Christmas Betrothals. Sophia James

Luc Clairmont would be gone after Christmas. A useful knowledge that, for he would be a temporary embarrassment only, should her whole scheme founder!

      The thought of Christmas turned her thoughts in another direction.

      Mistletoe!

      That was it. If she hung the mistletoe Ellie had bought her yesterday above the doorway and angled herself so that she stood beneath the lintel in front of him … Just an accident, a pleasant interlude that would mean nothing should his kiss rouse as little feeling in her as John’s had.

      She sat up further.

      Would he know of the traditions here in England? Would he even see it?

      Could she mention the custom if he did not? Her brain turned this way and that, and the clock in the corner struck the hour of two. Outside the echo of the other clocks lingered.

      Did Luc Clairmont hear them too? Was he awake with his swollen eye and wounded leg?

      She slipped from her bed and walked to the window, pulling back her heavy cream curtains and looking out into the darkness.

      Park Lane was quiet and the trees across the way were bleak against a sodden sky. Tonight the moon did not show its face, but was hidden behind low clouds of rolling greyness, gathering in the west.

      A nothing kiss in a rain-filled night and the weight of twenty-five years upon her shoulders.

      If she did not take this one chance, she might never know, but always wonder …

      Sitting at her desk, she pulled out a piece of paper and an envelope and, dipping her pen in ink, began to write.

      The letter had come a few minutes ago and Luc could make no sense of it. Lillian Davenport had something of importance to ask him and would like his company at three o’clock. The servant who had brought the message was one of Stephen’s so he presumed it to have gone to the Hawkhurst town house first. The lad also seemed to be waiting for a reply.

      Scrawling an answer on a separate sheet of parchment, he reached for his seal. Out of habit, he was to think as he placed it back down, for of course he could not use it here. ‘Could you deliver this to Miss Davenport?’

      The young servant nodded and hurried away, and when he had gone Luc lifted Lillian’s missive into the light and read it again.

      She wanted to speak to him about something important. She hoped he would come alone. She wondered about the Christmas traditions in America and whether mistletoe and holly were plants he was familiar with.

      He frowned. Though he grew trees for timber in Virginia, the subject of botany had never been his strongpoint. Holly he knew as a prickly red-berried plant but mistletoe … Was that not the sprig that young ladies liked to hang in the Yuletide salons to catch kisses? A different thought struck him. What would it be like to kiss Lillian Davenport?

      He chastised himself at the very idea. Lord, she seemed to be very familiar with Wilcox-Rice and he was leaving in little more than a month.

      But the thought lingered, a tantalising conjecture that lay in the memory of holding her fingers in his own and feeling the hurried beat of her heart. He guessed that Lillian Davenport was a warm and responsive woman beneath the outward composure, a lady who would be pleasantly surprised by the wonders of the flesh.

      Raking his hand through his hair, he stood, wincing at the lump on the back of his head. Four men had jumped him on returning to his lodgings three nights ago and it was only his training in the army that had allowed him the ability to fend them off until help arrived.

      He wished that Hawk had not persuaded him to take a walk the other day, the same walk that had brought him face to face with Lillian and her friends. Damn, he had seen in her eyes the censure he had noticed in every single one of their meetings and who could blame her?

      The charade of his visit here began to press in. He would have liked to tell Lillian that he was not a bad man, that he had been a soldier and that he held great tracks of virgin land in Virginia filled with timber. But he couldn’t because there were other things about him that she would not countenance.

      Still, for the first time in a long while he felt alive and excited, the inertia in Richmond replaced by a new vigour.

      He came through into the small yellow downstairs salon like one of the sleek black panthers she had once seen as a statue in an antique shop in Regent Street, all restless energy and barely harnessed menace, but she also saw he limped.

      ‘Miss Davenport!’ Today his injured eye looked darker, the bruising worsened by time, though he neither alluded to it nor hid it from her. Her letter was in his hand, she could see her tidy neat writing from where she stood and there was a question in his stance.

      ‘Mr Clairmont.’

      Silence stretched until she gestured him to sit, the absurdity of all she had planned, now that he was here, screaming in her consciousness. How did she begin? How did one broach such a situation with any degree of modesty and honour?

      ‘Thank you very much for coming. I know that you must be busy—’

      ‘Card games happen mostly at night,’ he interrupted and she swore she saw a glimmer of amusement in his velvet eyes.

      ‘And your leg is obviously painful,’ she hurried on. To that he stayed wordless.

      Her eyes strayed to the door. Did she risk broaching the subject before the parlourmaid brought in the refreshments or after? Relaxing, she decided on after, reasoning she could then instruct the girl to leave them alone for the few moments it would take to conduct her … experiment.

      Lord, she hated to call it that, but was at a loss as to what else to name it.

      ‘I hope London is treating you well …’ As soon as she said it she knew her error.

      ‘A few cuts and bruises, but what is that between a man and a beautiful city?’

      ‘Was it a fall?’

      He frowned at that and grated out a ‘yes’.

      ‘I had an accident last year at Fairley, our family seat in Hertfordshire.’

      ‘Indeed?’ His brows rose significantly.

      ‘I fell from a horse whilst racing across the park.’

      ‘I trust nothing was broken?’

      ‘Only my pride! It was a village fair, you see, and I had entered the race on a whim.’

      ‘Pride is a fragile thing,’ he returned in his American drawl, and her cheeks reddened. She shifted in her seat, hating the heat that followed and fretful that her letter had indeed told him far too much. Her eyes flickered to the mistletoe she had hung secretly, a sad reminder of a plot that was quickly unravelling, and then back to his hands lying palm up in his lap.

      Suddenly she knew just how to handle her request. ‘You told me once of a woman who had read your hand in the town of Richmond?’

      She waited till he nodded.

      ‘You said that she told you life was like a river and that you are taken by it to the place that you were meant to be.’ The tone of her voice rose and she fought to keep it back.

      ‘The thing is, Mr Clairmont, I would hope at this moment that the place you are meant to be is here in my salon because I am going to ask you a question that might, without some sense of belief in fate, sound strange.’

      ‘I know very little about the properties of mistletoe or holly,’ he interrupted. ‘If it is botany that you wish to quiz me on?’

      ‘I beg your pardon?’

      ‘Your letter. You mention something of particular plants.’

      Unexpectedly she began to smile and then caught the mirth back with a strong will as she shook her head.

      ‘No, it is not that. I had heard from … others that the state of your finances is somewhat