Of Heirs and Havoc ✔️ | Of Crimes and Crowns Book 2

six: of children and calming

Grace refused to stop crying.

Natasha stared up at the canopy of the four-poster bed, and counted to five in her head as she listened to Connor's slow breaths. If he didn't get up before she was finished counting, she would feed her daughter and then rock Grace back to sleep. Otherwise, she would allow Connor to take care of their child. It was a tactic she had used ever since that night when Grace had been a month old and Connor had confronted her. Natasha had been running herself ragged, refusing the help of her husband and their daughter's nurse alike, attempting to prove herself a better mother than her own had been. And failing, because she had been acting in a constrained manner when it came to motherhood. Unable to accept that she could be a good mother as well as letting others take care of her child.

Thankfully, she was better now. Less controlling, more willing to receive help and forgive herself for it. So when Connor remained still next to her save the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, she disentangled her limbs from those of her husband, and got out of bed to feed her child. When Grace was sated, she babbled incoherently and wriggled in Natasha's hold, looking up at her mother with her wide grey eyes. And then... looking behind her mother, over Natasha's shoulder at a yawning Connor.

"Hello, darling." He gently brushed his thumb over Grace's cheek, and then kissed Natasha. Not as softly as he would their daughter's—he knew her too well for that, knew her too well to be gentle with her.

She sighed with irritation even as she leaned back into him, letting the warmth of his body soak through her like water through paper. "I only got out of bed so that you wouldn't have to, and now you ruin my good deed with one of your own."

"Do two good deeds make a bad one?" His laugh fanned out over her neck like a brush of fine lace, his lips skimming the line of her jaw. "I hadn't realized that was part of philosophy, let alone logic."

Natasha bent over to set Grace down in her bassinet, and watched for a moment as she fell back into her gentle sleep. She could feel Connor's gaze on her, and turned around, planting her hands on his chest. The shaft of moonlight that cut through the leaden glass windows made him look otherworldly—his pale hair turned to silver, his face alight with an ethereal glow. And his eyes, his grey eyes, were now quicksilver, prone to changing on a whim. Dancing with merriment in one moment then becoming somber in the next, going from gray and earnest, to molten with desire as fluidly as the wind stirred the leaves outside. 

At the moment, they were clouded with anxiety, with concern for her. "There's more on your mind than Grace disturbing our sleep, is there not?"

She sighed, leaning forward so that her forehead rested against his collarbone. Tasha breathed him in, his scent of linen and grass, of pure refreshing things that were a far cry from the upheaval crashing in waves against her heart and the anxiety swirling in her head.

"There is," she admitted, lifting her chin to meet his gaze. "And there isn't."

A frown furrowed his brows. "Do you mind explaining your paradox of a statement, my queen?"

"The matter that worries me... it does involve Grace." She let out a long breath, and it stirred her hair so that strands of it escaped Connor's hands where they lay on her shoulders. "I'm worried that I won't be raise her well enough. How can I be, when my parents were alive all these years, and I abandoned them? And my brother—poor Matthew—I wasn't even a good sister, a good daughter, so how could I be a good mother to her?"

Connor's arms tightened around her, his fingers splayed on her back where it was bared by the laces of her nightgown. "Do you not think I have the same fears as you do? That terror, the paranoia that the most—the most seemingly harmless decision I make, or word I say, could ruin her life forever?"

"We're a proper pair of cowards, aren't we?" Natasha asked, her words bitter but her tone commiserating. It was freeing, to know that her anxieties were shared, her burden carried by another person. It hadn't always been freeing to her—once, she had thought it an even greater source of her troubles than the problem itself—but now she could allow herself to rest in her husband's arms, to share whatever weighed on her heart with Connor. That was what it meant to be married—to be properly married.

"We've always been cowards, darling." His fingers combed through her hair. "It's simply a matter of whether we are cowards together, or apart."

"Together," Natasha said with a nod. "Always."

He smiled, and she could still feel that curve of his lips when she stretched up and kissed him. Connor stepped back until they fell onto the bed, her on top of him, and any worries she had were replaced by pleasure. Sleep overcame both of them when they had finished, and then only the gentle light of dawn woke her. But it woke her to find a thousand catastrophes waiting to end her.

Waiting to end the both of them.