Page 57 of Last Comes Fate

Francesca

14 June 1983

HG back from Scotland today. Shot two more stags than allowed but terribly proud as always. Ortham wanted to hang them from the walls, but I gather his fiancée won’t have it. Chap doesn’t seem very happy with his betrothed. Not if he’s trading a honeymoon for a hunting trip.

They’ll go again next month for three full weeks after the wedding. Rupert does enjoy leaving the work for others to do.

I chuckled and took another sip of sparkling water. For whatever reason, I could not get enough of Coconut-flavored La Croix these days, despite never liking it before now. Especially when drinking it with dill pickle juice.

Ah, pregnancy. Intermittent nausea, insatiable sex cravings, and really weird flavor combos. What joy.

Said joy was currently being experienced on my couch while I watched the autumn leaves fall from the dogwood in the backyard and flipped through another journal from the stack Xavier had brought me on his most recent trip back from London. Since becoming a shockingly free woman two weeks earlier, I’d been steadily making my way through most of the stewards’ journals from the twentieth century and was finally getting into more recent stuff written by Henry Parker, Xavier’s uncle.

Which meant I’d be getting into stuff about Xavier.

Call me curious, but I wanted to know what the estate hadreallythought of the duke secretly marrying his cook. That was the kind of scandal that drove many a Regency novel onto the bestseller lists.

Mostly, though, I was trying to make the best of my new status as a lady of leisure.

Iwasupset about losing my job. Really, I was. But maybe not as much as I had thought. So far, it wasn’t bad, having my ducal chef ex-boyfriend living in my basement.

Most of our days passed pleasantly. We took turns dropping off Sofia at preschool in the mornings, then Xavier worked out of an office he’d rented in Tribeca while I pieced together income doing online tutoring. He had insisted on paying rent for the basement apartment, which I transferred directly to Matthew despite his protests otherwise.

Meanwhile, I hadn’t had to refill my fridge once since Xavier moved in. The errant duke was happily cooking for Sofia and me almost every night, and I was more than happy to inhale the leftovers for lunch, with him sitting across from me occasionally, watching me enjoy every bite.

It was nice. Safe.

Almost like we were a family again. A nice platonic family.

Which I might have appreciated more if my hormones hadn’t been playing awful, horrible tricks on me.

Like on this pleasant late fall day, for instance.

The birds were chirping.

The sun was shining.

And I was making myself read about the hunting patterns of the gentry in Northwest England to avoid memories of the way Xavier’s perfectly round butt had looked last night while he made Sofia and me his famous cod roe udon noodles.

And the way his blue eyes had gleamed with slightly lascivious pleasure when I couldn’t help but moan at the first bite.

And the way his lush, full lips had pursed every time he sucked a tender noodle between them.

The man really could…eat.

I groaned and forced myself to stare at the journal’s page, reading and rereading the same sentence about red stags at least twelve more times.

This was embarrassing. Like I wasn’t a grown, almost twenty-eight-year-old woman fully in control of her faculties, but in fact, a teenage boy desperate to dirty up a tube sock. It happened almost overnight, too. As soon as the baseline nausea of the first trimester faded away and that thirteen-week mark hit, it felt like clouds disappeared overhead and a bright light primarily composed of sex hormones beamed down on me from above.

Here, said God.Having a baby out of wedlock again? Enjoy the taste of sin.

Divine providence as sexual torture.

Now, from morning to night, all I wanted wasit. And it didn’t help that I had a walking tower of sex living in my apartment, begging to be climbed. The way he watched me, it was as though Xavier knew I was inches from breaking. The Xavier I knew couldn’t wait longer than five minutes for fast food, but this one was the soul of patience. A big black-haired panther tracking its quarry, waiting for weakness so he could pounce. He was biding his time, wearing tight T-shirts and gray sweatpants, ready for me to crack under pressure.

But I couldn’t go there. Not again. There were more important things to think about besides Xavier’s utterly sexy mouth and the fact that my vibrator was unequal to the task.

Suddenly feeling hot, I flipped the page to finish the entry, which seemed to be about Xavier’s father’s hunting prowess.

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