Читать книгу Christmas Betrothals: Mistletoe Magic - Amanda McCabe, Amanda McCabe - Страница 13

Her cousin Daniel was in the library the next morning when she went down to find again the book on the Americas and he did not look pleased.

‘Lillian. It has been a while since we have talked.’ His face was marked by the underlying anger she had got used to seeing there.

For the past few years Daniel had been away from England and the ease of conversation that they had at one time had was now replaced by distance. Some other more nebulous wildness was also evident.

‘Does my father know that you are here?’

‘Yes. He is just retrieving a document that my mother has asked me to find for her.’

‘I see.’

He flipped at the pages of the book on America as it lay open on the table next to him. ‘It’s a big land. I was there on the east coast. Washington, mainly, and New York.’

‘Is that where you met Mr Clairmont?’

He frowned and then realisation dawned. ‘Ah, you saw us the other night at the Lenningtons’.’

‘I met him in the street yesterday with Hawkhurst. He had the appearance of being in another fight and I thought perhaps—’ But he did not let her finish!

‘Stay away from him, Lillian, for he is trouble.’

She nodded, and, pleased to hear her father’s footsteps in the hall, excused herself.

John Wilcox-Rice arrived alone in the afternoon and he had brought her a bunch of winter cheer. Blooms that would sit well in her room and she thanked him.

Today he was dressed in a dark blue frock coat, brown trousers and a waistcoat of lighter blue. His taste was impeccable, she thought, his Hessians well polished and fashionable.

After her talk with her cousin that morning she was in a mood to just let life take her where it would. Thoughts of children and a home of her own were becoming more formed. Perhaps a life with John would be a lot more than tolerable? Her father liked him, her aunt liked him and she liked his sister very much. The young couple from yesterday came briefly to mind, but the time between then and now had dulled her sense of yearning, her more normal sensibleness taking precedence.

So when he took her hand in his she did not pull away, but savoured the feeling of gentle warmth.

‘We have known each other for a passably long time, Lillian, and I think that if we gave it the chance …’

When she nodded, he looked heartened.

‘I have asked your father if I could court you and he has given his permission. Now I need the same permission from you.’

The warning from Daniel and the Countess of Horsham’s gossip welled in her mind.

Stay away from Lucas Clairmont. Stay away from trouble.

‘It is six weeks until Christmas. Perhaps we could use this time to see if …?’ She could not finish. To see what? To see if she felt passion or fervour or frenzy?

When he drew her up with him in response she stood, and when his lips glided across her own she did try to answer him back, did attempt to summon the hope of joy and benefit.

But she felt nothing!

The shock of it hit her and she pulled away, amazed at the singular smile of ardour on John’s face.

‘I will consider that as a troth, my love, and I will treasure the beauty of it for ever.’

The sound of a maid coming with tea had him moving away and taking his place on a chair opposite her. Yet still he grinned.

A gentleman, a nice man, a good man. And a man whose kisses made her feel nothing.

She lay in bed that night and cried. Cried for her mother and her father and for herself, trapped as she was by rules and rituals and etiquette.

John’s fragrant flowers were on the table beside her bed, but she missed the ugly single orange bloom. Missed its vigour and its irreverence and its unapologetic raw colour. Missed the company of the man who had given it to her.

He had had a wife who had died quite recently according to the gossip. Lord, how had he dealt with that? Badly, by all accounts, as she thought of his gambling and his obvious lack of funds.

Closing her eyes, she brought her hand to her mouth and kissed the back of it as John Wilcox-Rice had kissed her lips today. There was something wrong with the way that he had not moved, the static stillness of the action negating all the emotion that should have been within it.

Lord, she had never in her life been kissed before and so she was hardly an expert, but a part of her brain refused to believe that that was all that it was, all that was whispered about and written of. No, there had to be more to it than what she had felt today, but with Christmas on its way and the honouring of a promise to find a spouse, she was running out of time to be able to truly discover just what it was.

A new and more daring thought struck her suddenly.

Perhaps she could find out? Perhaps if she invited Lucas Clairmont to call and offered him a sum of money for both his service and his silence, she might discover what she did not now know.

To buy a single kiss!

She smiled, imagining such a wild and dangerous scheme. Of course she could not do that! Lucas Clairmont was hardly a man to bargain with and any trust she might give him would be sorely misplaced. Or would it? He had melted into the background at the Lennington ball and she had heard no gossip of her conversation on the Belgrave Square balcony. Indeed, when she had seen him in the street yesterday he had barely acknowledged her. But was that from carefulness or just plain indifference?

She moved her hand and slanted her lips, increasing the pressure in a way that felt right. A bloom of want wound thin in her stomach, the warm promise of it bringing to mind the dangerous American.

Quickly she sat up, hard against the backboard of the bed, pulling the bedding about her shoulders to try to keep the cold at bay.

This was her only chance to find out. She had been in society for nearly eight years and not once in all that time had she lain here imagining the things she did now about any man.

Forty-two days until she would give a promise of eternal obedience and chastity to a man whose kisses left her with … nothing.

Her teeth worried her top lip as she tried to imagine the conversation preceding the experiment. It hardly seemed loyal to tell him of her reaction to John’s kiss and her need to see if others would be the same, and yet if she did not he might think her wanton. A new thought struck her. Could men kiss well if they thought that they were being compared in some way? Would it not dampen a natural tendency?

And how much should she pay him? Would he be offended by fifty pounds or thankful for it? Would he want a hundred if he kissed her twice?

The hours closed in on her, as did the fact that 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 precarious and wanted to offer you a boon to alleviate the problem.’ She knew that she had taken the wrong turn as soon as he stood, the polite façade of a moment ago submerged beneath anger.

Panic made her careless. ‘I want to buy a kiss from you.’ Blurted out with all the finesse of a ten-year-old.

‘You what …?’

‘Buy a kiss from you …’ Her hands shook as she rummaged through her bag, trying to extricate the notes she had got from the bank that very morning.

When she finally managed it he swore, and not quietly.

‘Shh, they might hear.’

‘Who might hear? Your father? Your cousin? Someone has already had one go at me this week and I would be loathe to let them have another one.’

‘Someone did that to you?’ Goodness, she had lost hold of the whole conversation and could not even think how to retrieve it.

With honesty!

Taking a breath, she buried vanity. ‘I am a twenty-five-year-old spinster, Mr Clairmont, and a woman who has been kissed only once, yesterday, by Lord Wilcox-Rice. And I need to know if what I felt was … normal.’

‘What the hell did you feel?’

She drew herself up to her tallest height, a feat that was not so intimidating given that she stood at merely five foot two, even in her shoes.

‘I felt nothing!’

The words reverberated in the ensuing silence, his anger evaporating in an instant to be replaced by laughter.

‘I realise to you that the whole thing may seem like a joke, but …’

He breathed out. Hard.

‘Nay, it is not that, Lilly, it is not that.’ She felt his hand against her cheek, a single finger stroking down the bone, a careful feather-touch with all the weight of air.

A touch that made her shiver and want, a touch that made her move towards this thing she wished for, and then vanishing as a sound came from outside in the corridor.

Luc Clairmont moved back too, towards the window, his body faced away from hers and his hand adjusting the fit of his trousers. Perhaps he was angry again? Perhaps on reflection he saw the complete and utter disregard of convention that her request had subjected him to?

She smiled wanly as a young maid entered the room and bade her leave the tea for them to pour. Question shadowed the girl’s eyes and Lillian knew that she was fast running out of minutes. It was simply not done for an unmarried lady to be sequestered alone for any length of time with a man.

At twenty-five some leeway might have been allowed, but she knew that he would need to leave before too many more seconds had passed.

Consequently when the door shut behind the servant she walked across to him.

‘I do not wish to hurry you, but—’

He did not let her finish. The hard ardour of his lips slanted across her own, opening her mouth. Rough hands framed her cheeks as the length of his body pressed against hers, asking, needing, allowing no mealy response, but the one given from the place she had hidden for so, so long.

Feeling exploded, the sharp beat of her heart, the growing warmth in her stomach, the throb of lust that ached in a region lower. As she pressed closer her hands threaded through his hair, and into the nape of his neck, moving without her volition, with a complete lack of control.

He was not gentle, not careful, the feel of his lips on her mouth, on her cheek and on the sensitive skin at her neck unrestrained.

And then stopped!

She tried to keep it going, tipping her mouth to his, but he pulled her head against his chest and held her there, against a heartbeat that sped in heavy rhythm.

‘This is not the place, Lilly …’

Reality returned, the yellow salon once again around her, the sound of servants outside, the tea on the table with its small plume of steam waiting to be drunk.

She pushed away, a new danger now in the room and much more potent than the one that had bothered her before.

Before she had been worried about his actions and now she was worried about her own, for in that kiss something had been unleashed, some wild freedom that could now not be contained.

Lucas Clairmont placed her letter on the table and gathered his hat. ‘Miss Davenport,’ he said and walked from the room.

Lord, he thought on the journey between Pall Mall and his lodgings. He should not have kissed her, not allowed her confession of feeling ‘nothing’ with Wilcox-Rice to sway his resolve.

And now where did it leave him? With a hankering for more and a woman who would hate him.

He should have stayed, should have reassured her, should have at least had the decency to admit the whole thing as his fault before he had walked out.

But she had captivated him with her pale elegance and honesty and with the fumbled bank notes pushed uncertainly at him.

To even think that she would pay him?

Absolute incredulity replaced irritation and that in turn was replaced by something … more akin to respect.

She was the one all others aspired to be like, the pinnacle of manners and deportment and it could not have been easy for her to have even asked him what she did. Hell, she had a hundred times more to lose than he, with his passage to Virginia looming near and a reputation that no amount of bad behaviour could lower.

Why on earth, then, had she picked him? She must have weighed up the odds as to what he could do with such information, the pressures of society here like a sledgehammer against any deviation from the strict codes of manners.

Why had she risked it?

The answer came easily. She did so because she was desperate, desperate to discover if what she felt for Wilcox-Rice was normal and hopeful that it was not.

Well, he thought, with the first glimmer of humour coming back. At least she had found out that!

Lillian threw herself on her bed and took the breath she had hardly taken since Lucas Clairmont had left the house.

He had been angry, the notes she had tried to give him in her fist, a coarse message of intent and failure. She rolled over and peeled each one away from the other.

Two hundred pounds! And if he had taken them it would have been worth every single penny. Turning, she looked at the ceiling, reliving each second of that kiss, her fingers reaching for the places his had been and then falling lower.

What if he had not stopped? What if he had not pulled back when he did? Would she have come to her senses? Honesty forced her to admit she would not have and the admission cost her much.

‘If you aren’t careful you will be your mother all over again, Lillian.’ Her father’s voice from the past, a warning to her as her mother lay dying, the words uttered in a despair of melancholy and sorrow. She had been thirteen and the fashions of the day had begun to be appealing, the chance to experiment and change. She blinked.

Had such advice altered the person she might have become? Was she changing back?

She shook her head and lay still, closing her eyes against the light.

The knock on the door woke her and for a second she could not work out quite where she was, for seldom did she doze in the afternoon.

Her bedroom. Lucas Clairmont. The kiss. Reality surfaced and with it a rising dread.

‘You have some flowers, Miss.’

A maid came in with a large unruly bunch of orange flowers and her breath was caught. ‘Is there a card?’

‘Indeed, miss, there is.’ The maid broke the envelope away from a string that kept it joined to the bouquet, speculation unhidden in the lines of her face.

‘That will be all, thank you,’ Lillian said, waiting until the door was shut before she slit open the card.

I FELT SOMETHING

The words were in bold capitals with no name attached.

Without meaning to, Lillian began to cry—in those three words Luc Clairmont had given her back the one thing she had not thought it possible to regain.

Her pride.

Holding the flowers close to her breast, her tears fell freely across the fragrant orange petals.