Leah pushed off his chest to regard him in the moonlight. “You love that child with your whole soul, Nicholas Haddonfield, and it breaks your heart to have to part from her, never knowing when you can steal another little visit, never seeing her day to day as all parents can see their children. You missed her first two years, and it simply won’t do for you to miss any more. She’s clever enough to try to extract promises from you regarding your next visit, and she wants to be with you more as well.”
Nick buried his face against her neck, his throat constricting. “She’s difficult, she has a temper, she’s loud, and she can be clumsy when she’s happy—also when she isn’t.”
“I have a temper when my courses are near,” Leah said. “I hate needlepoint, and I will hoard chocolates if left to my own devices. She is your daughter, and of all people, Nicholas, of all women, I cannot stand by and watch another young lady fret that her papa doesn’t love her, doesn’t want to be with her, isn’t proud of her. I will argue with you on this and not give up.”
“She knows I love her,” Nick said roughly. “She has to know that.”
“Of course she does, but it’s the sort of thing that can be doubted even while one knows it.” Leah folded herself back against him, wrapped her arms around his waist, and tucked in close. “She’s your daughter. She should live with her papa.”
And now what Nick felt was beyond words, beyond even the concepts of hope, joy, and gratitude. It made him humble and invincible, determined and at peace. It gave him the strength to cry and the courage to accept the miracle he held in his arms.
Sitting on the stone bench in the moonlight, his backside going numb, his wife in his arms, Nicholas Haddonfield knew he was absolutely and unshakably, unequivocally and eternally loved.
***
“I believe you have something that belongs to my wife.” Nick allowed himself to glower at his father-in-law, though he relished those two little words: my wife.
“Why would I retain any evidence of the blight she embodied under my own roof?” Wilton replied mildly.
Nick braced himself on his fists and leaned over Wilton’s ornate desk. “Because at some point,” he replied in equally unimpressed tones, “you considered it might gain you leverage, with someone, somewhere, to be able to prove her marriage to Frommer was legal, and to conceal such evidence in the meanwhile.”
“How do you reach such an absurd conclusion?” Wilton rose and turned his back on Nick, his posture suggesting he was absorbed in the study of the gardens behind the Wilton town house.
“Hellerington was forthcoming,” Nick said. And Nick had been inclined to believe the man, even when he claimed to have had nothing to do with an attempted abduction from the park. “Seems while taking the waters in Bath, your old friend got some charming little trollop pregnant. He no longer pants after Leah, which, under the circumstances, is most wise of him, albeit inconvenient for you.”
“Hellerington’s doings are no concern of mine.”
“Not now,” Nick said, “but you saved those marriage lines in case you needed to convince Hellerington you could not keep your promise to him, that you had no authority to promise your widowed daughter’s hand to anyone.”
“Widowed…” Wilton did turn then, and though he hid it well, Nick saw the fear behind the calculation in the older man’s eyes.
“Widowed,” Nick said. “Widowed, entitled to both her portion and her inheritance from her mother, which—alas—we will find mysteriously plundered by none other than my father-in-law.”
“You are making wild accusations against a peer of the realm,” Wilton spat, crossing his arms over his chest.
“Peer being the operative word,” Nick retorted, “when I now enjoy that status myself. Did you really think Hellerington would keep his mouth shut forever? You promised him a wife if he kept the details of the duel to himself, reneged on your promise, and now he neither needs nor wants the only wife you could have procured for him.”
“He doesn’t know the details of any duel,” Wilton shot back, his voice rising.
“One can hardly call it a duel when a young man trips before the count is done and his pistol discharges while he yet faces away from his opponent, and that opponent turns, sees the young man on the ground, and shoots him in the back. I agree with you, it doesn’t