Christmas Betrothals: Mistletoe Magic. Amanda McCabe

with me?’

      When Cassandra St Auburn suggested that the party now retire to dress for dinner Lillian could do nothing but lift her skirts and follow, noticing with chagrin that Lucas Clairmont did not join them.

       Chapter Eight

      Luc took a sixteen-hand gelding from the stables of St Auburn and rode for Maygate, a village a good ten miles away. He was tired and using the last light of dusk and the first slice of moon to guide him he journeyed west.

      Dinner would still be a few hours away and he felt the need to stretch his body and feel the wind on his face and freedom.

      Lord, how the English enjoyed their long and complicated afternoon teas, something which in Virginia would have been thought of as ludicrous.

      Virginia and a green tract of land that reached from the James to the Potomac. His land! Hewed from the blood, sweat and tears of hard labour, the timber within his first hundred acres bringing the riches to buy the rest.

      A piecemeal acquisition!

      He ran his thumb across the scar on his thigh, feeling the ridges of flesh badly healed. An accident when the Bank of Washington was about to foreclose on him and he had no other means of paying to get the wood out. He had dragged it alone along the James by horse, unseated as a log rose across another and his mount bolted, pushing him into the jagged end of newly hewn timber. The cut had festered badly, but still he had made it to Hopewell and the mill that would buy the load, staving off the greed of the bank for a few more months.

      Hard days. Lonely days.

      Not as lonely as when Elizabeth had come, though, with her needs and wants and sadness.

      No, he would not think of any of that, not here, not in the mellow countryside of Kent where the boundaries of safety were a comfortable illusion.

      ‘Lately I find I have a growing preference for orange.’ The words drifted to him from nowhere, warming him with possibility. Was it the flowers he had given her she spoke of? He shook his head. Better for Lillian Davenport to marry Wilcox-Rice than him and have the promise of an English heritage that was easy and prudent.

      He stopped in a position overlooking a stream, the shadows of night long as he ran his fingers through his hair. Such dreams were no longer for him and he had been foolish to even think they could be. He should depart again tonight for London, leaving Lilly with her enticing full lips and woman’s body to his imagination. But he could not. Already he found himself turning his horse for home.

      Lillian felt like a young girl again, this dress not quite fitting and that one not quite right. She was glad for the help of her lady’s maid and glad too that her aunt Jean was still in bed, her headache having turned into a cold.

      When she finally settled on a gown she liked she walked to the window and looked out. The last of the daylight was lost, the moon rising quickly in the eastern sky and the gardens of St Auburn wreathed in shadow. She was about to turn away when a lone rider caught her eye, his gait on the horse fluid. No Sunday rider this, the beat of the hooves fast and furious.

      Lucas Clairmont. She knew it was him, the raw power of his thighs wrapped about the steed in easy control and the reins caught only lightly as the animal held its head and thundered on to the gravelled circle of the driveway.

      Caught in the moonlight, hair streaming almost to his shoulders and without a jacket, he looked to her like the living embodiment of some ancient Grecian God. What would it be like to lie with such a man, to feel him near her, close?

      Shocked, she turned away. Ladies did not ponder such fantasies and she had been warned many times of the man that he was. Yet surely a light flirtation was a harmless thing and, perhaps, if she were generous, she could place her clandestinely bought kiss into that category. But she should take it no further. To cross the line from coquetry into blowsy abandonment would be to throw away everything that she had worked hard for all her life. Stepping to the mirror, she looked at herself honestly, observed eyes full of anticipation and the smile that seemed to crouch there, waiting.

      For him!

      Adjusting her chemise so that a little more flesh than usual was showing, she smiled, still proper indeed, but bordering on something that was not. This wickedness that had leaked into her refined formality was freeing somehow, a part of her personality that had until lately lain dormant and unrealised.

      ‘Oh God, please help me.’ Spoken into the silence of her room, she wondered just exactly what it was that she was asking. For absolution of sin or for the strength to see her virtue in the way she had always tried to view it? Shaking her head, she sought for the words to cancel such a selfish prayer and found that she couldn’t. There was some impunity received, after all, in asking for celestial help and a sense of providence. Tonight she would need both.

      Proceeding in to dinner on the arm of the Earl of St Auburn, Lillian was surprised when Clairmont found his seat next to hers. Status and rank almost always determined seating after the formal promenade and she was astonished to see John consigned to a place at the other end of the table and looking most displeased. Cassandra St Auburn raised her glass and Lillian wondered at the definitive twinkle in the woman’s glance. Had she planned this? Was there some communal strategy behind the reason for her invitation? Well, she thought, the usual nerve-racking worry of seating seemed to have been done away with completely and the lack of any remorse was, if anything, refreshing.

      At her own dinner parties the seating arrangements were what she always hated the most in her fear of offending some personage of higher status than the next one.

      Determining to think no more of it, she took a quick peek at the American. His hair was slicked back tonight, still wet from a late bath she supposed after the exercise that he had taken.

      ‘I saw you return from your ride.’ She spoke because she found the growing silence between them unnerving.

      ‘After the carriage trip I needed to blow away the cobwebs.’ A loud trill from Caroline Shelby two places away punctuated his words. ‘Need I say more?’ He smiled as she looked shocked. ‘It must be difficult to always be so virtuous, Miss Davenport.’

      ‘I am hardly that, Mr Clairmont.’ The kiss they had shared quivered between them, an unspoken shout. ‘You of all people should know it.’

      ‘Your small experiment to … determine emotion can hardly be consigned to the “fallen woman” basket. Nay, put it down instead to any adult’s healthy pursuit of knowledge.’

      He was more honourable in his dismissal of her lapse than he needed to be and a great wave of relief covered her. With shaking hands she took small sips of her wine and then laced her fingers tightly together.

      ‘I thank you for such a congenial summary, but my actions the other day were much less than what I usually expect from myself.’

      ‘As a dubious consolation I can tell you that the wisdom of age dims such exacting standards. When you are as old as I am you will realise the freedom of doing just as one wills.’

      ‘Like fighting with my cousin at the Lenningtons’?’

      ‘Or sending a beautiful woman flowers.’

      She was silent, the last rejoinder putting a halt to her fault-finding. Beautiful. He thought her that?

      ‘How old are you, Mr Clairmont?’ She hated herself for asking the question in the face of everything that had passed between them.

      ‘Thirty-three and judicious beyond my years, Miss Davenport.’

      ‘Some here might call you a gambler?’

      ‘Which I am.’

      ‘And a cheat?’

      ‘Which I am not.’

      ‘There are even rumours circulating that hint at the possibility that you have killed people.’

      ‘More than one?’ His eyebrows rose in a parody of an actor