Undeniable Rogue (The Rogues Club Book One) (20 page)

The midwife gasped, cursed, and squinted at her accuser. “Lay-deee Ver-hon-hic-haaa shall hear about thish.” Maggs raised her nose, harrumphed, turned on her heel, and tumbled her tangle-footed way down the front steps.

“Oh, for heaven’s sakes,” Gideon said. “Pick her up, give her a guinea, and send her on her bosky way.” He shut the door on the sight of his retainers righting the lush, dusting his hands of the grime he imagined must linger in her wake. “There.”

“But, your grace. Who will, er, assist the Duchess?”

Gideon ran his hand through his hair. “Mrs. Chalmer surely has exper—”

“Went to her sister’s in Cheapside, not three hours ago. Children come down with the spots.”

Gideon raised his chin, squared his shoulders and took the stairs two at a time. He would tell Sabrina that she would have to wait until the doc—

Every candle in the bedchamber blazed.

In the middle of the huge four-poster, her legs bent, her back arched, a feral animal sound issuing from her throat, Sabrina labored alone.

The sight, the sound, his wife’s isolation in her struggle, were like to cut Gideon to the quick.

He would never forget any of it. Neither would he allow her to struggle alone. He tore off his coat and released his cuff studs. “The midwife was disgusting,” he said, taking her hand. “Unwashed, reeking of gin, and God knows what else. Disease-ridden as well, no doubt. Did you say that someone recommended the woman?”

The pleading look Sabrina gave him, when she finally lowered her back to the bed and closed her eyes in exhaustion, turned his heart over in his chest and brought it up into his throat. “I sent her away,” he confessed. “I had to, Bree.”

Her look incredulous, his wife appeared too breathless, too exhausted to speak.

“Tell me what I must do,” he said, dipping a cloth into the warm, soapy water that she had prepared.

He sponged her face and her neck. “I want to help, but you must tell me, Sweetheart, what to do. I am sorry. I am so sorry that I did this to you with my selfish lust. I would not blame you if you never forgave me. But let me help you, now. Please.”

She stopped his ministrations, took and kissed the back of his hand. “He is almost here. Just catch him when he comes.” She started to twist again, her stomach to mound. Then she raised herself on her elbows, pulled her legs back, and pushed.

Gideon did not know which of them perspired more, which was more like to scream.

“Now,” she shouted. “Catch him now.”

Gideon went to the foot of the bed and watched amazed as a bloody, wiggling bundle of screaming humanity slipped into his waiting hands. He looked up at his wife, awed and shaken by what he had just witnessed. “A girl,” he said, the lump in his throat making further speech impossible.

At Sabrina’s direction, he cut and tied the cord, his knees going to water. Then he bound the baby’s belly. And when he made to lift her, the mite waved her arms as if she were losing her balance. So he brought her close against him, and she nuzzled his neck, clutching him with the tiniest little hands he ever saw, as if...she needed him.

And Gideon knew that he would never be the same again. “There’s my girl,” he crooned. “You are safe. Do not fret, little one, I will keep you safe.”

As Sabrina regarded them, her sparkling violet eyes bright and alive with some heady emotion he could not fathom, she smiled. Sabrina St. Goddard, the most beautiful woman he had ever beheld. Radiant. “This little one must be the second most beautiful sight in the world,” he said, gazing into Sabrina’s eyes in such a way as to make her understand that, she was the first.

With the babe clinging to him, filling his arms, his heart, Gideon had not felt so protective, so needed, or so strong and capable in his entire thirty-four years.

Sincerely loathe to relinquish the wiggling bundle, he nevertheless carried her toward the bed, while near his ear the mite squeaked and cooed and made soft, sweet suckling noises.

His grin grew so wide, of its own volition, he could barely contain it.

“I think you should name her,” Sabrina said, still breathing heavily, looking weak but satisfied. “After all, you delivered her.”

“
You
delivered her, make no mistake, but I would— Never mind. Here she is.”

“Wait,” Sabrina said arching, appearing to be in pain again.

“Oh Good Lord,” Gideon said, placing the babe on the bed and covering her with a corner of the blanket. “Is there another?” He went back toward the foot of the bed. “Is it twins?

Sabrina groaned and laughed at the same time, quite an odd sound. “No, thank God. It is only the afterbirth. I can feel it coming.”

Gideon received the afterbirth in a basin as Sabrina directed, then he called for one of the maids to dispose of it.

“You are certain,” he said, his heart still pounding, “that there is not another babe?”

Sabrina shook her head as she took her new daughter and put her to her breast. “I am certain.”

“I ask because you are bleeding heavily.” The amount of blood that flowed with the afterbirth had disturbed him greatly. “So much bleeding cannot be good,” he said, feeling foolish. “Of course you would bleed, but...What can I— I mean, I do apologize, but I do not know what to do for you.”

“The babe’s nursing will slow the flux,” Sabrina said. “Fold one of the cloths for now, will you, and place it between my legs?”

After everything, Gideon could not believe that she blushed when she asked.

“Later,” she said, “after I rest, I will wash.”

Placing the padding between her legs, Gideon found himself shocked by the terrifying amount of blood pooled there.

His head swam and his stomach roiled...and the floor rose up to greet him.

No sooner did he land, however, than he heard the baby wailing furiously, and Sabrina calling his name, both sounds coming to him as if through a long and deep tunnel.

The lightheadedness had come upon him so quickly, he had been caught unaware, but now he turned his head toward the sounds and, despite the dip to the floor and the spin in the room, Gideon moved his arms and legs to brace himself and attempt to rise.

Once he was up, he placed one foot in front of the other and made his way around the bed, determined not to go down again.

His wife and his daughter needed him.

Sabrina’s concern, he could tell, despite her attempt to hide it, was tempered with a good deal of amusement. He cared not. He had reached her when she most needed him, which was all that mattered.

“Sit there, on the bedside chair,” she said. “And lower your head between your knees. That should help.”

Gideon slipped, rather than sat, in the chair and did as she bid.

Foolish as the position seemed, the ridiculous contortion did help clear his foggy brain considerably. When he felt almost normal again, he raised his head, rested it against the chair-back and closed his eyes.

“Good,” Sabrina said. “Rest for a few minutes. You have had a difficult time of it.”

“You need not sound so amused,” Gideon said, not bothering to open his eyes while the bedchamber continued to waltz about him. “You have quite established your superiority in the birthing department.”

“I have had practice. Double practice, when you come down to it. Did you hurt yourself when you fell, though it was more a fold and glide type of swoon you performed. Very neat.”

He opened one eye. “If you ever,
ever
, tell anyone that I swooned at the birth, I will beat you.”

Sabrina giggled. “Sorry. I already perceive that you will not.”

“Thank you,” Gideon said. “That is the nicest compliment you have paid me to date. However, lest we lose track of the subject, let me say that you also had more than a few days to prepare for this.”

“I did, and for the first time, I did not give birth alone. Thank you. You were magnificent.” She had not seen her first husband for two months before the twins’ birth, for he considered her useless to him, then. Neither did she see him for three months after, praise be, because the tardy and remorseful midwife had frightened him with tales of birth fever spread through a woman’s bloody after-flux.

“Are you up to calling a maid to take and bathe the baby,” Sabrina asked her husband. “I think she is finished nursing for the moment.”

By then, Gideon seemed to have regained enough of his equilibrium to stand and perform the menial task she assigned him.

By the time the maid answered his summons, Gideon seemed more himself. But he appeared loathe to let young Alice take the baby away. “Prepare two basins of warm water,” he told her. “And bring them here.”

Gideon took the fretting babe from Sabrina’s arms, then, and the mite’s squeaky, little whimpers calmed the minute he cuddled and crooned to her, almost as if she knew him.

Sabrina caught her trembling lip between her teeth. “I repeat, she is yours to name, as she believes you are hers to command.”

Gideon sat on the bed beside her, the babe cradled in his protective embrace. “I would not mind if she...thought of me as her Papa. The boys, too, except that they knew their father, so perhaps they would not care to. At any rate, it might be best to allow them to decide. It matters not to me, of course.”

“Of course,” Sabrina said, getting for herself a rare glimpse of the true Gideon St. Goddard.

“But how would you feel if they did call me Papa, eventually?”

His wife’s hesitation eroded the thread of expectation Gideon refused to name.

“You are a good man, Gideon St. Goddard. I know you are, and yet I feel compelled to remind you that they are but babes, the three of them. I will not have anyone hurt them. Not again. I will not.”

Gideon did not know what to say to that. He understood her warning, was humbled that she considered him good at all, especially when he considered all the ways in which he was not. He understood her need to protect her children.

If only she understood that he would protect them as fiercely, himself. With his dying breath, if needs be.

Sabrina covered his hand with her own. “What shall we call her?”

“Juliana, perhaps?” Gideon dared suggest. “I have loved the name since I was a child. It is my grandmother’s.”

“Oh, I like that.”

Gideon wondered how someone who had just endured so much could remain so beautiful.

“I like it very well, indeed. Juliana St. Goddard.”

The sound of it gave Gideon a quick and pleasant flood of warmth in the region of his cold rogue’s heart. Juliana would carry his name. Of course, she would; he was married to her mother. “Thank you,” he said, sincerely moved, though he gave his thanks for so much more than her allowing him to name her daughter.

Alice, the maid, brought Gideon’s basins of warm, soapy water, and he set himself up to supervise the girl’s attempt at bathing the babe. He ignored his wife’s raised brow at his high-handed tactics, because, well, this was important.

“Be careful she does not fall,” he cautioned Alice. “Hold her head. No, watch her belly, the cord.” And finally, he all but elbowed the poor maid out of his way and sent her up to the nursery for his old cradle.

Gideon proceeded to take great care and inordinate pleasure in giving Juliana her first bath. “Did you ever see such tiny fingernails in your life?” he asked Sabrina, earning himself a muffled giggle in reply.

After that, he did not deign to look in the direction from which the uncivil squeak had come, he simply directed his conjecture toward the beautiful and wide-eyed babe, herself. “And look at your little toes,” he crooned. “And your perfect little button nose, exactly like your amused Mama’s.”