Better that than be abandoned at the altar." She smiled fleetingly. "You must not feel badly. I am not in love with you, and I do not /need/ to marry. After a few days I do not doubt I will realize that I have had a fortunate escape. It is /not/ comfortable to be notorious." Perhaps he should leave it at that. Perhaps she really would be thankful in a few days' time to have been released from all this madness. Perhaps he should simply get to his feet, make her a heartfelt apology, and take his leave. "Miss Huxtable," he said instead, "there is a /child/. Toby – Tobias. I love him, and I have promised him a home at Woodbine Park. A safe haven after all he has known in his life so far. Laura was constantly terrified of being found. We were constantly on the move, settling into one home only to be uprooted and having to start all over again – with new names, new identities each time. I have promised Toby Woodbine as a home." She was staring at him, her face expressionless. "A child," she said. "You and Mrs. Turner had a child." She bit her upper lip. "There is a couple looking after him," he said. "The Harrises. In Harrogate. They at least have been a constant in his life. Woodbine needs a new head gardener, and I offered the position to Harris before I heard from my grandfather and understood that the position was not mine to offer. Mrs. Harris has always been Toby's nurse. He was to pass as their orphaned grandson so that the neighborhood need not be scandalized and outraged at the presence of an illegitimate child in the nursery.

Since learning that I must marry in order to retain Woodbine, I have toyed with the idea of putting the three of them in one of the cottages on the estate, but I could not push Toby out of the house merely so that my wife could live there. I hoped somehow to keep you all under the one roof and hide the truth from you. But Toby has been accustomed to calling me /Papa/ even though we have been trying to train him to address me as /sir/ before the move to Woodbine. You would have found out soon enough, I do not doubt, but it would be too late then for you to refuse to marry me. And even if the secret could be kept from you forever, I realized last night, I could not do it. I cannot put you in the position of having to share your home with a – with a bastard child." Good Lord, he had never /ever/ used that word of Toby before now. "Thousands of fathers," he said, "/most/ fathers, in fact, house and feed and clothe their children on their earnings. I will do it too for as long as I must. Forgive me, Miss Huxtable. I ought not even to have come to London to plead with my grandfather. I certainly ought not to have been tempted by his ultimatum, which I goaded him into making. I ought to have apologized to you at the Tindell ball for colliding with you and let you go on your way. I ought not even to have /been/ at the ball." "You did not collide with me, Lord Sheringford," she said. "It was the other way around." He laughed – totally without humor. "How old is he?" she asked. "Four." "Does he look like you?" she asked. "Like Laura." He closed his eyes and then opened them to look down at his hands draped over his knees. "Blond and blue-eyed and delicately built – and the very devil. He suffers from anxiety and insecurities, but he has all the makings of a happy, mischievous hellion. He will be a perfectly normal little boy, given the chance. I have promised myself that he will have that chance. I am sorry, Miss Huxtable. He must come first in my life. He did not ask to be born. He did not ask for the difficulties of the first four years of his life. For better or worse, he is in my care, and care for him I will. I hope I have not caused undue embarrassment to you with your family. Though dash it, of course I have." "Lord Sheringford," she said softly, "will you marry me? Please?" He looked up at her, startled. "I understand," she said, "that you do not really want to marry at all.

I understand too that if you did want to and had the time to look about you at some leisure, you would very probably not choose me. But your child does need the home and the life you have promised him. He needs a father who is always close by to soothe his insecurities and anxieties.

And I daresay he needs a mother, though no one will ever be able to replace his real mother, of course." "Laura," he was startled enough to say, "had very little to do with him.

She was depressed after his birth. She never got over her depression. Or her fears. She spent most of her time alone." In a darkened room. Usually in bed. She could not bear to look at Toby. "Poor lady." She frowned. "And poor little boy. Then he needs a mother, Lord Sheringford. Let me be a mother to him." "You cannot mean it," he said. "Just think, Maggie. The very thought of it should scandalize you. You would be sharing your home with m-my bastard." She looked steadily at him. "I notice your hesitation," she said. "Is that a word with which you are accustomed to describe your son, Lord Sheringford?" "No," he said. "I have never used it before today." "Then never use it again," she said, "either in my hearing or out of it.

As you said a short while ago, your son did not choose to be born of a married lady and her rescuer and lover. He is a child, as valuable as a king's child. In the future when you refer to him, call him your son." He was surprised into smiling at her. "The neighbors would be scandalized," he said. "It would have to be our secret." She clucked her tongue. "Will you never learn your lesson?" she asked him. "Your neighbors doubtless know of the scandal. And so they will be very suspicious of you when you return, perhaps even hostile for a while. You might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, then. We will make open reference to the fact that the child who is coming to Woodbine Park to live with us is your son. We will both show without any artifice at all that we love him as if he were ours. Your neighbors may react as they wish, but if I know anything about neighbors in a country setting – and I /do/ – I can feel perfectly confident that almost everyone will soon forgive you and accept your son and get on with their lives." He sat back in his seat and regarded her in silence for a while.

She was formidable indeed. He wondered if after all he would come to dislike her intensely after he had lived with her for a while. Or if he would come to love her.

If the latter were the case, he suspected that he might love her with a passion to end passions.

Though where /that/ thought had come from he did not know. "Are you quite sure?" he asked.

She stared back at him. "I think," she said, "I must believe in fate. I have never thought much about it before now, but I think I must believe in it. The last few days have been bizarre. Ten days ago I was still at Warren Hall – I left there late in the morning to come to town. Four days ago I was planning to attend Lady Tindell's ball and hoping to meet the Marquess of Allingham there and rekindle our friendship. Four days ago I had not even met you.

And then a whole series of strange things happened at the ball that led up to my colliding with you – and a string of events had happened to you that had brought you there in search of a bride. So much has happened since then that sometimes I think I have crammed a whole year's worth of living into a few days. All this cannot possibly have happened just by chance or for nothing. If I send you on your way this morning and return to my former life, I will forever suspect that I missed the whole point of my life. This /has/ to be the point, or why has it all happened?

There have been so many coincidences that I cannot escape the conclusion that it has not been coincidence at all. Perhaps fate intends that I be a mother to your little boy, Lord Sheringford." "And a wife to me?" he said.

She hesitated and then nodded. "Yes," she said. "Strange, is it not? I hope I am not wrong. I hope we do not all end up living unhappily ever after." He got to his feet and extended a hand for hers. She set her own in it and rose to stand before him. "I will do my very best," he said, "to see that you do not regret your decision but that rather you will rejoice in it. I said that Toby must come first in my life. But you will not be second, Maggie. I do not believe life and relationships work that way." He raised her hand to his lips and turned it to kiss her palm.