“I didn’t take the painting. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t you?”
“Of course not! Margaret was in her old place in the ancestral gallery when I departed this morning. I left her with Lucien. I left her so that you could always enjoy her, so why on earth would you say I took her?”
“You didn’t take her?”
“I beg your pardon, Sir Roger, but you’re making no sense to me at all.”
His lips began to twitch, and he let out a little guffaw. Then, the guffaw became laughter, that rich, full, male laughter that buoyed her soul and spirit and made her want to laugh right along with him, and he leaned back against the squab, all anger gone from his eyes.
“You and I,” he finally said, “have been neatly manipulated.”
“Sir Roger, I fear the cold has befuddled your brain. You speak in riddles.”
“It is Lucien’s doing.”
“What is?”
“Come with me.” He opened the door, reached back in for her hand, and together, they walked through the thick, partially frozen white chalk mud to the boot. As the driver, still seated above, watched in bemusement and the horses, eager to be off once more, shifted in their harnesses, Sir Roger Foxcote opened the boot and there, for both to see, was evidence of Lucien’s hand in things.
The painting.
It was wrapped in blankets and tied up with rope, but its shape was unmistakable.
Angela’s eyes widened. “What on earth . . . ?”
“Don’t you see?” Fox shook his head. “I was ready to leave for home. I went into the ancestral gallery to see Margaret one last time. Not because I wanted to see Margaret, but because I wanted to see you. She reminds me of you. But she was not there, and then Lucien was behind me, saying quite matter-of-factly that you had left with the painting and that if I wanted it back, I’d better ride hard and fast to catch up with you. This is all his doing. All of it.”
“Lucien’s? What do you mean?”
“He accepted the painting back from you after you told him it should remain at Blackheath . . . but secretly, he had it wrapped up and placed in the boot along with the gifts he sent home with you. You obviously had no idea he had done so, and I was left to believe that you had gone back on your word, that you had taken the one thing I had that would always remind me of you and you had taken it after promising me you would leave it here. Don’t you see? This was all neatly set up by Lucien. He knew very well that if you left, we would likely never see each other again, so he told me that you took the painting and that if I wanted it back I’d better go get it.”
“So he did this as a last way to try and get us together . . . .”
“Yes. A second chance.”
“And you came after the painting.”
“No, Angela. I came after you.”
She looked at him blankly.
“Don’t you understand?” He made a helpless gesture. “It has all been reversed for me, Angela. I don’t want you because of Margaret. I wanted Margaret because of you, because she is the only thing I had left to remind me of the living, breathing woman I knew for only a short time. The woman who thought that I loved a painting more than I could possibly ever love her.”
Sir Roger shut the boot and looked at her. Snow frosted his eyelashes, and he reached out and took her hand.
“You and I were meant for each other from the moment I fell in love with that portrait,” he said softly. “Please don’t tell me I rode all this way in the cold to no avail. Please don’t tell me that Christmas miracles don’t exist, after all. And for God’s sake, please don’t tell me that you’ll deny me a chance to prove to you that my interests are in you and you alone, the most beautiful woman I have ever laid eyes on, and not an old portrait.”
A chance.
That was all he was asking for.
A chance.
She reached out and placed her hand in his.
“I will give you that chance, Sir Roger,” she murmured. “I will give us that chance. Because today has been one of the loneliest, saddest days of my life, and I would be a fool not to take it.”
She stepped willingly into his embrace, feeling his hard arms go around her, enfolding them in his warmth and strength and protection as she lifted her head for his kiss once more.
It was Christmas.
A season for hope, love, and miracles.
And for Sir Roger Foxcote and Angela Seaford Holmes, they had just been given the very best of all three.
* * *
Read on for more about Lucien, the Duke of Blackheath, and the gorgeous De Montforte Brothers — and many more books from Danelle Harmon as well as a sneak peak from the #1 Kindle Download, The Wild One!
My First Noel
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
24 December, 1779
Berkshire, England
My dear Katharine,
I do not quite know how to begin this letter, and I hope you will forgive it coming to you at a time of year that is meant to be one of peace and happiness. Christmas should be a joyous season, but I fear that in examining my own life and our intended plans for a future together, I am finding an absence of that joy, and I beg you to release me from my promise to you. You are a fine woman, and I know that you will bring happiness to some fortunate soul, but I am afraid that after much reflection, I have come to the decision that I am not that man. I am sorry. I hope you will find it in your heart to forgive me.
— Bisley
Lady Katharine Farnsley read the letter over a second time, then let it fall from nerveless fingers to her desk. A trembling started deep within her bones, and nausea flared in her stomach as she tried to digest the shock of what she had just read.
After an engagement that had already become suspiciously long, Viscount Bisley was breaking it off. Throwing her over. Just like she’d been thrown over twice before.
She stood up, her knees shaking, her tears held firmly in check, and took a deep and steadying breath. Dazed, she walked to the looking glass and studied herself by the light of a candle.
What is so wrong with me that no man will have me?
Large, dark blue eyes gazed back at her. At times those eyes had been cold, calculating, even cruel. At the moment there was nothing in them but stunned disbelief.
She pushed an errant lock of thick blonde hair back into place, touched one cold pearl earring, and turned from the mirror. She could take the letter to Perry who, as the Earl of Brookhampton, would likely call Bisley out for this insult to his sister, but Perry had been through enough this past year and Katharine had no wish to see him fighting a duel on her behalf.
She wished she could go to her mother with the letter, but Mama was in London, spending Christmas with friends.
Lady Katharine was on her own.
She walked to the window and looked out over the dark and wintry Berkshire countryside. Night had fallen hours before, and an icy rain beat against the windows of the old manor house as a gust of wind lashed it like a jockey whipping a horse.
A beastly night to get such news, and on Christmas Eve, as well.
A beastly night indeed.
She turned from the window, put her head into her hands, and quietly, so that not even the fire crackling in the hearth would hear, wept.
* * *
“Stand and deliver!”
It was a miserable evening to be working the road from Wantage to Lambourn but sometimes a man didn’t have a choice. Noel O’ Flaherty watched the coach come to a stop, its wheels sinking into the chalk mud, its lanterns showing sleet beating down from the heavens above in weak bars of light that barely cleaved the darkness. He could see that the door of the coach bore a fancy crest, but the drizzle and the gloom made it impossible to make out, let alone recognize.
He pulled his tricorn low and cursed his cloak, threadbare now—no elegant robber was he, but a desperate one, a hungry one, a currently impoverished and homeless one—for its inability to keep
him warm and dry. It wouldn’t do to shiver when you were holding up a person. And he had a bad feeling about this coach. There it stood in the darkness, silent and waiting, something menacing about it. He was Irish. He had bad feelings and good ones, all the time. This was a bad one. A very bad one.
The driver looked down at him. “Come now, sir, my master has just returned from a long trip abroad and would like to get home to his family. What are you doing out bothering good, decent folks on a night like this? It’s Christmas Eve!”
“A lad’s got to eat at Christmas just like any other time of the year,” Noel muttered, watching the driver from behind his pistol as he urged his mare, a great piebald beast with shaggy fetlocks and a shock of mane and tail, closer to the coach. Normally, the terrified occupants would raise the shade or open a door, thinking that by making his task easier, he’d show mercy. But in this case, the coach remained ominously silent and still and the bad feeling at the base of his spine became more pressing.
Danger.
Get the devil out of here, and do it now.
His stomach growled. His spine tingled in warning. He ignored both.
“Get out of the coach,” he repeated.
Nothing.
On the box the driver sighed, shifted his weight, and looked at Noel with a little knowing smirk.
“I said, out of the coach, damn you!”
For another maddening moment, nothing. Then the window opened and Noel found himself staring at a pistol and behind it, the dark, shadowy visage of a man whose features were obscured by gloom.
“You heard my driver,” said the urbane, aristocratic voice. “It is indeed Christmas, and you are inconveniencing me. Stand aside.”
“Who the devil d’you think you are?”
“I am the Duke of Blackheath, and as I would like to get home to my wife and son sooner rather than later, you are best advised to stand aside.”
Madness, Noel thought. He’d expected his victim to hastily comply with his demands. Instead, here he was pointing a pistol at a man who was pointing his own right back at him. What a bloody impasse.
Perhaps it might have remained so if, out of the corner of his eye, Noel hadn’t seen the driver very slowly reaching down for what he presumed was his own weapon. Instinctively Noel swung his own gun up toward the driver—and everything happened at once.
A flash in the darkness, the crack of the aristocrat’s pistol. The violent motion of the mare rearing up and sideways beneath him, her legs flailing as she lost her balance and began to go over backwards. Noel had no time to throw himself fully clear before the horse, all thousand pounds of her, came crashing down atop him. The cantle caught him across the ribs, his head bounced off the rim of a frozen rut, and a second later the mare was up, wild-eyed and bolting off through the darkness in a thunder of hoofbeats.
Noel, the breath knocked from his lungs, lay helpless in the mud as the aristocrat stepped down from the coach and moved purposely toward him.
Over him.
“I’ve a mind to shoot you and put you out of your misery where you lay,” the duke murmured, “but it is, after all, Christmas and I’m feeling rather ... charitable. My friend Sir Roger is the local magistrate, and he lives near enough that I am going to go fetch him. If you’re still here when I return, or you’re unlucky enough that I find you, you’ll have wished I did shoot you.”
Noel couldn’t draw breath, and he wondered if the impact had broken a rib. Or two. If he could only suck in enough air to talk, he’d tell this cold-hearted English bastard just what he could do with his Christmas mercy. Instead, he raised himself up on one elbow, holding his breath against the pain, and watched as the duke strode back to his coach, murmured something to the driver, and climbed back inside. A moment later the vehicle was moving off, its lights cutting through the sleety drizzle until it went around a bend in the road and disappeared from sight.
The night, getting colder by the moment, closed in.
And Noel was alone.
He lay there for a long moment in the mud, shivering and wet and very much in pain. So much for tonight’s work. His stomach was destined to stay hungry, his horse was gone, and he cursed himself for ignoring his intuition about that damned coach. He might not get the chance to do better next time, because if the duke returned before he managed to get away he was as good as dead.
Noel dragged himself to his feet and managed one step. Two. He leaned against a tree, trying to draw breath against the pain in his side, and gazed out into the darkness. Freezing rain hammered down from above and made a tinkling sound all around. The temperature was dropping, the wind getting colder. His head swam with dizziness. Far out over the downs, he could see the lights of a great manor house twinkling in the night.
He put one foot in front of the other and focusing on those distant lights, struck out over the dark pastures as the rain turned to sleet and then, to snow.
Chapter 3
“’Tis the Season. ’Tis the season for bloody what, I ask you?”
The Earl of Brookhampton set his brandy down on the long, empty table that dominated the dining room and gazed down at what was left of the contents of his glass. His sister looked at him in dismay, pity and disgust. “We’re supposed to celebrate,” he continued. “Celebrate what? I might’ve been married by now to Lady Nerissa if that bastard Blackheath hadn’t interfered in my life. Ruined me, he did. Ruined me.” He took another swallow of his drink, his eyes becoming more and more unfocused as the brandy took hold—a grip in which Perry was all too happy to lose himself every night. But he had his demons, Katharine knew, and his made hers look like impish children in comparison. Who was she to judge him?
“You never loved her the way you should have,” she said, regretting her sudden impulse to tell him about Bisley’s note. All it had done was send him deeper into drink.
“Love? What do you know about love? You’ve been jilted what, twice now? Thrice?” He made a noise of disgust and reached for the brandy bottle. The liquid splashed unsteadily into his glass, some of it missing it altogether and pooling on the tabletop. “Quite the pair we are, Kat. Quite the pair.”
“That was unkind, Perry.”
“It’s the truth. You’re beautiful. Heavily dowered. But you’re too much of a shrew, Kat, to hold the interest of a man and I’m too damaged to hold the interest of a woman. So much for beauty and wealth and titles, eh? Fat lot of good they’ve done either of us. We’re two bloody misfits on a miserable night.”
She looked away, refusing to let him see that the barb—dipped in truth as it was—had hit home. Maybe she had been catty and spiteful, especially to those awful American women that Blackheath’s brothers Charles and Gareth had married. But she had been promised since birth to the handsome, noble Lord Charles de Montforte, had waited years until they were both old enough to marry, and for what? He’d sailed to Boston as part of the King’s forces. There, while everyone had mistakenly thought him dead, he’d fallen in love with some ... some colonial savage, and worse, he’d married her. Married her, after being betrothed to Katharine all those years. Even now, the pain of it was all but unbearable. How the ton had laughed, the women whispering behind their fans when she passed during a ball, in the street, at a dinner, the gossip rags trumpeting “poor Lady K—’s ‘misfortune.’” Of course it had hurt. It had been the biggest hurt of her life, really, and any other woman who’d suffered that kind of bitter, public shame would have lashed out just as hard. And had Charles’ younger brother offered for her in his stead after he’d supposedly been killed in Boston? Had he stepped up to honor his brother’s commitment? Of course not. He too had married a lowly American nobody. And now, the letter from Bisley....
I’m destined to die an old maid.
And maybe I deserve it.
Outside, rain lashed the windows and wind howled around the house. She looked out into the night, turning her head so her brother wouldn’t see the sudden moisture in her eyes. She would not sink to his level and feel sorr
y for herself. She would not.
But Perry ... Blackheath had indeed ruined his life, ruined Perry himself, and he hadn’t been the same since he’d been rescued from the French gaol where he’d been imprisoned after his ship had been captured by an American privateer. Perry had good reason to hate Lucien for his part in sending Perry off on that ship in the first place. How much better both of their lives would have been if their ancestral lands didn’t border those of the duke’s.
“You are drunk, Perry. You should go to bed.”
“Yes, I am. Quite foxed, and happily so.” He raised his glass. “Happy Christmas, Sister.”
“Happy Christmas,” she returned.
He drained it in one swallow, set it down, and pushing himself to his feet, mumbled a goodnight. He stood swaying for a moment, one hand anchoring himself against the back of his chair, the other dragging through his wheat-colored curls as though he had something else to say, something he’d forgotten, before staggering off toward the great staircase. A few moments later, a door slammed upstairs and Katharine was alone.
She sat unmoving. Around her, the stillness grew large, quietly condemning. The portraits of her ancestors who had once gathered around this very table gazed down at her, and she all but heard their voices in her head. Voices echoed by a brother too drunk to care what he said and who wouldn’t remember it in the morning, anyhow. You are a shrew. It’s no wonder you’re alone at Christmas. Perry at least has an excuse. What’s yours?
She stared at the single candle still burning on the table. Its flame wavered as drunkenly as Perry himself had just done, bending to the cold drafts sliding in from the window casings. Katharine gazed dully into it, emptying her mind of thoughts, her heart of emotion. It was easier not to think too much, to avoid looking too deeply into the consequences of her own behavior and far, far less painful.
It Happened One Holiday Page 6