’Twas the Night After Christmas

by Sabrina Jeffries

  “Was this your room when you lived here?” If so, he’d left it utterly barren of anything that might have been his as a schoolboy—no globes or telescopes or even old racing journals. Only a few books were there, which was odd, given his rumored obsession with increasing Montcliff Manor’s library.

  “No,” he said tersely. “The nursery was my room.”

  “Well, of course, until you were older, but after you went off to school, you must have had—”

  “I’ve decided what entertainment I wish for tonight,” he said bluntly.

  Shrugging off his lack of interest in discussing his room, she walked toward him. “All right. And what might that be?”

  With a sudden, suspect gleam in his eye, he reached for a book on the table next to him. “Since Mother said you were an excellent reader, I thought you might read aloud to me.”

  His manner reminded her of Jasper when he thought to play some trick on her.

  Warily, she sat down in the chair opposite him and took the volume he offered. Then she pushed up her spectacles so she could better view the cover. Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.

  A woman of pleasure? Oh, dear.

  She felt the earl’s gaze on her, felt him waiting for her to make some expression of horrified dismay. The desire to thwart his expectation was too overwhelming to resist.

  Opening the book, she read the title aloud in a resounding voice that surprised her almost as much as it seemed to surprise him. Then she turned the page and began to read the text:

  Madam,

  I sit down to give you an undeniable proof of my considering your desires as indispensable orders. Ungracious then as the task may be, I shall recall to view those scandalous stages of my life—

  “You’re actually going to read it,” he interrupted.

  Biting back a smile, she lifted her gaze. “That is what you asked of me, isn’t it?”

  His gaze hardened. “Of course. Do go on.”

  So she did. It was the account of a country girl who set off to make her fortune in the city, only to be taken in by a suspiciously friendly older woman. Camilla instantly recognized the older character as a bawd in disguise. Not for nothing had she helped her vicar husband with his work in Spitalfields. She knew how easily naive girls were deceived.

  But the narrator, relating the beginnings of her own downfall, didn’t seem overly bothered by it. Indeed, she had no sense of shame at all.

  Camilla found that fascinating. She was becoming quite intrigued by the book when his lordship said, “You can stop now if you wish.”

  She glanced up to find him looking nervous. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve only read ten pages.”

  “But I doubt you’ll like where it goes from here.”

  He seemed so uncomfortable with the idea of her going on that she couldn’t resist provoking him. “Nonsense. This happens to be a book I read often,” she lied blithely. “I’m enjoying revisiting it.”

  Perhaps she had done it up a bit too brown, for he eyed her with rank skepticism. “Are you indeed?” He leaned back in his chair. “What’s your favorite part?”

  She gauged the length of the book and took a guess. “Page ninety-six.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “Then by all means, do read that aloud.”

  “All right.” So far there hadn’t been anything terribly shocking, so she thumbed through to it without a qualm.

  But page 96 did not contain text. Instead, there was only a crudely drawn illustration so appalling it took her breath away.

  A woman lay on a bed, naked from the waist down, with her legs parted as she prepared to receive a man whose overly large appendage, also quite naked and rendered in some detail, jutted out from his breeches. The female actually had her hand on it, as if to . . . to assess its dimensions.

  Nothing in Camilla’s experience had prepared her for such a blatant display of carnality.

  “Well, read on,” the earl taunted when she hesitated.

  A blush rose on her cheeks. “I can’t.” She lifted her stunned gaze to his. “There are no words. Just a . . . picture.”

  The color drained from his face. Reaching over, he snatched the book from her and stared at it, then shot her a horrified look. “Oh, holy hell. It has pictures.”

  7

  If Camilla hadn’t been so mortified, she would have laughed. “Surely you knew that.”

  “Not exactly.” When she eyed him skeptically, he shut the book and set it down. “I recently acquired this edition as part of a lot of fifty books I won at auction. I hadn’t looked at it since I bought it. My other edition, in London, is not . . . er . . . illustrated.”

  “You have two editions of that?”

  His eyes narrowed. “You shouldn’t be surprised. You read it ‘often,’ remember?”

  The jig was clearly up. “You know perfectly well I’ve never read that book.” She stared him down. “And if that’s what the illustrations are like, I shudder to think what’s in the text.”

  “You have no idea.” He released an exasperated breath. “You, madam, are the most stubborn female I’ve ever met. If not for that picture, I wonder how far you’d have read before throwing the book at my head.”

  “I’d never throw it at your head, sir.” She tilted up her chin. “Just into the fire.”

  “I would have your head if you did. It’s damned difficult to obtain a copy of it. There are only a few hundred.”

  “Yes, I can see why,” she said dryly. “The illustrations are very poorly rendered.”

  He laughed full out. “They are indeed. Perhaps we should choose some other book.” His eyes gleamed at her. “One with art of a higher quality.”

  “Or writing of a higher quality,” she countered. “Poetry, for example.” When he groaned, she added, “Lord Byron’s Don Juan ought to be just your cup of tea. Or perhaps some of Lord Rochester’s poems. I believe he used a great many naughty words.”

  “I believe he did.” He picked up his glass to down some brandy. “But alas, there are no pictures.”

  She forced a stern expression onto her face. “You, sir, are nothing more than an overgrown child.”

  “Indeed I am,” he said without a trace of remorse. “That’s what happens when a man has no real childhood to speak of. He has to make up for it later.”

  Even as she caught her breath to hear him reveal something about his past, he realized what he’d said and added, “But how the devil does a sheltered female like you know of Don Juan? Or Lord Rochester’s poems?”

  “I’m not so sheltered as all that. As you well know, I was raised in a London orphanage.”

  “Where they fed you on risqué poetry?” he quipped.

  “Well, no. I found out about Lord Byron’s scandalous Don Juan from the newspaper.”

  “Ah. So you haven’t actually read the poem.”

  “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure, no,” she said primly.

  He lifted one eyebrow. “Trust me, you’d know if you had.”

  “I suppose you’ve read it.”

  “I have my own copy. But I don’t have Lord Rochester’s poems. So how did you get them?”

  Heat rose in her cheeks. “I didn’t. Not exactly. When I served as paid companion to an elderly lady with a bachelor grandson, he gave me free access to his library, which contained a few . . . questionable books of verse.”

  “That you decided to read?”

  She scowled at him. “I didn’t know they were questionable until I read them, now, did I? And I happen to like verse. I’d read some of Lord Rochester’s more respectable poems, and I never guessed—”

  “That he was such a naughty boy?”

  “Exactly.” Her tone turned arch. “Apparently you’re not the only lord out there who’s a naughty boy.”

  “We do get around.” He took another sip of brandy, then eyed her seriously over the rim of his glass. “And speaking of that—did this bachelor with the vulgar library ever behave as a naughty boy to you?”

>   “No more than you have.”

  “I’ve been a perfect gentleman to you. For me, anyway.”

  “Trying to blackmail me into your bed and then asking me to read naughty literature to you is not gentlemanly.”

  “But it’s certainly entertaining,” he pointed out.

  She rolled her eyes. “To answer your question, the bachelor grandson never laid a hand on me. For one thing, he lived in terror that his grandmother, my employer, would cut him off. For another, he had no time for me. He spent it all courting women with large fortunes.”

  “Ah. Why did you leave?”

  “His grandmother died.” Camilla had been torn between dismay and relief. She hadn’t wanted to look for a new post, but neither had she wanted to continue with the miserly and highly critical Lady Stirling. “He wasn’t nearly as bad as the man who employed me next, as companion to his widowed sister. He wanted her to marry a rich marquess twice her age in order to gain him an entrée into White’s and further his political career.”

  “And did he succeed?”

  She smirked at him. “She ran off with his best friend. And he couldn’t blame me for it, since he was the one who’d thrown them together.” Her smile faded. “Unfortunately, he also no longer had any need for my services, which is how I ended up here.”

  He drank more brandy. “I keep forgetting this isn’t your first post. Indeed, that’s why I was so surprised to see how young you are.”

  “I’m not all that young. I’m nearly twenty-eight.”

  “A greatly advanced age indeed,” he said sarcastically.

  “Only three years younger than you,” she pointed out.

  One corner of his mouth quirked up. “True. But it’s different for a man. We see more of the world in thirty-one years than a woman sees in a lifetime.”

  “Trust me, I’ve seen plenty enough of the world at my age.”

  He fell silent, his brow pursed in thought. “Twenty-seven. And you had two posts before this. You must have married very young.”

  That observation put her on her guard. “I was old enough.”

  “How old?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “You work for me. I have a right to know more about your circumstances.” When she bristled, he softened his tone a fraction. “Besides, why should your age at marrying be such a secret? Were you ten and sold off from the orphanage to a ninety-year-old fellow with gout?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I was nineteen. And the orphanage was perfectly respectable. Indeed, I stayed there to work until I married.”

  “Ah. So you met your husband there.”

  “Yes,” she said warily, not sure she wanted to talk about Kenneth with him. “He used to perform religious services for the children, and I would help him.”

  “And he fell in love.” His voice was almost snide. When she hesitated a bit too long in answering, he added, “Or not.”

  Uncomfortable with his probing, she rose and went to the bookcase. “Perhaps you’d like me to read another book.”

  Setting down his glass, he rose, too. “You don’t wish to talk about your marriage. I wonder why.”

  She faced him with a frown. “Probably for the same reason you don’t wish to talk about your relationship with your mother. Because it’s private.”

  He ignored that. “Did your husband mistreat you?” he asked in a hard voice. “Is that why you don’t wish to discuss him?”

  “Certainly not!” she said, appalled at the very thought. “You always assume the worst of people, don’t you? He was a vicar, for pity’s sake.”

  “That means nothing,” he said evenly. “Men who mistreat women exist in every corner of society, trust me.”

  “Well, my husband didn’t mistreat anyone. He was a crusader for the poor and the sick.”

  “Yet not in love with you?” Before she could answer, he added, “Let me guess. He saw you at the orphanage and determined that you would be the perfect helpmeet for him in his work.”

  She shot him a startled glance. “How did you know?”

  He shrugged. “The average crusader tends to see women only as an extension of his mission.”

  “That’s a most astute comment for an overgrown child.”

  He walked over to lean against a bedpost. “Children often pay better attention to their surroundings than adults give them credit for.”

  “Another astute observation,” she said.

  “I have my moments.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “So how did you end up married to this crusading vicar? You seem the kind of woman who would marry only for love.” His eyes glittered obsidian in the candlelight. “Did he tell you that he didn’t love you? Or did he pretend to be enamored of you until after he got you leg-shackled for life?”

  “You’re very nosy, aren’t you?”

  “If you have nothing to hide, why should you care?”

  Since she preferred to keep her most important secrets from him, she should probably fob him off with inconsequential ones. “If you must know, he never pretended anything. We’d been friends a few years when he made his proposal. He pointed out that he needed a woman of my skills, and I could use a home and a family. So he suggested—” She caught herself with a scowl. “I don’t know why I should tell you this. I haven’t even told your mother. Then again, she was never so rude as to pry.”

  “No, Mother isn’t much interested in anyone’s situation but her own.”

  She glared at him. “That’s not true! She’s kind and thoughtful and—”

  “Don’t change the subject,” he bit out. “You were saying that your vicar gave you a most practical proposal. Go on. Didn’t he spout any romantic drivel to get you to accept him?”

  A pox on him. He was going to push her until he knew it all, wasn’t he? And if she refused to tell him, she risked having him delve deeper into her past, which she couldn’t afford.

  “Kenneth wasn’t the romantic sort,” she said tersely. “If he felt anything deeper than friendly affection for me, he didn’t say. For him, our marriage was more of a fair trade in services.”

  “That sounds cold-blooded even to me, and I’m definitely not the ‘romantic sort.’ ”

  “What a surprise,” she muttered.

  “So, was it? A fair trade, I mean.”

  She pushed up her spectacles. “Fair enough . . . until his heart failed him three years after we married, and he left me a widow.”

  “Ah, now I understand. You married him because he was older, more mature—”

  “I married him because he offered,” she said blandly, annoyed that he presumed to know so much when he knew so little. “And he was only a few years older than you. The doctor told me that it happens like that sometimes, even to young men in good health. One day Kenneth was well; the next he was gone.” Leaving her alone with an infant, very little money, and her grief.

  Some of her distress must have showed on her face, for he said, “You loved him.”

  The earl had misunderstood entirely, but she wasn’t about to explain how complicated even a loveless marriage became when there was a child involved. She’d sought to build a family; instead she’d gained a dissatisfying union with a man she barely knew. Turning on her heel, she headed for the bookcase again. “If we’re to do any more reading tonight, then you’ll have to choose another bo—”

  “You were in love with your husband,” he persisted, pushing away from the bedpost to follow her. “It might have been a marriage of convenience for your vicar, but it wasn’t for you, was it?”

  Determined to ignore him, she ran her fingers over the books in the case. “There’s a novel by Henry Fielding here that I understand is very good,” she said firmly.

  “Admit it!” He caught her arm and pulled her around to face him. “You loved your husband.”

  “No, I did not!” She wrenched her arm free as he stood there gaping at her. “I grieved him, yes. But I did not love him.” That was the most embarrassing thing of all to admit. “I wante
d to love him. I thought that once we were married, I would feel something, but I never . . . I couldn’t . . . ”

  His gaze on her was intent, penetrating. “Don’t blame yourself for that. Romantic love isn’t for everyone.”

  For some reason that sparked her temper even more. “You mean a woman like me is incapable of love.”

  He scowled. “I didn’t say that.”

  “You think that a woman with no resources is always on the hunt for a man with money,” she went on hotly.

  He looked as if she’d punched him. “I don’t think any such thing!”

  “Don’t you? I married to escape the orphanage and a future as a spinster.” To gain a family, though to say so would make her sound even more pitiful. “You said your mother married your father for money. Neither of us married for love. So I’m not much different from her.”

  “That’s not true,” he gritted out. “You didn’t marry a man of means and rank whom you knew could aim higher. You came to a mutual agreement with a fellow who didn’t profess to love you—”

  “How do you know that she didn’t do the same?” When he merely glowered at her, she thrust her face up in his. “You don’t know what she did, do you? You don’t even know the full circumstances of her situation, yet you pass judgment on her.”

  She must have hit a nerve, for his face closed up. “I won’t talk about my mother.”

  “Of course not. You might learn that you don’t know her as well as you think. That you might be wrong about—”

  “Quiet!” he growled. “I won’t discuss her with you!”

  “You’re ready to defend me, whom you barely know,” she persisted, heedless of how reckless she was being to provoke him, “yet you refuse to defend your own mother, who bore you and raised you.”

  “She did not—” He caught himself. “You don’t know anything about it, damn you!”

  “No, I don’t! So tell me! How else can I learn if you don’t?”

  “If you don’t stop talking about her, I’ll—”

  “What?” she pressed him. “You’ll dismiss me? Run back to London, where it’s safe? Except that it isn’t safe, is it? Because even I, a complete stranger, can see the noose that is choking you more and more with every day that you—”