Lady Sophie's Christmas Wish - By Grace Burrowes Page 0,119
her upper arms. “It’s the right thing for you and the right thing for Kit. I can’t raise him—Lady Sophia and all. I can have my charities, but I cannot actually keep a child to raise. I understand that.”
“Can we talk about this?”
Her chin came up. “You didn’t want to talk to me at the party.”
The strains of some old Handel came floating over the sounds of the Moreland gathering, the same pastoral lullaby Sophie had sung to Kit days ago, but this time rendered with mellow beauty on the church piano. The music was soothing, but sad too.
“Your father had something to explain to me, Sophie. I apologize if it seemed as if I was avoiding you.” But she was avoiding him, standing there trying not to shiver in the frigid night air. “Can we not find somewhere to sit? Because I do want to speak with you; I want it badly.”
“You’re taking the baby,” she said, visually scanning the green. “My brother is an idiot.”
He wasn’t sure which brother she referred to. “If you say so. I find them all likeable when they’re not threatening to thrash me.”
She scowled. “They’re still making threats?”
“Not lately.” He took her by the arm and started walking in the direction of the Harrads’ tidy porch. “I’m not inclined to take on the responsibility for the child, Sophie. Not in my present circumstances.”
“Because you’re going to China?”
“I was supposed to go to Baltimore.” And she was going to Yorkshire, for God’s sake.
“Wherever. Children usually travel well, particularly when they’re as small as Kit. He can’t stay with the Harrads, though. They’re decent people, but it was foolish of me to think strangers would love him the way we do.”
“So you love Kit?”
She stopped at the foot of the Harrads’ steps. “I do. I think you love him too, though, and you’re in a position to provide for him. I am prepared to be stubborn about this.”
“Formidable threat, my dear, but I am prepared to be stubborn too. Do you know what your papa wanted to discuss with me so urgently?”
This time when she looked him up and down, Vim had the sense she might be seeing him. “Papa is prone to queer starts. He does not confide in anybody that I can tell, except possibly Her Grace.”
He believed her. He believed she’d no more notion of who and what had been involved in Vim’s great humiliation all those years ago than he had himself. To this extent, then, His Grace—and likely the ducal consequence, as well—had been guarding Vim’s back, not driving daggers into it.
“It is a night for revelations. Can we take a seat?”
There was nowhere to sit, except the Harrads’ humble wooden stoop. He lowered himself to it and patted the place beside him. “Cuddle up, Sophie. It’s too cold to stand on pride much longer, and we have a dilemma to solve.”
She sat, and he let out a sigh of relief.
“What is our dilemma?” She might have tucked herself just a bit closer to him, or she might have been trying to get comfortable on their hard wooden seat.
“If Kit is to have the best start possible in life, he needs two parents who love him and care for him.”
She focused on something in the distance, as if trying to see the notes her brother’s playing was casting into the chilly darkness. “I cannot be both mother and father to him; neither can you.”
“I suggest a somewhat more conventional arrangement. You be his mother, and I’ll be his father.”
The arrangement was conventional in the extreme: one baby, a mama, a papa. It was the most prosaic grouping in the history of the species. The slow pounding of Vim’s heart was extraordinary, though. He fought to speak steadily over it.
“I owe you an apology, Sophie Windham.”
She closed her eyes. “You are speaking in riddles, Mr. Charpentier.”
Not my lord, not baron, not Sindal. “Vim. I would be Vim to you, and I will start with the apology. When we were in Town—”
She shook her head. “That was then; this is now. That time was just a silly wish on my part, and we stole that time for ourselves despite all sound judgment to the contrary. If you are going to apologize to me for what took place there, I will not accept it.”
He thought she might get up and walk away, and that he could not bear. Not again, not ever again. Not for himself, and not for the child, either. He