“She didn’t tell anybody. She was off visiting friends, supposedly, so you see there’s precedent for her little detours from the agreed-upon itinerary. She stayed two weeks, and when she judged I was sober enough to listen to her, she pointed out that I had five sisters who were all in want of decent mounts. I owned a stud farm, and did I think my business would prosper if my own sisters could not find decent horses in my stables?”

Westhaven looked intrigued. “She lectured you?”

“She bludgeoned me with common sense, and when I told her to have His Grace pick out something from Tatt’s she… she cried. Sophie hates to cry, but I made her cry. I was so ashamed I started selecting my training prospects that very afternoon.”

“You made her cry.” Westhaven smiled ruefully. “Rather like my shouting at our sisters.”

“Or hollering at His Grace over my music,” Lord Val observed. “I wanted to make beautiful sounds… and there I was, carrying on like a hung over fishwife.”

“And Sophie put you all to rights?” Vim had siblings, he’d had parents and a loving stepfather, a grandfather and several grandmothers, cousins, and an aunt and uncle. Family interactions were seldom quite this dramatically simple, but clearly, in the minds of Sophie’s brothers, the situation was not complicated at all.

“Sophie put us to rights,” Westhaven said, “and my guess is we’ve never thanked her. We’ve gone off and gotten married, started our families, and neglected to thank someone who contributed so generously to our happiness. We’re thanking Sophie now by not calling you out. If she wants you, Charpentier, then we’ll truss you up with a Christmas ribbon and leave you staked out under the nearest kissing bough.”

“And if she doesn’t want me?”

“She wanted you for something,” Lord Val said dryly. “I’d hazard it isn’t just because you’re a dab hand at a dirty nappy, either.”

Vim didn’t want to lie to these men, but neither was he about to admit he suspected Sophie Windham, for reasons he could not fathom, had gifted him with her virginity then sent him on his way.

“She lent you that great hulking beast of hers,” St. Just pointed out. “She’s very protective of those she cares for, and yet she let you go larking off with her darling precious—never to be seen again? I would not be so sure.”

Vim had wondered about the same thing, except if a woman as practical as Sophie were determined to be shut of a man, she might just lend the sorry bastard a horse, mightn’t she?

“I proposed to my wife, what was it, six times?” Westhaven said.

“At least seven,” Lord Val supplied.

St. Just sent Westhaven a wry smile. “I lost count after the second hangover, but Westhaven is the determined sort. He proposed a lot. It was pathetic.”

“Quite.” Westhaven’s ears might have turned just a bit red. “I had to say some magic words, cry on Papa’s shoulder, come bearing gifts, and I don’t know what all before Anna took pity on me, but I do know this: Sophie has been out for almost ten years, and she has never, not once, given a man a second look. You come along with that dratted baby, and she looks at you like a woman smitten.”

“He’s a wonderful baby.”

“He’s a baby,” Westhaven said, loading three words with worlds of meaning. “Sophie is attached to the infant, but it’s you she’s smitten with.”

All three of Sophie’s brothers speared him with a look, a look that expected him to do something.

“If you gentleman will excuse me, I’m going to offer to take the baby tonight for Sophie. She’s been the one to get up and down with him all night for better than a week, and that is wearing on a woman.”

He left the room at as dignified a pace as he could muster and considered it a mercy Lord Val hadn’t barked anything at him about leaving Sophie’s damned door open.

“That is just famous.” Westhaven scowled at the empty basket of rolls, wanting nothing so much as to summon Sindal back into the room—but for what?

“Yes,” Valentine said, though his expression was more puzzled than thunderous. “If Sophie and Sindal were in separate bedrooms several doors apart, how does he know she was getting up and down all night with the child? I slept in one of those bedrooms for years and never heard Sophie stirring around at night.”

St. Just smiled a little crookedly. “Because you sleep like the dead and snore accordingly. One wonders if Sindal has told Sophie about the debacle in his past. I don’t think the man’s forgotten it.”

“She wouldn’t hold it against him,” Val said, frowning. “We don’t hold it against him, do we?”

“His Grace thundered about it for weeks,” St. Just said. “You two were more concerned with getting back to school, but Sindal is only a couple years older than I am. It isn’t something a man would quickly forget.”

Westhaven got up and crossed the room to hunker near the fire. “Like we can’t forget he took liberties with our sister. His Grace will be calling for his dueling pistols if the truth should reach him.”

“I don’t think so.” Val kept to his seat and rearranged the cutlery on his empty plate. “I’ve come to realize His Grace picks up a lot more than we thought he did, and he chooses to overlook it.”

“Perhaps.” St. Just shifted in his chair and crossed his legs at the ankle. “That leaves us only with Her Grace to worry about.”

Westhaven rose from poking up the fire and regarded his brothers’ unhappy expressions. “’Tis the season, you lot. Cheer up. At least the man can change a dirty nappy. If he and Sophie have anticipated their vows, he’ll need to be handy in the nursery. Now, shall I beat you at cribbage seriatim or both at the same time?”

“And what if there are to be no vows?” St. Just asked.

Valentine answered as he crossed his knife and fork very precisely across his plate. “Then he’ll need to learn how to disappear from Sophie’s life and never show his miserable face in the shire again. We won’t have him trifling with her.”

Westhaven resumed his place at the table.

“But his family seat is in Kent,” St. Just said. “He can’t very well avoid that for the rest of his life, particularly not after he inherits.”

Westhaven smiled, not a particularly pleasant smile. “Exactly so. Valentine, fetch the cards; St. Just, we’ll need decent libation. As I see it, we really don’t have very many options.”

Fourteen

A quiet knock sounded on Sophie’s door, no doubt one of her infernal, well-meaning brothers come to check on her.

Come to make sure she hadn’t knotted her sheets and eloped with a stable hand to dance on café tables in Paris.

She opened the door and stepped back.

“I wasn’t sure you’d still be awake.” Vim didn’t come into the room, just looked her up and down from where he stood in the drafty corridor.

“Come in, please. We’re letting in the cold.”

He advanced exactly three steps inside the door and still made no move to touch her. “I’ve come to spell you with Kit. I can take him tonight, and you can get some rest.”

And wasn’t that just fine? Vim would come for the baby but not to see how she fared or to speak with her privately.

“I’ll let you take him. I must accustom myself to being without him, mustn’t I?”

“Not necessarily.” He shifted half a step as Sophie closed the door behind him. “You can raise that child, Sophie. You’re a duke’s daughter, and your reputation has no doubt been spotless until now. Your family is of sufficient consequence you could take in a half-dozen children and nobody would take it amiss.”

“You’re wrong.” She rummaged in her traveling bag for some clean nappies and a rag. “They would say: Like father, like daughter. They would say: Like brother, like sister.”

“What does that mean?”

“Anna and Westhaven anticipated their vows, as did St. Just and Emmie. The proof is in their nurseries. I expect Val and Ellen did, as well, but time will tell. His Grace raised two bastards in the Moreland Miscellany, though I love my brother and sister dearly. I’m even named for the royal princess whom all believe to have whelped a bastard, though nobody will say it in public.”