Betrothed by Christmas: A Holiday Duet

by Jess Michaels

  “Is he”—Tamsin felt her way along carefully with a woman who was clearly loyal to her employer—“often blue and…” Broody seemed the wrong word for sunny Simon. “Out of sorts?”

  “A touch, though not so much as before. Low and hard on himself he was, when he came back. Not sleeping the night through, roaming about at all hours. Cagey-like, poor lad.”

  Of all the things Tamsin had thought about Simon, that he could be characterized as either a lad, or cagey, was not one of them. “But he’s better now?”

  “When he writes—though I’m not supposed to say about that. Colonel will have my hide, so we’ll just keep that between you and me, miss. But it is so. And he’ll be better still if he gets himself a missus—a mistress for this fine house.” A steam kettle began to whistle in the distance. “That’s me kettle. But as I was going to say, you just set to writing yourself and leave it all to me.”

  “Thank you, I will.”

  And Tamsin did because there didn’t seem to be anything else to do that was not exceptionally nosy. She shut herself into the library where she was not tempted to poke her nose into his bedchamber and open his closets and chests and inhale the divinely singular scent of starch on his shirt.

  But each book on the library shelves—and there were hundreds there, and more scattered throughout the rest of the rooms—held some new question. Had Simon read it? Did Simon sit here, in the wing-backed chair before the fire, when he read? Did he like this book, or that?

  There were books of every kind. Some she might have expected of a military man—atlases of the continent with maps of different countries. But others seemed an odd choice for a man who professed to be muzzy-headed—plays and poetry, and a vast many novels, many by a Scottish authoress, whose books Tamsin had seen at Mattigan’s but never yet read, Essie Greenock. There was even a copy of the novel she had only just purchased—Patronage by Maria Edgeworth—which carried a personal inscription from the authoress to Simon.

  Simon. Not Colonel Cathcart. But My dear friend Simon.

  Tamsin racked her brain to remember what he had said—a friend of his knew the bluestockings. No—a neighbor moved in Joanna Baillie’s circles. But Simon was a neighbor—Miss Baillie’s house was only a few streets away.

  And once her curiosity was aroused, Tamsin could not resist poking her nose into every shelf and drawer—for hadn’t she been especially granted the run of the place?—and examining every painting for more clues about their owner.

  Everything around her told her that he was a well-read, organized, private man, who liked his simple comforts. The house gave her new and not entirely surprising insights into his character which were in complete contradiction to the man she had met in the library that first night—the addled, indolent, masculine wallflower.

  Tamsin turned her attention to the desk positioned directly in front of the windows overlooking the snowy heath. It was a beautiful desk, made of carved cherry wood, warm and well-polished with gracefully curving legs—as beautiful and polished as the man himself.

  And what had Mrs. Walters said?—there were plenty of fresh-cut quill pens. Tamsin opened the writing case set in the middle of the desktop. And indeed there were plenty of pens, as well as ink and paper. Plenty—far more than Mama, who had a large correspondence, or than Lady Malmesbury had kept in her desk in her private sitting room where Tamsin and Simon had embraced.

  So what was Simon Cathcart, a man who slept in libraries from one end of the Ton to the other, doing with so much pen and paper?

  She dove into the drawers, pulling out each and rifling through the contents. And what she found astonished her—page after page of what must be notes filled with a bold, carelessly slanted hand she recognized at once as Simon’s. But that wasn’t all—in the bottom drawer she found a box filled nearly halfway with more sheets, covered in a neater, more careful version of that same, unmistakable, boldly slanted hand.

  A manuscript. In Simon’s hand.

  Tamsin ignored the hectic beating of her pulse in her ears and took the box to a chair next to the window. And began to read.

  Simon decided not to make a mad dash for Scotland after all. The weather—always something one had to take into account on a campaign—helped him decide, as did the sense that both he and Tamsin would be exonerated far more quickly and at far less inconvenience to both himself and Mahoney were he to simply stay in London and let himself be found.

  And so he stuck like burr on the hide of Cathcart House, letting himself be seen coming and going, and going and coming in the snowy dusk. Making a spectacle of himself.

  Waiting to play his part.

  Mrs. Lesley did not disappoint, though she did take a good deal longer to arrive than Simon had anticipated—it was early the next morning by the time she darkened Cathcart House’s door and insisted upon seeing him.

  The butler conducted the lady to him—stretched out on the library sofa in his evening clothes, as if he lay where he had fallen the night before.

  He did so like a scripted stage piece.

  “Colonel?” The butler gently shook his shoulder, although he was already well awake. “There’s someone to would like to speak to you—a Mrs. Lesley.”

  “Mrs. Lesley.” He opened one eye. “What ho?” He sat up slowly—it wouldn’t do to give up the game all at once. Especially since Tamsin didn’t seem to want him to—what he wanted would have to keep for another time.

  “Pray forgive my appearance, madam.” Simon attempted to look chagrinned. “I seem to have fallen asleep inappropriately attired, what?”

  “Colonel Cathcart.” The lady had the good graces to look uncomfortable. “I had thought to come to you on a matter of some…delicacy. For some intelligence about my daughter.”

  “Miss T? Lovely girl. Very intelligent. Didn’t see her here.” He pretended to reconnoiter behind the lady’s lines. “Is she not here?”

  “No. That is—I wondered if you might have some news of her?”

  “Haven’t heard a thing, but I just woke up, what? Anything from you, Steller?” he asked the butler.

  “I’m sorry, no, sir.”

  Simon turned back to Mrs. Lesley, who nodded and pursed her lips and nodded again. “I see.”

  “Is there anything—” he began.

  “No, no, I thank you,” Mrs. Lesley answered quickly. “No, I’m sure it’s all just a misunderstanding.”

  “Indeed,” he said as kindly as he might. “I hope that is exactly so.”

  “Yes. Thank you. I—” Mrs. Lesley fought for her composure, and Simon began to see from whence her daughter’s characteristic determination came.

  And clearly, no matter their differences, the woman cared deeply for her daughter, and was genuinely upset and worried for her girl—the snow on her shoes was evidence that she had hastened there on foot from Hill Street.

  Simon couldn’t help but be moved. “Lovely lass, Miss Lesley. Clever and sensible. Been a very good friend to me, what?” He was running out of kind but misleading things to say. “Clever, lovely lass. Lass to be proud of. She’ll come right, don’t you worry. She’ll come right as rain.”

  “I do hope so,” Mrs. Lesley sniffed into her handkerchief. “I do so hope.”

  Chapter 20

  The day dawned bitingly cold and glaringly gray, with the promise of even more snowfall on the wind. “Do you think it will keep snowing like this?” she asked Mrs. Walters at breakfast.

  The housekeeper waved away any involvement in such a wish. “Oh, it’ll do what it’s going to do, no matter what we want.”

  Yes, life was like that, wasn’t it—life went on no matter what one did, or didn’t do. Tamsin had meant to do something life-changing, but life was still very much the same as it had been at home in Somerset—she rose and ate breakfast, Last night she had dinner and read, and went to her bed. Alone.

  Alone with Simon’s story for company, for she knew to her soul that the manuscript was his. And it was strangely intimate, reading his words an
d sharing his thoughts. Aunt Dahlia had said that books didn’t keep her warm at night in the same way a man might. But Simon’s books had made her extraordinarily warm. They had changed the way she saw him. All of him, and not just the strange facet he presented to Society.

  She knew now that façade was not the true measure of the man.

  Outside a dog barked in the yard, and she turned to see a shadow loom at the door—a tall, snow-covered figure carrying—

  “Simon!” It was exactly as if her thoughts had conjured him out of the snow this time. Tamsin threw open the bolt. “What are you doing here?” Excitement made her breathless and giddy and demanding.

  “Well, look what the storm’s blown in!” Mrs. Walters was in alt. “Thought as you’d be back to us in this weather. Come you in, colonel, come you in.”

  “I thought you were meant to be in Scotland,” Tamsin stammered. Not that she wasn’t ecstatic to see him. “You must be frozen in this weather.”

  Simon set his snowy burden—a now-wet wicker hamper—on the table, and said, “I admit I am.”

  “I’ll put the kettle on.” Mrs. Walters bustled to her hob. “Where’s yer man?”

  “Right behind me.” Simon turned back for the door and opened it to admit his manservant, Mahoney, who carried in an armful of firewood.

  Tamsin worked to keep from bouncing on her toes in happiness. “I didn’t think you would be coming back—that’s not what we had arranged.”

  “The weather had another arrangement in mind.” He shrugged as if it were self evident that he needed to come and check on her. “I wanted to make sure you had everything you needed out here, in all this snow. It being Christmas and all. ”

  She had never been so grateful for a storm. Yes, let it snow. Let it snow even harder, so he would have to stay. Let it snow so much the roads became impassable and the whole of the world came to an ice-frosted stop.

  Just this once. Just for a little while.

  She did not care why he was there, only that he was. “Let me help you. Come in and get these wet things off. You are frozen—your hands are like ice.”

  “The colonel insisted on taking the reins himself,” Mahoney told them, “when I got too cold to feel the ribbons.”

  He would do that, wouldn’t he? No thought for himself, but always for others, even his servant. “Come in,” Tamsin urged him, “to the fire.”

  She divested him of his cold, clammy coats until he was in his dry shirtsleeves and waistcoat and seated in a comfortable high-backed chair before a toasty fire in his snug library. He surrendered himself to the warmth, propped his numb feet upon the brass fireplace fender and closed his eyes.

  “You must be exhausted,” she said from nearby. “I’ll leave you in peace.” She would find something to do, some chore from Mrs. Walters to keep her busy and away from him.

  “No.” Without opening his eyes he reached out and found her hand. “I’d actually prefer company. I’ll rouse myself to amuse you in a moment, see if I don’t.”

  “You don’t need to amuse me, Simon. In fact, I should be the one amusing you.”

  “Oh, you do, my friend. You surely do.”

  Tamsin was not sure if that was a good thing. Or if she was still content being called his friend. But he was holding her hand in a way that was surely more than merely friendly.

  She would start there. “Let me thank you again for the use of the house.”

  He smiled again without opening his eyes. “Happy to oblige. It’s a snug little bolt-hole, isn’t it?”

  “Indeed.” Her eyes went to the desk where her manuscript sat. And where that other manuscript was tucked back up in its drawer. “Just perfect for writing. But you already knew that.”

  One wary green eye cracked open at that. But he said, “Glad you find it so.”

  “I do. Your library is filled with exactly the kind of books I needed—histories and diaries of all sorts of interesting people. Just the thing for a historian or a writer. Just the thing for me.” Tamsin hesitated before playing her last card. “And for you, Essie Greenock.”

  “I read your manuscript, Simon.”

  The siege was up—his carefully erected ramparts were crumbling. Just as he knew they must when he had invited her here. For surely he had known she was too clever, too determined not to find evidence of who he truly was.

  “Why did you not tell me?” she asked, her voice laced with confusion and disappointment, but also kindness.

  Simon closed his eyes again, and made himself find the truth he had hidden—perhaps even from himself—for too long. “Because I didn’t want anyone to know. It would have interfered.”

  “With what?”

  “With everything. With my privacy and peace.”

  “I don’t understand—you’ve adopted this pose, let people think of you as Simple Simon on purpose? You would rather people think you stupid, and damaged by the war, than—”

  “A sentimental novelist?” he finished for her. “Aye.”

  He closed his eyes again so he would not have to see her reaction, would not have to swallow his own disappointment.

  But she didn’t disappoint him. “You’re a rather exceptional sentimental novelist,” she averred. “I read it. You may chastise me roundly for taking such a liberty, for violating your privacy, but once I had started, I could not stop. I had to keep reading and find out what happens to Lillianne. But I couldn’t find the rest of the story.”

  “That’s because I haven’t written it. My heroine has not yet decided what she is going to do.”

  “Then you don’t know what happens to Lillianne?”

  “I know what I want to happen,” he said. “But I’ll have to wait and see if it comes true.”

  She let out that delicious little huff of laughter that he so loved. “You know that makes no sense. You are the author, Simon—you decide.”

  “That’s what you would think. But what has to happen is that she lives happily ever after. It’s a rule of all good tales,” he told her. “The good must be rewarded and the evil punished.”

  “Like a fairy tale,” Tamsin sighed. “It isn’t like that in real life, is it?”

  “Sometimes,” he conceded. “But we have to work very hard to make it so.”

  “And sometimes, even when we work hard, like you and I did to convince my mother, it doesn’t work anyway.”

  His question was quiet. “Was it hard work then, kissing me?”

  “No,” she assured him. “That was no work at all.”

  He drew in an easier breath and let his mind drift where it would. “I missed you,” he told her. “In the carriage. The journey wasn’t the same without you.”

  “Did you set out for Scotland and turn back from the weather?”

  “Oh, no. Never wanted to go to Scotland in the first place. Mostly because you’re not there.”

  “Simon,” she chided. But he could hear the warm smile in her voice.

  “So I stayed in London and slept on a sofa. And I dreamt of you.”

  “Oh?” She sounded startled and unsure.

  He would reassure her. “Hmm.” He turned to look at her, so beautiful, and so curious with her spectacles glinting at him in the firelight. “I dreamt we waltzed.”

  “Did you?” She was smiling. “I've never waltzed.”

  “You should—it’s marvelous. Learned it on the Continent during the war. Funny the things that stick with you. Funny the things you do to try and make yourself forget everything else.”

  “You mean the war?”

  “Hmm.” He made another sound of vague agreement. “The waltz is marvelously close. And intimate—your partner never leaves your arms. Spinning and spinning together. Makes you quite lose your head.”

  “And were you happy waltzing, in your dream?”

  “Intensely. I was happy to lose my head.” He gathered what little courage he had left, and let the tension in his gut tighten another notch. “I’d be even happier to make you lose yours.”

 
Heat blossomed across her cheeks, but she kept her aplomb. “And how would you do that?” she finally asked.

  He gave in to his need to tease. “Secrets of the guild, Miss T. An officer and a gentleman—even an ex-officer—never tells.”

  She smiled at that—from relief and something else.

  Something he hoped was at least the beginnings of love.

  “But I would demonstrate. If you liked. If you asked me, Tamsin, I think I would do anything.” He held out his open palm for her to take. “I doubt I could resist.”

  She clasped the hand he offered. “I don’t want you to.”

  Chapter 21

  She came to him, leveraging herself against him, angling her mouth to his, offering him her body, her self, her very soul. She would not just passively wait for him to accept her offer. She would not let this opportunity slip from her grasp.

  Softly at first, she moved her mouth across his, feeling her way toward passion, using his sleepy kisses as stepping stones on her way. She kissed him gently, pressing her lips against his lightly, shifting to place little busses along the rough line of his jaw, until her lips seemed to want to move of their own volition, until she was opening her mouth and delving in to taste him. And then her hands were fisting in his linen, and wrapping around his neck, sliding into his hair, holding him still and near so she could kiss him as she pleased, as she had always wanted to do.

  “I don’t want to be alone tonight, Simon,” she whispered with all the painful longing she had bottled up inside. “I don’t want to sleep in a bed while you sleep in this chair or anywhere else that isn’t with me. Please. I know what I’m asking of you. I know the sacrifice I’m asking of your honor. But please, please don’t turn me away. Please let me be with you. Please.”