“Yes,” Patrick said firmly. He settled her more carefully into the crook of his arm. “We’ll practice.” His tone was resonant with anticipation.

“I have something to confess,” Sophie whispered. “I wasn’t entirely honest with you.”

Patrick listened lazily to his wife’s sweet voice, hardly paying attention.

“I didn’t interrupt you only because I realized that I … I had to resolve the problem with my drawers. I wanted to enchant you. It was all I could think about this morning.”

Patrick didn’t answer. His arm pulled her tighter, crushing her small sweetness against his chest. Oh God, what a wonderful thing it was to have a wife, to make love to one’s wife on the loading bills, and on the couch, and on the library floor. To have a wife who thought all morning.

It wasn’t until much later that afternoon that a thought of his own strayed into Patrick’s mind. Without even noticing it consciously, he was replaying the moment when he pulled Sophie’s loose dress to her waist. It almost made him groan just to think about the way her breasts overflowed in his hands, their rounded plumpness begging for kisses.

They’ve grown, he thought. Sophie’s breasts have grown. From caresses? Slowly the thought trickled into the rational part of Patrick’s brain. The truth was likely a good deal less romantic.

Patrick’s back suddenly grew rigid. The image of Sophie’s curvaceous body entered his mind. Unconsciously he stood up, and desperately counted in his head. The night he first went to her room—Jesus, when was that? Over three months ago.

He was an idiot, an outrageously stupid idiot. He had protected women from pregnancy hither and yon … women he didn’t give a toss about. And now, when he had found a woman whom he loved—why not admit it? He loved her, loved Sophie, with all his soul and heart. Now he had her, and he was wooing her, and it was working, he knew it was working…. He deliberately, stupidly, had put her in the greatest danger a woman could face.

“Idiot! Idiot!” Patrick didn’t even realize that he was howling, face up to the elaborate whorls of plaster ornamenting the ceiling.

In the back of his mind, Patrick had meant to talk Sophie out of the idea of having a child. She was too small, too petite, the lovely woman he’d taken to wife. In his mind’s eye he could see her slender hips, her waist, so small that he used to be able to span it with both hands. How could he be so witless? All the evidence was there.

She would never survive a birth. Look at his sister-in-law. Charlotte was much taller than Sophie, and she had almost died. Hell, compared to Sophie she was an Amazon. His mother … Even the Indian woman he had seen die in childbirth had been larger than Sophie.