“I’ll Show You How Nobles Make Babies,” the Duke Whispered to His Innocent Bride on Their Wedding Night — Then One Kiss Began a Lesson That Would Shatter His Legendary Composure.

PART 7

She spoke of it only once to Lucian, on a particularly bleak evening in February, when the whole of London seemed to have shrunk to gray skies and colder rain.

“What if it simply does not happen?” she asked, staring into the fire rather than at him. “What if I am, after all this, precisely what your mother feared?”

He had drawn her into his lap without a word, wrapping both arms around her as though he could physically hold the worry at bay. “Then we shall have failed to give my mother her grandchild, and I shall have gained every other thing I actually wanted from this marriage. I did not fall in love with a broodmare, Genevieve. I fell in love with a woman who rides out in the rain for tenants, who steps on my foot at balls, who reduced me to a fumbling fool over a household ledger within a month of our wedding. Whatever else happens, that woman is not going anywhere. And neither, I promise you, am I.”

She had wept a little then — not from sorrow, but from the sheer relief of being loved so completely apart from any expectation.

And then, on a bright morning in early spring, it became considerably more than enough.

She had known for nearly a fortnight before she told him. Small things had suggested it first — a tiredness that did not lift with sleep, a faint unsteadiness at the smell of coffee. A tenderness she recognized eventually with a startled clarity that left her sitting very still in her own dressing room for the better part of an hour. She had sent, with great discretion, for the family physician — not the one the dowager had once so pointedly suggested, but a quieter, kinder man she trusted — and he had confirmed, with evident pleasure at delivering good news, precisely what she had already begun to suspect.

She did not tell Lucian immediately. It was not, she told herself, any lingering hurt or hesitation. It was something closer to mischief — the same impulse that had once made her step on his foot at a ball, that had once sent her into the library with her hair deliberately unpinned. She wanted, after everything they had endured together, to give him this particular news in a manner that belonged only to the two of them, and not to the family that had spent so many months treating the matter as their own.

She waited until dinner. Said nothing through the soup course, nothing through the fish, sat through the entire meal with a private, contained satisfaction she could feel humming beneath her composure like a plucked string.

Lucian noticed, of course. By the second course he had set down his fork altogether, watching her with open, undisguised curiosity.

“You are pleased with yourself about something,” he said. “You have been all evening.”

“Am I?”

“What have you done?”

“Nothing at all, Your Grace. I have simply been thinking that I learned my old lessons rather well.”

He went very still. For a long moment he simply looked at her across the candlelit table, and she watched, with private fierce delight, the exact instant the meaning of her words reached him fully — watched the color shift in his face, watched the famous, unshakable composure of the Duke of West Haven dissolve entirely into something raw and disbelieving and achingly hopeful.

“Genevieve.” Her name came out entirely unsteady.

She began to laugh, unable to hold back any longer, and he was out of his chair and around the table before the sound had fully left her, gathering her up with an urgency that nearly upset the candles, his face buried against her hair, his whole frame trembling in a way she had never once seen from him — not on their wedding night, not in the gallery at the Ashworth ball, not even in the fury of his confrontation with his mother.

“Are you certain?” he asked, drawing back just far enough to search her face. “You are certain.”

“Dr. Ashford confirmed it a week ago. I wished to tell you myself, in my own time, rather than have it become the entire family’s business before it was even properly ours.”

“A week.” He let out a breath that was half laugh, half something rougher. “You have known for a week and said nothing.”

“I told you I learned my lessons well. A little patience. A little strategy. I believe you once called it thorough instruction.”

“I am going to remember this,” he said, his voice gone thick with an emotion he made no effort now to disguise, “every single time you accuse me of being too self-satisfied.”

“I certainly hope so, Your Grace.”

He kissed her, slow and reverent, one hand cradling the back of her head, the other resting with careful, wondering tenderness against her still-flat middle, as though he could scarcely credit what she had told him and needed the proof of his own hands to believe it.

“I love you,” he said against her mouth. “More than I have ever managed to say properly, and I intend to spend the rest of our lives correcting that failure.”

“You have said it rather well tonight.”

“I intend to say it considerably better, for considerably longer.” He drew back, and something in his expression turned suddenly, boyishly delighted — a look the ton would scarcely credit on the famously composed Duke of West Haven. “A child, Genevieve. We are to have a child.”

“We are,” she said, and found, saying it aloud for the first time to the person who mattered most, that the words carried none of the old dread the dowager’s comments had once attached to them.

They carried instead only joy — pure, and entirely her own, untethered at last from any ledger of duty or expectation.

But even as the household stirred with the first quiet rumors of the news, Genevieve could not have guessed how completely it would rewrite the family’s regard for her — nor how much of her own fear still waited, unspoken, to be laid finally to rest.