Christmas Betrothals

Christmas Betrothals
Mistletoe Magic
Sophia James
The Winter Queen
Amanda McCabe

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Mistletoe Magic

Praise for Sophia James

ASHBLANE’S LADY

“An excellent tale of love, this book is more than a

romance; it pulls at the heartstrings and makes you

wish the story wouldn’t end.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

MASQUERADING MISTRESS

“Bold and tantalising, plotted like a mystery and

slowly exposing each layer of the multi-dimensional

plot and every character’s motivations, James’s novel

is a page-turner.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

HIGH SEAS TO HIGH SOCIETY

“James weaves her spell, captivating readers with

wit and wisdom, and cleverly combining humour

and poignancy with a master’s touch in this

feel-good love story.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

About the Author

SOPHIA JAMES lives in Chelsea Bay on Auckland, New Zealand’s North Shore, with her husband, who is an artist, and three children. She spends her morning teaching adults English at the local migrant school and writes in the afternoon. Sophia has a degree in English and history from Auckland University and believes her love of writing was formed reading Georgette Heyer with her twin sister at her grandmother’s house.

Look out for Sophia James’s latest exciting novel, One Unashamed Night, available in March 2010 from Mills & Boon^® Historical romance.

Author Note

Christmas is a time of family and laughter and joyousness, a time when all the good things in the world seem to come together in a crescendo of happiness.

But what happens when people have no family left or the secrets that bind them to their kin preclude the simple ability to embrace the haphazard chaos that is often Christmas?

In this story I wanted to draw in two people on the edge of loneliness and add children, pets, colour and carols. I wanted to see whether the magic of the season had its own power and whether a kiss bought under a sprig of mistletoe could change two lives forever.

I’d like to dedicate this book to my friend Jane,

whose sense of style inspired Lillian.

Prologue

Richmond, Virginia—July 1853

Lucas Clairmont found the letter by chance, wrapped in velvet and hidden in the space beneath the font in the Clairmont family chapel.

A love letter to his wife from a man he had little knowledge of and coined in a language that had him reaching for the pew behind him and sitting down.

Heavily.

He knew their marriage had been, at best, an unexceptional union, but it was the betrayal in the last few lines of the missive that was unexpected. His uncle’s land was mentioned in connection with the Baltimore Gaslight Company’s intention of developing their lines. Luc shook his head—he knew Stuart Clairmont had had no notion of such a scheme and the land, bought cheaply by Elizabeth’s lover, had been sold for a fortune only a few months later.

Loss and guilt punctuated the harder emotion of anger. Jesus! Stuart had died a broken man and a vengeful one.

‘Find the bastard, Luc,’ he had uttered in the last few hours of his life, ‘and kill him.’

At the time Luc had thought the command extreme, but now with the evidence of another truth in hand …

Screwing up the parchment, he let it slip through his fingers on to the cold stone floor, the written words still teasing him, even from a distance.

His marriage had been as much of a sham as his childhood, all show and no substance, but the love of his uncle had never wavered.

Shaking his head, he felt the sharp stab of sobriety, the taste of last night’s whisky and the few bought hours of oblivion paid for dearly this morning, as his demons whispered vengeance.

Here in the chapel though, there lay the sort of silence that only God’s dwelling could offer with the light streaming in through the stained glass window.

Jesus on the cross!

Luc’s fingers squeezed against the hard smooth wood of oak benches, thinking that his own crown of thorns was far less visible.

‘Lord, help me,’ he enunciated, catching sight of the pale blue eyes of a painted cupid, hair a strange shade of silver blonde, and white clothes falling in folds on to the skin of a nearby sinner, dazzling him with light.

A sinner just like him, Luc thought, as the last effects of moonshine wore off and a headache he’d have until tomorrow started to pound.

Elizabeth. His wife.

He’d been away too much to be the sort of husband he should have been, but the truth of her liaison was as unexpected as her death six months ago. His thoughts of grief unravelled into a sort of bone-hard wrath that shocked him. Deceit and lies were written into every word of these outpourings.

He should not care. He should consign the evidence of his wife’s infidelity to a fire, but he found that he couldn’t because a certain truth was percolating.

Revenge! One of the seven deadly sins. Today, however, it was not so damning and the ennui that had consumed him lifted slightly.

It would mean going back to England. Again.

His home once.

Perhaps he could claim it back for a while, for apart from the land there was nothing left to hold him here. Besides, Hawk and Nathaniel had asked him to come back to London repeatedly, and he felt a sudden need for the company of his two closest friends.

‘Ahhh, Stuart,’ he whispered the name and liked the echo of it. The bastard who had swindled his uncle was in London, living on the profit of his ill-gotten gains no doubt.

Daniel Davenport. The name was engraved in his mind like a brand, seared into flesh.

But to kill him? The dying glances of others he had consigned to the hereafter rose from memory.

Not again! He leaned back on the pew and breathed in, trying to determine only the exact amount of force necessary to make Elizabeth’s lover sorry.

Chapter One

London—November 1853

‘Miss Davenport is a young woman any mother would be proud of, would you not say, Sybil?’

‘Indeed, I would, for she countenances no scandal whatsoever. A reputation unsullied in each corner of her life, and a paragon of good sense, good taste and good comportment.’

Lillian Davenport listened to the compliments from her place in the little room, deciding that the two older women hadn’t a notion of her being there. To alert them of her overhearing such a private matter would now cause them only embarrassment and so she stayed silent, letting the heavy petticoats in her hands fall to her side and ironing out the creases in white shot silk with her fingers.

‘If only my Jane had the sort of grace that she has, I often say to Gerald. If only we had drilled in the importance of the social codes as Ernest Davenport did, we might have been blessed with a very different daughter.’

‘Sometimes I think you are too hard on your girl, Sybil. She has her own virtue after all and …’

They were moving away now and out of the ladies’ retiring room. Lillian heard the door close and tilted her head, the last of the sentence lost into nothingness.

One minute. She would give them that before she opened the door and took her leave.

A paragon of good sense, good taste and good comportment.

A smile began to form on her face, though she squashed it down. Pride was a sin in its own right and she had no desire to be thought of as boastful.

Still … it was hard not to be pleased with such unexpected praise and, although she frequently detected a general commendation on her manners, it was not often that the words were so direct or honest.

Washing her hands, she shook off the excess, noting how the white gold in her new birthday bracelet caught the light from above. Twenty-five yesterday. Her euphoria died a little, though she pushed the unsettled feeling down as she walked out into a salon of the Lenningtons’ townhouse and straight into some sort of fight.

‘I think you cheated, you blackguard.’ Her cousin Daniel’s tones were hardly civil and came from a very close quarter.

‘Then call me out. I am equally at home with swords or pistols.’ Another voice. Laconic. The drawl of a man new from the former colonies, the laughter in it unexpected.

‘And have you kill me?’

‘Life or death, Lord Davenport, take your choice or stop your whining.’

There was the sound of pushing and shoving and the two assailants came suddenly into view, Daniel’s head now locked in the bent elbow of a tall, dark-haired man, her cousin’s eyes bulging from the pressure and his fair hair plastered wet across his forehead.

Lillian was speechless as her glance drew upwards into the face of the assailant. Jacket unbuttoned and with cravat askew, the stranger’s jaw was heavily shadowed by dark stubble and she was transfixed by two golden eyes brushed in humour that stared now straight at her. Unrepentant. Unapologetic. Pure and raw man with blood on his lip and danger imprinted in every line of his body.

It seemed that her own throat choked with the contact, her heart slamming full into the ribs of her breast in one heavy blow, leaving her with no breath. A warmth that she had never before felt slid easily from her stomach, fusing even the tips of her fingers with heat, and with it came some other nameless thing, echoing on the edge of a knowledge as old as time. Shocking. Dreadful. She pulled her eyes from his and turned on her heels, but not before she had seen him tip his head at her, the wink he delivered licentious and untrammelled.

Mannerless, she decided, and American, and with more than a dozen other men and women looking on she knew the gossip about the fight would spread with an unstoppable haste.

Pulling the door to the retiring room open again, she returned to the same place she had left not more than a few minutes prior.

Anger consumed her.

And dread.

Who was he? She held out one hand and watched it shake before laying it down on her lap and shutting her eyes. A headache had begun to form and behind the pain came a wilder and more unwieldy longing.

‘Stop it,’ she whispered to herself, placing cold fingers across her lips to soften the sound as the door opened and other women came in, giggling this time and young.

‘I love these balls. I love the music and the colour and the gowns …’

‘And of all the gowns I love Lillian Davenport’s best. Where does she get her clothes from, I wonder? Ester Hamilton says from London, but I would wager France—a modiste from Paris, perhaps, and a milliner from Florence? With all her money she could have them brought from anywhere.’

‘Did you see her exquisite bracelet? Her father gave it to her for her birthday. Her twenty-fifth birthday!’

‘Twenty-five! Poor Lillian,’ the other espoused, ‘and no husband or children either! My God, if she does not find a groom soon …’

‘Oh, I would not go that far, Harriet. Some women like to live alone.’

‘No woman wants to live alone, you peagoose. Besides Lord Wilcox-Rice has been paying her a lot of attention tonight. Perhaps she will fall in love with him and have the wedding of the year in the spring.’

The other girl tittered as they departed, leaving Lillian speechless.

Poor Lillian!

Poor Lillian?

Paragon to poor in all of five minutes, and a stranger outside who made her heart beat in a way that worried her.

‘Mama?’ The sound came in a prayer. ‘Please, Lord, do not let me be anything like Mama.’ She pushed the thought away. She would not see this colonial ruffian again; furthermore, if his behaviour tonight was anything to go by, she doubted he would be invited into any house of repute in the future. The thought relaxed her—after all, they were the only sort of homes that she frequented!

Wiping her brow, she stood, feeling better for the thought and much more like herself. She was seldom flustered and almost never blushed and the heartbeat that had raced in her breast was an unheard-of occurrence. Perhaps it was the fight that had made her unsettled and uncertain, for she could not remember a time when she had ever heard a voice raised in such fury or men hitting out at each other. Certainly she had never seen a man in a state of such undress.

Ridiculously she hoped the stranger would have had the sense to adjust his cravat and his jacket before he entered the main salons.

No! Her rational mind rejected such a thought. Let him be thrown out into the street and away from the city. She wondered what had happened to arouse such strong emotion in the first place. Cards, probably, and drink! She had smelt it on their clothes and her cousin’s behaviour of late had been increasingly erratic, his sense of honour tarnished with a wilder anger ever since returning home to England.

Poor Lillian!

She would not think about it again. Those silly young girls had no notion of what they spoke of and she was more than happy with her life.

Lucas Clairmont draped his legs across the stool and looked into the fire burning in the grate of Nathaniel Lindsay’s town house in Mayfair.

‘My face will feel better come the morrow,’ Lucas said, raising his glass to swallow the chilled water, the bottle nestling in an ice-bucket beside him.

‘Davenport has always had a hot temper, so I’d watch your back on dark nights as you wend your way home. Especially if you are on a winning streak at the tables.’

Luc laughed. Loudly. ‘I’d like to see him try it.’

‘He is no lightweight, Luc. His family name affords him a position here that is … secure.’

‘I’ll deal with it, Nat,’ he countered, glad when his friend nodded.

‘His cousin, Miss Lillian Davenport, on the other hand is formidably scrupulous.’

‘She’s the woman I saw in the white dress?’ He had already asked Nat her name as they had walked to the waiting coach and now seemed the time to find out more, her pale blue eyes and blonde hair reminding him of the lily flowers that grew in profusion near the riverbeds in Richmond, Virginia.

‘Is she married?’

‘No. She is famous not only for her innate good manners but also for her ability to say no to marriage proposals and, believe me, there have been many.’

Luc gingerly touched his bottom lip, which was still hurting.

‘Society here is under the impression that you are a reprobate and a wild cannon, Luc. Many more tussles like tonight and you may find yourself on the outskirts of even the card games.’

Lucas shook his head. ‘I barely touched him and he only got in a punch because I wasn’t expecting it. Where does Lillian Davenport live, by the way?’

‘We’re back to her again. My God, she is as dangerous to you as her cousin and many times over more clever. A woman who all men would like to possess and who in the end wants none of them.’

Cassandra bustled into the drawing room, a steaming hot chocolate in hand.

‘Take no notice of my husband, Lucas. He speaks from his own poor experience.’

‘You were lining up, Nat, at one time?’

‘A good seven years back now. Her first coming out it was, and long before I ever set eyes upon my Cassie.’

‘And she refused you?’

‘Unconditionally. She waited until I had sent her the one and only love letter I have ever written and then gave it back.’

‘Better than keeping it, I should imagine.’

He nodded. ‘And those famous manners relegate anything personal to the “never to be discussed again” box, which one must find encouraging.’

‘So she’s not a gossip?’

‘Oh, far from it,’ Cassie took up the conversation. ‘She is the very end word in innate good breeding and perfect bearing. Every young girl who is presented at Court is reminded of her comportment and conduct and encouraged to emulate it.’

‘She sounds formidable.’

Cassandra giggled and Nathaniel interrupted his wife as she went to say more. ‘Lord, Cassie, enough.’ He caught her arm and pulled her down on to his knee. ‘Luc is only here in London until the end of December and we have much to reminisce about.’

‘I’ll drink to that, Nat.’ Raising his glass, Luc swallowed the lot, already planning his second foray into discovering the exact character of Daniel Davenport.

Lillian pulled up the sheets on her bed and lay down with a sigh. She had left her curtains slightly open and the moon shone brightly in the space between. A full moon tonight, and the beams covered her room in silver.

She felt … excited, and could not explain the feeling even to herself, the sleep she would have liked so far, far away. Her hand slid across her stomach beneath the gossamer-thin silk nightdress.

John Wilcox-Rice had been most attentive tonight, but it was another face she sought. A darker, more dangerous countenance with laughing golden eyes and a voice from another land. Her fingers traced across her skin soft and gentle, like the path of a feather.

Bringing her hands together when she realised where they lingered, she closed her eyes and summoned sleep. But the urgency was not dimmed, rather it flared in the silver moon and in the pull of something she had no control over. A single tear ran down her temple and into her hair. Wet. Real. She was twenty-five and waiting for … what?

The stranger had tipped his head to her, night-black hair caught long in the sort of leather strap that a man from past centuries would have worn. Careless of fashion!

His hands had been forceful and brown, work imbued into the very form of them. What must it be like to have a hand like that touch her body? Not soft, not smooth. Fingers that had worked the earth hard or loved a woman well!

She smiled at such a thought, but could not quite dismiss it.

‘Please …’ she whispered into the night, but the entreaty itself made her pause.

‘Let me find someone to love, someone to care for, someone to love me back.’ Not for her money or for her clothes or for the colour of her hair, which men always admired. Not those things, she thought.

‘For me. For just me.’ Words diffusing into the silence of the night as the winds of winter buffeted the house and the almost full moon disappeared behind thick rain-filled clouds.

Chapter Two

Her father was at breakfast the next morning, an occurrence that was becoming more and more rare these days with the time he spent at his clubs and his new interest in horseflesh pulling him away from London for longer and longer time-spans.

‘Good morning, Lillian,’ he said with a lilt in his voice and her puzzlement grew. ‘I have it on good authority that you had a splendid time at the Lenningtons’ last night?’

A splendid time? She could not for the life of her quite fathom his meaning.

‘Lord Wilcox-Rice called to see me yesterday afternoon to ask if he might court you with an eye to a betrothal later in the month and I had heard from Patrick that you spent much of the night at his side.’

Lillian grimaced at her youngest cousin’s penchant for telling a tale. ‘I was there as a friend.’

The words were wrung out in anger and her father’s brows lifted in astonishment.

‘Wilcox-Rice has not said anything to you yet? Perhaps the boy is shy or perhaps you did not encourage him as it may have been prudent to.’

‘I do not wish for his advances. I could not even imagine …’

‘All the best marriages begin with just that. A friendship that develops into love and lasts a lifetime.’

The unspoken words hung between them.

Like your marriage did not. Mama. A quick dalliance with an unsuitable man and then her death. Repenting it all, and an absolution never given.

‘Lord Wilcox-Rice wishes for you to become better acquainted. He wants you to spend some time with him at his estate in Kent. Chaperoned, of course, but well away from London and it may give you the chance to—’

‘No, Papa.’

Her father was still. The knife he held in his hand was carefully set down on his plate, the jam upon it as yet to be spread. ‘I think, Lillian, we have come to an impasse, you and I. You are a girl with a strong mind, but your years are mounting and the chances you may have for a family and a home of your own are diminishing with each passing birthday.’

Lillian hated this argument. Twenty-five had pounced upon her with all the weight of expectations and conjecture; an iniquitous year when women were no longer young and could not fall back upon the easy excuse of choice.

‘John Wilcox-Rice is from a good family with all the advantages of upbringing that you yourself have had. He would not wish to change you, and he would make an admirable father, something that you must be now at least thinking about.’

‘But I don’t have any feelings for him. Not ones that would naturally lead to marriage.’

With a quick flick of his fingers her father dismissed the servants gathered behind them. Left alone, Lillian could hear the ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner of the room, time marked by mounting seconds of silence.

Finally her father began. ‘I am nearing fifty, Lillian, and my health is not as it once was. I need to know that you are settled before I am too much older. I need grandchildren and the chance of an heir for Fairley Manor.’

‘You speak as if I am over thirty, Father, and I can see little wrong with the state of your health.’ She did not care for the harshness she heard in her voice.

‘Then if you cannot understand the gist of my words, I worry about you even more.’

His tone had risen, no longer the measured evenness of logic and sense, and Lillian walked across to the window to look out over Hyde Park where a few people rode their horses on the pathways. Everything was just as it should be, whereas in here….

‘I will give you till Christmas.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ She turned to face him.

‘I will give you until Christmas to find a man of your choice to marry, and if you have no other candidate by then you must promise me to consider Wilcox-Rice and without prejudice.’

His face was blotched with redness, the weight he had put on since last year somehow more worrying than before. Was he ailing? He had seen the physician last week. Perhaps he had learnt something was not right?

Regret and remorse surged simultaneously, but she did not question him. He was a man who held his secrets and seldom divulged his thoughts. Like her, she supposed, and that made her sad.

She was cornered, by parental authority and by the part in her heart that wanted to make her ageing father happy, no matter what.

‘It is not so very easy to find a man who is everything that I want.’

‘Then find one who is enough, Lillian.’ His retort came quickly. ‘With children great happiness can follow and Wilcox-Rice is a good fellow. At least give me the benefit of the wisdom old age brings.’

‘Very well, then. I will promise to consider your advice.’ When she held out her hand to his, she liked the way he did not break the contact, but kept her close.

Half an hour later she was in the morning room to one side of the town house having a cup of tea with Anne Weatherby, an old friend, and trying to feign interest in the topic of her children and family, a subject that usually took up nearly all the hours of her visit. Today, however, she had other issues to discuss.

‘There was a contretemps last night at Lenningtons’. Did you hear of it?’

Lillian’s attention was immediately caught.

‘It seems that your cousin Daniel and a stranger from America were in a scuffle of sorts. I saw him as he walked from the salon afterwards. He barely looked English, the savage ways of the backwaters imprinted on his clothes and hands and face. So dangerous and uncivilised.’ She began to smile. ‘And yet wildly good-looking.’

‘I saw nothing.’

‘Rumour has it that you did.’

‘Well, perhaps I saw the very end of it all as I came from the retiring room. It was but a trifle.’ She tried to look bored with the whole subject in the hope that Anne might change the topic, but was to have no such luck.

‘It is said that he has a reputation in America that is hardly savoury. A Virginian, I am told, whose wife died in a way that was … suspicious at the very least.’

‘Suspicious?’

‘Alice, the Countess of Horsham, would say no more on the matter, but her tone of voice indicated that the fellow might have had a hand in her demise.’ She shook her head before continuing. ‘Although the gossip is all about town, the young girls seem much enamoured by his looks and are setting their caps at him in the hopes of even a smile. He has a dimple on his right cheek, something I always found attractive in a man.’ She placed her hands across her mouth and smiled through them. ‘Lord, but I am running on, and at thirty I should have a lot more sense than to be swayed by a handsome face.’

Lillian poured another cup of tea for herself, while Anne had barely sipped at hers. She hoped that her friend did not see the way the liquid slopped across the side of the cup of its own accord and dribbled on to the white-lace linen cloth beneath it. How easy it was to be tipped from this place to that one. His wife. Dead!

Her imaginings in a bed bathed in moonlight took on a less savoury feel and she pushed down disappointment.

No man had ever swept her off her feet in all the seven years she had been out and to imagine that this one had even the propensity to do so suddenly seemed silly. Of course a man who looked like this American would not be a fit companion for her with his raw and rough manner and his dangerous eyes. The promise she had made her father less than an hour ago surfaced and she shook away the ridiculous yearnings.

Betrothed by Christmas! Ah well, she thought as she guided the conversation to a more general one, if worst came to the worst, John Wilcox-Rice was at least biddable and she was past twenty-five.

She met John at a party that evening in Belgrave Square and she knew that she was in trouble as soon as she saw his face. He looked excited and nervous at the same time, his smile both protective and concerned. When he took her fingers in his own she was glad for her gloves and glad too for the ornamental shrubbery placed beside the orchestra. It gave her a chance to escape the prying eyes of others while she tried to explain it all to him.

When the cornet, violin and cello proved too much to speak over she pulled him out on to the balcony a little further away from the room, where the light was dimmer, the shadow of the shrubs throwing a kinder glow on both their faces.

‘You had my message from your father, then, about my interest—’ he began, but she allowed him no further discourse.

‘I certainly did and I thank you for the compliment, but I do not think we could possibly—’

‘Your father thinks differently,’ he returned, and a sneaking suspicion started to well in Lillian’s breast.

‘You have seen my father today?’ she began, stopping as he nodded.

‘Indeed I have and he was at pains to tell me you had agreed to at least consider my proposal.’

‘But I do not hold the sort of feelings for you that you would want, and there would be no guarantee that I ever could.’

‘I know.’ He took her hand again, this time peeling back the fine silk of her right glove, and pressing his lips to her wrist. Without meaning to she dragged her hand away, wiping it on the generous fabric of her skirt and thinking that this meeting place might not have been the wisest one after all.

‘I just want you to at least try. I want the chance to make you happy and I think that we would rub along together rather nicely.’

‘Well,’ she returned briskly, ‘I certainly value your friendship and I would indeed be very loath to lose it, but as for the rest….’

He bowed before her. ‘I understand and I am ready to give you more time to ponder over it, Lillian, for as like-minded people of a similar birth I am convinced such a union would benefit us both.’

She nodded and watched as he clicked his heels together and took his leave, a tall, thin man who was passably good looking and infinitely suitable. A husband she could indeed grow old with in a fairly satisfying relationship.

Sighing, she made her way to the edge of the balcony, the same moon as the night before mocking her in her movements, remembering.

‘Stop it!’ she admonished herself out loud.

‘Stop what?’ Another voice answered and the American walked out from the shrubs behind her, the red tip of a cheroot the only thing standing out from the black of his silhouette.

‘How long have you been there?’

‘Long 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.