Nicholas - By Grace Burrowes Page 0,116

thing. Not relief, not fatigue, not resignation, nothing.

“Do you mind if we walk back to Clover Down?” Leah suggested on impulse. She wanted to be touching Nick when they finally got around to discussing his daughter, not stealing glances at him from atop her horse.

“It’s a pleasant night.” Nick handed the reins to the groom, who led the horses off without a word. Leah accompanied her husband to the foot of the lane before Nick’s voice pierced the gathering gloom.

“For God’s sake, Leah, say something.”

Eighteen

What to say?

“That Mrs. Crumpet is rather a dull thing,” Leah managed. “Makes you wonder upon whom Leonie modeled her.”

“Her previous companion,” Nick replied. “It took me almost a year to comprehend the dratted woman threatened to hide Leonie’s stuffed animals if Leonie complained to me of anything.”

“How old is your daughter?”

“She just turned sixteen,” Nick said on a soft exhalation. “Physically she’s sixteen, but mentally…”

“I’m not sure mentally matters a great deal. We can all be reduced to mewling infancy under the wrong circumstances. Tell me about her, Nicholas. You are clearly a devoted papa, and she adores you.”

“She adores anyone,” Nick said, wearily to Leah’s ears, maybe guardedly as well. “It scares the hell out of me, if you want the truth. Someday, some bloody young swain will come along, delivering the eggs, and walk off with her heart if not her virtue.”

He went on, pouring out a litany of every father’s hopes and fears for his daughter, his fondest memories and most harrowing moments. Leah listened, leading Nick around to the back gardens at Clover Down as the words continued to flow from him, haltingly at first, but then more steadily, until his voice was a rumbling torrent of paternal devotion.

When it had been full dark for more than an hour and the crickets were chirping at the moon, Leah sat beside Nick among the newly blooming roses, holding his hand and hoping she was reading the situation correctly.

“So how did she come to be as she is?”

“Fevers, though I didn’t realize it until my old nurse informed me of it this week. I thought Leonie was born that way.”

“It must have been quite a shock,” Leah said, “to be what, fifteen years old, and a father?”

“It was a shock. I didn’t find out about Leonie until I was seventeen. I’d been dallying for several years at that point and had come to comprehend the precautions that must be taken. As a very young fellow, though, I was heedless.”

“You got somebody with child. I can’t understand why the young lady didn’t simply apply to you for support.”

“She was a relation of Magda’s,” Nick said. “Daughter to a tenant, and she went to Magda first, thinking to rid herself of the child. Even the heir to an earldom is a poor bet for one’s future when he’s fifteen years of age.”

“Your father pensioned her off?” Leah suggested, drawing Nick’s hand through hers.

“Magda sent the girl to live with cousins here in Kent,” Nick said. “Then announced her own retirement about a year later. No one thought anything of it, given that Magda is older than dirt.”

“And you would have been sixteen when your nurse left Belle Maison.”

“Sixteen, and as is the case at that age, a very different heir than I would have been at fourteen or fifteen. I charged off to university, full of my considerable self, ready to have at adult life.”

“What happened?”

“When I was seventeen, Leonie’s mother died,” Nick said, his arm stealing around Leah’s waist. “Of influenza or high fevers, I’m not sure exactly what, but Magda thought at that point I was old enough to intervene. Her own little pension wasn’t going to be sufficient to raise an earl’s by-blow, and I had grown up enough in her opinion to do the right thing. Magda is, after all, elderly, and she didn’t want Leonie getting attached to her just as her own health failed—or worse.”

In other words, Magda had not wanted Leonie embarking on the series of losses that had marked Nick’s early upbringing.

“You became Papa to a two-year-old at seventeen.”

“Nearer three,” Nick recalled, “and she was gorgeous, all blond curls, smiles, and big blue eyes. I understood when I first held her what it was that drove my father to be so fierce sometimes, so irrationally protective. Leonie is the most tenderhearted, dear person…”

“Like her papa.” Leah laid her head on Nick’s shoulder and heard a great, heartfelt sigh go out of him. “Nicholas, did you really think

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