Kitabı oxu: «Christmas Betrothals: Mistletoe Magic»

Christmas Betrothals
Mistletoe Magic
Sophia James
The Winter Queen
Amanda McCabe

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Mistletoe Magic

Praise for Sophia James

ASHBLANE’S LADY

“An excellent tale of love, this book is more than a

romance; it pulls at the heartstrings and makes you

wish the story wouldn’t end.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

MASQUERADING MISTRESS

“Bold and tantalising, plotted like a mystery and

slowly exposing each layer of the multi-dimensional

plot and every character’s motivations, James’s novel

is a page-turner.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

HIGH SEAS TO HIGH SOCIETY

“James weaves her spell, captivating readers with

wit and wisdom, and cleverly combining humour

and poignancy with a master’s touch in this

feel-good love story.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

About the Author

SOPHIA JAMES lives in Chelsea Bay on Auckland, New Zealand’s North Shore, with her husband, who is an artist, and three children. She spends her morning teaching adults English at the local migrant school and writes in the afternoon. Sophia has a degree in English and history from Auckland University and believes her love of writing was formed reading Georgette Heyer with her twin sister at her grandmother’s house.

Look out for Sophia James’s latest exciting novel, One Unashamed Night, available in March 2010 from Mills & Boon^® Historical romance.

Author Note

Christmas is a time of family and laughter and joyousness, a time when all the good things in the world seem to come together in a crescendo of happiness.

But what happens when people have no family left or the secrets that bind them to their kin preclude the simple ability to embrace the haphazard chaos that is often Christmas?

In this story I wanted to draw in two people on the edge of loneliness and add children, pets, colour and carols. I wanted to see whether the magic of the season had its own power and whether a kiss bought under a sprig of mistletoe could change two lives forever.

I’d like to dedicate this book to my friend Jane,

whose sense of style inspired Lillian.

Prologue

Richmond, Virginia—July 1853

Lucas Clairmont found the letter by chance, wrapped in velvet and hidden in the space beneath the font in the Clairmont family chapel.

A love letter to his wife from a man he had little knowledge of and coined in a language that had him reaching for the pew behind him and sitting down.

Heavily.

He knew their marriage had been, at best, an unexceptional union, but it was the betrayal in the last few lines of the missive that was unexpected. His uncle’s land was mentioned in connection with the Baltimore Gaslight Company’s intention of developing their lines. Luc shook his head—he knew Stuart Clairmont had had no notion of such a scheme and the land, bought cheaply by Elizabeth’s lover, had been sold for a fortune only a few months later.

Loss and guilt punctuated the harder emotion of anger. Jesus! Stuart had died a broken man and a vengeful one.

‘Find the bastard, Luc,’ he had uttered in the last few hours of his life, ‘and kill him.’

At the time Luc had thought the command extreme, but now with the evidence of another truth in hand …

Screwing up the parchment, he let it slip through his fingers on to the cold stone floor, the written words still teasing him, even from a distance.

His marriage had been as much of a sham as his childhood, all show and no substance, but the love of his uncle had never wavered.

Shaking his head, he felt the sharp stab of sobriety, the taste of last night’s whisky and the few bought hours of oblivion paid for dearly this morning, as his demons whispered vengeance.

Here in the chapel though, there lay the sort of silence that only God’s dwelling could offer with the light streaming in through the stained glass window.

Jesus on the cross!

Luc’s fingers squeezed against the hard smooth wood of oak benches, thinking that his own crown of thorns was far less visible.

‘Lord, help me,’ he enunciated, catching sight of the pale blue eyes of a painted cupid, hair a strange shade of silver blonde, and white clothes falling in folds on to the skin of a nearby sinner, dazzling him with light.

A sinner just like him, Luc thought, as the last effects of moonshine wore off and a headache he’d have until tomorrow started to pound.

Elizabeth. His wife.

He’d been away too much to be the sort of husband he should have been, but the truth of her liaison was as unexpected as her death six months ago. His thoughts of grief unravelled into a sort of bone-hard wrath that shocked him. Deceit and lies were written into every word of these outpourings.

He should not care. He should consign the evidence of his wife’s infidelity to a fire, but he found that he couldn’t because a certain truth was percolating.

Revenge! One of the seven deadly sins. Today, however, it was not so damning and the ennui that had consumed him lifted slightly.

It would mean going back to England. Again.

His home once.

Perhaps he could claim it back for a while, for apart from the land there was nothing left to hold him here. Besides, Hawk and Nathaniel had asked him to come back to London repeatedly, and he felt a sudden need for the company of his two closest friends.

‘Ahhh, Stuart,’ he whispered the name and liked the echo of it. The bastard who had swindled his uncle was in London, living on the profit of his ill-gotten gains no doubt.

Daniel Davenport. The name was engraved in his mind like a brand, seared into flesh.

But to kill him? The dying glances of others he had consigned to the hereafter rose from memory.

Not again! He leaned back on the pew and breathed in, trying to determine only the exact amount of force necessary to make Elizabeth’s lover sorry.

Chapter One

London—November 1853

‘Miss Davenport is a young woman any mother would be proud of, would you not say, Sybil?’

‘Indeed, I would, for she countenances no scandal whatsoever. A reputation unsullied in each corner of her life, and a paragon of good sense, good taste and good comportment.’

Lillian Davenport listened to the compliments from her place in the little room, deciding that the two older women hadn’t a notion of her being there. To alert them of her overhearing such a private matter would now cause them only embarrassment and so she stayed silent, letting the heavy petticoats in her hands fall to her side and ironing out the creases in white shot silk with her fingers.

‘If only my Jane had the sort of grace that she has, I often say to Gerald. If only we had drilled in the importance of the social codes as Ernest Davenport did, we might have been blessed with a very different daughter.’

‘Sometimes I think you are too hard on your girl, Sybil. She has her own virtue after all and …’

They were moving away now and out of the ladies’ retiring room. Lillian heard the door close and tilted her head, the last of the sentence lost into nothingness.

One minute. She would give them that before she opened the door and took her leave.

A paragon of good sense, good taste and good comportment.

A smile began to form on her face, though she squashed it down. Pride was a sin in its own right and she had no desire to be thought of as boastful.

Still … it was hard not to be pleased with such unexpected praise and, although she frequently detected a general commendation on her manners, it was not often that the words were so direct or honest.

Washing her hands, she shook off the excess, noting how the white gold in her new birthday bracelet caught the light from above. Twenty-five yesterday. Her euphoria died a little, though she pushed the unsettled feeling down as she walked out into a salon of the Lenningtons’ townhouse and straight into some sort of fight.

‘I think you cheated, you blackguard.’ Her cousin Daniel’s tones were hardly civil and came from a very close quarter.

‘Then call me out. I am equally at home with swords or pistols.’ Another voice. Laconic. The drawl of a man new from the former colonies, the laughter in it unexpected.

‘And have you kill me?’

‘Life or death, Lord Davenport, take your choice or stop your whining.’

There was the sound of pushing and shoving and the two assailants came suddenly into view, Daniel’s head now locked in the bent elbow of a tall, dark-haired man, her cousin’s eyes bulging from the pressure and his fair hair plastered wet across his forehead.

Lillian was speechless as her glance drew upwards into the face of the assailant. Jacket unbuttoned and with cravat askew, the stranger’s jaw was heavily shadowed by dark stubble and she was transfixed by two golden eyes brushed in humour that stared now straight at her. Unrepentant. Unapologetic. Pure and raw man with blood on his lip and danger imprinted in every line of his body.

It seemed that her own throat choked with the contact, her heart slamming full into the ribs of her breast in one heavy blow, leaving her with no breath. A warmth that she had never before felt slid easily from her stomach, fusing even the tips of her fingers with heat, and with it came some other nameless thing, echoing on the edge of a knowledge as old as time. Shocking. Dreadful. She pulled her eyes from his and turned on her heels, but not before she had seen him tip his head at her, the wink he delivered licentious and untrammelled.

Mannerless, she decided, and American, and with more than a dozen other men and women looking on she knew the gossip about the fight would spread with an unstoppable haste.

Pulling the door to the retiring room open again, she returned to the same place she had left not more than a few minutes prior.

Anger consumed her.

And dread.

Who was he? She held out one hand and watched it shake before laying it down on her lap and shutting her eyes. A headache had begun to form and behind the pain came a wilder and more unwieldy longing.

‘Stop it,’ she whispered to herself, placing cold fingers across her lips to soften the sound as the door opened and other women came in, giggling this time and young.

‘I love these balls. I love the music and the colour and the gowns …’

‘And of all the gowns I love Lillian Davenport’s best. Where does she get her clothes from, I wonder? Ester Hamilton says from London, but I would wager France—a modiste from Paris, perhaps, and a milliner from Florence? With all her money she could have them brought from anywhere.’

‘Did you see her exquisite bracelet? Her father gave it to her for her birthday. Her twenty-fifth birthday!’

‘Twenty-five! Poor Lillian,’ the other espoused, ‘and no husband or children either! My God, if she does not find a groom soon …’

‘Oh, I would not go that far, Harriet. Some women like to live alone.’

‘No woman wants to live alone, you peagoose. Besides Lord Wilcox-Rice has been paying her a lot of attention tonight. Perhaps she will fall in love with him and have the wedding of the year in the spring.’

The other girl tittered as they departed, leaving Lillian speechless.

Poor Lillian!

Poor Lillian?

Paragon to poor in all of five minutes, and a stranger outside who made her heart beat in a way that worried her.

‘Mama?’ The sound came in a prayer. ‘Please, Lord, do not let me be anything like Mama.’ She pushed the thought away. She would not see this colonial ruffian again; furthermore, if his behaviour tonight was anything to go by, she doubted he would be invited into any house of repute in the future. The thought relaxed her—after all, they were the only sort of homes that she frequented!

Wiping her brow, she stood, feeling better for the thought and much more like herself. She was seldom flustered and almost never blushed and the heartbeat that had raced in her breast was an unheard-of occurrence. Perhaps it was the fight that had made her unsettled and uncertain, for she could not remember a time when she had ever heard a voice raised in such fury or men hitting out at each other. Certainly she had never seen a man in a state of such undress.

Ridiculously she hoped the stranger would have had the sense to adjust his cravat and his jacket before he entered the main salons.

No! Her rational mind rejected such a thought. Let him be thrown out into the street and away from the city. She wondered what had happened to arouse such strong emotion in the first place. Cards, probably, and drink! She had smelt it on their clothes and her cousin’s behaviour of late had been increasingly erratic, his sense of honour tarnished with a wilder anger ever since returning home to England.

Poor Lillian!

She would not think about it again. Those silly young girls had no notion of what they spoke of and she was more than happy with her life.

Lucas Clairmont draped his legs across the stool and looked into the fire burning in the grate of Nathaniel Lindsay’s town house in Mayfair.

‘My face will feel better come the morrow,’ Lucas said, raising his glass to swallow the chilled water, the bottle nestling in an ice-bucket beside him.

‘Davenport has always had a hot temper, so I’d watch your back on dark nights as you wend your way home. Especially if you are on a winning streak at the tables.’

Luc laughed. Loudly. ‘I’d like to see him try it.’

‘He is no lightweight, Luc. His family name affords him a position here that is … secure.’

‘I’ll deal with it, Nat,’ he countered, glad when his friend nodded.

‘His cousin, Miss Lillian Davenport, on the other hand is formidably scrupulous.’

‘She’s the woman I saw in the white dress?’ He had already asked Nat her name as they had walked to the waiting coach and now seemed the time to find out more, her pale blue eyes and blonde hair reminding him of the lily flowers that grew in profusion near the riverbeds in Richmond, Virginia.

‘Is she married?’

‘No. She is famous not only for her innate good manners but also for her ability to say no to marriage proposals and, believe me, there have been many.’

Luc gingerly touched his bottom lip, which was still hurting.

‘Society here is under the impression that you are a reprobate and a wild cannon, Luc. Many more tussles like tonight and you may find yourself on the outskirts of even the card games.’

Lucas shook his head. ‘I barely touched him and he only got in a punch because I wasn’t expecting it. Where does Lillian Davenport live, by the way?’

‘We’re back to her again. My God, she is as dangerous to you as her cousin and many times over more clever. A woman who all men would like to possess and who in the end wants none of them.’

Cassandra bustled into the drawing room, a steaming hot chocolate in hand.

‘Take no notice of my husband, Lucas. He speaks from his own poor experience.’

‘You were lining up, Nat, at one time?’

‘A good seven years back now. Her first coming out it was, and long before I ever set eyes upon my Cassie.’

‘And she refused you?’

‘Unconditionally. She waited until I had sent her the one and only love letter I have ever written and then gave it back.’

‘Better than keeping it, I should imagine.’

He nodded. ‘And those famous manners relegate anything personal to the “never to be discussed again” box, which one must find encouraging.’

‘So she’s not a gossip?’

‘Oh, far from it,’ Cassie took up the conversation. ‘She is the very end word in innate good breeding and perfect bearing. Every young girl who is presented at Court is reminded of her comportment and conduct and encouraged to emulate it.’

‘She sounds formidable.’

Cassandra giggled and Nathaniel interrupted his wife as she went to say more. ‘Lord, Cassie, enough.’ He caught her arm and pulled her down on to his knee. ‘Luc is only here in London until the end of December and we have much to reminisce about.’

‘I’ll drink to that, Nat.’ Raising his glass, Luc swallowed the lot, already planning his second foray into discovering the exact character of Daniel Davenport.

Lillian pulled up the sheets on her bed and lay down with a sigh. She had left her curtains slightly open and the moon shone brightly in the space between. A full moon tonight, and the beams covered her room in silver.

She felt … excited, and could not explain the feeling even to herself, the sleep she would have liked so far, far away. Her hand slid across her stomach beneath the gossamer-thin silk nightdress.

John Wilcox-Rice had been most attentive tonight, but it was another face she sought. A darker, more dangerous countenance with laughing golden eyes and a voice from another land. Her fingers traced across her skin soft and gentle, like the path of a feather.

Bringing her hands together when she realised where they lingered, she closed her eyes and summoned sleep. But the urgency was not dimmed, rather it flared in the silver moon and in the pull of something she had no control over. A single tear ran down her temple and into her hair. Wet. Real. She was twenty-five and waiting for … what?

The stranger had tipped his head to her, night-black hair caught long in the sort of leather strap that a man from past centuries would have worn. Careless of fashion!

His hands had been forceful and brown, work imbued into the very form of them. What must it be like to have a hand like that touch her body? Not soft, not smooth. Fingers that had worked the earth hard or loved a woman well!

She smiled at such a thought, but could not quite dismiss it.

‘Please …’ she whispered into the night, but the entreaty itself made her pause.

‘Let me find someone to love, someone to care for, someone to love me back.’ Not for her money or for her clothes or for the colour of her hair, which men always admired. Not those things, she thought.

‘For me. For just me.’ Words diffusing into the silence of the night as the winds of winter buffeted the house and the almost full moon disappeared behind thick rain-filled clouds.

Chapter Two

Her father was at breakfast the next morning, an occurrence that was becoming more and more rare these days with the time he spent at his clubs and his new interest in horseflesh pulling him away from London for longer and longer time-spans.

‘Good morning, Lillian,’ he said with a lilt in his voice and her puzzlement grew. ‘I have it on good authority that you had a splendid time at the Lenningtons’ last night?’

A splendid time? She could not for the life of her quite fathom his meaning.

‘Lord Wilcox-Rice called to see me yesterday afternoon to ask if he might court you with an eye to a betrothal later in the month and I had heard from Patrick that you spent much of the night at his side.’

Lillian grimaced at her youngest cousin’s penchant for telling a tale. ‘I was there as a friend.’

The words were wrung out in anger and her father’s brows lifted in astonishment.

‘Wilcox-Rice has not said anything to you yet? Perhaps the boy is shy or perhaps you did not encourage him as it may have been prudent to.’

‘I do not wish for his advances. I could not even imagine …’

‘All the best marriages begin with just that. A friendship that develops into love and lasts a lifetime.’

The unspoken words hung between them.

Like your marriage did not. Mama. A quick dalliance with an unsuitable man and then her death. Repenting it all, and an absolution never given.

‘Lord Wilcox-Rice wishes for you to become better acquainted. He wants you to spend some time with him at his estate in Kent. Chaperoned, of course, but well away from London and it may give you the chance to—’

‘No, Papa.’

Her father was still. The knife he held in his hand was carefully set down on his plate, the jam upon it as yet to be spread. ‘I think, Lillian, we have come to an impasse, you and I. You are a girl with a strong mind, but your years are mounting and the chances you may have for a family and a home of your own are diminishing with each passing birthday.’

Lillian hated this argument. Twenty-five had pounced upon her with all the weight of expectations and conjecture; an iniquitous year when women were no longer young and could not fall back upon the easy excuse of choice.

‘John Wilcox-Rice is from a good family with all the advantages of upbringing that you yourself have had. He would not wish to change you, and he would make an admirable father, something that you must be now at least thinking about.’

‘But I don’t have any feelings for him. Not ones that would naturally lead to marriage.’

With a quick flick of his fingers her father dismissed the servants gathered behind them. Left alone, Lillian could hear the ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner of the room, time marked by mounting seconds of silence.

Finally her father began. ‘I am nearing fifty, Lillian, and my health is not as it once was. I need to know that you are settled before I am too much older. I need grandchildren and the chance of an heir for Fairley Manor.’

‘You speak as if I am over thirty, Father, and I can see little wrong with the state of your health.’ She did not care for the harshness she heard in her voice.

‘Then if you cannot understand the gist of my words, I worry about you even more.’

His tone had risen, no longer the measured evenness of logic and sense, and Lillian walked across to the window to look out over Hyde Park where a few people rode their horses on the pathways. Everything was just as it should be, whereas in here….

‘I will give you till Christmas.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ She turned to face him.

‘I will give you until Christmas to find a man of your choice to marry, and if you have no other candidate by then you must promise me to consider Wilcox-Rice and without prejudice.’

His face was blotched with redness, the weight he had put on since last year somehow more worrying than before. Was he ailing? He had seen the physician last week. Perhaps he had learnt something was not right?

Regret and remorse surged simultaneously, but she did not question him. He was a man who held his secrets and seldom divulged his thoughts. Like her, she supposed, and that made her sad.

She was cornered, by parental authority and by the part in her heart that wanted to make her ageing father happy, no matter what.

‘It is not so very easy to find a man who is everything that I want.’

‘Then find one who is enough, Lillian.’ His retort came quickly. ‘With children great happiness can follow and Wilcox-Rice is a good fellow. At least give me the benefit of the wisdom old age brings.’

‘Very well, then. I will promise to consider your advice.’ When she held out her hand to his, she liked the way he did not break the contact, but kept her close.

Half an hour later she was in the morning room to one side of the town house having a cup of tea with Anne Weatherby, an old friend, and trying to feign interest in the topic of her children and family, a subject that usually took up nearly all the hours of her visit. Today, however, she had other issues to discuss.

‘There was a contretemps last night at Lenningtons’. Did you hear of it?’

Lillian’s attention was immediately caught.

‘It seems that your cousin Daniel and a stranger from America were in a scuffle of sorts. I saw him as he walked from the salon afterwards. He barely looked English, the savage ways of the backwaters imprinted on his clothes and hands and face. So dangerous and uncivilised.’ She began to smile. ‘And yet wildly good-looking.’

‘I saw nothing.’

‘Rumour has it that you did.’

‘Well, perhaps I saw the very end of it all as I came from the retiring room. It was but a trifle.’ She tried to look bored with the whole subject in the hope that Anne might change the topic, but was to have no such luck.

‘It is said that he has a reputation in America that is hardly savoury. A Virginian, I am told, whose wife died in a way that was … suspicious at the very least.’

‘Suspicious?’

‘Alice, the Countess of Horsham, would say no more on the matter, but her tone of voice indicated that the fellow might have had a hand in her demise.’ She shook her head before continuing. ‘Although the gossip is all about town, the young girls seem much enamoured by his looks and are setting their caps at him in the hopes of even a smile. He has a dimple on his right cheek, something I always found attractive in a man.’ She placed her hands across her mouth and smiled through them. ‘Lord, but I am running on, and at thirty I should have a lot more sense than to be swayed by a handsome face.’

Lillian poured another cup of tea for herself, while Anne had barely sipped at hers. She hoped that her friend did not see the way the liquid slopped across the side of the cup of its own accord and dribbled on to the white-lace linen cloth beneath it. How easy it was to be tipped from this place to that one. His wife. Dead!

Her imaginings in a bed bathed in moonlight took on a less savoury feel and she pushed down disappointment.

No man had ever swept her off her feet in all the seven years she had been out and to imagine that this one had even the propensity to do so suddenly seemed silly. Of course a man who looked like this American would not be a fit companion for her with his raw and rough manner and his dangerous eyes. The promise she had made her father less than an hour ago surfaced and she shook away the ridiculous yearnings.

Betrothed by Christmas! Ah well, she thought as she guided the conversation to a more general one, if worst came to the worst, John Wilcox-Rice was at least biddable and she was past twenty-five.

She met John at a party that evening in Belgrave Square and she knew that she was in trouble as soon as she saw his face. He looked excited and nervous at the same time, his smile both protective and concerned. When he took her fingers in his own she was glad for her gloves and glad too for the ornamental shrubbery placed beside the orchestra. It gave her a chance to escape the prying eyes of others while she tried to explain it all to him.

When the cornet, violin and cello proved too much to speak over she pulled him out on to the balcony a little further away from the room, where the light was dimmer, the shadow of the shrubs throwing a kinder glow on both their faces.

‘You had my message from your father, then, about my interest—’ he began, but she allowed him no further discourse.

‘I certainly did and I thank you for the compliment, but I do not think we could possibly—’

‘Your father thinks differently,’ he returned, and a sneaking suspicion started to well in Lillian’s breast.

‘You have seen my father today?’ she began, stopping as he nodded.

‘Indeed I have and he was at pains to tell me you had agreed to at least consider my proposal.’

‘But I do not hold the sort of feelings for you that you would want, and there would be no guarantee that I ever could.’

‘I know.’ He took her hand again, this time peeling back the fine silk of her right glove, and pressing his lips to her wrist. Without meaning to she dragged her hand away, wiping it on the generous fabric of her skirt and thinking that this meeting place might not have been the wisest one after all.

‘I just want you to at least try. I want the chance to make you happy and I think that we would rub along together rather nicely.’

‘Well,’ she returned briskly, ‘I certainly value your friendship and I would indeed be very loath to lose it, but as for the rest….’

He bowed before her. ‘I understand and I am ready to give you more time to ponder over it, Lillian, for as like-minded people of a similar birth I am convinced such a union would benefit us both.’

She nodded and watched as he clicked his heels together and took his leave, a tall, thin man who was passably good looking and infinitely suitable. A husband she could indeed grow old with in a fairly satisfying relationship.

Sighing, she made her way to the edge of the balcony, the same moon as the night before mocking her in her movements, remembering.

‘Stop it!’ she admonished herself out loud.

‘Stop what?’ Another voice answered and the American walked out from the shrubs behind her, the red tip of a cheroot the only thing standing out from the black of his silhouette.

‘How long have you been there?’

‘Long enough.’

‘A gentleman would have walked away.’

He pointedly looked across the balustrade. ‘The fifteen-foot drop is somewhat of a deterrent.’

‘Or stayed quiet until I had left.’ The beat of her heart was worrying, erratic, hard. ‘Why, most Englishmen would be mortified to find themselves in this situation …’ She didn’t finish, owing to a loud laugh that rang rich in the night air.

‘Mortified?’ he repeated. ‘It has been a long while since I last felt that.’ His accent was measured tonight and at times barely heard, a different voice from the one he had affected at the Lenningtons’ with its broad Virginian drawl. She was glad she could not catch his eyes, still shaded by the greenery, though in the position she stood she knew her own to be well on show.

Perhaps he had orchestrated it so? The gold band on the ring finger of his left hand jolted her. His marriage finger! She tried not to let him see where she looked.

‘We have not even been introduced, sir. None of this can be in any way proper. You must repair inside this instant.’

Still he did not move, the dimple that Anne Weatherby had spoken of dancing in his cheek.

‘I am Lucas Clairmont from Richmond in Virginia,’ he said finally. ‘And you are Miss Davenport, a woman of manners and good taste, though I wonder at the wisdom of Wilcox-Rice as a groom?’

‘He is not that. You just heard me tell him so.’

‘He and your father seem to believe otherwise.’ Now he walked straight into the light and the golden eyes that had haunted her dreams made her pause. She swallowed heavily and held her hands hard against her thighs to stop them from shaking, though when he picked a slender stem from a pyracanthus bush behind him and handed it to her she leant forwards to take it.

‘Thank you.’ She could think of nothing else at all to say. The thorn on the stem pricked the base of her thumb.

‘I am glad I have this chance to apologise for frightening you yesterday at the Lenningtons’.’

‘Apology accepted.’ For the first time some of her tension dissipated with the simple reasoning that a criminal mind would not run to seeking any sort of amnesty. ‘I realise that my cousin can be rather trying at times.’

His teeth were white against the brown of his face and Lillian was jolted back to reality as his eyes darkened and she saw for a moment a man she barely recognised.

A dangerous man. A man who would not be moulded or conditioned by the society in which he found himself.

So unlike her. She stepped back, afraid now of a thing that she had no name for, and wondered what her cousin had done to cause such enmity.

‘Have no fear, Miss Davenport. I would not kill him because he’s not worth being hanged at Newgate for.’

Kill him? My God. To even think that he might consider it and then qualify any lack of action with a personal consequence.

I would if I could get away with it.

John Wilcox-Rice’s gentle mediocrity began to look far more appealing until Luc Clairmont reached out for her hand and took it in his own. The shock of contact left her mute, but against her will she was drawn to him.

Against her will? She could not even say that!

His finger traced the lines on her palm and then the veins that showed through in the pale skin of her wrist.

‘An old Indian woman read my hand once in Richmond. She told me that life was like a river and that we are taken by the currents to a place we are meant to be.’

His amber eyes ran across hers, the humour once again back. ‘Is this that place, Miss Davenport?’

Time seemed to stop, frozen into moonlight and want and warmth. When she snatched her hand away and almost ran inside, she could have sworn it was laughter she heard, following her from a balcony drenched in silver.

She stopped walking quite so briskly once she was back amongst others, finding a certain safety in numbers that she had never felt the need of before. Would he come again and speak to her? Would he create a fuss? The very thought had her hauling her fan from her reticule, to waft it to and fro, the breeze engendered calming her a little. She stuffed the sprig of orange berries into her velvet bag, glad to have them out of her fingers where someone might comment upon them.

‘Your colour is rather high, Lillian,’ her aunt Jean said as she joined her. ‘I do hope you are not sickening for something so close to the Yuletide season. Why, Mrs Haugh was saying to me just the other day how her daughter has contracted a bronchial complaint that just cannot be shaken and …’

But Lillian was listening no more, for Lucas Clairmont had just walked in from the balcony, a tall broad-shouldered man who made the other gentlemen here look … mealy, precious and dandified. No, she must not think like that! Concentrating instead on the mark around his bottom lip that suggested another fight, she tried to ignore the way all the women in his path watched him beneath covert hooded glances.

He was leaving with the Earl of St Auburn and a man she knew to be Lord Stephen Hawkhurst. Well-placed men with the same air of menace that he had. The fact interested her and she wondered just how it was they knew each other.

As they reached the door, however, Lucas Clairmont looked straight into her eyes, tipping his head as she had seen him do at the Lenningtons’ ball. Hating the way her heartbeat flared, Lillian spread her fan wide and hid her face from his, a breathless wonder overcoming caution as a game, of which she had no notion of the rules, was begun.

Once home herself she placed the crumpled orange pyracanthus in a single bloom vase and stood it on the small table by her bed. Both the colour and the shape clashed with everything else in her bedroom. As out of place in her life as Lucas Clairmont was, a vibrant interloper who conformed to neither position nor venue. Her finger reached out to carefully touch the hard nubs of thorn that marched down its stem. Forbidding. Protective. Unexpected in the riot of colour above it!

She wished she had left it on the balcony, discarded and cast aside, as she should be doing with the thoughts of the man who had picked it. But she had not and here it was with pride of place in a room that looked as if it held its breath with nervousness. Her eyes ran over the sheer lawn drapes about her bed, the petit-point bedcover upon it in limed cream and the lamp next to her, its chalky base topped by a faded and expensive seventeenth-century tapestry. The décor in her room was nothing like the fashion of the day with its emphasis on stripes and paisleys and the busy tones of purple and red. But she enjoyed the difference.

All had been carefully chosen and were eminently suitable, like the clothes she wore and the friends she fostered. Her life. Not haphazard or risky, neither arbitrary nor disorganised.

Once it had been, once when her mother had come home to tell them that she was leaving that very afternoon ‘to find excitement and adventure in the arms of a man who was thrilling’. The very words used still managed to make her feel slightly sick, as she remembered a young girl who had idolised her mother. She was not thrilling and so she had been left behind, an only child whose recourse to making her father happy was to be exactly the daughter he wanted. She had excelled in her lessons and in her deportment, and later still when she came out at eighteen she had been daubed an ‘original’, her sense of style and quiet stillness copied by all the younger ladies at Court.

Usually she liked that. Usually she felt a certain pride in the way she handled everything with such easy acumen. But today with the berries waving their overblown and unrestrained shapes in her room, a sense of disquiet also lingered.

Poor Lillian.

John Wilcox-Rice and his eminently sensible proposal.

Her father’s advancing age.

The pieces of her life were not quite adding up to a cohesive whole any longer, and she could pin the feeling directly to Lucas Clairmont with his easy smile and his dangerous predatory eyes.

Standing by the window, she saw an outline of herself reflected in the glass. As pale as the colours in her room, perhaps, and fading. Was she her mother’s daughter right down to the fact of finding her own ‘thrilling and unsuitable man’? She laid her palm against the glass and, on removing it, wrote her mother’s initials in the misted print Rebecca Davenport had returned in the autumn, a thinner and sadder version of the woman who had left them, and although her father had taken her back into his house he had never taken her back into his heart. No one had known of her infidelity. The extended holiday to the Davenports’ northern estate of Fairley Manor was never explained and, although people had their suspicions, the steely correctness of Ernest Davenport had meant that they were never even whispered.

Perhaps that had made things even harder, Lillian thought. The constant charade and pretence as her mother lay dying with an ague of the soul and she, a child who went between her parents with the necessary messages, seeing any respect that they had once had for each other wither with the onset of winter.

Even the funeral had been a sham, her mother’s body laid in the crypt of the Davenports with all the ceremony expected, and then left unvisited.

No, the path Rebecca had taken had alienated her from everybody and should her daughter be so foolish as to follow in those footsteps she could well see the consequences of ‘thrilling’.

John Wilcox-Rice was a man who would never break her heart. A constant man of sound morals and even sounder political persuasions. One hand threaded through her hair and she smiled unwillingly at the excitement that coursed through her. Everything seemed different. More tumultuous. Brighter. She walked across to the bed and ran a finger across the smooth orange berries, liking the fact that Lucas Clairmont had touched them just as she was now.

Silly thoughts. Girlish thoughts.

She was twenty-five, for goodness’ sake, and a woman who had always looked askance at those highly strung débutantes whose emotions seemed to rule them. The invitation to the Cholmondeley ball on the sill caught her attention and she lifted it up. Would the American be attending this tomorrow? Perhaps he might ask her to dance? Perhaps he might lift up her hand to his again?

She shook her head and turned away as a maid came to help her get ready for bed.

Chapter Three

Luc spent the morning with a lawyer from the City signing documents and hating every single signature he marked the many pages with.

The estate of Woodruff Abbey in Bedfordshire was a place he neither wanted nor deserved and his wife’s cries as she lay dying in Charlottesville, Virginia, were louder here than they had been in all the months since he had killed her.

He did not wish for the house or the chattels. He wanted to walk away and let the memories lie because recollection had the propensity to rekindle all that was gone.

Shaking away introspection, he made himself smile, a last armour against the ghosts that dragged him down.

‘Will you be going up to look the old place over, Sir?’

‘Perhaps.’ Non-committal. Evasive.

‘It is just if you wish me to accompany you, I would need to make plans.’

‘No. That will not be necessary.’ If he went, he would go alone.

‘The servants, of course, still take retainers paid for by the rental of the farming land, though in truth the place has been let go badly.’

‘I see.’ He wanted just to leave. Just to take the papers and leave.

‘Your wife’s sister’s daughters are installed in the house. Their mother died late last year and I wrote to you—’

Luc looked up. ‘I did not have any such missive.’

The lawyer rifled through a sheath of sheets and, producing a paper, handed it across to him. ‘Is this not your handwriting, sir?’ A frown covered his brow.

With his signature staring up at him, Luc could do nothing else but nod.

‘How old are these children?’

‘Eight and ten, sir, and both girls.’

‘Where is their father?’

‘He left England a good while back and never returned. He was a violent man and, if I were to guess, I would say he lies in a pauper’s grave somewhere, unmarked and uncared for. Charity and Hope are, however, the sort of girls their names suggest, and as soon as they gain their majority they will have no more claim to any favours from the Woodruff Abbey funds.’

Luc placed the paper down on the table before him. So poor-spirited, he thought, to do your duty up to a certain point and then decline further association. He had seen it time and time again in his own father, the action of being seen to have done one’s duty more important than any benefit to those actively involved.

Unexpectedly he thought of Lillian Davenport. Would she be the same? he wondered, and hoped not. Last night when he had run his fingers across the pale skin on her wrist he had felt her heartbeat accelerate markedly and seen the flush that covered her cheeks before she had turned and run from him.

Not all the ice queen then, her high moral standards twisted against his baser want. Because he had wanted her, wanted to bring his hands along the contours of her face and her breasts and her hips hidden beneath her fancy clothing and distance.

Lord, was he stupid?

He should not have made his presence known. Should not have sparred with her or held her fingers and read her palm, for Lillian Davenport was the self-styled keeper of worthiness and he needed to stay away from her.

Yet she pierced a place in him that he had long thought of as dead, the parts of himself that he used to like, the parts that the past weeks of sobriety had begun to thaw against the bone-cold guilt that had torn at his soul.

The law books lined up against the far wall dusty in today’s thin sun called him back. Horatio Thackeray was now detailing the process of the transfer of title.

Woodruff Abbey was his! He turned the gold ring on his wedding finger and pressed down hard.

Lillian enjoyed the afternoon taking tea in Regent Street with Anne Weatherby and her husband Allen. His brother Alistair had joined them, too, a tall and pleasant man.

‘I have lived in Edinburgh for a good few years now,’ he explained when she asked him why she had not met him before. ‘I have land there and prefer the quieter pace of life.’ Catching sight of a shopkeeper trying to prop up a Christmas tree in his window, he laughed. ‘Queen Victoria has certainly made the season fashionable. Do you decorate a tree, Miss Davenport?’

‘Oh, more than one, Mr Weatherby. I often have three or four in the town house.’

‘And I am certain that you would do so with great aplomb if my sister-in-law’s comments on your sense of style are to be taken into consideration.’ He smiled and moved closer. ‘If I could even be so bold as to ask for permission to accompany Anne to see these Yuletide trees next time she visits, I would be most grateful.’

The man was flirting with her, Lillian suddenly thought, and averted her eyes. Catching the glance of Anne at her side, she realised immediately that her friend was in on the plot.

Another man thrust beneath her nose. Another suitor who wanted a better acquaintance. All of a sudden she wished that it could have been just this easy. An instant attraction to a man who was suitable. The very thought made her tired. Perhaps she was never destined to be a wife or a mother.

‘You’re very quiet, Lillian?’ Anne took her hand as they walked towards the waiting coach.

‘I have a lot to think about.’

‘I hope that Alistair is one of those thoughts?’ she whispered back wickedly, laughing as Lillian made absolutely no answer. ‘Would he not do just as well as Wilcox-Rice? His holdings are substantial and Scotland is a beautiful place.’

The tree in the window was suddenly hoisted into position with the sound of cheering, a small reminder of her father’s ultimatum of choosing a groom before Christmas. Lillian placed a tight smile across her face.

‘I am not so desperate as to throw myself on a stranger, Anne, no matter how nice he is and I would prefer it if you would not meddle.’

The joy had quite gone out of the afternoon and she hated the answering annoyance in her oldest friend’s eyes. But today she could not help it. She had not been sleeping well, dreams of Virginia and the dark-haired American haunting her slumber, the remembered feel of his thumb tracing the beat on her wrist and the last sight of him tipping his head as he had left the room in the company of his friends.

To compare Lucas Clairmont to these other men was like equating the light made by tiny fireflies to that of the full-blown sun, a man whom she had never met the measure of before in making her aware that she was a woman. Breathing out heavily, she held on to her composure and answered a question Alistair asked her with all the eagerness that she could muster.

Chapter Four

The gown Lillian wore to the Cholmondeley ball was one of her favourites, a white satin dress with wide petticoats looped with tulle flowers. The train was of glacé and moiré silk, the festoons on the edge plain but beautiful. Her hair was entwined with a single strand of diamonds and these were mirrored in the quiet beading on her bodice. She seldom wore much ornamentation, preferring an understated elegance, and virtually always favoured white.

The ball was in full swing when she arrived with her father and aunt after ten; the suites of rooms on the first floor of the town house were opened up to each other and the floor in the long drawing room was polished until it shone. At the top of the chamber sat a substantial orchestra, and within it a group of guests that would have numbered well over four hundred.

‘James Cholmondeley is harking for the renommée of a crush,’ her father murmured as they made their way inside. ‘Let us hope that the champagne, at least, is of good quality.’

‘He must be of the persuasion that it is of benefit to be remembered in London, whether good or ill.’ Her aunt Jean’s voice was louder than Lillian would have liked it. ‘And I do hope that your dress is not hopelessly wrecked in such a crowd, my dear, and that the floor does not mark your satin slippers.’ She looked up as she spoke. ‘At least they have replaced the candles in the chandeliers with globe lamps so we are not to be burned.’

Lillian was not listening to her aunt’s seemingly endless list of complaints. To her the chamber looked beautiful, with its long pale-yellow banners and fresh flowers. The late-blooming roses were particularly lovely, she thought, as she scanned the room.

Was Lucas Clairmont here already? He was taller than a great deal of the other gentlemen present so he might not be too hard to find.

John Wilcox-Rice’s arm on hers made her start. ‘I have been waiting for you to come, Lillian. I thought indeed that you might have been at the MacLay ball in Mayfair.’

‘No, we went to the Manners’s place in Belgrave Square.’

‘I had toyed with the idea of going there myself, but Andrew MacLay is a special friend of mine and I had promised him my patronage.’ A burst of music from the orchestra caught his attention as the instruments were tuned. ‘The quadrille should be beginning soon. May I have the pleasure of escorting you through it?’

Her heart sank at his request, but manners forced her to smile. ‘Of course,’ she said, marking her dance card with his name.

The lead-off dance might give her the chance to look more closely at the patrons of this ball, as the pace of the thing was seldom faster than a walk and Lucas Clairmont as an untitled stranger would not be able to take his place at the top of the ballroom without offending everyone.

Her heart began to beat faster. Would he know of those rules? Would he be aware of such social ostracism should he try to invade a higher set? Lord, the things that had until tonight never worried her began to eat at her composure.

Still as yet she had not seen him, though she supposed a card room to be set up somewhere. She unfurled her fan, enjoying the cool air around her face and hoped that he would not surprise her with his presence.

The quadrille was called almost immediately and Lillian walked to the top of the room, using up some of the small talk that was the first necessity for dancing it as she went.

Holding her skirt out a little, she began the chasser, the sedate tempo of the steps allowing conversation.

‘Are you in London for the whole of the Yule season?’ Wilcox-Rice asked her, and she shook her head.

‘No, we will repair to Fairley in the first week of January and stay down till February. Papa is keen to see how his new horses race and has employed the services of a well-thought-of jockey in his quest to be included in next year’s Derby Day at Epsom. And you?’ Feeling it only polite, she asked him the same question back.

‘Your father asked me down after Twelfth Night. Did he not tell you?’

Lillian shook her head.

‘If you would rather I declined, you just need to say the word.’

She was saved answering by the complicated steps of the dance spiriting her away from him. The elderly gentleman she now faced smiled, but remained silent; taking her lead from him she was glad for the respite.

Luc watched Lillian Davenport from his place behind a colonnade at the foot of the room. He had seen her enter, seen the rush of men surround her asking for a dance and Wilcox-Rice placing his hand across hers to draw her away from them. Her father was there, too; Nat had pointed him out and an older woman whom he presumed was a family member. She seemed to be grumbling about something above her and Luc supposed it must be the lighting. Lillian looked as she always did, unapproachable and elegant. He noticed how the women around her covertly looked over her dress, a shining assortment of shades of white material cascading across a lacy petticoat.

She had worn white every single time he had seen her and the colour mirrored the paleness of her skin and hair. He smiled at his own ruminations. Lord, when had he ever noticed what a woman had worn before? The mirth died a little as he thought about the ramifications of such awareness. With determination he turned away, the quadrille and its ridiculous rules taking up the whole of the upper ballroom. British aristocracy took itself so seriously; in Virginia such unwritten social codes would be laughed about and ignored. Here, however, he did not wish for the bother of making his point. In less than two months he would be on a ship sailing back to America where the nonsensical and exclusive dances of the upper classes in London would be only a memory.

The chatter of voices around him made him turn and Nathaniel introduced two very pretty sisters to him, the elder laying her hand across his arm and showing him a card that she had, the dances named on one side and a few blank spaces that were not filled in with pencil upon the other.

‘I have a polka free still, sir. If you should like to ask me …’

Nat laughed beside him. ‘I have been fending off interested ladies since you arrived, Luc. Do me at least the courtesy of filling your night so that I have no further need of mediation and diplomacy.’

Cornered, Luc assented though it had been a long time since he had learned the steps to the thing. A complicated dance, he remembered, though not as fast as the galop. He wished he had taken better heed of his teacher’s instructions when he had been a lad, and wished also that it might have been Lillian Davenport that he partnered.

The girl’s younger sister thrust her own card at him and he was glad when they finally turned to leave.

Lord, time was beginning to run short and he did not want to be in England any longer than he had to be.

A flash of Lillian caught his eye as she finished with the quadrille and bowed to her partner. Finally it looked as though Wilcox-Rice might depart of his own accord and that he could get at least a little conversation with the most beautiful woman in the room.

But when another man claimed her for the waltz he admitted defeat and moved into the next salon to see what could be had in the way of supper.

The dancing programme was almost halfway through and Lillian was quite exhausted. She had deliberately pencilled in two waltzes with made-up initials just in case Luc Clairmont should show, but by midnight was giving up the hope of seeing him here.

Sir Richard Graham, a man who had pursued her several years earlier and one she had never warmed to, had asked her for the third galop and she had just taken her place in the circle when she felt a strange tingle along the back of her neck.

He was here, she was sure of it, the shock of connection as vivid as it had been on first seeing him outside the retiring room at the Lenningtons’.

Gritting her teeth, she took four steps forwards as her partner took her left hand in his, and when she moved back again she casually looked across her shoulder.

He was three or four couples behind them, partnering a pretty girl whom she knew to be the younger one of the Parker sisters and he looked for all the world as if he might actually be enjoying the dance. Certainly the Parker girl was, her colour high and her eyes flashing, the dimples in her cheeks easily on show.

Perhaps he had been here all night and made no effort to single her out. Perhaps this sharp knowledge she felt when he was near her was not reciprocated. Stepping forwards, she gained in ground on the couple in front of her and Graham’s hand closed upon her own, slowing her down. Concentrate, she admonished herself. Concentrate and pretend that Lucas Clairmont is not there, that you do not care for him, this reckless colonial who can only do your reputation harm.

For the next few figures in the dance she felt her confidence return, then drain away altogether as he winked at her when she caught his eyes across the small space between them. She turned away quickly, not deigning any reply, and listened to some inconsequential thing her partner was relaying to her, trying to give the impression of the free-and-fancy woman she did not feel at all. When the dance ended she curtsied and allowed Graham to take her hand and lead her back to the shelter of her aunt, a courtesy she rarely took part in.

‘You look flushed, my dear,’ Jean said as she finished off a sizeable glass of lemonade, followed by a strawberry bonbon. The first strains of a waltz filled the air and Lillian looked at her card. The initials she had written there stared back at her.

‘Your partner for this next dance is rather tardy.’ Aunt Jean looked around expectantly. ‘Ahh, here he is now.’

Lillian’s head whipped upwards as Luc Clairmont strode into view beside them, and again she was mesmerised by his reckless golden eyes.

‘Miss Davenport,’ he said before turning to her companion. ‘Ma’am.’

Her aunt’s mouth had dropped open, the red of the strawberry bonbon strangely marking her tongue.

‘Aunt Jean, let me introduce you to Mr Lucas Clairmont, from America. Mr Clairmont this is my aunt, Lady Taylor-Reid.’

Again Luc bowed his head. ‘Pleased to meet you, ma’am.’

Her aunt flushed strangely. ‘How long have you been in England, Mr Clairmont?’

‘Only a few weeks’

‘Do you like it?’

‘Indeed I do.’ He looked straight at her, the dimple in his cheek deeper than she had seen it, the gold of his eyes glinting in mirth.

The music had now begun in earnest, the dance getting underway and, excusing herself, she allowed Lucas to guide her through the throngs of people.

On the floor his hand laced around her waist and she felt the warmth of it like a burn. In England it was proper for couples to stand a good foot apart, but the American way seemed different as he brought her close, his free hand taking her fingers and clasping them tight.

‘I had thought I would have no chance for a waltz with you, Lillian. How is it that your card is empty on the best dance of them all?’

She ignored his familiar use of her name, reasoning that as no one else had heard him use it, it could do no harm.

‘It was a mix-up,’ she replied as they swirled effortlessly around the room. He was a good dancer! No wonder the Parker sister had looked so thrilled.

‘Are there other mix-ups on your card?’

She laughed, surprised by his candour. ‘Actually, I have the last waltz free …’

‘Pencil me in,’ he replied, sweeping her around the top corner of the room, her petticoat swirling to one side with the movement of it, an elation building that she had never before felt in dancing.

Safe. Strong. The outline of his muscles could be seen against the black of his jacket and felt in the hard power of his thighs. A man who had not grown up in the salons of courtly life but in a tougher place of work and need. Even his clothes mirrored a disregard for the height of fashion, his jacket not the best of cuts and his shoes a dull matt black. Just a ‘little dressed,’ she thought, his apparel of a make that held no pretension to arrogance or ornament. She saw that he had tied his neckcloth simply and that his gloves were removed.

She wished she had done the same and then she might feel the touch of his skin against her own, but the thought withered with the onslaught of his next words.

‘I am bound for Virginia before too much longer. I have passage on a ship in late December and, if the seas are kind, I may see Hampton by the middle of February.’

‘Hampton is your home?’ She tried to keep the question light and her disappointment hidden.

‘No. My place is up on the James River, near Richmond.’

‘And your family?’

When he did not answer and the light in his eyes dimmed with her words, she tried another tack. ‘I had a friend once who left London for a home in Philadelphia. Is that somewhere near?’

‘Somewhere …’ he answered, whirling her around one last time before the music stopped. Bowing to her as their hands dropped away from each other, he asked, ‘May I escort you back to your aunt? Your father does not look too happy with my dancing style.’

Lillian smiled and did not look over at her father for fear that he might beckon her back. ‘No. I have not supped yet and find myself hungry.’

The break in the music allowed him the luxury of choice. If he wanted to slip away he could, and if he wanted to accompany her to the supper room he had only to take her arm. She was pleased when he did that, allowing herself to be manoeuvred towards the refreshment room.

Once there she was at a loss as to what to say next, his admission of travelling home so soon having taken the wind from her sails. She saw the Parker girls and their friends behind him some little distance away and noticed that they watched her intently.