Jenson leaned back against the wall with all the nonchalance of a man who knew the outcome of the argument already. “I have six more men outside that door who would beg to differ.”
Exactly what she did not need in that moment was a pissing contest. “Stand down. Amelia is not going anywhere.”
“You told me you would give her to me,” Patrick accused.
“I told you I would ask her what she wanted. Look at her, Patrick. Do you think you could move her? I’d wager she won’t even let you touch her.”
“I’ll take that wager,” Amelia muttered from the bed. When three sets of eyes were on her, her spine straightened and a show of defiance lit her features. “I asked him—” she indicated Patrick with a point of her trembling finger “—for help once and he denied me then.”
“I’ve been trying to make up for it ever since. Why do you think I’m here?”
Amelia tried to sit up, tried to collect some of her forgotten dignity, but another pain gripped her and she screamed again. Patrick ignored everyone and took her in his arms. She held on to him as though he was the anchor and around them raged a hurricane. Burying her face in his dirty shirt, Amelia sobbed and begged him to take the pain away.
Jenson moved to the foot of the bed and began to lift her skirts.
Patrick pulled his dagger and pushed the man away with one hand while he tried to hold on to Amelia with the other. “What the hell are you doing?”
“We need to know if the baby is coming,” Jenson told him, not budging an inch.
Daniella moved forwards then too and placed her hand on Patrick’s outstretched arm. “We need to know how long she has laboured. The baby could be in trouble. Amelia is tiring quickly.” Any fool could see it.
“They are right,” Amelia said with a groan, rolling to her back and letting her knees fall apart. “He is coming. Just get him out, please.”
Jenson flicked her skirts up with no more preamble, with no more argument. He removed her drawers and Daniella had to just about hold Patrick back. She wondered if he even knew exactly how babies were brought into the world.
“Be still,” she told him as she also bent to look. Already she could see a small amount of white-blond hair atop a barely crowning head.
“He is nearly here,” Jenson told them all as he pushed his sleeves up to his elbows.
Hoste slipped into the room with steaming water and clean linens and then left again. Jenson washed his hands and then bade Daniella to do the same.
Her hands shook. This was not supposed to happen. Where the bloody hell was the brandy?
“I’m so sorry,” she told the other woman as she readied the linens. “You should have been at your home dealing with this, with a doctor, with your brother and your mother around you. You should never have ended up here.”
Amelia shook her head, her hair splayed around her. She opened her mouth to speak but Patrick cut her off. “If anyone is to take the blame for this mess, ’tis me. I should have listened to you when you came to me. I was a coward and a cad and a dunderhead. I should have married you right then in the church down the road from the club. We would right now be with my mother and my sisters and a midwife. Our child would not be born out of wedlock. He would know he was loved from the first instant.”
Amelia’s cinnamon eyes, eyes the same as James’s in every way, opened wide. She panted, “He has been loved from the first instant. By me.”
“He is our son, Amelia. I made a mistake, the biggest of my life. I was never worthy of your heart then. I should never have taken advantage of you but I was so taken with your beauty and your kindness and your passion for everything in life. And when you came to me, I was confused and drunk and I made the wrong choice. Not days later I realized and went to find you but you had gone and I thought your brother had found out and done away with you.”
“Done away with her?” Daniella asked. “You honestly thought he’d killed her?”
Patrick nodded. “I did at first. The Butcher and all that. It’s why I followed him when he took you.”
Daniella gasped. “It was you in the garden that night watching the house?”
Amelia spoke up then. “What? What? My brother…would never…harm me.”
He turned back to her. “Then why did you disappear so suddenly? Why did you not ask him for help?”
Yet another pain gripped her and this time instead of screaming, her eyes rolled back and a long low moan rent the air. Her back arched off the bed and her fingers curled to fists. “Please make it stop,” she begged again when her stiffened body softened slightly. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Tell James I’m sorry.”
Daniella took Amelia’s hand in hers and said, “You can tell him yourself when you introduce him to your baby.”
“He’ll…never forgive…” she managed.
“Then you don’t know him very well. He kidnapped me to have you back.”
“You’re…his wife…”
“We were married this morning. On board a ship in the middle of the ocean. Now you breathe. Right down as far as you can.”
A thought came to her as the girl obeyed. “Amelia, Patrick will marry you right here, aboard this ship. No disgrace. No shame. Only love.”
“He doesn’t…love me. Or the…baby.”
Patrick leaped to his feet and roared, “The hell I don’t!”
Amelia jumped, her eyelids snapping open as she stared at him. “Just…honour.”
Patrick held her head up so she could see him. “I do love you. I don’t go about bedding random virgins, Amelia—I made a mistake. You can spend the rest of our lives taking it out of my hide but please,
