Mary settled Tommy in his crib and covered him with the wool blanket. The baby’s eyes were already heavy, the bath having done its work. Evander stood beside her and looked down at Tommy’s face, round and flushed from the warm water, and the feeling that moved through him was the same feeling that had moved through him in the nursery at midnight, vast and unnamed, and this time he did not try to push it away.
“Have you thought about what I said?”
Mary’s hands stilled on the blanket’s edge. She did not look at him. “I have thought of little else.”
“And?”
Mary straightened. She turned to face him, and her eyes were clear and dry and terribly calm. The composure of a woman who had made a decision and was not going to let it break her, even if the cost of it was visible in the set of her mouth.
“I accept.”
Evander exhaled. The relief he expected did not arrive. In its place came something heavier, something that sat against his ribs and pressed.
“But I need to know how it is done.”
Evander blinked. “How is what done?”
Mary’s cheeks flushed. The calm composure cracked, just slightly, and beneath it, Evander caught a flash of the vulnerability she had been hiding.
“The act itself, Evander. No one has told me. My mother died when I was young, and Charlotte was the elder sister, and she never—” Mary pressed her lips together. “I know the generalities. I am not a child. But the specifics have not been made available to me, and I would rather not discover them without some preparation.”
Evander stared at her. He had not considered this. In the cold mathematics of his offer, in the careful construction of a proposal that gave Mary a child while protecting himself from the risk of loving her, he had not once thought about the fact that his wife, his twenty-one-year-old wife who had never been touched, would need someone to explain what would happen between them.
The realization landed with a force that knocked the composure from his face.
“Mary—”
A knock at the nursery door. Hattie stood in the corridor, pink-cheeked and breathless.
“Your Graces, forgive the interruption. A guest has arrived. The footmen have returned, and they’ve brought?—”
“Charlotte.” Mary’s voice was barely a whisper. Her hand flew to her mouth. “Charlotte is here.”
She was past Hattie and through the door before Evander could speak. Her footsteps ran down the corridor, hit the staircase, and descended at a pace no duchess should attempt in house slippers.
Evander followed.
“Oh, God. Oh, Mary!”
The woman in the parlor was taller than Evander had expected.
Fair-haired, as Richard had described, with blue eyes swollen from crying, and a traveling dress creased from the road.
She stood in the center of the room with her hands clasped and her face blotched and her chin trembling, and the moment Mary appeared in the doorway, Lady Charlotte Gillies made a sound that was not a word but held every word she had not spoken in months.
Mary crossed the room and took her sister in her arms.
Evander stayed in the doorway. He watched the two women hold each other, Charlotte’s face buried in Mary’s shoulder, Mary’s hand pressed flat against the back of her sister’s head, both of them shaking.
Charlotte wept openly, her body heaving, and Mary held her the same way she held Tommy when he cried, with the steady, unbreakable grip of someone who would not let go until the storm passed.
“I’m sorry.” Charlotte’s voice was muffled against Mary’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Mary. I’m sorry?—”
“I know.” Mary’s voice broke. “I know you are.”
They stood like that for a long time. Evander did not move. He understood, with the instinct of a man who had spent his lifeobserving from doorways, that this moment did not belong to him.
Charlotte pulled back and gripped Mary’s hands. Her eyes were raw. “Tommy. Is he?—”