A Baron for Becky

Preface

In the nursery, the two little girls waited, sombre in their mourning blacks. Hugh Baron Overton had not stopped in the hall to remove his gloves or his tall hat with its crepe bands. He handed them to the nursemaid, barely looking to see if she caught them, his eyes only for the poor orphaned mites left to his care.

He knelt so he didn't loom over them, and they both shrank a little, clinging to one another. Were they frightened of him? He had never hurt them; in the four years he'd been married to their Mama, he had barely seen them.

He could tell himself he'd been busy putting his unexpected inheritance back on a sound financial footing. And they'd worked: those long voyages to secure cotton for the mill in Liverpool, the trips to London for buyers, the constant scurrying to and from the West Indies and the length and breadth of England.

But the truth was he'd also been avoiding their Mama. Only after he married the widow-after the birth of her deceased husband's posthumous daughter and her own reluctant consent to take her second husband to her bed-did she tell him that she hated him; that she couldn't bear to look at the scars on his face and body.

Was it the scars that the girls feared? He turned his head a little so that the light fell on the unmarked side of his face. What did one say to little girls of four and seven?

"Are you well, my dears?"

The older one stiffened her thin shoulders and stuck out her chin, all determination. "Papa?" she said. "Have you come to send us to the orfa semery, Papa?'

"I don't plan to send you anywhere, Sophrania," he said, "but I don't understand? What is an orfa semery?"

She frowned with him. "The orfa semery. Where the orfa's live. After their Mama dies."

Orphans. He would not have understood if he'd not been thinking the word himself. Later he would find out which of the maids had been frightening his daughters. For now...

"Listen carefully, my dears. I am your Papa. This is your home. No one will send you away, I promise. You are not orphans. You have a Papa."

He settled back so he was sitting on the floor with the wall as a backrest and his legs outstretched. "Come here, Sophrania. Come here, Emmaline."

Cautiously they approached his welcoming arms, each sitting gingerly upright on a thigh.

He rested a gentle hand on each small back, and-on a sudden inspiration-began telling them stories about his own time in this very nursery with his three cousins. And, moment by moment, they relaxed, until he had a little girl nestled on each shoulder prompting a surge of tender protectiveness.

He had not been a good Papa, but he was all they had. He would have to do better.