A Grosvernor Square Christmas

by Vanessa Kelly

No, it was not him falling to his knees professing his love.

  But it was a start.

  “Then perhaps I should ask the beautiful Miss Westforth to dance.”

  The fast-paced reel was in its final notes now. A new dance would start up in minutes. “I would love to.”

  After a moment of held gazes and breaths, Susannah finally realized she was the one blocking their way out of the alcove. With a blush and a grin, she turned and made to move, but was stopped by Sebastian’s hand, trailing down her arm, a silken touch, finally catching at her hand.

  “Wait,” he said. She turned. His eyes were on the ceiling above them. “I need to ask you something.”

  “Yes?”

  He pulled her to him slowly, so much so that she did not know if it was him or gravity.

  “I heard… Did you really turn down an Earl over the summer?”

  Susannah’s eyes went wide, and then her cheeks heated up. But she kept her gaze on his. Finally, she nodded.

  “My friend Jude.” He coughed. Then began again. “He said that there were only two reasons a lady would turn down an Earl. If she was waiting for love, or if she had the means to be particular.”

  She kept her eyes on his face. Searching. “You know my family, Sebastian,” she answered calmly. “Do you think I can afford to be so choosy?”

  Her family was landed, and even if she remained unmarried, she would never be impoverished. But her mother had nearly fainted when she was informed of the riches and luxuries that Susannah had given up by refusing a man of such status as that Earl. There were some things a girl simply did not say “no” to.

  But Sebastian simply held her eyes, as he arrived at the answer. She could read every feature. It thrilled him. It terrified him. But still, he held tight to her hand, and now, he wrapped his free arm around her back, pressing her even closer.

  She had never stood this close to a man before. Not even when waltzing. Her mind went entirely blank, while her body became entirely awake. Then, he flicked his gaze up to the ceiling. To the the garland overhead, and to the little weed hanging from the center…

  Mistletoe.

  And she knew. Susannah knew she was about to be kissed. Well and truly kissed for the first time. By Sebastian. And it would be the moment that he finally came to know, to feel everything she felt for him.

  The kiss that would alter everything. The last first kiss.

  He lowered his head to hers. Their lips a breath apart.

  “Are you certain?” she found herself saying. “If you kiss me – everything changes.”

  “And don’t you think it’s about time?” He grinned. And tilting her chin up, pressed his lips to hers.

  And Susannah, lost in that wonderful consuming last first kiss, in the warmth and press of his body wrapped around hers, had one single joyous thought shining above everything else.

  She had been right this whole time.

  One kiss did change everything.

  Out on the balcony, the snow falling around them, Lucy Frost, Lady Winterson, stood facing Philbert. Her butler of over thirty years.

  Her truest friend.

  Neither had moved, neither had spoken for some minutes. Because if either spoke… their carefully built lives would fall apart. One way or another. The way things were could not last.

  “Do you think Mr. Beckett’s found her by now?” she finally asked, her voice a squeak. The war of her wanting to hold onto the moment and her need to fill the painful silence finally came to a head.

  “My lady…” Philbert began.

  “I only ask because I thought it might be useful to have the band play another waltz in a song or two, help them along.”

  “My lady, I…”

  “He likely has found her. After all, youth has the advantage of speed and vigor. And impatience.”

  “Lucy.”

  She stopped. Her heart stopped. And then, something else fluttered to life. Not new, no… simply dormant. It had been waiting. Waiting for years.

  No, the way things were could not last, she realized. But perhaps… perhaps she did not want them to. Perhaps, they could brush it aside and make way for something better. And that one little word – her name on his lips – thrilled her with the thought that it was not only possible, but worthwhile.

  “I know you heard me,” Philbert said at last. His rigid butler’s posture came undone. He looked nervous… and young. But then again, hope always made one young.

  “I… yes, I did.”

  “And you have nothing to say?” he replied, waiting.

  But Lucy did not know what to say. Her heart fluttered in her chest, her body rooted to the spot for fear of flying away.

  After a moment, Philbert’s shoulders sagged. “I see. I will tender my resignation, my lady, as soon as a replacement can be found.”

  “Wait!” she cried. “I do have something to say, if you will allow me a moment.”

  He blinked, but said nothing, giving her a short nod of acquiescence.

  And then she did the only thing she could.

  The brave thing.

  She took three short steps, Susannah on her tiptoes, and pulled his head toward hers.

  The kiss rocked both of them, a kiss of too many feelings long growing and long denied. When they finally broke apart, he held her back by the shoulders, searching her face. Needing answers.

  “Is this real?” he whispered.

  “Yes,” she breathed.

  “I’m old, Lucy. I have no time for games.”

  “You forget, Philbert, I am old too.”

  He toyed with a graying curl at her temple. “Never,” he whispered. “You will always be the bright-eyed young woman who, after interviewing me, told me that my job hung on my ability to hang Christmas garland.”

  “And you will always be the man who I hired because he could reach the top of the library shelves without a ladder.”

  “And because I had excellent references.”

  “Pish – every butler has excellent references. You had the advantage of height.” She slapped his chest at his smirk. “You jest, but that was the criteria I used, and I have never made a better decision in my life.”

  “I cannot fault you, then.”

  Her eyes softened, her lips curved. “This is the first time I have wanted my Christmas Ball to end. So we need not be butler and mistress. So we can be more to each other.”

  He grinned at her, a wickedness entering his eyes, sending a thrill down her spine, connecting to where his hand had come to rest at the small of her back.

  Oh my.

  “I, for one, cannot wait to get started, my lady.” His voice became a prayer. “My Lucy.”

  And as Lady Winterson smiled up at her butler, her truest friend, her soon-to-be-lover, she was struck by the truth that so many other couples had learned over the years.

  That there was magic to be found at the Christmas Ball, at No. 3 Grosvenor Place. One need only look in the right place.

  The End

  Kate Noble love books. Romances especially. But, being born into a family of doctors, scientists, and mathematicians, she didn't discover she was adept at writing until, oh, about junior year of high school. Which came as something of a relief, as she was hopeless at memorizing the Latin names for all the bones in the human body. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle eludes her to this day. Kate lives in Los Angeles.

  You can find Kate on the web a www.katenoble.com

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  Excerpt From The Winter Wife: A Christmas Novella

  by Anna Campbell

  North Yorkshire, Christmas Eve, 1825

  THE CRASH OF shattering wood and the terrified screams of horses pierced the frosty night like a knife
.

  Sebastian Sinclair, Earl of Kinvarra, swore, brought his restive mount under control, then spurred the animal around the turn in the snowy road. With icy clarity, the full moon lit the white landscape, starkly revealing the disaster before him.

  A flashy black curricle lay on its side in a ditch, the hood up against the weather. One horse had broken free and wandered the roadway, harness dragging. The other plunged wildly in the traces, struggling to escape.

  Swiftly Kinvarra dismounted, knowing his mare would await his signal, and ran to free the distressed horse. As he slid down the muddy ditch, a hatless man scrambled out of the smashed curricle.

  “Are you hurt?” Kinvarra asked, casting a quick eye over him.

  “No, I thank you, sir.” The effete blond fellow turned back to the carriage. “Come, darling. Let me assist you.”

  A graceful black-gloved hand extended from inside and a cloaked woman emerged with more aplomb than Kinvarra would have believed possible in the circumstances. Indications were that neither traveler was injured, so he concentrated on the trapped horse. When he spoke soothingly to the terrified beast, it quieted to panting stillness, exhausted with thrashing. While Kinvarra checked its legs, murmuring calm assurances, the stranger helped the lady up to the roadside.

  The horse shook itself and with a few ungainly jumps, ascended the bank to trot along the road toward its partner. Neither animal seemed to suffer worse than fright, a miracle considering that the curricle was beyond repair.

  “Madam, are you injured?” Kinvarra asked as he climbed the ditch. He stuck his riding crop under his arm and brushed his gloved hands together to knock the clinging snow from them. It was a hellishly cold night. Christmas tomorrow would be a chilly affair. But then of course his Christmases had been chilly for years, no matter the weather.

  The woman kept her head down. With shock? With shyness? For the sake of propriety? Perhaps he’d stumbled on some elopement or clandestine meeting.

  “Madam?” he asked again, more sharply. Whatever her fear of scandal, he needed to know if she required medical assistance.

  “Sweeting?” The yellow-haired fop bent to peer into the shadows cast by her hood. “Are you sure you’re unharmed? Speak, my dove. Your silence troubles my soul.”

  While Kinvarra digested the man’s outlandish phrasing, the woman stiffened and drew away. “For heaven’s sake, Harold, you’re not giving a recitation at a musicale.” With an impatient gesture, she flung back her hood and glared straight at Kinvarra.

  Even though he’d identified her the moment she spoke, he found himself staring dumbstruck into her face. A piquant, vivid, pointed face under an untidy tumble of luxuriant gold hair.

  Furious and incredulous, he wheeled on the milksop. “What the devil are you doing with my wife?”

  ALICIA, COUNTESS OF Kinvarra, was bruised, angry, uncomfortable, and agonizingly embarrassed. Not to mention suffering the aftereffects of her choking terror when the toppling carriage had tossed her around like a pebble in a torrent.

  Even so, her heart lurched into the wayward dance it always performed at the merest sight of Sebastian.

  She’d been married for eleven miserable years. Their short interval living as man and wife had been wretched. She disliked her husband more than any other man in the world. But nothing prevented her gaze from clinging to every line of that narrow, intense face with its high cheekbones, long, arrogant nose and sharply angled jaw. He looked older than the last time she’d seen him, more cynical if that was possible. But still handsome, still compelling, still vital in a way nobody else she knew could match.

  Damn him to Hades, he remained the most magnificent creature she’d ever seen.

  Such a pity his soul was as black as his glittering eyes.

  “After all this time, I’m flattered you recognize me, my lord,” she said silkily.

  “Lord Kinvarra, this is a surprise,” Harold stammered, faltering back as if anticipating violence. “You must wonder why I accompany the lady—”

  Oh, Harold, act the man, even if the hero is beyond your reach. You’re safe. Kinvarra doesn’t care enough about me to kill you.

  Although even the most indifferent husband took it ill when his wife chose a lover. And Kinvarra had always suffered an overabundance of pride. There wasn’t the slightest hope that he’d mistake Alicia’s reasons for traveling on this isolated road in the middle of the night. She stifled a rogue pang of guilt.

  Curse Kinvarra, she had absolutely nothing to feel guilty about.

  “I’ve recalled your existence every quarter these past ten years, my love,” her husband said equally smoothly, ignoring Harold’s dismayed interjection. Although the faint trace of Scottish brogue in Kinvarra’s deep voice indicated that he reined in his temper. His breath formed white clouds on the frigid air. “I’m perforce reminded when I pay your allowance. A substantial investment upon which I receive woefully little return.”

  “It warms the cockles of my heart to know that I linger in your thoughts,” she sniped. She refused to cower like a wet hen before his banked anger. He sounded reasonable, calm, controlled, but she had no trouble reading the tension in his broad shoulders or in the way his powerful hands opened and closed at his sides as if he’d dearly like to hit something.

  “In faith, my lady, you speak false. Creatures of ice have no use for a heart.” A faint, malicious smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “Should I warn this paltry fellow that he risks frostbite in your company?”

  She steeled herself against Kinvarra’s taunting. He couldn’t hurt her now. He hadn’t been able to hurt her since she’d left him. Any twinge was merely the result of temporary shakiness after the accident. That was all. It couldn’t be because this man retained the power to stick needles into her feelings.

  “My lord, egad, I protest.” Fortunately, shock made Harold sound less like a frightened sheep. “The lady is your wife. Surely she merits your chivalry at the very least.”

  Harold had never seen her in her husband’s company, and some reluctant and completely misplaced loyalty to Kinvarra meant she hadn’t explained why the Sinclairs lived apart. The accepted fiction was that the earl and his countess were polite strangers who by mutual design rarely met.

  Poor Harold, he was about to discover the nasty truth that the earl and his countess loathed each other.

  “Like hell she does,” Kinvarra muttered, casting her an incendiary glance under long dark eyelashes.

  Alicia was human enough to wish the bright moonlight didn’t reveal quite so much of her husband’s seething rage. But the fate that proved capricious enough to fling them together tonight of all nights wasn’t likely to heed her pleas.

  “Do you intend to present your cicisbeo?” Kinvarra’s voice remained quiet. She’d long ago learned that was when he was most lethal.

  Dear God, did he plan to shoot Harold after all?

  Her hands clenched in her skirts as fear tightened her throat. Lacerating as Kinvarra’s tongue could be, he’d never shown her a moment’s violence. But did that extend to the man she planned to take into her bed? Kinvarra was a crack shot and a famous swordsman. If it came to a duel, Harold wouldn’t stand a chance.

  “My lord, I protest the description,” Harold bleated, sidling further away. He’d clearly also heard the unspoken threat in Kinvarra’s question.

  Oh, for pity’s sake. Was it too much to wish that her suitor would stand up to the scoundrel she’d married as a silly chit of seventeen? Alicia drew a deep breath of freezing air and reminded herself that she favored Lord Harold Fenton precisely because he wasn’t an overbearing brute like her husband. Harold was a scholar and a poet, a man of the mind. She should consider it a mark of Harold’s superior intelligence that he was wary of Kinvarra.

  But her insistence didn’t convince her traitorous heart.

  How she wished she really was the callous witch Kinvarra called her. Then she’d be immune both to his insults and to this insidious attraction that she’d never co
nquered, no matter how she tried.

  “My lady?” Kinvarra asked, still in that even voice that struck a chill into her soul sharper than the winter wind. “Who is this…gentleman?”

  She stiffened her backbone and leveled her shoulders. She was made of stronger stuff than this. Never would she let her husband guess that he still had power over her. Her response was steady. “Lord Kinvarra, allow me to present Lord Harold Fenton.”

  Harold performed an uncertain bow without stepping any nearer. “My lord.”

  As he straightened, tense silence descended. Alicia shifted to try and warm up her icy feet, fulminating against the bad luck that threw her in Kinvarra’s way tonight.

  “Well, this is awkward,” Kinvarra said flatly, although she saw in his taut, dark face that his anger hadn’t abated one whit.

  “I don’t see why,” Alicia snapped.

  It wasn’t just her husband who tried her patience. There was her lily-livered lover and the perishing cold. The temperature must have dropped ten degrees in the last five minutes. She shivered, then silently cursed that Kinvarra noticed and Harold didn’t. Harold was too busy staring at her husband the way a mouse stared at an adder.

  “Do you imagine I’m so sophisticated that I’ll ignore discovering you in the arms of another man? My dear, you do me too much credit.”

  She stifled the urge to consign Kinvarra to perdition. Just as she stifled the poignant memory that once he’d called her his dear and his love and he’d meant it. Once, briefly, long ago. “If you’ll set aside your bruised vanity for the moment, you’ll understand that we merely require you to ride to the nearest habitation and request help. Then you and I can return to acting like mere acquaintances, my lord.”

  He laughed and she struggled to suppress the sensual awareness that rippled down her spine at that soft, deep sound. “Some things haven’t changed, I see. You’re still dishing out orders. And I’m still damned if I’ll play your lapdog.”