by Mary Balogh
Although it was still dark and impossible to see any distance with perfect clarity, nevertheless it was painfully obvious that no one was going to be doing any traveling today.
He waited for gloom and ill-humor to descend upon his spirits again and was surprised to discover that instead he was feeling more cheerful than he had since before Christmas. None of the new conditions of his life had changed, of course, but fate had provided him with this slight respite from them. There was going to be nothing he could do today that would in any way further his plans to reform his life and be the model grandson, son, brother, and bridegroom, and so he might as well enjoy what the day might offer.
It was a strange thought when he was stranded at a sorry apology of a country inn without his valet—and without most of the other comforts he usually took for granted.
He shaved in the cold water that had been sitting in the pitcher on the washstand since the night before, got dressed, and pulled on his top boots, his greatcoat, and his hat. He held his gloves in one hand as he descended the stairs. All was in darkness. As he had fully expected, Wally was still in his bed—and maybe the coachmen were still in theirs. They had still been playing cards and voicing dark suspicions about each other’s honesty when he had finally felt it safe to go up to bed well after midnight—safe for his own peace of mind, that was. When she had said that it was time for bed, he had felt for a few moments—again!—that the top of his head might well blow off.
He had an excess of energy this morning despite the fact that he had not slept much. And since he could not go riding—his favorite early morning exercise—or boxing or fencing, which would have been worthy alternatives, he would clear some of the snow away from before the door, he decided, pulling on his gloves, letting himself out into the dusk of approaching daylight, and wading back to the stables in search of a shovel and broom. With the help of Peters, who was already out there tending the horses, he found what he was looking for.
“I’ll do it myself after I’ve finished in ’ere, guv, if you like,” Peters said. “I’d rather that than wash bloomin’ dishes again. But I can see you are fair to bustin’ with wanting something to do yourself. So you go ahead.”
“Much obliged to you,” Lucius said dryly.
He took the shovel and set to work with it.
In the gathering light he could see that the inn was at some remove from a village, which he had suspected must be there, but that the road connecting them was so completely submerged beneath the snowfall that it was impossible to know exactly where it was. There were unlikely to be visitors today even if would-be imbibers of ale knew that the landlord was due home. It was even more unlikely that the Parkers would be able to return.
He rather suspected that he might prefer Miss Allard’s cooking anyway, unless beef pie was her pièce de résistance and she was incapable of preparing anything else. She could make it again, though, as far as he was concerned.
After an hour he had shoveled a path from the door to the stables and another from the door to what he estimated to be the road. He felt breathless and warm and invigorated. While he had been working, the sun had come up. At least, he presumed it had—the sky was still cloudy and a few snowflakes still sifted down from the heavens now and then. But at least the world was light.
He leaned on the shovel and drew in a deep breath of fresh air. He still had more energy than he was going to be able to use up stranded inside a small country inn for a whole day.
He shoveled along beside the inn, past what he realized was the kitchen window. He straightened up and glanced inside.
Frances Allard was up already and busily employed close to the fire. Whether she had built it and lit it herself he did not know, but it looked as if it had been going for some time.
She was wearing a similar dress to yesterday’s except that this one was cream in color and suited her better. Her hair was neatly, sleekly dressed. She was wrapped again in a large apron. He could see steam curling from the spout of the kettle. There was something cooking on the range top. On the table was a bowl of what looked like whipped eggs.
He was, he realized suddenly, ravenously hungry.
He was also curiously charmed by the domesticity of the scene—and more than a little aroused by it. There was something almost erotic about the sight of a woman bending and turning and absorbed in the task of cooking a meal.
It was a thought that he must definitely not pursue any further. She was a schoolteacher and doubtless virtuous to a fault.
She was, in other words, strictly off-limits.
She turned from the fire as if she felt his eyes on her and saw him looking in on her. And then—damnation!—she actually smiled and looked dazzling even this early in the morning. That smile of hers was a lethal weapon, and under present circumstances he would be just as happy if she did not use it on him.
She beckoned him and pointed at the cooking food.
When he entered the kitchen a few minutes later after shaking out his greatcoat and changing his boots, he could see that she had laid two places at the long kitchen table.
“I trust you do not mind eating in here,” she said, turning her head to acknowledge his presence before returning her attention to the eggs, which she was now scrambling over the heat. “I roused Wally a while ago and sent him for water. Then he felt he had earned breakfast with Thomas and Peters. Only now has he been assigned the lighting of the fire in the taproom. The kitchen will be a cozier place for us to eat.”
“The men have already eaten?” he asked, rubbing his hands together and breathing in the mingled smells of smoked bacon and fried potatoes and coffee.
“I could have called you in too,” she said. “But you looked as if you were enjoying yourself.”
“I was,” he said.
She set a generous plateful of food before him and a more modest one at her place. She removed the apron and took her seat.
“I suppose,” he said, getting up again to pour the coffee, “you made the fire in here yourself.”
“I did,” she said. “Is this not a strange adventure?”
He laughed, and she looked sharply at him before dipping her head to look down at her plate again.
“Have you ever been in charge of an inn kitchen before?” he asked her. “And the appetites of four grown men?”
“Never,” she said. “Have you ever shoveled snow away from a country inn?”
“Good Lord! Never.”
This time they both laughed.
“A strange adventure indeed,” he agreed. “You told me yesterday that all over Christmas you longed for snow. What would you have done with it if it had come?”
“I would have gazed out on it in wonder and awe,” she said. “Snow for Christmas is so very rare. And I pictured myself wading about the neighborhood through it with the village carolers—but there were no carolers this year. And wading through it to the Assembly Rooms for a Christmas ball. But there was none.”
“A poor-spirited village if ever I heard of one,” he said. “Everyone stayed at home and stuffed themselves with goose and pudding, I suppose?”
“I suppose so,” she said. “And my great-aunts refused the invitations they received in favor of remaining home in order to enjoy the company of their great-niece.”
“Who would have far preferred to be kicking up her heels at a village dance,” he said. “A grim Christmas you had of it, ma’am. You have my heartfelt sympathies.”
“Poor me,” she agreed, though her eyes were now dancing with merriment.
“Those are the only uses you would have put the snow to?” he asked her. “It was hardly worth longing for, was it?”
“Well, you see,” she said, setting one elbow on the table and resting her chin in her hand, against all the rules of etiquette, “my great-aunts would not have enjoyed engaging in a snowball fight and one can hardly fight with oneself. I probably would have built a snowman. When it snowed two winters ago, Miss Martin canceled afternoon classes and we took the
girls out into the meadows beyond the school and had a snowman-building contest. It was great fun.”
“Did you win?” he asked.
“I ought to have,” she said, picking up her knife and fork again. “My snowman was far and away the best. But the teachers were declared ineligible for prizes. It was grossly unfair. I almost resigned on the spot. But when I threatened to do so, I was rolled in the snow by a dozen or more girls, and Miss Martin studiously looked the other way and made no attempt to exert her authority and come to my rescue.”
It sounded, he thought, like a happy school. He could not somehow imagine rolling any of his own former teachers in the snow, especially with the headmaster looking on.
Miss Frances Allard was certainly not the bad-tempered, prunish woman he had taken her for yesterday. And he must admit that if their positions had been reversed, he would have been in an even more cantankerous mood than he had been anyway and would have been entertaining gruesome dreams of boiling someone in oil too. Not that either he or Peters would tolerate someone’s overtaking them on any road under any circumstances, of course.
“Teachers are not ineligible for this morning’s prizes,” he said.
“Oh?” She looked at him with raised eyebrows.
“Out beside the inn,” he said, pointing in the direction of the side facing away from the village. “As soon as I have helped you do the dishes. One problem, though. Do you have proper boots?”
“Yes, of course I do,” she said. “Would I have longed for snow for Christmas if I did not? Am I being challenged to a snowman-building contest? You will lose.”
“We will see,” he said. “What did you put in these potatoes to make them so delicious?”
“My own secret combination of herbs,” she said.
He finished his meal and gathered the dishes together to wash while she set about mixing a fresh batch of bread—it could rise while she was outside winning the competition, she told him.
Fresh bread! His mouth watered even though his stomach was full.
He even—horror of horrors!—dried the dishes.
If it had not snowed, he would now be on the final leg of his journey. He could have been home by this afternoon—to the quiet, familiar peace of Cleve Abbey and the prospect of an early return to London and its myriad pleasures—though only until the Season began, by Jove. But here he was instead, planning to alleviate the boredom of a useless day by building a snowman.
Except that he was no longer bored—had not been since he rose from his bed actually.
He tried to remember the last time he had built a snowman or otherwise frolicked in the snow, and failed.
4
He was making the mistake, Frances noticed with a furtive glance in his direction, of building his snowman too tall and thin—an error often made by novices. It looked much larger than hers, but he was going to have problems with the head. Even if he could lift a suitable one that high, it would not remain in place but would roll off and ruin all his efforts. She would be the undisputed winner.
Her snowman, on the other hand, was solid and squat. He was broader than he was tall. He was—
“Too fat to pass through any door,” Mr. Marshall commented, diverted from his own efforts for a moment, “even if he were to turn sideways. Too fat to find a bed wide enough or sturdy enough to sleep on. Too fat to be allowed any bread or potatoes with his meals for the next year. He is disgustingly obese.”
“He is cuddly,” she said, tipping her head to one side to survey her unfinished creation, “and good-natured. He is not cadaverous like some snowmen I have seen. He does not look as if he will blow over in the first puff of wind. He is—”
“Headless,” he said, “as is mine. Let us get back to work and resume the name-calling afterward.”
Her poor snowman looked even more obese after she had fixed a nice round head on his shoulders. The head was too small. She tried to pack more snow about it, but it fell off in clumps about his shoulders, and she had to be content with picking out the two largest coals they had brought from the kitchen with them so that she could at least give him large, soulful eyes. She added a somewhat smaller coal nose and a fat carrot to act as his pipe and a few more small coals for coat buttons. With one forefinger she sculpted a wide and smiling mouth about the carrot.
“At least,” she said, stepping back, “he has a sense of humor. And at least he has a head.”
She looked down with a smirk at the massive one he had sculpted on the ground, complete with jug-handle ears and sausage curls.
“The contest is not over yet,” he said. “There was no time limit, was there? It would be somewhat premature to start jeering yet. You might feel foolish afterward.”
She saw then that he was not as ignorant of the laws of gravity as she had assumed. He spent some time on the shoulders of his snowman, scooping out a hollow to hold the head so that it would not roll off. Of course, he still had to get the head up there.
She watched smugly as he stooped to pick it up.
But she had reckoned without his superior height and the strength of those arm muscles. What would have been an impossibility for her looked like child’s play for him. He even had the strength to hold the head suspended over the torso for a few moments so that he could get it at just the right angle before lowering it into place. He selected the coals and carrot he wanted and pressed them into place—though he used his carrot for a nose. And then he reached into one of the pockets of his greatcoat and drew out a long, narrow knitted scarf in a hideous combination of pink and orange stripes and wrapped it about the neck of his snowman.
“The vicar’s wife in my grandfather’s parish presented it to me for Christmas,” he said. “General opinion in the village has it that she is color-blind. I think general opinion must have the right of it. It is kinder than saying she has no taste at all, anyway.”
He stepped back and stood beside Frances. Together they contemplated their creations.
“The scarf and the curls and the lopsided mouth save yours from looking mean and humorless,” she said generously. “Not to mention those ears. Oh, and those pockmarks are meant to be freckles. That is a nice touch, I must confess. I like him after all.”
“And I must admit to a fondness for Friar Tuck with his black coat buttons,” he said. “He looks like a jolly old soul, though I do not know what holds his pipe in his mouth if he is smiling so broadly.”
“His teeth.”
“Ah,” he said. “Good point. We forgot to appoint a judge.”
“And to have a trophy awaiting the winner,” she said.
It was only then, when he turned his head to grin at her, that she realized he had one arm draped about her shoulders in a relaxed, comradely gesture. She guessed that he had only just realized it himself. The smiles froze on their faces, and Frances’s knees felt suddenly weak.
He slipped his arm free, cleared his throat, and wandered closer to the snowmen.
“I suppose,” he said, “we might as well declare the competition a draw. Agreed? If we do not, we will get into a scrap again and you will be devising some other hair-raising scheme for putting a period to my existence. Or are you going to insist upon declaring me the winner?”
“By no means,” she said. “Mine is definitely sturdier than yours. It will withstand the forces of nature for much longer.”
“Now that is a provocative statement when I have been magnanimous enough to suggest a draw,” he said, and he stooped and turned and without warning hurled a snowball at her. It caught her in the chest and spattered up into her face.
“Oh!” she cried, outraged. “Unfair!”
And she scooped up a gloveful of snow and tossed it back at him. It hit the side of his hat, knocking it askew.
The battle was on.
It raged for several minutes until to a casual observer it might have looked as if four snowmen had been erected beside the inn. Except that two of them were moving and were helpless with laughter. And except that one of them,
the taller and broader of the two, suddenly lunged for the other and bore her backward until she was lying on her back in a soft snowdrift with his weight pressing her deeper and his hands clamped to her wrists and holding them imprisoned on either side of her head.
“Enough!” he declared, still laughing. “That last one caught me in the eye.”
He blinked flakes of snow off his eyelashes.
“You admit defeat, then?” She laughed up at him.
“Admit defeat?” His eyebrows rose. “Pardon me, but who is holding whom vanquished in the snow?”
“But who just declared that he had had enough?” She waggled her eyebrows at him.
“The same one who then ended the battle with a decisive annihilation of the enemy.” He laughed back at her.
She suddenly became aware that he was actually on top of her. She could feel his weight bearing her down. She could feel his breath warm on her face. She looked into his hazel eyes, only inches away, and found them smoldering back into her own. She looked down at his mouth and was aware at the same moment that his eyes dropped to hers.
Her strange adventure moved perilously close to danger—and perhaps to something rather splendid.
His lips brushed across hers and she felt as if she were lying beneath a hot August sun rather than December snow clouds.
She had never known a man so very male—a thought that did not bear either pursuing or interpreting.
“I have just remembered the bread,” she said in a voice that sounded shockingly normal to her ears. “I will be fortunate indeed if it has not risen to fill the kitchen to the ceiling. I will be fortunate if I can get through the door to rescue it.”
His eyes smoldered into hers for perhaps a second longer, and then one corner of his mouth lifted in what might have been a smile or perhaps was simple mockery. He pushed himself to his feet, brushed himself off, and reached down a hand to help her up. She banged her gloved hands together and then shook her cloak, but there was as much snow down inside the collar of it as there was on the outside, she was sure.