The Christmas Countess: A Valor of Vinehill Novella

by K. J. Jackson

  His fingers rubbing her feet stopped and he looked away. His jaw shifted, tensed, just like it always had years ago when he was beyond irate with her.

  So much for calm.

  She studied his profile. He had the dark scruff of a week’s worth of a beard covering his face, blending up along his cheek into his light brown hair. His dark blue eyes—the color of her deepest indigo dress—were set solidly on the crackling fire four feet to her left. Crinkles of lines around his eyes made him look older. Older than when she’d last seen him six years past.

  He wore only a lawn shirt, and at that, he still looked hot. The blazing fire wasn’t helping with that. Had he always been this big, this strong? Or was it that she’d been surrounded by small, thin men for too long?

  His head turned to her, his dark blue eyes pinning her. “What the blasted hell were ye doing going out into that storm, Karta?”

  “I wasn’t about to let Maggie die. I was of no help to her—the only thing I could do was come for help.”

  “So you’d have both of ye dead instead of just one of ye? A fool’s mission that was.”

  “Dom—”

  “Why didn’t ye take a horse?” His hand clamped onto her right foot and squeezed it. Hard, but for how the touch seared heat into her, she’d take it.

  “I may be a fool but I’m not an idiot.” She met his glare, the indignant fire in her chest warming her more than the blankets. “I went to the stable first to get a mare, but the snow had drifted in front of the doors and I couldn’t get them open more than a crack. Not enough for me to even get into the barn. I thought there was enough time to get here before nightfall. The snow was easing, but then the wind came up when I was only a quarter of the way here. It blinded me. But I thought I could still make it.”

  “You were always too stubborn.” The words grumbled, he tore his gaze away from her, his look landing on the fire. His fingers started massaging her feet on his lap again.

  Heaven. Absolute heaven, even if her bones felt like ice.

  For this, she could set her hatred of him aside for the moment.

  She shifted under the heavy blankets, her hand rubbing across her belly.

  Bare skin.

  She moved her fingers around. Bare skin on her belly. On her arms. On her chest. On her legs.

  Her head lifted off the pillow.

  “Dom, I’m stripped to the bare under here.”

  He met her look straight on. “That ye are.”

  “No.” Her head twisted to the side though she kept her gaze locked on him. “Did you?”

  He shrugged. “Of course I did. The fire was barely sputtering when I got ye back here. You were soaked to the bone and I had to get the freeze of the snow off of ye.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing. I averted my eyes.” A slight grin lifted his right cheek. “My hands didn’t slip…much.”

  “Dom—”

  “I tease.” He patted her ankle. “It was frightening how I managed to undress ye with the utmost propriety. Even an Almack’s patroness would have approved.”

  She exhaled an exasperated groan and her head fell back down onto the pillow. Coming from any other man, she wouldn’t believe those words. But from Domnall…she believed him. Twinkle in his blue eyes and all.

  He pointed to the middle of the blankets. “Are your fingers still blue?”

  She pulled her right hand free of the cover of blankets and held it in front of her. Though her muscles hurt—hell, every inch of her body ached raw—the color of her fingers seemed normal. She turned the pads of her fingers to Domnall.

  He leaned over her legs, his eyes squinting at them in the light of the fire. “Aye. They look much better than they did.”

  She tucked her hand under the heavy wool blankets, watching him as he watched the fire and rubbed her feet.

  Impossible.

  She couldn’t quite grasp the twist of fate that had sent him here to the earl’s abbey and into her path. She’d given up years ago on ever seeing Domnall again.

  Unless…unless he was here for her. And if that was the case, he’d better think again on what he thought to do here in Badenoch. She wasn’t the innocent girl he’d once known. Far from it. And she could never let him discover what she’d become.

  She cleared her throat. “What are you doing here, Dom?”

  “I could ask the same of you.”

  “I live here—well, not here at the abbey—I live at the Leviton dower house to the east of this estate. I have since Lord Leviton died.”

  His hands on her feet stilled. It took a long breath before he looked to her. “I’ve been away from Vinehill Castle—in Spain, procuring new bloodlines for the herds—so I hadn’t heard the information on his passing. How long has that been?”

  “He died in May.”

  Domnall nodded, his jaw stubbornly still, his gaze going back to the fire.

  “Your turn, Dom. What are you doing here?”

  His head slowly turned to her and a heavy breath lifted his massive chest. “I’m the new Earl of Kirkmere.”

  { Chapter 4 }

  She was a widow.

  The viscount she’d left him for, dead.

  The one woman he would have once moved mountains for. Now a widow.

  He’d been attempting to wash her from his blood for the past six years.

  Six long and bitterly lonely years.

  She’d left him to marry the viscount. Left him without a word. Without a note. Without a chance.

  Just left him. Disappeared.

  Crushed his heart, leaving the shattered fragments to harden and crust with time.

  And now her bare feet were on his lap. Her body sleek and naked on the settee next to him. Her long dark hair—almost black—haphazard about the pillow. Her jaw slightly agape at his admission of the earldom he’d recently inherited.

  Her mouth clamped closed, the shock dissolving from her exquisite porcelain skin. “I understood Lord Kirkmere had died before Maggie and I moved up here, and they were searching for the next heir, but I never would have imagined you, of all people, to appear here, next in line.”

  “Neither did anyone else. Especially me. They had to search far back to find the branch that led to my”—he lifted his fingers one by one to tick off the number—“great, great, great, great-grandfather that was the youngest brother of three boys. He died in the Dutch War—young, so it wasn’t easily apparent he had a wife and child.”

  Karta shook her head. “Amazing. The happenstance of it.”

  “Aye.” He met her look, noting how her amber brown eyes were the color of honey in the light of the fire. Eyes he needed to not lose himself in, for he would be forever stuck. He had to remember the cruelty she was capable of. “It is that.”

  “But what will Vinehill do without you? If it’s been the same since I was last there, you run that estate to a fault. Lachlan must be distraught, not to mention his grandfather.”

  “Lach wasn’t exactly happy about what it would mean for Vinehill, but he was happy for me. If anything, it is more that Lach and Eva’s children didn’t want me to leave. Lach understands—as does the marquess even as bitter as he was when it was first announced. Lach will manage Vinehill fine now that his grandfather has finally peeled his fingernails away from controlling everything.”

  “Was that even possible? The marquess was always a…force.” Her toes wiggled under his palm, nudging his hands back into motion.

  “Politely said.” Domnall shrugged, then lifted her left foot, his thick hand slipping under her leg to massage the tight tendons. “The marquess has managed to do so, with lots of encouragement from Eva. I think the marquess is as in love with his granddaughter-in-law as Lach is. Either way, they will get on without me.”

  Karta nodded, her chin rubbing on the stack of blankets drowning her body. “I just know how heavily the marquess depends—depended upon you.”

  He nodded and his hands wrapped around her feet, drawing long strokes down against
the length of them. Her feet had long since warmed, but he couldn’t quite pull his fingers from her skin. Couldn’t quite tuck her toes under the cover of the blankets.

  For how he’d stumbled upon her in the snow—for how he’d believed not but an hour ago that he’d found her again and was about to lose her in the span of fifteen minutes—the feel of her skin, warm and pulsating with every heartbeat, grounded him to the fact that she was alive.

  Next to him.

  Next to him and now a widow.

  A blasted widow.

  Everything he could have ever wanted, if only he didn’t despise her for leaving him those many years ago.

  A surge of bitterness ran through his chest as the past crept forward in his mind like it always did. His look shifted to the fire. “Why did ye come to Badenoch, Karta? It’s bitter cold with the wind beating through these lands and I know how you hate the cold.”

  “I don’t hate it like I once did.”

  His eyebrow cocked and he glanced at her. “When did that change?”

  Her dark eyelashes closed slightly, her brown eyes looking to the dark rafters in the ceiling above. “It just…did.”

  “I donnae hardly believe it. There was a time when ye would make me block the slightest whiff of wind from your shoulders. In the dead of summer, even.”

  A soft smile lifted the right side of her full lips, then quickly fell away. “Maybe it was because I’ve had no one to shelter me from the cold, so I had to become accustomed to it.” A frown took over her bottom lip and her gaze dropped to him. “To be honest, I have been numb for the last six years and the cold here is one of the few things that makes me feel alive—makes me feel something. Even if that something is a bitter snap across my face.”

  Domnall’s eyebrows lifted. “But it is also barren of people up here. Why not go to live in Edinburgh or, strike my words, London?”

  Her frown deepened for a long moment, then she shook her head, more to herself than to him. “I was not well liked by my husband’s sons from his first wife. The eldest is older than me, the other two just younger, and after my husband died, I was banished to the dower house here in Badenoch. My options have been very few.”

  Her words rushed far too fast from her lips. There was something she wasn’t telling him.

  “Why not go home to your father’s estate? You’d at least be around people.”

  “And let him get the notion in his head that he could use me again to advance his alliances? I think not.” Her voice spiked. “One marriage at the altar of his ambition was enough—not to mention the failed engagements to Jacob and then Lachlan I suffered. I’ve spent too many of my years tied to his machinations. I’m done with my duty to my family.”

  “So now ye think to hide out here in the mountains? Live out your days skulking amongst the trees and mountain heath with only your maid for company?”

  She shrugged, the pile of blankets shifting upward. “Better than the alternative.”

  “Which is?”

  Her nose wrinkled, the cut of her voice hardening. “Be pawned off onto another elderly, sallow-skinned dandy.”

  There it was.

  The shot of deranged jealousy—of fierce protectiveness—that sliced through his belly at the slightest hint of anyone doing Karta wrong.

  He’d wondered when it would appear.

  It had always been visceral and it flared back to life, just as raw and angry as it always had been.

  His look narrowed at her. “Did the bastard hurt ye, Karta?”

  “You don’t get to ask me that, Dom.” Her brown eyes pierced him, boring into him as they always had. “You gave up your right to ask anything about my person long ago.”

  His hands tightened around her feet. “Karta—”

  She jerked her toes from his grip, drawing them under the blankets and curling them up toward her body. “No. You did. You gave up everything to do with me that summer before I married the viscount.”

  His hands curled into fists on his lap, his jaw clenching. “I was always too old for you.”

  “Too old?” She shifted under the blankets, scooting away from him to sit up and set her back along the cushioned side of the settee. In a wild flurry of arms moving, she jutted out her left hand to clutch the blankets to her bare chest as she leaned forward, fire in her words. “You’re ten years older than me, Dom. How is that too old? Do you even know how much older the viscount was?”

  He shook his head. The last thing he wanted to do was listen to facts about her husband.

  “Twenty-two years. So don’t you dare speak such ridiculous drivel.” Her right hand found its way free of the blankets and she pointed at him. “Excuses. Excuses as always. The thousands of reasons why we shouldn’t be together. You’re too old. Vinehill needed you. You had to tromp across the countryside with Lach. You came up with one excuse after another and I’d heard them all—hundreds of times. But they never dissuaded me, did they?”

  A sigh escaped his lips. “No.”

  “But I should have listened to them. Each and every one. If I had…” Her head shook and she slumped back against the arm of the settee.

  “If you had, what?”

  Her lip curled as she looked at him with scorn in her brown eyes. “I would have been smart. I wouldn’t have ever dared to have my heart broken by you.”

  His head jerked back. “I broke—what—what do you mean—I br—”

  A sharp knock on the open door made both of their heads swivel toward the entrance of the room opposite the fireplace.

  Stooped over with age, the Kirkmere butler stood there, looking from Domnall to Karta, his wiry grey eyebrows lifted high on his wrinkled forehead. “My lord.”

  It took Domnall several seconds to realize the butler was addressing him. He gave his head a slight shake. “Yes, Fredrick?”

  The man lifted a wrinkled hand to his ear, cupping it as he looked at Domnall. “What was that, my lord?”

  Domnall lifted his voice. “I said, yes, Frederick?”

  At least the man hadn’t heard him and Karta arguing. Not at Kirkmere Abbey for two hours and he already had a naked woman sitting in his drawing room. His first impression as Lord Kirkmere was not going quite as planned.

  The butler nodded and what constituted a smile pulled his thin lips back. “Very good, sir. Cook has made a meal for ye and yer men and yer guest. And the men have just arrived with the maid from the dower house. They have placed the lass in one of the guest rooms above.”

  “The doctor?” Domnall asked.

  “Has yet to arrive. Though it is farther to reach him than the dower house.”

  In sudden movement beside him, Karta went busy, tucking the blankets around her naked body, attempting to figure out how to gracefully stand without the cover of the blankets failing her. “Then I must go up and tend to Maggie. If she’s awake, she will be most frightened. She didn’t want me to leave for help.”

  Fredrick looked to Karta, a kind smile sending a twinkle into his greying eyes. “Mrs. Humphrey has found a dress for ye, my lady. It is fifty years beyond fashion, but it is dry.”

  Karta slipped her feet to the floor in front of the fireplace, her toes avoiding Theodora’s paws that were directly underneath. She quickly swept the one blanket she pulled up with her around her backside. “That would be most helpful, Fredrick. Thank you. Perhaps you could show me the way to the dress and to Maggie?”

  Fredrick started shuffling in a circle to turn around before he spoke. “I would be happy to, my lady. ‘Tis been a long time since a lady of yer status has graced these halls.”

  Karta made her way to the door, her stride stifled by the tight swathe of the blanket about her legs. She wasn’t about to show more skin than necessary.

  Even wrapped in an old wool blanket, she was still the epitome of exquisite grace and beauty.

  Still far, far out of his reach.

  Domnall heaved a breath that only made it into the top of his lungs.

  Some things never change
d.

  { Chapter 5 }

  Her eyes bleary after the restless night sleeping wedged onto the short settee in the room Maggie was brought into, and then the subsequent long day tending to her, Karta walked down the main stairs of the abbey.

  The doctor had arrived late last night. His prognosis—if Maggie made it through the night with her fever and closing throat, she would likely survive what he thought was scarlet fever.

  So Karta had stayed in her room all night and for most of the day, checking on her maid, cooling her head, dripping water into her mouth. Everything the doctor asked of her.

  Such little things that felt so insignificant in the battle against death.

  Maggie was too important to her to lose. She’d been her only friend in the viscount’s world, and Karta couldn’t bear the thought of her maid and only friend dying.

  Her hand resting on top of the newel post at the bottom of the staircase, Karta stepped down into the foyer and looked about.

  Her surroundings were catching the last rays of daylight from the windows high above the front doorway, whereas everything had been dark last night as she followed Fredrick through the house to Maggie’s room. The entryway of the abbey was grand, with interspersed white and dark marble lining the floors and reliefs of columns lining the walls. Far more imposing and modern than she would have guessed from the ancient gothic stones of the abbey’s exterior.

  Her stomach growled and a pang of hunger twisted her belly. Where was the dining hall? She cocked her head, listening for sound.

  A rumble of men’s voices came from her left and she made her way down the hallway that led into that wing.

  Roasted grouse filled her nostrils. The right direction.

  She arrived at the entryway to the dining room just as four huge Scotsman were exiting. Jumping a step to her right, they almost ran her over in quick succession before Domnall spotted her on the side of the doorway.

  “Karta.”

  All the men stopped in stride, turning to her.