Gifts of the Season: A Gift Most Rare / Christmas Charade / The Virtuous Widow. Lyn Stone

to duck the slightest possible curtsy. “Forgive me for speaking so rudely to you, my lord. You didn’t mean to be clumsy and bumbling. You just were.”

      “I know,” admitted Revell as he tried to scrape the paste from his sleeve. “It’s quite a problem with me, isn’t it? But perhaps Miss Blake can help me. Surely there must be some task you’ll trust me with, Miss Blake? Something that not even I could ruin?”

      Though Revell’s expression remained serious and properly penitent for Clarissa’s sake, his eyes sparkled with such amusement that Sara realized he, too, was dangerously close to laughing. The blobs of paste and ruined paint were like another secret they shared, another connection—albeit an untidy one—and she felt such a warmth of fresh affection swirling between them that she couldn’t keep from smiling.

      If they had wed as they’d planned, they could be husband and wife in a house of their own, instead of guest and governess in this one. They could be laughing with their children, making plans for their Christmas together, sharing the paint and paste and mangled elephants, trust and love and happiness.

      Oh, Sara, Sara, take care! A smile is not a promise for the future, nor an explanation for the past, and not once since he found you has he mentioned love….

      “He could make the paper chains to hang over the looking glasses, Miss Blake, couldn’t he?” suggested Clarissa. “Even babies can make those. Here, my lord, it’s quite simple. You cut the strips of paper and loop them together like this.”

      She demonstrated importantly, showing Revell exactly how to make the chain’s paper links tie into one another, as if she were a conjurer revealing a complex trick. “You do have to use the paste again, my lord, but it goes inside, where no one will see if you use too much.”

      “As you wish, memsahib,” said Revell, dutifully bending over the strips of colored paper with more success than he’d shown with the animals; as Clarissa had noted, even a baby could make paper chains.

      But Clarissa’s attention had already bounded forward. “What did you call me?” she asked. “Mem what?”

      “Memsahib,” he said, concentrating on making the paste stick. “That’s what fine ladies are called in India, as a form of respect. Your mother would be memsahib, while your father would simply be sahib.”

      “Memsahib,” repeated Clarissa, relishing the sound and feel of the foreign word. “Do you know other Indian words?”

      “Oh, an entire wagon full,” said Revell expansively. “Instead of a gown, you would wear a sari. Your mother’s grand ball would be called a burra khana, and Miss Blake here would be your ayah.”

      Sara laughed, wrinkling her nose. “I do not know if I wish to be anyone’s ayah. All the ayahs I ever had were cross-tempered old women who’d pinch my arm to make me obey.”

      “Did you truly know ayahs, Miss Blake?” asked Clarissa curiously. “Or is it like the elephants, and you only mean from books?”

      “From books, I am sure,” said Revell quickly, rescuing Sara from her misstep. “I’m the one who’s more at home in Calcutta than London.”

      “Which is how you’ve come to know so many peculiar foreign words, I expect,” said Clarissa, leaning closer to admire his handiwork. “Why, my lord, that is almost a proper chain after all. Here, let me put it with the others.”

      Gingerly she gathered up Revell’s chain and carried it across the room to add it to the other decorations they’d made, pausing to admire the animals once again.

      “We need to talk, Sara,” said Revell, his voice low and urgent as he touched her arm. “When can we meet alone?”

      Startled, she blushed, and pulled her arm away. “We shouldn’t, Revell,” she whispered. “That night on the terrace—wasn’t that enough?”

      “Not by half, it wasn’t,” he said. “Tonight, after Clarissa is in bed. Ten o’clock, say, by the same door to the terrace.”

      “Please, Rev, I do not—”

      “I’ll not take no, Sara,” he said firmly. “Tonight, on the same terrace. Don’t fail me, lass.”

      But before she could answer the door to the schoolroom opened and in swept Lady Fordyce.

      “Look, Clary, look what I’ve brought you from town!” she called gaily, holding up an elaborate mask decorated with gold beads and red plumes. “It shall be the perfect accompaniment to your costume for—oh, my, Lord Revell! You surprise me, my lord!”

      She might have been surprised, but Sara was beyond that, to out-and-out speechless horror. To have Lady Fordyce discover her like this, in Clarissa’s schoolroom, with Revell standing so guiltily close to her that there could be no respectable explanation possible.

      Not that Revell wouldn’t venture one. “I didn’t intend to surprise you, Lady Fordyce,” he said, remaining beside Sara as if there were nothing at all remarkable about such proximity. “I was simply helping your daughter with the elephants.”

      Lady Fordyce’s face went cautiously blank. “Elephants?”

      “Yes, Mama, look!” Gleefully Clarissa held a paper elephant in one hand and a tiger in the other. “For the ballroom! Miss Blake and I made the animals, while Lord Revell made chains!”

      “Even babies can make chains,” explained Revell modestly, stepping to the table to drape one of his chains from one hand across to the other. “And so, therefore, can I.”

      “But elephants and tigers, Miss Blake?” asked Lady Fordyce, disapproval frosting her voice. “For my masquerade ball?”

      Sara nodded, resolutely determined to put the best face on what now seemed a disastrous decision. “Yes, my lady. The elephants were inspired by our lessons on ancient Rome.”

      “But your lessons are one thing,” said Lady Fordyce, her expression growing darker still, “and my Christmas masquerade is quite, quite another.”

      “Ah, but there will be no more appropriate creatures imaginable,” assured Revell as he idly swung the chain back and forth. “You’ve only to see how the Prince of Wales himself is covering his walls with peacocks and tigers everywhere, and my own brother is having the dining room of Claremont House painted all over with frolicking monkeys.”

      “Your brother the duke?” asked Lady Fordyce, reconsidering the elephant in her daughter’s hand. “His Grace would approve? And the Prince, too?”

      “I should not be surprised if you set a new fashion, and all on account of your daughter’s lessons,” said Revell, his smile shifting toward Sara, as if to thank Clarissa’s governess for such a splendid notion.

      But at the same time his gaze seemed to warm as he found Sara’s, giving his words another meaning that only she would understand, and that would remind her once again of the meeting he sought with her later.

      “You know, Lady Fordyce,” he continued, determinedly not looking away and not letting Sara do so, either, “that in England today there is nothing more choice, more desired, than that which comes from India, and never more so than this Christmas.”

      Chapter Five

      By the single candlestick in her chamber upstairs from the nursery, Sara took one final look at her reflection in the small looking glass over the washstand. Did her eyes truly seem brighter, happier, her mouth more ready to curve into a smile? Or was it no more than the most wishful hopes and the wavering candlelight that had made the difference, and not Revell?

      Lightly she touched the crooked head of the paper tiger that she’d hidden in her pocket, now tucked into the frame of her looking glass, and as she ran her finger along the hardened paste on the tiger’s neck, she smiled, thinking of how gamely Revell had struggled at the low schoolroom table. Tomorrow, when they began decorating