A Christmas Letter: Snowbound in the Earl's Castle. Shirley Jump

      He guessed she was talking about somebody having misbehaved. ‘You’d be surprised what the rich and powerful get up to just because they can,’ he said, a dry tone to his voice. ‘The second Duke was a bigamist, the third Duke had more illegitimate children than he could count and the fourth Duke lost Hadsborough in a drunken game of dice and won it back again the next night. And those are just the highlights. There are plenty more stories to tell about the Huntingtons.’

      Faith shook her head, but she was smiling. ‘Not the same, and you know it. All those things make your family sound dashing and exciting. My family just makes people shake their heads and look sad.’

      A stab of something hit Marcus square in the chest. Suddenly Faith wasn’t the only one on the edge of revealing something big.

      ‘Oh, mine make people shake their heads and look sad, too,’ he said.

      ‘No, they don’t …’ Faith began, laughing gently, assuming he was teasing. But when she met his eyes the laughter died. ‘They do?’ she said, blinking in disbelief.

      They did. And he found that for the first time in over eighteen months he wanted to tell someone about it. Someone who wasn’t connected. Someone who didn’t care, who wouldn’t invest. He suddenly realised that Faith’s walls made her the perfect candidate.

      ‘I worked for my father until just before he died,’ he said, his voice deceptively flat and unemotional. ‘He’d started up an investment company thirty years before, and things were going really well…At least I thought they were.’ He shook his head. ‘I should have seen it coming. He was always so sure of himself—too sure—as if he thought he was indestructible. It made for great business when the markets were good. He liked to take risks, you see, and they often paid off.’

      She nodded, waited for him to continue.

      ‘But in the last few years, with the way the financial climate had been—’ he made a face ‘—being daring didn’t cut it any more. In fact he lost a lot of people a lot of money. But my father was gripped by the unswerving belief that he could turn it around. He kept risking, kept gambling, kept losing…The company went bust. People lost their jobs.’ He looked her straight in the eye. ‘I knew what he was like, even though I didn’t know the extent of his recklessness. I should have done more. I should have stopped him.’

      ‘It wasn’t your fault, Marcus, what your father did. He made his own choices.’

      Marcus swallowed. That was what he’d been afraid of.

      Not on the business front. People had called Harvey Huntington a swindler, but that hadn’t been true. He’d just had an unshakeable belief in himself, hadn’t thought he could fail so badly. And when he had…Well, the unshakeable man had been shaken to the core. He’d never quite recovered.

      ‘About a year later they found his car wrapped round a lamp post,’ he added baldly.

      Faith gasped and her hand covered her mouth. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know.’

      ‘The inquest ruled it an accident,’ he said, nodding to himself. ‘He’d been drinking, and he never did like to wear his seat belt. But there were rumours …’

      Faith’s eyes grew wide. ‘You mean that he’d meant to do it?’

      Marcus just looked at her. ‘That’s about the gist of it.’

      ‘You don’t believe that, do you?’ she said, horrified. ‘I try not to.’

      Faith reached over and laid her hand on his arm. He looked down at it. They hadn’t touched since their first meeting, and that one simple, spontaneous gesture completely arrested him. He looked back at her face—really looked at her—and saw warmth and compassion and gentle strength. Instead of climbing back behind her walls, he could feel she was reaching out to him, and it made him ache for her in an entirely new way.

      No. He couldn’t want this. Shouldn’t.

      But he could feel himself slipping, forgetting why.

      ‘You can’t take the blame for this, Marcus. It was nothing to do with you.’ She shook her head as she talked. ‘You can’t carry this round with you, believe me. For your own sanity you have to find a way to separate yourself, to disconnect.’

      That pulled him up short. She was good at that, wasn’t she? He needed to remember that.

      ‘Is that what you did?’

      She stopped shaking her head. ‘I beg your pardon?’

      ‘Disconnect?’ he said. ‘I might be too wrapped up in my family, but you seem cast adrift from yours. Is that how you cope? Running away? Living in a different country? I can’t do that, Faith. I have to stay and fight—for Bertie, for my children and their children.’

      He knew he sounded angry, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself. He was angry with her for showing him parts of herself she’d never let him have, at his father for leaving him in such a mess, even at Hadsborough for the way it hung around his neck like a millstone. Telling her the truth had opened a floodgate. And he needed desperately to break this sense of intimacy weaving its way around them both and binding them together. He needed to push her away, to make that soft compassion completely disappear from her eyes.

      She pulled her hand back and glared at him, and he knew his accusations had struck home. He should have been pleased.

      ‘You don’t know anything about me, so don’t you dare judge.’

      ‘I’m not judging you,’ he said. ‘You’re right. I don’t know anything about you. Because every time anyone asks you block them out.’ It irritated him that she’d been able to run from her family, to taste freedom, when he’d been trapped by his. ‘So shock me. Tell me. Tell me what awful thing happened to make you avoid your home and family like the plague.’

      Faith looked up at him, her eyes huge, and swallowed. For a few hot seconds she’d been furious, but then something else had crept up on her and taken her completely by surprise—the urge to do just what he suggested.

      Could she tell him? Would it really be as easy as that? She never wanted to talk about this. Not to anyone. And especially not to the rest of her family.

      But he wasn’t family. And she was thousands of miles away in a soundproof cellar. Somehow it seemed safer to let the words out here than anywhere else.

      Also, Marcus had shared something incredibly painful and personal with her, and she couldn’t ignore the sense of imbalance that left her with. She needed to get them back on an equal footing again so she could put her defences in place.

      ‘You …’ she said, shaking her head. ‘You’ve always known who you are, where you belong in the world. I don’t know if I can explain it …’ She swallowed. It had been so long since she’d talked about this with anyone that she didn’t know if the words were still there. ‘I don’t know where to start,’ she whispered.

      He held her gaze. There was still fire in his eyes, but it was softening, brightening. ‘Try the beginning,’ he said in a low voice.

      Faith nodded and moistened her lips. ‘My mom…She’s a bit of a …’

      How did she put this? Calling your own mother a flake out loud, no matter how many times you did it in your head, did not seem right.

      She shrugged. ‘She likes to move around, has sudden passions for hobbies or places—even people—that are all-consuming.’

      Faith looked down at her denim-clad thighs. ‘While they last. And they never do last.’

      Marcus gave her his half-smile, the one that curved the right side of his mouth so deliciously. ‘A bit like Bertie, then?’

      She gave an exasperated puff. ‘No way! Bertie is sweet and charming. Mom…Well, Mom is just…infuriating.’

      He