around his neck and beg him to stay, to hold her, to love her, to talk her out of this awful decision regarding Kit.
“Sweet dreams, Lady Sophia. I will be about your errand directly after breaking my fast.”
And then he was gone, and Sophie had no one to talk her out of anything, not even the errand of placing her wonderful baby in the care of complete strangers.
“I thought you’d be gone to Morelands by now.”
Vim stood in the doorway to Sophie’s sitting room, watching as she played on the floor with a smiling Kit. They made such a lovely picture, thoroughly enthralled with each other, a picture no amount of practical reasoning could convince Vim should be drawn for Kit with any other family.
“I was outvoted,” Sophie said, picking up the baby and getting to her feet. “Valentine must tune the piano, St. Just is dickering with your uncle over the mare, and Westhaven is claiming certain unmentionable parts are not up to another ride in the cold without soaking them for a bit first.” She paused in her recitation and met his gaze. “Well?”
“The Harrads were from home.” The relief in her eyes was painful to behold. “They’ll be back this afternoon.”
And then the dread again. She cuddled the baby closer and kissed his ear. Kit turned to swing his little paw at her, but Sophie drew back, only to kiss his ear again when he dropped his hand.
“That child likes to play.” And Sophie adored to play with him, to lavish love and attention upon him.
“He’s been singing today, as well,” she said, taking a seat on the sofa with the infant. “Wonderful baby songs, odes to his toes, madrigals to his knuckles. I wonder when he’ll begin to speak. Mrs. Harrad will no doubt know such things.”
She was Lady Sophia this morning, a woman with no recollection of the glorious intimacies they’d shared. A duke’s daughter determined on her cause. He sat beside her, missing plain Sophie Windham with a fierce ache.
“The livestock look well fed, the fences are in good repair, the chicken coop is snug, and the house looks tidy and spruce. The windows are clean, the woodboxes are full, the porch is swept, and the walkway has been shoveled clear of snow. I hope this disappoints you as much as it did me.”
She gave him a puzzled look.
“Sophie, I would foster the boy here, except my aunt and uncle are surrounded by the oldest domestics this side of the Flood, my aunt is growing vague, and my uncle can’t keep track of the valuables. I will not be here enough to matter, and that is no situation to leave a child in.”
“I meant to ask you about that.” She bundled the child into a receiving blanket then folded a second, heavier blanket around the first. “Will you show me your portrait gallery?”
“Of course.” But why would she want to see a bunch of old paintings, and what exactly was she going to ask him about?
She passed him the baby and wrapped a shawl around her shoulders. As they progressed through the house, Vim tried to hoard up some memories: Sophie trotting up the main staircase, Sophie pausing at the top to wait for Vim and his burden to catch up with her, while a shaft of sunlight gilded red highlights in her dark hair.
As they entered the cavernous portrait gallery—a space so cold Vim could see his breath before him—Sophie gathered her shawl around her.
“We ought not to stay long,” he said. “You’ll take cold with just a shawl.”
“I’m warm enough.” She glanced around the room, which was brightly lit with late morning sun pouring in the floor-to-ceiling windows and bouncing off the polished parquet floors. “This would be a marvelous place to hold a holiday reception.”
“It would take days to heat it.” But she had a point: when had his aunt and uncle stopped entertaining?
“Fill it with enough people, and it will heat easily enough. Who’s this?”
She stood before a full-length portrait of a big, blond fellow standing beside a pretty, powdered lady lounging in a ladder-backed chair.
“My grandfather. He never took to wearing powder or wigs, though he liked all the other finery. That is his first wife. My grandmother is in the next portrait down.”
Sophie moved along a few steps. “I see where you get your great good looks. These four are all of him?”
“With his various wives. He lived to a great old age and was expecting to get a passel of sons on them all.”
She studied the portrait, while Vim wondered what, exactly, constituted great good looks.
“I can see Rothgreb in him,” Sophie said, “about the eyes. They have a Viking quality to them, devil take the hindmost. Was your grandmother the only one to give him sons?”
“An heir and spare, and then years later, when the heir died of some wasting disease, my father as an afterthought. I think my father’s death was particularly hard on the old man.”
She moved to the last portrait of Vim’s grandfather. “He had you by then, though. You should have been some consolation.”
“I was not.” Vim shifted to stand beside her but focused on Kit, not the painting of his grandfather. “My father had a weak heart. His lordship was convinced, because I look like my father, I would be a similar disappointment.”
Sophie perused him up and down, her lips compressed in a considering line, then she gestured to the next portrait. “This is your father?”
“Christopher Charpentier, my sainted father.”
“He’s quite handsome, but I have to say, you look as much like your grandfather as you do your sire.”
“I do not.” Not one person had ever told him he looked like his grandfather.
She crossed her arms. “By the time you came along, his hair had likely gone white, but it was the exact shade of golden blond yours is now. As a younger man, his eyes were the exact shade of baby blue yours are too.”
“If I am the spit and image of him, I wonder why, when I told him I was leaving for a life at sea, he did nothing to stop me.”
She gave him another visual inspection. “Was this declaration made after your heart was broken?”
“Shall we move on? The older portraits are over here.”
Sophie crossed the room with him and took a seat beside him when he lowered himself to one of the padded benches between paintings.
“I never liked this room,” he said, shifting so Kit sat on his lap. “Never liked the sense the eyes of the past are upon me.”
“Some of the people in this room loved you, I should hope.” She reached over and loaned Kit her finger to wrestle into his mouth.
“And I loved them, but they’re dead all the same.” He paused to take a breath and marshal his composure. “It wasn’t my heart that was damaged so much as it was my pride, and on the occasion of a gathering attended by the entire neighborhood. A young lady made it dramatically apparent she preferred another, and I did not handle the situation well. In hindsight, I made far too much of the entire matter. Would you like to hold the baby?”
As gambits went to change the subject, it ought to have been foolproof, but Sophie shifted to look out over the room, taking her finger from Kit’s maw.
“He’s comfortable where he is, and if I’m dreading my leave-taking from him, you can’t be looking forward to losing him, either. Are you still in love with your young lady?”
“For God’s sake, Sophie.” He set the baby, blankets and all, in her lap and rose, pacing off a half-dozen feet. “I haven’t seen the woman in years, and she preferred another. No sane man would allow himself to hold on to tender feelings under such circumstances.”
“We’re not necessarily sane when we’re in love.” Her smile was wistful, as if recalling her own first love.
