Chapter 1
Love
“I’m so enormous.”
The groan reached Thomas’ ears and opened his eyes. Damn. He’d been dozing in front of the fire. He shouldn’t be dozing. He had no need to doze. His wife should be the one dozing.
A fortnight ago, Harry had forsaken her aerie—“It’s too far,” she said—and had taken to spreading her papers and books all around the library.
During this extraordinary time, she also allowed her husband to haunt the room while she sat and thought and thought and sat.
Thomas had learned to ignore the mutters and chortles that accompanied her work, so it was her groan that had jerked him awake.
He got to his feet and put another log on the fire.
Harry liked it warm. He dusted off his hands and turned to look at his wife.
She sat at the large table in the middle of the library with her back to him, a cherry-red woolen shawl draped over her narrow shoulders.
He came up behind her and set his hand atop her head. She usually didn’t mind that.
“Enormously brilliant,” he said.
A snort from Harry. “No. Just enormous. Look.” She stretched her arms out in front of her. “Look how far I have to sit from the table. I can barely reach to write.”
His poor wife. She was so uncomfortable, both in mind and body. And Thomas wasn’t helping her. He knew he should leave her alone, but he couldn’t bring himself to stay away. Not now.
He leaned down and scraped his whiskered jaw against the side of her neck.
“I could cut a hole in the table,” he murmured. “A curve to accommodate your belly and the baby.”
Her head drooped. “No. Don’t bother. There’s not much time left.”
He swung to her side, resting one hand on the back of the chair and one on the table, dropping onto his knees so he could see her face.
Tears. Harry had tears in her eyes. A queer, hot ache—half fear, half excitement—seared the center of Thomas’ chest.
“Are you in pain? Is the baby coming?”
“Stop. No.” She wiped her eyes. “Nothing like that. I just hoped . . . I thought— Never mind.”
He knew. She hadn’t spoken of it, but he thought he knew what she had hoped.
To prove Fermat’s conjecture before the baby came.
“I’m sorry,” he said, overwhelmed by regret. Regret she had to be the one to bear the baby, and he couldn’t help her with that burden. Regret he couldn’t understand the vexing mathematical problems occupying her brain, so he couldn’t help her with that burden, either.
“Don’t be sorry. You have nothing to be sorry for. And besides, I’m not sorry.” Harry raised her head and jutted out her chin, tears glistening on her long lashes. “If I never prove the conjecture, maybe the baby will.”
“Yes,” he said, glad to see her spirits rallying but apprehensive about the enormous expectation she was placing on their unborn child.
“But you can’t give up working. Because maybe the baby will be like me and have no head for mathematics, and proving the conjecture will still all come down to you in the end. ”
“Yes,” Harry said absently, looking in the far distance. Then her eyes dipped and came to rest on his face, and an ink-stained hand cupped his cheek. “Yes. Like you. That would be even better.”
Thomas tended to become a watering pot when his wife displayed even a trace of tenderness, so he turned his face into her hand and kissed her scarred palm to hide his emotion.
“Shall I ask for some coffee to be brought?” he asked her hand.
Harry hummed.
“And cakes?” he added. “With currants in them?”
“Cakes will make me sleepy.” She slid her hand across his jaw and pulled on his earlobe, toying with it.
“Is that such a bad thing? You can lie on the sofa after the cakes, and I can read to you.”
She let go of his ear and folded her hands on top of her belly and stared at the ceiling. He stood.
“I’ll even provide your favorite pillow.”
Her eyes stayed on the ceiling, but the corners of her mouth curved up.
“I swear you’re the devil, Tommy. You know I can’t resist your thigh.”
Mmmph.
Warm, cozy, drowsy, cinnamon. Almost perfect. But she was lying on her back. She’d much rather be lying on her side. She went to shift, and then she remembered.
She was exceedingly pregnant.
“Harry.” A velvet whisper.
She opened her eyes. Her favorite face—blue eyes, good nose, square jaw—peered down at her.
“The duke and duchess have arrived. We should go greet them.”
“Yes.” She strained but could not sit up. “Ooof.”
“Hold on.” Her thigh-pillow disappeared, as Thomas stood and grasped her forearms and pulled her first to a sitting position and then upright and onto her feet.
“Oh.”
An arm behind her back, holding her. “Are you dizzy?”
“Yes.” She frowned. “And crabbed.”
“Yes.” Her husband smiled. He was amused. “You don’t like when you are awoken from a nap.”
She bridled and corrected him. He needed correction. “I don’t like knowing I’ve lost time.”
He laughed and led her across the library, one arm curled snugly around her waist, his other hand holding her wrist as if they were promenading.
“What are you laughing at?” she said peevishly, willing her head to stay upright even as it wanted to nestle into the space just below her husband’s collarbone.
“You didn’t lose anything. You gained something.”
She stifled a yawn. “No.”
“Rest. Currant cakes. A cuddle with me.”
All right, yes. And each of these was all very well and good and agreeable in its place, but Harry was in no mood to be agreeable. So she glowered and growled and shook her head.
Her maddeningly blithe husband merely laughed again and kept guiding her towards the door.
“I’m glad our visitors are Jamie and his wife. Your stepmother will know I’m not to blame for your foul temper.”
“Yes. She’ll know.” Harry’s eyes and nose filled with tears. From scowling to sniveling in the span of two heartbeats. “Wait. Stop. Don’t open the door.” She looked up into her husband’s anxious face. “And before you ask, I have no pain, and, no, the baby is not coming right now.”
“All right,” he said, but his eyes stayed anxious.
“Listen, Tommy. You mustn’t pay any mind to me. To my gripes and sulks and tears. It’s all nonsense and has nothing to do with you.”
He kept his hold tight around her waist but let go of her wrist and went inside his tailcoat and pulled out a handkerchief and handed it to her.
“Of course I pay mind to you, Harry. You’re my wife.”
She dabbed at her eyes and blew her nose, a disgustingly huge honk. “You shouldn’t.”
“If you’re trying to tell me your moods are mysterious and governed by unpredictable tides, I know that.”
“Yes, but I mean to say, you mustn’t— You make me very happy.” Only by dint of the greatest fortitude did she manage to hold back her sob. “You must know that.”
“I hoped—” Thomas swallowed. He raised his eyebrows. “As happy as cakes and coffee do?”
She pretended to consider. “Since you arrange for the cakes and coffee, yes.”
He grinned. “I hope you remember that happiness when the baby comes. Alasdair says even the most docile of wives have a tendency to curse their husbands during childbirth.”
“Well, I’ll be sure to curse you then. I’m miles away from docile.” She handed back his handkerchief. “Shall we go meet our guests?”
“If you’re ready, my lady.”
“I am.”
Catherine thought Harry looked very well. But Thomas looked wretched.
As the earl helped his wife lower herself to the drawing room sofa, Catherine turned her head a fraction of an inch and pursed her lips ever so slightly. Her gorgeous young husband was at her side in an instant, his alacrity much more befitting an eager-to-serve footman than a duke.
“Yes?” he asked.
She curled her finger, and he leaned down so she could speak directly into his ear.
“Will you take Thomas out of the house? Get some fresh air into his lungs?”
James nodded and then straightened to his normal height. “Tom, when’s the last time you had a pint in the village? Or gave your stallion some exercise? Shall we go for a ride?”
Thomas finished arranging the pillows behind Harry’s back before he looked up. “I don’t know—”
“We’ll be gone an hour. Two, at the most.” In a few quick strides, James had made his way over to his friend to clap him on the back.
Thomas ran a hand through his dark hair. “Harry. What do you think?”
Harry looked at Thomas sleepily, and as she took him in, her half-hooded eyes suddenly widened.
“You’re drawn,” she said sharply. “You have dark circles under your eyes. Go for a ride.”
“I don’t like to leave you—”
“Now,” she barked. “You’ll do me no good if you collapse from excessive hovering. And Mama Katie is here.”
Catherine interjected smoothly, “Not that I’m a substitute for a husband, but I know enough to send for Dr. Andrews and the midwife, to get a groom to go after you and Jamie if anything should happen.”
“She’s had two babies herself, you know,” James said, grinning.
“Yes.” Thomas still sounded doubtful.
“Please,” Harry said in dulcet tones. “Please, Tommy, go for a ride and let me talk to my mother.”
Catherine had never heard Harry ask for something so nicely. Harry had famously always been much better at demanding than persuading.
And she had referred to Catherine as her mother.
Thomas held his hands up in surrender and attempted something like a smile. “I must obey. You said please.”
Harry cackled, and her voice became raspy again. “That’s exactly why I say it so rarely. I wouldn’t want to dilute the word’s power.”
“And I will reward your courtesy with compliance.” Thomas bowed, and now his smile seemed more genuine. “An hour. Two, at the most.”
James ushered Thomas out of the drawing room, giving Catherine a wink as he shut the door behind them.
Harry closed her eyes. “I hope you won’t scold me about not saying please more often. Or for being a neglectful wife and not noticing how truly terrible Thomas looks.”
Catherine settled herself next to Harry on the sofa. “Your days of being scolded by me are long over, dearest. You’re going to be a mother yourself soon, and you’ll be the one doing the scolding.”