The Last Chance Christmas Ball

by Mary Jo Putney

  “I was hoping to get through the holidays without stealing those jewels. We shall see.”

  His family. His interwoven and nearly limitless family with branches and twigs of it sprouting off in every direction and every one of them madder than the next. Why did he let himself get drawn into these things? Claire was enough complication to last a man for his lifetime.

  He said, “Charlie doesn’t need your trinkets. He’s not poor.”

  “They belong to me and I want them.” Now she looked like a sly and devious rabbit.

  They’d come to the top of the stair that led downward. Clatter and roistering surged through the front hall. A dozen of the younger guests, skates in hand, were headed for the ornamental pond at the end of the garden and ice-skating. Mary took his arm and leaned on him all the way down the stair.

  At the bottom he detached her. “Find Charlie,” he said. “Go ice-skating. Your father’s not going to be watching you out there.”

  She frowned again. She had a pretty frown, like a kitten or some baby animal. That was something else he hoped Charlie appreciated. She said, “We don’t have much time. Papa wants to find me in a compromising position with one of the men he’s picked out. I don’t know how he’s going to do it, but that’s what he’s planning. It could be you, Nickie. You have to help me.”

  Because he’d known her since she was a wobbly three-year-old, he said, “I’ll do my best.”

  If anyone wondered why he spent his life flitting between the major cities of Europe, it was to escape his family.

  Around them in the entrance hall the pack paired off for skating, laughing, acutely aware of each other, collecting coats and scarves from the footmen. Through the door of the Tapestry Drawing Room he could see a dozen older guests ranged comfortably by the fire.

  Charlie wandered out from behind a pillar and saw Mary. His head snapped up like some questing hound. There was an almost audible click in the air and he started toward her.

  “I’m going to marry Charlie. I don’t care what Papa says.” The white rabbit had become a determined white rabbit. Love did that to you.

  “I’ll see if I can get him for you.” That might even be a good use for the pair of reliable riding horses he’d brought. The border with Scotland was spitting distance away. How hard could it be to travel ten or fifteen miles in this weather? His coachman would know. Or he’d ask Claire’s advice. She was always sending messengers across Europe with a fortune in jewels stuffed in their smallclothes.

  He left Mary in Charlie Pearson’s capable hands and went to track down the woman who was in no shadow of any possibility a fool.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It was surprisingly difficult to pluck one maidservant from the flock at Holbourne Abbey. Nick finally found her in the maze of service halls on the lower floor. When she left the house, she carried what appeared to be a basket of festive plant materials—holly, bay, pine, fir branches possibly.

  They pushed through the wind and snow, her leading, him following, around the house. Then they stood awhile, each in their separate bit of landscape. He was getting cold, even if she wasn’t.

  He’d admit he didn’t know the minutia of a housemaid’s work at Holbourne Abbey, but he’d wager it didn’t include long, chill intervals inspecting the bushes outside the house. The bushes directly under . . . He leaned against a brick wall that separated one anonymous garden from another and counted windows, matching them to his mental floor plan of the house. She was exactly under the Red Bedroom. Gower’s room.

  That was interesting. He would have gone to help if she’d been doing something industrious, but she just stood and considered the shrubbery. Probably she was thinking. She could do that as well without him as with him.

  He was utterly charmed by the intensity with which she ignored him. It seemed impolite to break through that. She knew he was here. He hadn’t been secretive following her out the back door and around the house. So now they both stood about getting snowed on and he kept watch in case she needed help. He passed the time guessing what that ingenious woman might be up to.

  It took five or six minutes for Claire to discover all she needed to know about that patch of icy ground and snow-covered bushes. All was satisfactory, it seemed. She set her basket neatly on the ground, removed a top layer of prickly green, and took out what was underneath. That turned out to be a rope ladder with iron hooks on top. It was very much like one they’d used in Vienna. He could even make a good guess as to which shop she’d bought it in near the docks in London.

  She pushed in among the bushes, scattering snow, and everything shook for a while. He didn’t have to see to know she was unrolling those ropes over branches and along the ground, making it look as if it had fallen from the window above. When she came out, dislodging more snow, she left no obvious sign of what she’d done. The ladder wouldn’t be seen unless you happened to be walking by and looked closely. Another hour of snow and even that would be hidden.

  So now he knew what she was up to. Not the final cunning details, of course, but the overall plan.

  He clapped slowly, not making noise, using broad gestures. She turned in his direction, radiating displeasure, but didn’t come over and say anything. She’d evidently decided to reserve comment for another time and place. A warmer one, he hoped.

  She picked up her holly and pine, replaced it in the basket, and headed off. He followed twenty paces behind on the cold stomp back to the house, playing the lovelorn swain, which he was. Whatever she was up to, from here he could keep an eye on her.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Once inside, Claire didn’t dawdle getting to the Tapestry Drawing Room. Mrs. Taft wanted the holly and green boughs put out, the good luck distributed to the household, and everybody in the kitchen on hand to help with the dinner.

  Nick strolled along behind her with his signature insouciance, keeping up. He must be freezing to death. She’d wrapped up in her cloak when she went out, the warm, red wool that was a practical countrywoman’s wear. He’d followed her without getting his own coat. He’d stood in the wind wearing nothing but his jacket. Idiot.

  Down the long hall past the kitchen. Up the stairs. She was full of images that had nothing to do with here and now. She remembered Nick skimming down the rope ladder in Vienna, holding it taut and steady for her as she came after him, awkward in skirts. Nick absolutely silent while he loaded a gun for her and went out to meet a pack of mountain bandits, unarmed. Nick taking the cold spot in the bed.

  She’d made the right decision when she cut the ties between them. She’d known it was going to hurt. It did.

  She stopped at the door of the Tapestry Room and let him catch her up. She said, “We have the room to ourselves. If you have something to say, this is the moment.”

  The Foreign Office dispatched Mr. Nicholas Lafford to the far corners of Europe to lie for his country. In Prague or Paris he sliced Gordian knots and disentangled complications for king and country. Cunning as a fox, knowing as one of the more successful Medicis, accepted everywhere. He raised aristocratic blandness to high art. It was a pleasure to watch him work, except when his particular skills were directed at her.

  “Ah. Good. Do you know where we are?” he asked.

  The answer to that was not the “Tapestry Drawing Room off the main Hall,” obviously. “Guessing games?”

  “Of a sort.” Nick took the basket from her and held it in one hand. He used the other to tilt her head up. “Look.”

  For an instant she didn’t see what he meant.

  He said, “The kissing bough’s hung. Those clever footmen.” Gently, one hand along her cheek, he brought her to face him. He laid his lips over hers.

  They’d shared a thousand kisses. This was different.

  Nick had brought the cold in with him on his clothes and his skin. Cold filled the air around him. Rose from his damp jacket. When she took his face between her hands, she felt the chill scoured into him by the wind. His hair between her fingers still held snowflake
s.

  He didn’t offer an amiable kiss, a friendly kiss, a comfortable kiss. This wasn’t even the passion he took and gave so fiercely. This was Nick stripped to stark demand, the pretenses gone.

  It was unsettling to think of what Nick might be, stripped of pretenses.

  He ended it before she did. He took the hand she’d laid on his cheek and kissed it, as formal as if he’d been taking liberties with a duchess. “I wish kisses could convince you,” he said. “But they won’t.”

  “No.”

  She felt him shrug. “Let’s exchange some of those words you’ve been running away from for the last three months.”

  The face of Nicholas Lafford changed when he wasn’t telling lies. He looked both older and younger when his defenses were down. Younger face. Older eyes. He was still beautiful as the dawn. Maybe that came from being an aristocrat and bred to it.

  She felt her heart twist in her chest. Felt her lungs clench as if a giant fist squeezed around them.

  “I’d rather not have this conversation.”

  He nodded. “Not so easy to say it to my face, is it?”

  “Painful,” she said. “For both of us. You’ll probably wish you’d just walked away. I know I do.” She pulled her shawl around her and crossed to the great mantelpiece over the fireplace. He was right. It was time to say these words. No more avoiding it. No more hoping she could tear apart the ties between them without this final confrontation.

  When she looked back, he was plucking one single white berry from the mistletoe of the kissing bough. He tucked it in the pocket in his vest before he picked up the basket and joined her.

  She must say good-bye to Nicholas with complete finality. She must marshal the facts that would convince him. But she was in no hurry to come to that inevitability. She could wait five minutes. Or ten.

  “I have my own mantelpieces here,” she told him. “My own assigned picture frames and mirrors, plinths and odd corners. Mrs. Taft—she’s the housekeeper—makes use of me extensively in the matter of mantelpiece decoration. She thinks I’m filled with artistic talent. It’s because I come from London.”

  “A woman of perspicacity.” Nick helped himself to one of the parlor chairs. “Where do you want this?

  “I’ll get one of the ladders from—”

  But he’d already pulled his jacket off and draped it across the seat so she could stand on it. “Where?”

  Gallantry. It came from his excellent good manners and from that great generosity he mostly kept hidden. She was about to hurt him in several significant ways so she accepted this gesture. She said, “Let us go left to right as if we were reading. Put it here, on the left side.”

  The footmen had brought up baskets of useful green bits and pieces. She knelt and went through her inventory.

  Nick stood beside her, arms folded, looking down. “The holly and the ivy. A basketful of tradition. We did this together last year,” he said. “Remember?”

  Last year they’d crossed the Channel in cold weather and ridden up from Dover to arrive at her house in London the day before Christmas. Outside was rain that froze as it hit the cobbles and a stiff wind coming up the Thames. An unlovely day. But they’d been warm and cozy in her parlor. They’d walked to her parish church at midday and Nick had stuffed the poor box with banknotes on his way out.

  Yes. She remembered.

  “This isn’t so different. Just grander.” She lifted red ribbons tied into bows and sewed tight. Took wide white ribbon still on the spool from the top of the basket. “We have hectares of holly and miles of ribbon. Enough to decorate East Anglia.”

  “A county badly in need of embellishment.”

  “I’ve always thought so.”

  Last year on the way home from church they’d bought Christmas wreaths and pine branches from a cart in Russell Square and carried armfuls home in the rain, prickly and awkward and dripping. They’d stood laughing on her doorstep to shake the water off before they went inside. She said, “My grandmother used to take me to the Winter Market to buy gingerbread. It doesn’t taste the same when I buy it in London.”

  “I envy you that gingerbread.” He sounded perfectly serious. She looked up sharply. There was nothing in his face but a kind of serious intensity. “I envy you a childhood in the house on Verdaine Street in Geneva with the mountains all around. Learning a trade at your grandfather’s knee. Sorting citrines and topaz by the window. Rolling your hoop across the Place de la Madeleine down to the docks on the lake. I envy you sitting on a stool in the kitchen, eating gingerbread.”

  “I know how lucky I am.”

  The smells and sounds and sights crowded around her. She was overdue for a visit home. She’d go there when she was finished striking back at Gower. Grandpapa spent most of his time drowsing before the fire these days, but he’d laugh when she told him about it.

  Nick put a touch on her shoulder. Three fingers, just holding her attention. “Claire, let me tell you about growing up a Lafford.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “I’m making a rather lengthy point. Bear with me.” He went down on his haunches suddenly, beside her. They were face to face. “Show me what you’re doing with this greenery. Twining it together?”

  “Holly twisted with the ivy and tied. With this.” She picked thick black string from the selection of threads and strings. “We can talk about something else. I don’t need to know your secrets.”

  “Yes, you do.” He was competent with the holly. Mostly, though, he looked at her. “I want you to imagine a great mansion. A house grander than Holbourne Abbey, but silent and formal. A cold perfection from the topiary in the garden to the paintings on the ceiling. That’s where I grew up, spare son of a spare son. I doubt my parents could have picked me out of a crowd. I don’t know how old I was when I realized I was an annoyance who must be provided for. I was quite indecently glad to go away to Eton.”

  Nick—so totally self-possessed, such entertaining company. Men do not build a shield of caustic wit unless they need shields. Unshakable self-sufficiency comes from having no one to depend on.

  She said, “I thought it would be something like that.”

  “I stand before you, transparent as well-blown glass.” Nick took the scissors from her and snipped off a length of black string. Twenty inches or so. “I’ll need yards of this, so keep it handy. Claire, why did you kick me out of your life?”

  “You asked me to marry you.”

  “I did, didn’t I? Not usually the signal for panicked flight.”

  Could she tell him he offered everything she wanted? That she’d sent him away before she weakened and said yes.

  He’d opened a little muslin bag. “Do you want tiny gilded pinecones or gilded walnuts? I have both. In some ancient time an aged aunt of the Stretton household painted these. They use them every year.”

  She accepted them from his hand. “You used to spend Christmas here?”

  “They took in a distant cousin. I didn’t willingly return to that mausoleum my family lives in. More string, please.” He held out his left hand, palm up.

  She obliged with the string. “City Christmases for me. The manager of my London shop—the shop in Bond Street, not the exchange in the City—invites me to his house on every holiday.” She had to smile. “He has a fat wife, a yappy white dog, and an abundance of children. We speak German.” She added, “You can’t put gilded pinecones, even small ones, on ivy. Ivy doesn’t have pinecones.”

  “My ivy does.”

  “Then use the thread. There are needles here somewhere. Do it right, if you must do it.”

  “ ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ivy, rough hew it how we will.’ If you marry me we’ll put pinecones on apple trees in every city in Europe. I’ll catch blackmailers and petty thieves. You’ll buy the discarded gems of princes.” He gestured, asking for a threaded needle. Black thread. They were complex gestures. “It’ll never be dull with me, Claire.”

  She complied. She gave him fine b
lack silk thread to anchor his inappropriate pinecones. “It can’t work.”

  “I’m not conceited enough to think sharing a bed with me is going to change your mind. I don’t expect to overwhelm you with kisses, though it’d be fun to try. But we’ve been friends. We’ve been accomplices, partners, lovers. Tell me why we can’t take the next step. I deserve to know why you’ve sent me away. Tell me.”

  There was a universe of patience inside him, all of it waiting for her to answer.

  Then a woman stood in the doorway. One of the guests. She choked out, “Oh, Nickie,” and stumbled toward them, crying.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The girl in the doorway was pretty. Lovely even. Slender and graceful, with the gold and rose English coloring. And oh, so young.

  Claire thought, This is the sort of woman Nick should marry, and was sad and angry knowing that.

  The girl launched herself at Nick and began sobbing into his cravat. Nick was precisely the sort of man one would want to sob upon, having mountains of sangfroid at his disposal and the likelihood of handkerchiefs. He was performing the necessary soothing and patting and looked gratifyingly annoyed with the whole business.

  “Papa found us in the library together,” the girl choked out. “He ordered Charlie to go away and never see me again.”

  “You can ignore that,” Nick said. “It’s not possible to snub somebody at a house party. You’re going to find yourself sitting next to Charlie at every meal. I’ll arrange it.”

  “Charlie left and Papa hit me and called me a stupid little slut. He hit me, Nickie. He said I’d been—”

  “Hush. It’s over. He won’t hit you again.” Nick folded the girl in against his chest. “I won’t let it happen.”

  Quiet words, firmly spoken. The reassurance you’d give a child. But this was Nick making the promise.

  Nick met her eyes over the girl’s head. Sometimes his mask slipped and the ruthlessness that made him so useful to the diplomatic corps showed through. His features held nothing but a certain immobility. It was his eyes that gave him away. They had become entirely cold.