the baby out of the crib, noting the position of her hands, one under James's bottom and one securely behind his head. She placed the baby in the crook of his arm, and John sank into the chair beside the crib.

“Am I doing this right?”

“You might have been holding babies all your life, my lord,” Hill said, reminding him of that night at Tremore House when Beckham had made a similar comment. He hoped they were right, because he was going to be the best damn father in all England. Right now, however, he felt he was in way over his head.

James closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep again with a little sigh.

Hill sighed, too. “Right sweet that is, if you don't mind my saying so, my lord.”

He didn't mind.

She gave a little cough. “If you please, sir, I need to be getting some fresh laundry for him. He'll need changing any time now. Do you want to give him back, and I'll take him with me?”

He shook his head, gazing at his son. “Not a bit of it. I'm not giving him over. Go on to the laundry, Hill. I'll stay here and watch him until you get back.”

“Oh, no, sir!” She sounded horrified. “I couldn't leave you. What if he started to cry and fuss? Men hate that.”

“I won't hate it.” He looked up. “Hill, get that worried frown off your pretty face and go.”

He winked at her and smiled, and that made her laugh. He was still a shameless flirt. Probably always would be. Ah, well.

The girl bobbed a curtsy, then left the room, and he was alone with his son.

He touched the baby's cheek. It was the softest thing he'd ever felt in his life. “We'll buy you an estate,” he said, thinking out loud. “And railway stocks.”

James stirred, making a distressed sound in his sleep.

“What's wrong with railway stocks?” John murmured. “Railways are the way of the future. You watch and see if I'm not right. With an estate and good investments, you'll be a rich man by the time you're out of Cambridge.”

His son hit him in the chest with one tiny fist, but did not wake up.

“Cambridge,” he repeated for emphasis. “Not Oxford.”

Brown eyes blinked open at the firmness of his voice, then closed again. The small mouth opened for a huge, uninterested yawn.

John laughed softly. “Bored by school already, my son? You won't know what boredom is until they throw Latin at you.” He smoothed the fine brown hair across the baby's forehead at the eyelet edge of the cap. “They'll be cruel, James. No getting around it. They'll call you a bastard, and I'm
sorry about that. But I'll teach you to keep your head up and act like you don't give a damn, because that's what a man has to do, you see.”

James stirred again, turning his face to the side, his nose brushing the ruffles of John's shirtfront. He grasped a handful of the ruffles, still asleep.

John looked down, staring at the tiny, perfect fingernails of his son, and something hot and fierce unfolded inside him. A powerful feeling of wonder and awe and love that filled the last crevices of the hole in his soul.

“I'll take care of you,” he said in a savage whisper. “Don't worry about a thing. I'll see that you have an income of your own, so you won't ever feel desperate or scared. And I'll be right there to see that you don't squander it on stupid things. No getting into debt. No deep stakes gambling. And about the women…”

He considered that for a moment, then sighed, giving in to the inevitable. “I know I'm going to lose if I even try to reason with you on that one.” Leaning closer, he pressed a kiss to his son's brow and murmured, “We won't tell Viola. She might get upset about that.”

If she comes home.

The thought whispered in his mind like a shiver in a cold room. If Viola didn't come home, what would he do?

That hideous feeling of helplessness returned,
the same thing he'd felt looking at her in the Wild Boar. He could tell she hadn't been all that impressed by his little speech. He couldn't even remember what he said, but it hadn't been witty, and it hadn't been clever, and it sure as hell hadn't been poetic. And there she'd sat, staring at him in complete astonishment, as if he was off his chump for even daring to follow her and talk about love after what had happened.

John knew there was nothing he could do to make her come home. Nothing he could say to undo the past or right his wrongs. Nothing. She wouldn't come back to him. After all, he was the one who had always done the walking away. No surprise if she turned the tables. He deserved it.

But desperate men did desperate things. He knew that better than anybody. Being a desperate man, he prayed. “Come home, Viola,” he said, holding his son and praying hard. “Just come home.”

 

Viola pressed her fist to her mouth, listening. Oh, how she loved this man. Always had. Always would.

She moved into the doorway and saw him sitting by the cradle. When she looked at him with the baby in his arms, her heart began to ache with a joy so sweet, she could hardly breathe. All her life she had dreamed romantic dreams of having the honest love of one good man. It wasn't a
dream anymore. It was life. And it wasn't the life she'd imagined at all. It wasn't easy, and it wasn't bliss, and it may have been paid for with tears and pain, and everyday was a lesson in learning to just get along. But it was real and it was precious and it was hers. From now on she was hanging onto that life and this man with everything she had.

She made a sound from the doorway, soft enough not to wake the baby, and he looked up. When he saw her, he didn't smile. He didn't move. He was as still as an image in a painting by Reynolds, with the sun washing over him and the child in his arms. She walked into the room. “I came to make up,” she said.

“You did?”

She nodded. “It was that speech,” she said, deciding not to tell him she'd never intended to leave. She'd tell him someday. Maybe. Or maybe not. “It was the most incoherent, rambling, beautiful thing I've ever heard.” She knelt by the chair. She put her hand on his knee. “I love you, too, by the way.”

He gave a short, disbelieving laugh. “I can't think why.”

Viola looked at her husband. Reaching up, she brushed back the unruly hair at his temple and smiled. “Because you keep tricking me.” She began to laugh. “You silver-tongued devil.”

“
I
want to go up.” John turned at the end of the long gallery at Hammond Park, chewing on his thumbnail as he came back toward the stairs. “Deuce take it, why can't I go up?”

Anthony poured a glass of port and brought it to him. “Husbands are not allowed,” he said for perhaps the twentieth time.

“Stupid,” John muttered, “since we're the cause of it all.” He raked a hand through his hair. He hated this waiting, this helplessness. He was so scared, he thought he was going to throw up.

His brother-in-law held out the glass. “Have another drink.”

“I don't want another drink. How can you be so damned calm about this?”

Anthony sighed and set the port on the table beneath a painting of the tenth Viscount Hammond, John's grandfather. “I know what you're feeling,
believe me. And I'm not calm. I'm just doing better at hiding it than you are.”

A cry floated to them from the nearby stairs, a cry of intense pain, smothered almost at once by the slam of a door. That cry tore his guts apart. “That's it,” he said, and started for the stairs. “I'm going up.”

Anthony hauled him back. “You can't.”

“Christ,” John muttered, and started pacing again. “It's been half the night already. How long does this take?”

“Forever.”

Footsteps sounded over their heads, but another hour went by, and no one came. John's fear deepened with each turn he took down the gallery, and he nearly came apart when he heard another cry of pain from his wife echoing down the stairs.

“I'm going up. She needs me.” Anthony made a grab for him, but he evaded it and started up the stairs. On the landing, he encountered Daphne coming down.

Nothing in John's life had ever felt like this moment. He stopped. “Viola?”

“She is well,” Daphne assured him. “I came down to tell you that because I thought you might be worried.”

“Worried?” That was so patently tame a description of how he felt that he almost laughed at her.

She put a hand on his arm. “Come,” she said, and started to guide him back down, but he re
sisted. “John,” she said with quiet firmness, “you cannot help. You will only get in the way. Come.”

He reluctantly allowed himself to be pulled back down the stairs.

“This sort of thing takes a long time,” Daphne told him. “I was in labor for two days.”

“God!” Two days of this and he'd go mad.

Daphne patted his back in a soothing motion. “She's doing well, truly.”

They returned to the gallery. “Everything is all right,” Daphne told Anthony, and went back upstairs.

It was another hour, another eternity, before Daphne came back down again. He was at the far end of the gallery when she called his name. “John?”

He came at a run and was halfway to her before she spoke again. “Now you can go up.”

“Is she all right?” he cried, racing past his sister-in-law.

“Yes,” she answered, following him as he started up the stairs.

He had to see that for himself. He took the stairs two at a time and entered the bedchamber, racing right past Dr. Morrison. John took one look at his wife, at her pale face and disheveled hair, and he skidded to a halt just inside the door, his heart in his throat.

She looked so tired.

“Viola.” He walked over to the side of the bed, and as he did so, he saw the baby in her arms, a red-faced, wailing bit of a thing with an absurdly tiny nose.

“Viola,” he said again, because he couldn't think of anything to say but her name. He sank to his knees next to the bed.

Her hand reached out, touched his hair. “What happened to that silver-tongued devil I married?” she murmured with a tired, throaty chuckle.

He shook his head violently, seized her hand in both of his and kissed it. What the hell was a man supposed to say at a time like this? There weren't any words.

“John,” she said as he half rose and kissed her cheek, her hair. “I'm all right. The baby's all right.”

“Sure?”

She nodded and bit her lip, looking at him. Then she spoke. “We have a girl.”

“Agirl?” Stunned, he sank back to his knees and looked at the baby again. He stared, watching her as her fierce, angry wails died away into hiccoughs and she nestled into the vee of Viola's open nightgown, seeking her breast. She's hungry, he thought.

A girl.

He leaned closer, studying the baby in the dim lamplight, and it was then that he saw the tiny mole at the corner of her mouth. Joy welled up in his chest like a wave. He began to laugh. A girl.

“She's gorgeous!” he cried. “By God, she is. She looks just like her mother!”

“Oh, stop,” Viola said, almost laughing.

“She does.” He turned to Daphne, who was standing by the door with the doctor. “Doesn't she?”

Daphne smiled. “I believe you are right.”

“Of course I am.” He turned back to his wife. “Look,” he said, touching the baby's head, smoothing the damp, fine, barely visible blond fuzz that passed for hair. “She's got your hair. And that little mole and, by heaven, she's got that pretty, pretty mouth.” He laughed again. “Her eyes are the color of pond mud, I'll wager a thousand pounds on it.”

This time Viola did laugh. “We won't know for a while. All babies are born with blue eyes. We'll have to wait and see.”

John didn't need to wait. He looked at his beautiful baby girl and he looked at his beautiful wife. Yes, he thought, eyes like pond mud, hair like golden sunlight, and a heart big enough to love even him. And he had a strong, healthy son sleeping upstairs in the nursery. Damn, how did an irresponsible, reckless scapegrace like him ever get so lucky?