The woman went even paler under her unladylike sunburn and Magnus regretted his harshness for a moment. But, no, she needed a shock like this to force her to keep a better eye on the boy in future. He had to harden his heart again when she pushed her spectacles up her nose with a shaking hand and he counted himself lucky she wasn’t having an attack of the vapours. She braced her shoulders instead and he had better things to do than admire her resolution and the fine figure he should not even notice when he had ridden all the way here at breakneck speed to plead with Delphi not to take his child so far away he might never see her again.
‘Stop that ridiculous wriggling and pretend-crying, Toby Champion,’ the boy’s mother snapped at her flailing offspring.
Magnus felt the boy still as if she had waved a magic wand. Deciding the brat was not likely to get away with his sins after all, Magnus swung him down. ‘Buy him a chain if you can’t keep him under better control in future, madam,’ he barked.
‘How can you be so harsh, Magnus?’ Delphi broke in as the lad threw himself at his mother so enthusiastically she lurched and nearly fell over.
Magnus had been so intent on the boy’s mother he hadn’t noted how Delphi’s wide and horrified eyes were fixed on him as if she expected him to lash out as the late, unlamented Sir Edgar Drace was prone to when something about his young wife did not suit him. It said much for his baby’s sunny nature that she was gurgling and wriggling in her mother’s arms as if this was a fine show, instead of cowering and grizzling as she caught the megrims from her mother.
‘If someone doesn’t check the boy, he will kill himself,’ he explained with an impatient glance behind him to convince Delphi he wasn’t in the least like the straw man she had married for some reason he had never managed to fathom.
‘Only your horror at the idea of doing so could excuse such a wicked display of temper,’ Delphi said, reproaching him with the stiffness in her voice.
‘I could hardly pat him on the head and bid him be more careful next time.’
‘No, he could not,’ the boy’s mother admitted with a sigh, as if it cost a lot to stand up for such a grim stranger. She turned to Delphi with a resigned shrug and said, ‘He’s right. My son is far too adventurous for his own good. And I want you to see your eighth birthday, despite all your best efforts not to, my lad, so you can take the wounded expression off your face and listen to your elders and betters for once,’ she added as her boy let go of her narrow waist to stare up at her with the wide eyes of a wronged cherub.
Magnus revised her age down a decade and decided, if she still had a husband, the neglectful idiot should be here, trying to back up her efforts to keep their child alive so she wouldn’t look elsewhere for comfort for herself and a little help with the lad. A ridiculous, totally unacceptable part of him wanted to be the source of both for her for a moment and hadn’t he already had a harsh enough lesson about throwing himself at complicated and unfathomable women? And what did he know about how to bring up well-balanced and happy children after the childhood he and his younger siblings had endured at their father’s hands anyway?
‘I see,’ Delphi said almost as if she did.
Hope leapt in Magnus’s heart for a heady moment as his daughter blew kisses at him as if she would always be on his side. ‘Please, Delphi, let me come with you?’ he begged the child’s mother as softly as he could with all these wild emotions roiling around inside him right now. He would plead in front of the devil himself if it got him a place in his child’s life.
‘I told you before, Magnus. No. Have the manners to listen to me and stay away from us in future, before you do even more damage than you already have.’
‘Should I send for the Harbour Master?’ the strange woman said as if ready to leap into battle on Delphi’s behalf. Why must she be such an interfering, reckless female? He almost had to admire her for it. All his attention should be focused on Delphi and trying to persuade her to let him have any sort of role in his daughter’s life, but parts of it kept straying to this vital and puzzling stranger who was threatening to get in the way at the worst possible moment.
‘No, although I really do thank you for the offer,’ Delphi said with such horror in her expression a disinterested bystander might laugh at the show they were putting on. ‘He won’t hurt us,’ she explained.
Magnus was glad she gave him that much credit and supposed he ought to be grateful for small mercies. ‘I won’t,’ he added shortly.
‘Well then, perhaps you could work harder at seeming a little less threatening in future, Lord Drace,’ the woman said and made it all worse somehow.
‘He’s not my husband,’ Lady Delphine Drace said with such an appalled expression Magnus almost gave up and went home.
‘Oh,’ the stranger said, looking from one to the other and then at the baby in Delphi’s arms as if she had put two and two together and got four. She blushed and looked as if she wished herself a few hundred miles away as well right now, but she still met his eyes with defiance blazing from behind those disfiguring spectacles of hers and his reluctant admiration for her courage fretted like an itch under his skin. ‘It seems to me you have even more reason to leave her ladyship in peace, then, sir,’ she said severely.
‘None of your business, madam,’ he snapped because her words stung all the more sharply for being right.
Copyright © 2018 by Elizabeth Beacon
ISBN-13: 9781488047039
Sent as the Viking’s Bride
Copyright © 2018 by Michelle Styles
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