Page 84 of Lady Daring
“Oh. I’d forgotten about my dowry. And I plan on using Mama’s inheritance to rebuild my mill, if Hodge sells to me. So that ten thousand is already spoken for.” Henrietta buttoned Darien’s waistcoat. Her stomach shifted again when she looked up to find everyone watching her. “What?”
“She comes with an estate, an interest in her father’s mills, and twenty thousand pounds?” The marquess wheeled on Clarinda. “How is it she is not married already?”
Clarinda shrugged. “Henrietta has only just been presented, and she has been too busy to entertain suitors.”
“She has some philosophical objections to marriage,” Darien said. “The law’s attitude toward women’s property, or some such.”
“The law’s habit of regarding womenasproperty,” Henrietta reminded him. This conversation was veering from the course she’d plotted for it. “Whatever I bring to my marriage will become my husband’s, his to use and dispose of as he may please. I have no wish to find myself in the position of Mrs. Pennyroyal. Now, tell me how I am to tie this impossible cravat.”
The marquess watched as Darien held a hand mirror in his good hand and directed this next and most important step in his toilette. Henrietta did the best she could, slapping his hand away when he tried interfering. But when she looked up, she found Darien watching her with an impossible affection in his eyes.
Her breath dissolved into a tight, warm glow in her chest.
“A bluestocking for my son?” The marquess lifted a brow.
“Another Wollstonecraft in the making,” Darien confirmed.
His lordship shuddered. “Bah. Well, anything can be got ’round with the right settlements. I could give her another ten thousand for her jointure, if she makes a respectable man of you, and five thousand apiece for your children.”
Henrietta paused with her hands at Darien’s throat, feeling the heat wafting from him to her fingertips. “You cannot be suggesting what it seems you are suggesting, sir.”
“Oh, look, here’s tea,” Clarinda announced as a maid opened the connecting door to Henrietta’s sitting room. “Shall we go through? Hetty’s parlor has the loveliest light, and Langford, I should like to offer you bread and some of this excellent butter.”
She processed into the sitting room, and the marquess followed. Henrietta made a hurried adjustment to Darien’s coat and tugged him to his feet.
“Your father—” she began.
But as Darien stepped into her parlor, he froze. The opposite door to her sleeping chamber stood open and Mary Ann leaned over the bed, cooing as she unwrapped a tiny infant, who stared at her with a newborn’s total concentration.
“Oh, Hetty,” Clarinda said from behind the tea service. “Mary Ann asked if she might bring up the baby. Is this a bad time?”
Darien didn’t move, his gaze fixed on the other room and the occupant of the broad four-poster bed. Henrietta stopped breathing as she watched the expressions move over his face.
The marquess frowned and looked at Clarinda. “I thought you were—?” He tried and failed not to look at her enlarged waistline.
“Henrietta has taken in a ward,” Clarinda said. “Lady Celeste’s daughter.”
“Where did she come by that whelp?”
“Found it in a parsley bed, of course,” Henrietta said, moving toward the bedchamber.
The marquess’s horrified tone was a bracing slap to attention. Darien had warned her that Polite Society wouldn’t accept her as a mother. But thanks to her spectacular display at her debate, she no longer had reason to think society’s approval within her reach anyway.
She cared what Darien thought, though.
“I am told Lady Celeste was called away to the Continent,” Clarinda said. “Hetty was so good as to give the child a home.”
The marquess, too, stared through the door at the baby. “Baseborn brat,” he said under his breath. “The only thing my son has ever produced. And in your house, Clarinda? I am surprised you allow it.”
Clarinda paused with her hand over the teapot. “My lord, every child’s life is precious. You know that as much as I.”
The hurt stood out in his lordship’s face, the same pain Henrietta had seen in Darien’s eyes. All four of them paused for a moment in tableau, bound by their shared knowledge of loss.
“If you will excuse me,” Henrietta said. “I want to see Celestina while she is awake. Newborns sleep all the time, did you know that?”
“You may…bring her in here,” Darien said, pausing near a chair. “My father can leave if he does not wish to see his grandchild.”
“That is not my grandchild,” the marquess said swiftly.
