The Marriage Bed (35 page)

She moved into the doorway and saw him sitting by the cradle. When she looked at him with the baby in his arms, her heart began to ache with a joy so sweet, she could hardly breathe.
All her life she had dreamed romantic dreams of having the honest love of one good man.
It wasn't a dream anymore. It was life. And it wasn't the life she'd imagined at all. It wasn't easy, and it wasn't bliss, and it may have been paid for with tears and pain, and every day was a lesson in learning to just get along. But it was real and it was precious and it was hers. From now on she was hanging onto that life and this man with everything she had.

She made a sound from the doorway, soft enough not to wake the baby, and he looked up. When he saw her, he didn't smile. He didn't move. He was as still as an image in a painting by Reynolds, with the sun washing over him and the child in his arms. She walked into the room. "I came to make up," she said.

"You did?"

She nodded. "It was that speech," she said, deciding not to tell him she'd never intended to leave. She'd tell him someday.
Maybe.
Or maybe not.
"It was the most incoherent, rambling, beautiful thing I've ever heard." She knelt by the chair. She put her hand on his knee. "I love you, too, by the way."

He gave a short, disbelieving laugh. "I can't think why."

Viola looked at her husband. Reaching up, she brushed back the unruly hair at his temple and smiled.
"Because you keep tricking me."
She began to laugh.
"You silver-tongued devil."

Anthony poured a glass of port and brought it to him. "Husbands are not allowed," he said for perhaps the twentieth time.

"Stupid,"
John
muttered, "since we're the cause of it all." He raked a hand through his hair. He hated this waiting, this helplessness. He was so
scared,
he thought he was going to throw up.

His brother-in-law held out the glass. "Have another drink."

"I don't want another drink. How can you be so damned calm about this?"

Anthony sighed and set the port on the table beneath a painting of the tenth Viscount Hammond,
John
's grandfather. "I know what you're feeling, believe me. And I'm not calm. I'm just doing better at hiding it than you are."

A cry floated to them from the nearby stairs, a cry of intense pain, smothered almost at once by the slam of a door. That cry tore his guts apart. "That's it," he said, and started for the stairs. "I'm going up."

Anthony hauled him back. "You can't."

"Christ,"
John
muttered, and started pacing again. "It's been half the night already. How long does this take?"

"Forever."

Footsteps sounded over their heads, but another hour went by, and no one came.
John
's fear deepened with each turn he took down the gallery, and he nearly came apart when he heard another cry of pain from his wife echoing down the stairs.

"I'm going up. She needs me." Anthony made a grab for him, but he evaded it and started up the stairs. On the landing, he encountered Daphne coming down.

Nothing in
John
's life had ever felt like this moment. He stopped.
"Viola?"

"She is well," Daphne assured him. "I came down to tell you that because I thought you might be worried."

"Worried?" That was so patently tame a description of how he felt that he almost laughed at her.

She put a hand on his arm. "Come," she said, and started to guide him back down, but he re-
sisted
. "
John
," she said with quiet firmness, "you cannot help. You will only get in the way. Come."

He reluctantly allowed himself to be pulled back down the stairs.

"This sort of thing takes a long time," Daphne told him. "I was in labor for two days."

"God!"
Two days of this and he'd go mad.

Daphne patted his back in a soothing motion. "She's doing well, truly."

They returned to the gallery. "Everything is all right," Daphne told Anthony, and went back upstairs.

It was another hour, another eternity, before Daphne came back down again. He was at the far end of the gallery when she called his name. "
John
?"

He came at a run and was halfway to her before she spoke again. "Now you can go up."

"Is she all right?" he cried, racing past his sister-in-law.

"Yes," she answered, following him as he started up the stairs.

He had to see that for himself. He took the stairs two at a time and entered the bedchamber, racing right past Dr. Morrison.
John
took one look at his wife, at her pale face and
disheveled
hair, and he skidded to a halt just inside the door, his heart in his throat.

She looked so tired.

"Viola."
He walked over to the side of the bed, and as he did so, he saw the baby in her arms, a red-faced, wailing bit of a thing with an absurdly tiny nose.

"Viola," he said again, because he couldn't think of anything to say but her name. He sank to his knees next to the bed.

Her hand reached out, touched his hair. "What happened to that silver-tongued devil I married?" she murmured with a tired, throaty chuckle.

He shook his head violently, seized her hand in both of his and kissed it. What the hell was a man supposed to say at a time like this? There weren't any words.

"
John
," she said as he half rose and kissed her cheek, her hair. "I'm all right. The baby's all right."

"Sure?"

She nodded and bit her lip, looking at him. Then she spoke. "We have a girl."

"A girl?"
Stunned, he sank back to his knees and looked at the baby again. He stared, watching her as her fierce, angry wails died away into hiccoughs and she nestled into the
vee
of Viola's open nightgown, seeking her breast. She's hungry, he thought.

A girl.

He leaned closer, studying the baby in the dim lamplight, and it was then that he saw the tiny mole at the corner of her mouth. Joy welled up in his chest like a wave. He began to laugh.
A girl.

"She's gorgeous!" he cried. "By God, she is. She looks just like her mother!"

"Oh, stop," Viola said, almost laughing.

"She does." He turned to Daphne, who was standing by the door with the doctor. "Doesn't she?"

Daphne smiled. "I believe you are right."

"Of course I am." He turned back to his wife. "Look," he said, touching the baby's head, smoothing the damp, fine, barely visible blond fuzz that passed for hair. "She's got your hair. And that little mole and, by heaven, she's got that pretty, pretty mouth." He laughed again. "Her eyes are the color of pond mud, I'll wager a thousand pounds on it."

This time Viola did laugh. "We won't know for a while. All babies are born with blue eyes. We'll have to wait and see."

John
didn't need to wait. He looked at his beautiful baby girl and he looked at his beautiful wife. Yes, he thought, eyes like pond mud, hair like golden sunlight, and a heart big enough to love even him. And he had a strong, healthy son sleeping upstairs in the nursery. Damn, how did an irresponsible, reckless scapegrace like him ever get so lucky?