The Duke Is Mine
Page 76

Master Leo Rupert, who held the title of Earl of Calderon (though he didn’t know it yet), fell onto his knees beside his mother and showed her a little collection of twigs, all broken off at precisely the same length. Leo was imaginative, dreamy, and much quieter than Penelope. He was always thinking as hard as he could, harder than most five-year-olds.
“Will you build something with the twigs?” Olivia asked, pushing herself into a sitting position. “Perhaps a house?”
“I’m too young to build a house,” Leo said, with just a shadow of annoyance. “People my age don’t build houses, Mama. You should know that.” He stowed the twigs carefully in his pocket and got up from his rather grubby knees.
“What will you do with them?”
“Alfie and I will build a road. I’ll ask Uncle Justin if he will help us.” Then he gave her a smile that was all the more beautiful for being quite grave and rarely used. “Where’s Lucy?”
“She’s sitting in the pony cart,” Olivia told him. “You know Lucy doesn’t like leaving Grandmother’s knee these days.”
“I shall show these sticks to Grandmother,” he said, and wandered off.
Olivia watched him go, wondering. Her husband returned, and sat down just behind her, spreading his hands over her belly and pulling her against his warm chest. “This baby is bigger than either of the other two,” he observed.
“Quin, do you think it’s truly all right that Leo plays with a friend named Alfie all the time—and no one can see Alfie but him?”
Quin pulled her even more snugly against him and kissed her ear. “Do you think he does it simply because it makes his Papa so happy?”
Olivia tipped her head back against his shoulder. “No. Leo would say that Alfie is his own friend, just as he has said, many a time over the last year. As for the size of my belly, I begin to think I might be carrying twins.”
“You’re carrying twins?” Quin exclaimed. “Could you rethink that idea? I’m not sure we can handle two more.”
Olivia laughed. “Is this the same man who said he wanted the nursery full of children?”
“That was before I knew how loud they can be. With Georgiana’s two, and Justin’s boy arriving tomorrow—and you know that child is a perfect terror, Olivia—the house shakes at its foundations.”
“Kiss me,” Olivia asked, looking up at her beautiful warrior prince of a husband.
His first kiss was adoring, but it gradually deepened and turned into something else: a possessive, marauding kiss. His hands edged from her tummy up toward her chest, a softer and more voluptuous curve.
“You mustn’t!” Olivia said with a little gasp, sometime later. They were both breathing quickly.
“Let’s go home,” Quin said into her ear. “I want you. I want my wife on a Sunday afternoon in a sultry, sunny English summer. I want her naked and lying on our bed so that I can—”
Penelope skittered to a halt beside them. “Are you kissing again? Grandmother says it’s time to go home, and Nanny says that there are lemon tarts for tea. Come on!” She ran ahead, her half boots twinkling under her skirts.
Quin helped his beloved to her feet, took her hand, and entertained her all the way back to the pony cart with so many whispered suggestions that she was quite rosy when they at last reached the end of Ladybird Ridge.
“Humph,” the dowager said, seeing Olivia’s face. “Too hot out here, I shouldn’t wonder. Lucy is overheated as well.”
Quin bent down and gave Lucy’s ear a tug. “Then we must go home,” he said, nodding to the groom driving a second cart now full of his children and their cousins. He took the reins of the pony cart. “We mustn’t discomfort Lucy. And I think my wife would also be the better for—”
Olivia elbowed him.
“A nap,” he said, kissing her nose.
The dowager duchess looked at both of them and then away at the neat fields that spread out from the seat of the Sconces. It was not every day that she thanked God that she had chosen Georgiana to undergo that absurd series of tests she had devised, and that Georgiana had brought along Olivia.
But almost every day.