She Was Having Tea Alone—Until Duke’s Quadruplet Boys Whispered Pretend You’re Our Mother…

Chapter 2

All four crowded onto the bench meant for two, shoulder to shoulder, and Mrs. Cole brought a second pot without being asked, and Eleanor poured milk into four cups before she poured any tea into them at all, because she remembered from some corner of her own childhood that scalded tongues were the true tragedy of any nursery.

She did not know then that the man standing just beyond the fogged window glass, in a coat too plain for who he was, had been looking for these four boys for the better part of an hour with a fear he would not have named aloud to any living soul.

She did not know that he had stopped in the doorway of the tea room, one hand still on the frame, and gone entirely still at the sight of a stranger pouring milk before tea for children who were not hers, asking nothing, expecting nothing, already halfway to mending what the morning had broken.