Page 157 of Their Master

“He’s too damned lucky,” Daniel grumbled.

“Anything happen that I should know about?” Smith asked as he shrugged off his coat.

“No sir, all quiet.”

Smith hung the snow-specked garment on the coat rack—also placed there by Moira—which held enough cloaks and coats and scarves and whatnot that the old Smith would have felt uncomfortable with the clutter. Even now he felt a bit of a twinge, but he was getting better. Every day he became a little better.

“Good night, lads,” he said.

“’Night sir.”

Smith took the stairs two at a time, for all that he was exhausted. He’d been traveling for ten days, but at least this would be his last journey until the middle of next year. Now that he had a family, the syndicate divided up the traveling more equitably, although Smith was always the one who managed any volatile situations.

He bypassed the third floor and continued up to the nursery. He opened the door slowly and entered the warm room on the toes of his shoes.

The glow from the fire was the only light in the room. The old nurse—a woman Luke had personally selected—dozed in her favorite rocking chair near the fire.

Smith headed straight for the magnificent bed that Edward and some of the boys from the carpentry school had built for his child.

Had Smith cried when the massive crib/bed was delivered? Perhaps there had been a tear or two in his eyes when he’d read the terse message that had accompanied it:

It is a bed fit for an emperor. Or an empress.

Smith paused and peered over the high side of the crib—which would be lowered in the morning so the current occupant, a miniature tyrant, could crawl out of his bed without any help from his nurse, thank you very much.

Right now, Smith’s son was curled on his side, thumb between his lips, his shock of dark red hair a deceptive halo around his sleeping face.

Smith knew that he shouldn’t, but he had to.

He reached down and lifted the boy, cradling him against his chest and burying his nose in his hair, filling his lungs with that sweet baby scent.

Alexander—appropriately named after an ancient Macedonian King—shifted in his arms. “Papa?”

Smith kissed his temple. “Yes, it’s papa.”

“I missed you.”

“I missed you, too.”

“Did you bring me a puppy?” Alexander asked, the last word swallowed by a big yawn.

Smith laughed. “I don’t know. Have you been a good boy?”

Alexander nodded, his heavy eyelids already drifting shut.

Smith held him until his body was heavy with sleep and then gave him one last kiss before putting him back in his bed. Although he’d been gone less than two weeks the boy had grown. And he had missed it.

He sighed and covered Alexander with the blanket, staring for a long moment at his boy’s sleeping face. It was difficult to leave him, even for the night, but leaving for weeks at a time was excruciating. Smith knew he wasn’t a nine-year-old boy sneaking out to look for bird eggs. He knew he wouldn’t return home to smoking rubble and the bodies of those he loved. But the fear—though faint, now—was always at the back of his mind.

As he’d predicted to Selkirk that day two years ago, Clayton Tyler had died a poor and miserable man, stabbed in a dark alley, either by a desperate criminal or his creditors, Smith neither knew nor cared.

With Clayton Tyler’s death Smith had finally released the last of his anger.

Smith would miss his family until the day he died, but he had a new family now, and it was far more rewarding to live in the present than mourn the past.

He tossed a few more pieces of coal onto the fire and banked it before leaving, managing not to wake Nanny Keogh in the process.

Knox, who’d traveled with Smith on his ten-day trip, had come straight home from the train station while Smith had gone on to meet with his business partners at their club.

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