The Bridgertons Happily Ever After - By Julia Quinn Page 0,8
God.
“Daphne?” His voice shook. Hell, his whole body shook.
She nodded.
“But . . . how . . . ?”
“The usual way, I imagine,” she said, gratefully taking the towel.
“But it’s been— It’s been—” He tried to think. He couldn’t think. His brain had completely ceased working.
“I think I’m done,” she said. She sounded exhausted. “Could you get me a bit of water?”
“Are you certain?” If he recalled correctly, the water would pop right back up and into the chamber pot.
“It’s over there,” she said, motioning weakly to a pitcher on a table. “I’m not going to swallow it.”
He poured her a glass and waited while she swished out her mouth.
“Well,” he said, clearing his throat several times, “I . . . ah . . .” He coughed again. He could not get a word out to save his life. And he couldn’t blame his stutter this time.
“Everyone knows,” Daphne said, placing her hand on his arm for support as she moved back to bed.
“Everyone?” he echoed.
“I hadn’t planned to say anything until you returned, but they guessed.”
He nodded slowly, still trying to absorb it all. A baby. At his age. At her age.
It was . . .
It was . . .
It was amazing.
Strange how it came over him so suddenly. But now, after the initial shock wore off, all he could feel was pure joy.
“This is wonderful news!” he exclaimed. He reached out to hug her, then thought better of it when he saw her pasty complexion. “You never cease to delight me,” he said, instead giving her an awkward pat on the shoulder.
She winced and closed her eyes. “Don’t rock the bed,” she moaned. “You’re making me seasick.”
“You don’t get seasick,” he reminded her.
“I do when I’m expecting.”
“You’re an odd duck, Daphne Basset,” he murmured, and then stepped back to A) stop rocking the bed and
B) remove himself from her immediate vicinity should she take exception to the duck comparison.
(There was a certain history to this. While heavily pregnant with Amelia, she had asked him if she was radiant or if she just looked like a waddling duck. He told her she’d looked like a radiant duck. This had not been the correct answer.)
He cleared his throat and said, “You poor, poor dear.”
Then he fled.
Several hours later Simon was seated at his massive oak desk, his elbows resting atop the smooth wood, his right index finger ringing the top of the brandy snifter that he had already refilled twice.
It had been a momentous day.
An hour or so after he’d left Daphne to her nap, Colin and Penelope had returned with their progeny, and they’d all had tea and biscuits in the breakfast room. Simon had started for the drawing room, but Penelope had requested an alternative, someplace without “expensive fabrics and upholstery.”
Little Georgie had grinned up at him at that, his face still smeared with a substance Simon hoped was chocolate.
As Simon regarded the blanket of crumbs spilling from the table to the floor, along with the wet napkin they’d used to sop up Agatha’s overturned tea, he remembered that he and Daphne had always taken their tea here when the children were small.
Funny how one forgot such details.
Once the tea party had dispersed, however, Colin had asked for a private word. They had repaired to Simon’s study, and it was there that Colin confided in him about Georgie.
He wasn’t talking.
His eyes were sharp. Colin thought he was reading.
But he wasn’t talking.
Colin had asked for his advice, and Simon realized he had none. He’d thought about this, of course. It had haunted him every time Daphne had been pregnant, straight through until each of his children had begun to form sentences.
He supposed it would haunt him now. There would be another baby, another soul to love desperately . . . and worry over.
All he’d known to tell Colin was to love the boy. To talk to him, and praise him, and take him riding and fishing and all those things a father ought to do with a son.
All those things his father had never done with him.
He didn’t think about him often these days, his father. He had Daphne to thank for that. Before they’d met, Simon had been obsessed with revenge. He’d wanted so badly to hurt his father, to make him suffer the way he had suffered as a boy, with all the pain and anguish of knowing he had been rejected and found wanting.
It hadn’t mattered that his father was dead. Simon had thirsted for vengeance all