Self-control was, in Alicia’s book, perhaps the highest of the virtues, and this was a fact she thought her husband was familiar with. Her ability to keep her head was, after all, no small part of why he’d married her, risking his own chances for status and power on the assumption she would be helpful in increasing them in the long run. Said husband saw more unguarded reactions from her than he once had – an unavoidable side effect of living in close quarters with each other and not any other people – but Alicia thought she still managed to suppress the majority of reactions she thought Thad might strongly dislike.
This was much of the reason why she supposed he was likely too busy being stunned to instead be annoyed that she had just abruptly left the room while he was in the middle of some sentence she had not been paying the least bit of attention to. This was not a thing Alicia did. It was still, though, with a certain wariness that she reentered the room after she re-collected her wits and her composure.
“I’m sorry about that,” she apologized. “I’m not feeling well today.” A mild way of putting it, but she did not feel like announcing ’but I thought being rude was preferable to being sick in that potted plant’. She decided she still felt too thoroughly miserable to bother with any more proprieties at this point, though, and allowed herself to curl up in a corner of the sofa and pull the blanket on the back of it down and around herself. She did, however, put forth the effort to attempt half a smile. “I hope you haven’t changed your mind about wanting an heir, because I’m fairly sure you’ll have one by the end of the summer,” she said, as matter-of-factly as possible.
She had mostly accepted the Fact as a fact, now. She had suspected herself of paranoia at first, but the accumulation of evidence didn’t support the situation being all in her head at this point. She had, though, hoped to conceal the Fact from Thad for a bit longer. This had all been – well, at least his suggestion, but…well, there was a difference between an idea and a reality.
“Or heiress,” she amended, lest he somehow got it into his head that producing a girl would mar all. Thad could be a touch conventional at times, but Alicia had no intention of allowing Wesley’s brat to take precedence over Thad’s just because Wesley’s happened to be male. That was one aspect of old society which Alicia had no patience for – perhaps her blood was inferior, perhaps it was not, but her brain was as good or better than any man’s. It followed that a child she and Thad produced would also have a good brain, whether male or female, and besides - in addition to being practical (particularly if it was a boy; those were, she had gathered, generally more attached to their mothers than girls were), it would just be purely fun to confound them all.