Excerpt from The Irresistible Henry House by Lisa Grunwald, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Now she tucked Henry’s fist back under the blanket and stepped into the nursery. It was ten-thirty on a Monday morning, and the girls weren’t scheduled to come until eleven, and that would give Martha barely enough time.

Henry looked at her, his eyes just mature enough to focus on hers. Martha shrugged off her tweed jacket, keeping the baby snugly against her chest and inhaling the talcum-y smell of his neck.

There had been times, in her previous year of exile, when Martha had not been sure she’d ever get to hold a House baby again. Relief and the lingering loneliness of her time away now galvanized her. With Henry up on her shoulder, she all but spun around the room, reaching for her tools: a fresh journal, a sharp pencil, a measuring tape, a diaper. As she gathered the things, she hummed the song that Bing Crosby had been crooning since the end of the war:

Kiss me once, then kiss me twice

Then kiss me once again

It’s been a long, long time.

the nursery had remained largely unchanged in the year of Martha’s absence. The walls were still the palest shade of green, with crisp white wainscoting that hemmed them in and kept them from seeming completely institutional. The changing table and a small dresser flanked the left-hand wall. A rocking chair and an oak side table sat beside the far window. A faded Oriental covered most of the dark wooden floor.

In general, the room was—like Martha herself—not altogether cold but not particularly inviting. Functional described them both. At forty-eight, Martha was no longer confident, slim, or remotely happy enough to be what most people would consider attractive. In recent years, her face had become doughy and less defined, as if the lines of her features were starting to smudge. Her body, often plump, had become heavyset, and she had taken to wearing, along with her tailored suits, a series of eccentrically colorful silk scarves that were meant to distract attention from the rest of her.

Today Martha’s scarf was bright turquoise and orange, and as she laid Henry on the changing table, he seemed transfixed by its pattern. Staring, he didn’t protest as she unwrapped his green blanket and, ribbon by ribbon, undid his red pajamas. Only then—from the cold and the shock of not being swaddled—did he begin to yell and squirm. Resolutely, Martha ignored his cries and unfastened his diaper pin. “You’re a strong one,” she said to him, unfolding her tape measure.

She measured the circumference of Henry’s head, then his height, his hands, and his feet. She noted the color of his skin, his eyes, his hair. She noticed and recorded a small extra flap of skin on his right ear, like the ear tags that came on those German teddy bears that had been so popular before the war.

“What’s that doing there?” she asked Henry, while he kept on bellowing.

He was only fourteen weeks old, and Martha usually preferred the practice babies to be five or six months when she got them. Irena Stahl at the orphanage, however, had been unusually firm in insisting that Henry was the healthiest candidate, and Martha—anxious to resume her duties—had been in no mood to argue, and certainly not to wait.

She turned Henry over on his belly and scrutinized his skin, running one large hand across the tiny span of his shoulder blades, no wider than an octave. She studied the small of his back, his buttocks, checking for imperfections, marveling at their absence.

She knew that the girls would be coming soon, and that she should dress the baby, and prepare him, and prepare herself as well, but for this one moment, he was hers, entirely hers, and all of his magnificent future, and his already insignificant past, fit grandly within the span of her hand. She scooped him up, and, despite herself, she kissed him firmly on the cheek.

For a moment, their eyes met again, and Martha felt a surge of longing. Furtively, she looked around the empty room. “Now you know,” she whispered to Henry. “I think I’m going to love you,” she said. “Don’t tell a soul.”

Excerpted from The Irresistible Henry House by Lisa Grunwald Copyright © 2010 by Lisa Grunwald. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.