Christmas Betrothals. Sophia James

enough.’

      ‘A gentleman would have walked away.’

      He pointedly looked across the balustrade. ‘The fifteen-foot drop is somewhat of a deterrent.’

      ‘Or stayed quiet until I had left.’ The beat of her heart was worrying, erratic, hard. ‘Why, most Englishmen would be mortified to find themselves in this situation …’ She didn’t finish, owing to a loud laugh that rang rich in the night air.

      ‘Mortified?’ he repeated. ‘It has been a long while since I last felt that.’ His accent was measured tonight and at times barely heard, a different voice from the one he had affected at the Lenningtons’ with its broad Virginian drawl. She was glad she could not catch his eyes, still shaded by the greenery, though in the position she stood she knew her own to be well on show.

      Perhaps he had orchestrated it so? The gold band on the ring finger of his left hand jolted her. His marriage finger! She tried not to let him see where she looked.

      ‘We have not even been introduced, sir. None of this can be in any way proper. You must repair inside this instant.’

      Still he did not move, the dimple that Anne Weatherby had spoken of dancing in his cheek.

      ‘I am Lucas Clairmont from Richmond in Virginia,’ he said finally. ‘And you are Miss Davenport, a woman of manners and good taste, though I wonder at the wisdom of Wilcox-Rice as a groom?’

      ‘He is not that. You just heard me tell him so.’

      ‘He and your father seem to believe otherwise.’ Now he walked straight into the light and the golden eyes that had haunted her dreams made her pause. She swallowed heavily and held her hands hard against her thighs to stop them from shaking, though when he picked a slender stem from a pyracanthus bush behind him and handed it to her she leant forwards to take it.

      ‘Thank you.’ She could think of nothing else at all to say. The thorn on the stem pricked the base of her thumb.

      ‘I am glad I have this chance to apologise for frightening you yesterday at the Lenningtons’.’

      ‘Apology accepted.’ For the first time some of her tension dissipated with the simple reasoning that a criminal mind would not run to seeking any sort of amnesty. ‘I realise that my cousin can be rather trying at times.’

      His teeth were white against the brown of his face and Lillian was jolted back to reality as his eyes darkened and she saw for a moment a man she barely recognised.

      A dangerous man. A man who would not be moulded or conditioned by the society in which he found himself.

      So unlike her. She stepped back, afraid now of a thing that she had no name for, and wondered what her cousin had done to cause such enmity.

      ‘Have no fear, Miss Davenport. I would not kill him because he’s not worth being hanged at Newgate for.’

      Kill him? My God. To even think that he might consider it and then qualify any lack of action with a personal consequence.

      I would if I could get away with it.

      John Wilcox-Rice’s gentle mediocrity began to look far more appealing until Luc Clairmont reached out for her hand and took it in his own. The shock of contact left her mute, but against her will she was drawn to him.

      Against her will? She could not even say that!

      His finger traced the lines on her palm and then the veins that showed through in the pale skin of her wrist.

      ‘An old Indian woman read my hand once in Richmond. She told me that life was like a river and that we are taken by the currents to a place we are meant to be.’

      His amber eyes ran across hers, the humour once again back. ‘Is this that place, Miss Davenport?’

      Time seemed to stop, frozen into moonlight and want and warmth. When she snatched her hand away and almost ran inside, she could have sworn it was laughter she heard, following her from a balcony drenched in silver.

      She stopped walking quite so briskly once she was back amongst others, finding a certain safety in numbers that she had never felt the need of before. Would he come again and speak to her? Would he create a fuss? The very thought had her hauling her fan from her reticule, to waft it to and fro, the breeze engendered calming her a little. She stuffed the sprig of orange berries into her velvet bag, glad to have them out of her fingers where someone might comment upon them.

      ‘Your colour is rather high, Lillian,’ her aunt Jean said as she joined her. ‘I do hope you are not sickening for something so close to the Yuletide season. Why, Mrs Haugh was saying to me just the other day how her daughter has contracted a bronchial complaint that just cannot be shaken and …’

      But Lillian was listening no more, for Lucas Clairmont had just walked in from the balcony, a tall broad-shouldered man who made the other gentlemen here look … mealy, precious and dandified. No, she must not think like that! Concentrating instead on the mark around his bottom lip that suggested another fight, she tried to ignore the way all the women in his path watched him beneath covert hooded glances.

      He was leaving with the Earl of St Auburn and a man she knew to be Lord Stephen Hawkhurst. Well-placed men with the same air of menace that he had. The fact interested her and she wondered just how it was they knew each other.

      As they reached the door, however, Lucas Clairmont looked straight into her eyes, tipping his head as she had seen him do at the Lenningtons’ ball. Hating the way her heartbeat flared, Lillian spread her fan wide and hid her face from his, a breathless wonder overcoming caution as a game, of which she had no notion of the rules, was begun.

      Once home herself she placed the crumpled orange pyracanthus in a single bloom vase and stood it on the small table by her bed. Both the colour and the shape clashed with everything else in her bedroom. As out of place in her life as Lucas Clairmont was, a vibrant interloper who conformed to neither position nor venue. Her finger reached out to carefully touch the hard nubs of thorn that marched down its stem. Forbidding. Protective. Unexpected in the riot of colour above it!

      She wished she had left it on the balcony, discarded and cast aside, as she should be doing with the thoughts of the man who had picked it. But she had not and here it was with pride of place in a room that looked as if it held its breath with nervousness. Her eyes ran over the sheer lawn drapes about her bed, the petit-point bedcover upon it in limed cream and the lamp next to her, its chalky base topped by a faded and expensive seventeenth-century tapestry. The décor in her room was nothing like the fashion of the day with its emphasis on stripes and paisleys and the busy tones of purple and red. But she enjoyed the difference.

      All had been carefully chosen and were eminently suitable, like the clothes she wore and the friends she fostered. Her life. Not haphazard or risky, neither arbitrary nor disorganised.

      Once it had been, once when her mother had come home to tell them that she was leaving that very afternoon ‘to find excitement and adventure in the arms of a man who was thrilling’. The very words used still managed to make her feel slightly sick, as she remembered a young girl who had idolised her mother. She was not thrilling and so she had been left behind, an only child whose recourse to making her father happy was to be exactly the daughter he wanted. She had excelled in her lessons and in her deportment, and later still when she came out at eighteen she had been daubed an ‘original’, her sense of style and quiet stillness copied by all the younger ladies at Court.

      Usually she liked that. Usually she felt a certain pride in the way she handled everything with such easy acumen. But today with the berries waving their overblown and unrestrained shapes in her room, a sense of disquiet also lingered.

      Poor Lillian.

      John Wilcox-Rice and his eminently sensible proposal.

      Her father’s advancing age.

      The pieces of her life were not quite adding up to a cohesive whole any longer, and she could pin the feeling