Tori Phillips (39 page)

Without quite knowing how, Guy found himself cradling his child.

“You’re not disappointed, I hope?” Celeste asked, watching him closely.

Guy glanced at his wife. His poor sweetheart must still suffer some of the madness from her pain. “Disappointed? Nay! She’s a beautiful miniature of her mother.”

“Aye, an’ healthy too,” Mistress Conroy put in. “Has all her fingers and toes. I counted.”

“We’ll have a boy next year.” Celeste yawned.

Guy trembled at the thought. He couldn’t put her through that hell again. He knew for certain, he couldn’t go through it again. “One girl is enough. No more, my darling.”

Celeste’s eyes grew larger, then sparked with a glimmer of fire. “Then you are displeased with me,
oui?
You don’t want any more of my children,
oui
? Who blackened your eye, eh? I must reward him well. Perhaps I will blacken the other.”

Mistress Conroy rescued the baby when Guy almost dropped her. She tactfully withdrew, for which privacy he thanked assorted saints. The whiskey began to take its delayed effect. He could tell he was due for a monstrous hangover.

“Not so, my sweet. ’Tis only that I cannot bear to be the cause of such pain for you.” He knelt beside her and slipped one hand under her, gently drawing her closer to him. “I love you too much to lose you. I think I died a thousand times this night.” He buried his face in her damp hair.

Celeste said nothing, but stroked the back of his neck in the way she knew would send shivers of pleasure down his spine. “You let me be the judge of what I can bear and not bear,” she murmured in his ear. “I say next year a son. Tonia will need a playmate soon.”

“Tonia?” Guy looked at her and tried to focus his whiskey-soaked brains. What sort of a name was that? “You want to call her Tonia?”

“Oui
,” Celeste purred, still stroking his neck. “For short, of course.”

“Short for what?”

Celeste ran her pink tongue across her lips, a sign Guy had come to recognize when his wife was up to something. “Tonia is short for someone who has never had a child and who craves to be a godfather. One who is very dear to me—Gaston. But Gaston is a boy’s name, so she must be Gastonia,
oui
?”

Guy answered her beguiling smile with a broad one of his own. “You have just doomed that poor man, my sweet. He will be as wet clay in her little hands—and she’s not yet a day old. Aye, Tonia it is.”

Celeste pulled his face closer to hers. “And do you know what you are for suggesting we have no more children, my archangel?”

Guy brushed his lips across hers and chuckled when she sputtered at the bristles on his chin. “Nay, my heart, what am I?”

“You are the most peench-’potted raw-beet sucker I have ever met,” she pronounced, drawing him into a deeper kiss. Guy had neither the breath nor the desire to debate the matter.

ISBN : 978-1-4592-7552-2

SILENT KNIGHT

Copyright © 1996 by Mary W. Schaller

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