Page 85 of The Spy Who Loved Her
“Mum left,” Dannyboy said in a small voice, curling his knees toward his chest. “I don’t know where. An’ she took—she took all my coin wiv ‘er.”
“All of it!” Rafe’s hoarse bark startled the boy and baby both. The baby had managed to slip one tiny arm free of the blankets, and she flailed her small fist. In effort to soothe the disgruntled expression upon the baby’s face before it could devolve once more into a cascade of tears and wails, Rafe eased the baby to the cradle of one arm and gave her his finger to latch onto with her own.
Such tiny fingers, wrapped around just one of his own. With perfect little fingernails rendered in miniature.
“Even the purse ye gave me. I ‘adn’t even the time to buy a cradle.” He said the words as if they amounted to a personal failing. “Mum said she—she couldn’t care for both o’ us,” he said, tucking a melancholy sigh into the curve of his elbow.
“Oh, Dannyboy,” he said, but he was lost for the words necessary to comfort the child. He couldn’t be expected to understand such adult matters. There was nothing he could say that would erase the hurt, and it would hardly be fair to offer the boy assurances which might prove themselves to be lies.
Dannyboy firmed his chin. “I can take care o’ m’self,” he said. “But she’s just so little.” Another sweep of his grubby fist across his eyes. “She needs to be somebody’s,” he said. “She’s gotta ‘ave somebody what loves ‘er. And I thought—I thought maybe Lady Emma—”
God, Rafe was going to cry himself. It was there already, tearing at his throat. A massive, threatening lump through which he doubted he could comfortably speak.
“There was nowhere else I could go,” Dannyboy said, and his head dropped against the back of the couch. “I ‘ad to do what’s best for ‘er.”
He hadn’t just donehisbest. He’d donethebest. The best there was to do. “Yes,” Rafe said roughly, through the tight vise of his throat. And he knew he was making this promise for himself and Emma both—but he knew also that there was nothing that would please her more. “Yes. Of course.” Some men became fathers the usual way, over the course of months and month as they waited for a much-anticipated child to grace the world with its presence.
But he had become a father in this very moment. With a tiny babyplaced into his arms at an inopportune hour of the morning, within the walls of Emma’s green salon.
“I promise you,” he said to the boy. “She will be so very loved. But, Dannyboy, I can tell you from personal experience that every little girl deserves an older brother to look out for her, and she had got such a good one already. We can’t take only her,” he said. “It has got to be both of you.”
Dannyboy smothered a sob beneath his fist. “You don’t gotta,” he said. “I can—I can—”
“Bothof you,” Rafe said. “If she’s going to be our daughter, you have got to be our son. All right?” Carefully he reclaimed his hand from the baby’s tight grip and held out his arm.
Dannyboy broke down into a noisy burst of tears, scrambling off of the couch to cast himself at Rafe, his thin arms latching around his neck.
And that was how Emma found them when she made it down at last, cinching her dressing gown around her waist. Dannyboy sobbing into his right ear as the baby wailed into his left. She paused there in the doorway, staring dumbly.
On some level, he knew, she must have had some sort of inkling as to what, exactly, had brought Dannyboy to her home at this hour of the night. The presence of the screaming infant had only confirmed it. And still she listed there, bracing one hand against the door frame as if her knees had threatened to buckle beneath her. Afraid, he thought. Afraid to hope that it meant what she thought it must. She drew a soft, shuddering breath, and pressed one hand to her heart as her eyes began to glitter with the advent of tears.
He hadn’t asked her yet. His face was still a damned mess, his fingers still healing. He was going to go to his wedding looking like he’d come out the wrong end of a tavern brawl regardless.
But the time was now. It had to be now.
“There, now,” he whispered to Dannyboy. “Emma’s come down to see you. Here, take my hand.” When the boy had withdrawn enough to seize instead at his hand, Rafe managed to climb to his feet in an awkward sort of struggle. Undignified it was, but he had a sort of uncanny feeling that there would be little room for dignity in his immediate future. Children had a way of trampling straight across it.
They faced her at last, the three of them—as much as the baby could be said to have faced her at least, tucked as she was into Rafe’s arm. And he said, “Emma, I am asking now. Will you have us? Allof us?”
“Yes.” It was just a soft squeak of sound, issued before he’d even finished speaking, and it had been accompanied by an influx of tears. “Yes.Of course, yes.” And she flew across the floor—not to him, nor even to the baby held in his arms.
She went straight to Dannyboy, who burrowed into her arms and let her stroke back the messy tumble of his hair. Just as a mother would do. She had mothered so many children across the years, but these two—these two would be hers.Theirs.
“And who is this?” she asked, as she settled upon the couch with Dannyboy at her side, and Rafe brought the baby at last to lay into her arms. With a mighty flail, the baby caught up a skein of Emma’s hair and gave it a yank.
“My baby sister,” Dannyboy said, wiping his face with the dirty sleeve of his shirt. “She’s not got a name. Mum didn’t—mum didn’t give her one.”
“But you did,” Emma said with a soft smile. “Surely, you must’ve called her something.” She gave a nod as Neil brought a tray into the room to lay upon the low table there before the couch.
Dannyboy grabbed up a handful of sandwiches and crammed two of them into his mouth at once. With a sheepish shrug, he admitted, “I call ‘er Kitty sometimes. When she’s not screamin’, she sounds a bit like a cat, I think.”
“Kitty,” Emma mused, peering up at Rafe. “That’s often a pet name for Katherine. Like Dannyboy is for Daniel. Fine names, don’t you think? And Kit will be so pleased.”
No, he damned well wouldn’t—but Rafe thought it was perfect. They were both perfect. Daniel and Katherine Beaumont. Just like that, his family had expanded.
Neil coughed into his hand. “I think there might be a cradle somewhere in the attic. I could have it brought down.”
“Oh, please,” Emma said. “I haven’t got one to hand. Nobody’s ever brought me a baby before. Wherever are we going to find a wet nurse at this hour?”
