mocked. “The Knight of Shadows is about to sweep the damsel onto the rooftops and debauch her! Listen to this…”
He levered up, clasping his hands on both sides of her belly as if it had sprouted ears. “I beg you to spare innocent ears,” he teased. “That can hardly be appropriate!”
She threw the book at him, missing on purpose. “Neither are the things you say when you’re making love to me.”
He cast her a chastised, wretched look. “Touché.” Leaning down, he gathered the sheets away from her breast, and then swept them down her belly so he could lay his ear against it and close his eyes.
He loved to listen for the little one, and tonight a slight nudge pushed back against the pressure of his cheek.
His breath caught, and Pru’s did, as well, her hand reaching down to sift and stroke the strands of his hair.
“I was thinking…” she murmured dreamily. “If one of them is a girl…we could name her Caroline. Or does that cause you pain?”
He opened his eyes, an ache bloomed in his chest both bitter and exquisitely sweet. “It hurts to remember, but it would be worse to forget,” he told her honestly.
Honesty had become their default communication, and because of it, they flourished.
“Her loss has become a part of me. I’ll never forget her. But she is a part of the past I can reconcile. With this. With you. And I’d love to give her name to our child. To allow her the childhood she never had…”
“I’m glad you feel that way,” she gifted him a beatific smile, and his heart glowed.
Then stalled.
“Wait.” He sat up and looked down into her eyes with a frantically pulsating heart. “Did you just say them…?”
Her face shone up at him, incandescent with maternal pride.
“I must have done,” she said, pulling him back to collapse against her in bewildered amazement. “Because we’re having twins.”
Sneak Peek: Courting Trouble
A Goode Girls Romance
Chapter 1
London, November, 1879
Titus Conleith had often fantasized about seeing Honoria Goode naked.
He’d been in an excruciating kind of love with her since he was a lad of ten. Now that he was undoubtedly a man at fourteen, his love had shifted.
Matured, he dared wager.
What he felt for her was a soft sort of reverence, a kind of awe-struck incredulity at the sight of her each day. It was simply hard to believe a creature like her existed. That she moved about on this earth. In the house in which he lived.
That she was two years his senior at sixteen years of age was irrelevant, as was the fact that she stood three inches above him, more in her lace boots with the delicate heels. It mattered not that there existed no reality in which he could even approach her. That he could dare address her.
The idea of being with her in any capacity was so far beyond comprehension, it didn’t bear consideration. He was the boy-of-all-work for her father, Clarence Goode, the Baron of Cresthaven’s, household. Lower, even, than the chambermaid. He swept chimneys and fetched things, mucked stables and cleaned up after dogs who ate better than he did.
When he and Honoria shared a room, he was beneath her feet, sometimes quite literally. One of his favorite memories was perhaps a year prior when she’d needed to mount her horse in a paddock and no mounting block could be found. Titus had been called to lace his hands together so Honoria might use them as a step up into her saddle.
He’d seen the top of her boot that day, and a flash of the lily-white stocking over her calf as he’d presumed to slide her foot into the stirrup.
It was the first time she’d truly looked at him. The first time their eyes locked, as the sun had haloed around her midnight curls like one of those chipped, expensive paintings of the Madonna that hung in the Baron’s gallery.
In that moment, her features had been just as full of grace.
“You’re bleeding,” she’d remarked, flicking her gaze to a shallow wound on the flesh of his palm where a splinter on a shovel handle had gouged deep enough to draw blood. Her boot had ground a bit of dirt into the wound.
And he’d barely felt the pain.
Titus had balled his fist and hid it behind his back, lowering his gaze. “Inn’t nothing, Miss.”
Reaching into her pocket, she’d drawn out a pressed white handkerchief and dangled it in front of him. “I didn’t see it, or I’d not have—”