On the surface, she appeared naively genuine. She was too easy to believe, and, because of that very quality, enabled my cynical self to doubt her. She could play me for a fool and I would gladly take the punishment she meted out. If there were only me to worry about. But now this baby. Shit. A baby.
It was possible my predecessor had manipulated us from birth like a fairy godfather in a storybook tale. Maybe there were landmines and traps ahead the likes of which we couldn't even begin to imagine. He'd had thirty-plus years to set them.
Maybe she hadn't betrayed me. Maybe he had. Maybe he'd trapped us both. Again. As frightening as the thought was, it gave me too much hope. I wanted Haley to be innocent of conniving to get pregnant. I wanted it so damn badly it hurt. I wanted her, pure and simple.
I was frustrated and furious at being manipulated and controlled. By anyone. Especially a dead guy.
There was no need to take the car. The village was right out our back door. Out the back of the castle, along the path across the green, through the fortress wall, across the ancient remnants of the moat, and there we were, in the village proper. It looked as quaint as the setting of a Jane Austen novel.
People were out enjoying the fair weather. Haley was full of smiles and friendly waves for everyone we met. The new duchess was quite obviously determined to win over the public. I found myself following her lead, nodding and smiling along with her, though I was forcing it. Giving her the benefit of all that shitty doubt, keeping a path open for us to come back together.
"Have you noticed, how very … white everyone in the village is," she whispered to me.
I nodded. I'd noticed, but I wondered what she was getting at. "Not as diverse as London or Seattle. Does it matter?"
"A half-Chinese person would stand out here, wouldn't he or she?"
I studied her without comment.
Her brow furrowed. "Someone has to know something about Sid's twin."
"You're making a lot of assumptions," I said evenly. I was furious as hell with her, but I understood where her desperation was coming from. I wanted a cure for Sid, too. "Even if the Dead Duke was helping someone out, there's no guarantee whoever it was came from either the estate or village."
She gave me a fierce look. "They were. They had to be. By the time Sid was born, the Dead Duke had become a hermit. There were very few people he cared about left. He'd buried three wives. He had no children, no brothers, no nephews, no near cousins. He'd outlived most of his friends and contemporaries.
"He would only have helped someone he was close to or fond of. Or felt responsible for."
"Or someone he'd bribed to carry out his dastardly plans for our lives." I laughed without humor.
She looked at me and momentarily frowned. Her face cleared, lit with a light bulb of a thought. "Excellent point. I'll add that to the list, along with this-or who would be important to the future of the estate. We know its survival was his ultimate goal.
"You could say, I suppose, that he was helping my mom, his granddaughter, by giving her another child, as she desperately wanted. But there's more to it than that. I'm certain there is.
"When I try to think as cunningly as he did, I have to imagine he was trying to find another way to bind me to the estate. At that point, no one suspected Sid would get this horrible anemia and he'd have that to hold over me.
"There's a connection between the Dead Duke and Sid. I can feel it. He placed her with us. For another reason. I think he wanted to bring her back to it at some point when he needed the leverage. At least, that was his plan when she was born. Then life threw him what he needed and his plan evolved with it.
"I've begged Sid to come. She wants to finish out the school year first."
Arguing with a hormonal pregnant woman, especially one as determined as Haley, was pointless. She was seeing Dead Duke conspiracies where there were none. I hoped.
"Here we are." She stopped suddenly in front of a quaint, old building.
Dr. Turner's office was in an ancient building that, at a guess, had been standing five hundred years. There was a date placard by the door. If I checked it, I bet I wouldn't be far off. In its checkered history, it could have been a variety of things. A pub. A stable. An inn. Or, hell, maybe it had been a midwife's house or a barbershop, back when barbers did any doctoring that was going to get done. Maybe it had a long, august history of midwifery.
It was built in the Tudor style, and one could almost imagine Shakespeare taking Mrs. Shakespeare there for her monthly prenatal check. Everything in the village was quaint and cobblestoned or covered in stucco or had decorative wooden beams. There was very little of the twenty-first century revealed in the historic facades.
The building was barely two blocks down the street from the fortress wall.
"Very convenient," I said, dryly, as I held the door to the building open for her.
"Don't be sardonic, duke. It doesn't suit you."
"I was just stating a fact."
The doctor's office was on the main floor, just down a hall and across from the village's only general practitioner's office. I paused with my hand on the door handle. My heart raced as if I was going to my own shotgun wedding. Shotgun daddy-hood-there was something new. "Ready?"
"As I'll ever be." She smiled sweetly at me, serene and eager.
I may have had the heart of a blackguard, but I felt guilty as hell for not sharing her joy.
"Smile," she said as I opened the door and let her walk past.
From waiting patient to receptionist, every head turned our way. There were only six chairs, but every one was filled with a woman at some point of pregnancy, and from their surprised expressions, their thoughts were pretty clear. The tabloid stories are actually true? They must be. Why else would the duke and duchess visit the only ob in town?
I smiled and nodded to them as Haley dragged me along to the receptionist counter to check in.
I'd reluctantly agreed with Haley's assessment of our situation and was playing the role of happy, hopefully expectant father. Not well, if my distorted reflection in the glass of a framed print on the wall was any indication. I looked more cynical and angry than exuberant.
Haley was all bubbles and effervescence. "We have an eleven o'clock with Dr. Turner?"
"Yes, Your Grace. We're expecting you." She glanced from Haley to me and signaled a nurse who'd been hovering in the background. Clearly, she was telling the truth. And we were getting the VIP treatment.
The nurse called us back and introduced herself as Dawn. Haley lost none of her excitement as she chatted up Dawn while she weighed and measured Haley.
Dawn showed her to the bathroom while I waited for the inevitable confirmation of impending fatherhood in an examination room with walls covered with posters of uteruses and babies in various stages of fetal development. Judging from the pictures, and counting back the weeks, our baby looked like an alien tadpole and was roughly the size of a sesame seed. But not as easy to spit out of my life.
Haley returned with Dawn, who gave her a minute to change into an examination gown. She returned a few minutes later to ask us a series of health-related questions and tap her answers into a computer. "Any family history of birth defects we should be aware of?"
Haley turned to me, crinkling the paper covering the examination table as she did. "None that I'm aware of on my side. Duke?"
I tried not to scowl. "I thought there were some babies born with heart problems on your side, duchess." I couldn't resist the jab.
"That was due to an Rh factor problem." Her voice was cool. "Since I'm O positive, that won't be a problem."
Dawn finished her questioning and left. Dr. Turner came in a few minutes later. The good doctor wasn't as old as I'd anticipated for having delivered half the town. He was tall and wiry, built like a long-distance runner, with thin gray hair and kind eyes. "You're definitely pregnant, Your Grace, but then, you knew that already."
Haley beamed.
I felt sick. Confirmation was hell on hope.
"Congratulations!" His voice was heartily cheery. "The village will celebrate. We'll finally have a chance to hear the bells ring announcing a new birth at the castle this fall. I've practiced in the village for twenty-plus years and never heard them." He smiled as he took a seat in the chair in front of the computer screen and read Haley's chart. "Everything looks good. Let's take a peek under the bonnet and see what we have."