A Christmas Bride / A Christmas Beau

by Mary Balogh

  “You need not have worried,” he said. “I am giving in, you see, without even a fight.”

  “I hated you when I left you yesterday afternoon,” she said. “I thought it had all been a plot of revenge. I thought it had all been cold calculation. I thought I had been right about you from the start. But I was wrong. You still love me, don’t you?” She could feel herself flushing, but he was not looking at her. He had turned his head away again and set his forefinger against his mouth.

  “Perhaps you did not hear my words,” he said, “or fully comprehend their true meaning.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Loud and clear. But they were just words, spoken at the end of it all. I think perhaps they were what you had planned to say and so you said them. But what happened before you spoke those words was not part of your plan, Max.”

  He laughed again. “That good, was it?” he said.

  “You know it was,” she said. “And thinking about it last night and remembering, I knew that I could not have been mistaken. I could not have been. Even if I had had no experience with such matters I would know beyond any doubt that I was not mistaken. But I have had experience. I was married for almost seven years. I have been made love to many times. But yesterday you were not making love to me or I to you. We were making love with each other. That has never happened to me before, and I could not possibly be mistaken. It was no game you were playing, Max. It was love. I know it.”

  “So.” He turned his head to look at her, and his eyes were weary, bleak. “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Forgive me in your heart as well as with your mouth. Forgive yourself. Let go of all the bitterness. Move on into the future. There is so much goodness in your life. I will be gone within the hour. Let me go—right out of your life. Start again.”

  He stared at her, nodding his head slowly. “And you?” he said. “You will move on, too?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And if you are with child?”

  “I will know,” she said. “Whatever you may say, I will know that the child was begotten and conceived out of love. That is all that will matter. I do love you, you know, and it will always hurt me to know that I was pain and shadow and darkness in your life for eight years. But you can be free of me now, partly because you got even, but more importantly because you have forgiven me. And I you.”

  “Judith,” he said. “We have given each other so much pain. That can have nothing to do with love, surely?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “It obviously has a great deal to do with life.”

  He reached out his free hand toward her and she took a few steps closer to him until she could set her own in it. He drew her closer until she was against him, and his arms closed loosely about her and hers about him. She turned her head to lay against his chest and closed her eyes.

  They stood thus for many minutes, comforting each other wordlessly for pain and guilt and for all that might have been.

  “And so,” he said finally, “in one hour’s time you will be gone and we can both start to reconstruct our lives.”

  “Forgiven and forgiving,” she said.

  “Pardon and peace,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  His cheek rested against the top of her head briefly. “It cannot be done together, Judith? Is it too late for us?”

  She heard a gulp of a sob suddenly and realized in some horror that it had come from her. “I don’t know,” she said, and she tried to push away from him.

  But she was pulled back against him by arms that were suddenly as hard as steel bands and when she raised her face to avoid suffocation against his neckcloth it was to look into eyes that were themselves brimming with tears. He lowered his head and kissed her fiercely, a wet and breathless kiss.

  “Let us do it, Judith,” he said. “Let us give life and love and peace a chance together, shall we? I cannot contemplate any of the three of them without you. Not again. I don’t have the strength to do it again. I love you. Is that what I told you with my body yesterday? Did you recognize the language? I am telling you with words now. I love you. I always have.”

  He took one of her hands and held the palm to his mouth. She stood smiling up at him until gradually he relaxed and smiled back.

  “I think we had better get married and be done with it,” he said. “Don’t you?”

  Her smile deepened.

  “You are holding out for the poetic speech and the down-on-one-knee business, aren’t you?” he said.

  But before her smile could give place to laughter they were interrupted. One of the doors opened slightly and two little figures appeared around it.

  “Mama,” Rupert said, “Aunt Amy is not back yet and it is beginning to snow again and Mr. Rockford said he would take us sledding if we had nothing else to do. May we stay?”

  “The dog was sick all over the floor,” Kate said.

  “Oh, dear,” the marquess said, keeping his arms firmly about Judith when she would have pulled away. “You must have been feeding him muffins again, were you?”

  “And toast,” Kate said.

  “May we, Mama?” Rupert asked.

  “How would you like to stay forever and a day?” the marquess asked. “If your mama would just consent to marry me, you know, you could do so. And go sledding and skating and have plenty of company from the children in the village. And I could teach you to ride a real horse, Rupert, and to play cricket as well as your papa. And Kate could see the puppies when they are born in the spring and train one to sleep on her bed all night without once wetting the blankets or being sick all over the floor.”

  “Ye-es!” Rupert yelled. “Famous. Will you, Mama?”

  Kate had crossed the room and was clinging to a tassel of the marquess’s Hessian. “A black puppy?” she asked. “All black?”

  “I shall see what I can arrange,” he said.

  “Will you, Mama?” Dark and pleading eyes gazed up at her from beneath soft auburn curls.

  “Will you, Judith?” Lord Denbigh’s eyes smiled into hers. “Will you make it unanimous? It is already three against one.”

  “One thing I have noticed about you from the start,” she said, “is that you will quite unscrupulously get to me through my children.”

  “Guilty,” he said.

  “And it works every time,” she said.

  “Does it?”

  “Yes.”

  “This time, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “You will marry me?”

  She smiled broadly at him.

  He sighed. “Kate,” he said. “Stand back if you will. And watch carefully. This is going to happen to you one day. And you watch, too, Rupert, my lad. You are going to have to do this one of these fine days. I am about to get down on one knee to propose to your mama.”

  “My Christmas beau,” Judith said fondly, smiling down at him as he suited action to words.

  Get ready to fall in love with a brand-new series from Mary Balogh.…

  WELCOME TO THE SURVIVORS’ CLUB.

  The members are six gentlemen and one lady, all of whom carry wounds from the Napoleonic Wars—some visible and some not. These tight-knit friends have helped one another survive through thick and thin. Now, they all need the perfect companions to teach them how to love again. Learn how it all begins in:

  The Proposal

  Featuring the beloved Lady Gwendoline Muir from One Night for Love and A Summer to Remember.

  Available from Delacorte in hardcover.

  Turn the page for a sneak peek inside.

  1

  GWENDOLINE GRAYSON, LADY MUIR, HUNCHED HER shoulders and drew her cloak more snugly about her. It was a brisk, blustery March day, made chillier by the fact that she was standing down at the fishing harbor below the village where she was staying. It was low tide, and a number of fishing boats lay half keeled over on the wet sand, waiting for the water to return and float them upright again.r />
  She should go back to the house. She had been out for longer than an hour, and part of her longed for the warmth of a fire and the comfort of a steaming cup of tea. Unfortunately, though, Vera Parkinson’s home was not hers, only the house where she was staying for a month. And she and Vera had just quarreled—or at least, Vera had quarreled with her and upset her. She was not ready to go back yet. She would rather endure the elements.

  She could not walk to her left. A jutting headland barred her way. To the right, though, a pebbled beach beneath high cliffs stretched into the distance. It would be several hours yet before the tide came up high enough to cover it.

  Gwen usually avoided walking down by the water, even though she lived close to the sea herself at the dower house of Newbury Abbey in Dorsetshire. She found beaches too vast, cliffs too threatening, the sea too elemental. She preferred a smaller, more ordered world, over which she could exert some semblance of control—a carefully cultivated flower garden, for example.

  But today she needed to be away from Vera for a while longer, and from the village and country lanes where she might run into Vera’s neighbors and feel obliged to engage in cheerful conversation. She needed to be alone, and the pebbled beach was deserted for as far into the distance as she could see before it curved inland. She stepped down onto it.

  She realized after a very short distance, however, why no one else was walking here. For though most of the pebbles were ancient and had been worn smooth and rounded by thousands of tides, a significant number of them were of more recent date, and they were larger, rougher, more jagged. Walking across them was not easy and would not have been even if she had had two sound legs. As it was, her right leg had never healed properly from a break eight years ago, when she had been thrown from her horse. She walked with a habitual limp even on level ground.

  She did not turn back, though. She trudged stubbornly onward, careful where she set her feet. She was not in any great hurry to get anywhere, after all.

  This had really been the most horrid day of a horrid fortnight. She had come for a month-long visit, entirely from impulse, when Vera had written to inform her of the sad passing a couple of months earlier of her husband, who had been ailing for several years. Vera had added the complaint that no one in either Mr. Parkinson’s family or her own was paying any attention whatsoever to her suffering despite the fact that she was almost prostrate with grief and exhaustion after nursing him for so long. She was missing him dreadfully. Would Gwen care to come?

  They had been friends of a sort for a brief few months during the whirlwind of their come-out Season in London, and had exchanged infrequent letters after Vera’s marriage to Mr. Parkinson, a younger brother of Sir Roger Parkinson, and Gwen’s to Viscount Muir. Vera had written a long letter of sympathy after Vernon’s death, and had invited Gwen to come and stay with her and Mr. Parkinson for as long as she wished since Vera was neglected by almost everyone, including Mr. Parkinson himself, and would welcome her company. Gwen had declined the invitation then, but she had responded to Vera’s plea on this occasion despite a few misgivings. She knew what grief and exhaustion and loneliness after the death of a spouse felt like.

  It was a decision she had regretted almost from the first day. Vera, as her letters had suggested, was a moaner and a whiner, and while Gwen tried to make allowances for the fact that she had tended a sick husband for a few years and had just lost him, she soon came to the conclusion that the years since their come-out had soured Vera and made her permanently disagreeable. Most of her neighbors avoided her whenever possible. Her only friends were a group of ladies who much resembled her in character. Sitting and listening to their conversation felt very like being sucked into a black hole and deprived of enough air to breathe, Gwen had been finding. They knew how to see only what was wrong in their lives and in the world and never what was right.

  And that was precisely what she was doing now when thinking of them, Gwen realized with a mental shake of the head. Negativity could be frighteningly contagious.

  Even before this morning she had been wishing that she had not committed herself to such a long visit. Two weeks would have been quite sufficient—she would actually be going home by now. But she had agreed to a month, and a month it would have to be. This morning, however, her stoicism had been put to the test.

  She had received a letter from her mother, who lived at the dower house with her, and in it her mother had recounted a few amusing anecdotes involving Sylvie and Leo, Neville and Lily’s elder children—Neville, Earl of Kilbourne, was Gwen’s brother, and lived at Newbury Abbey itself. Gwen read that part of the letter aloud to Vera at the breakfast table in the hope of coaxing a smile or a chuckle from her. Instead, she had found herself at the receiving end of a petulant tirade, the basic thrust of which was that it was very easy for Gwen to laugh at and make light of her suffering when Gwen’s husband had died years ago and left her very comfortably well off, and when she had had a brother and mother both willing and eager to receive her back into the family fold, and when her sensibilities did not run very deep anyway. It was easy to be callous and cruel when she had married for money and status instead of love. Everyone had known that truth about her during the spring of their come-out, just as everyone had known that Vera had married beneath her because she and Mr. Parkinson had loved each other to distraction and nothing else had mattered.

  Gwen had stared mutely back at her friend when she finally fell silent apart from some wrenching sobs into her handkerchief. She dared not open her mouth. She might have given the tirade right back and thereby have reduced herself to the level of Vera’s own spitefulness. She would not be drawn into an unseemly scrap. But she almost vibrated with anger. And she was deeply hurt.

  “I am going out for a walk, Vera,” she had said at last, getting to her feet and pushing back her chair with the backs of her knees. “When I return, you may inform me whether you wish me to remain here for another two weeks, as planned, or whether you would prefer that I return to Newbury without further delay.”

  She would have to go by post or the public stagecoach. It would take the best part of a week for Neville’s carriage to come for her if she wrote to inform him that she needed it earlier than planned.

  Vera had wept harder and begged her not to be cruel, but Gwen had come out anyway.

  She would be perfectly happy, she thought now, if she never returned to Vera’s house. What a dreadful mistake it had been to come, and for a whole month, on the strength of a very brief and long-ago acquaintance.

  Eventually she rounded the headland she had seen from the harbor and discovered that the beach, wider here, stretched onward, seemingly to infinity, and that in the near distance the stones gave way to sand, which would be far easier to walk along. However, she must not go too far. Although the tide was still out, she could see that it was definitely on the way in, and in some very flat places it could rush in far faster than one anticipated. She had lived close to the sea long enough to know that. Besides, she could not stay away from Vera’s forever, though she wished she could. She must return soon.

  Close by there was a gap in the cliffs, and it looked possible to get up onto the headland high above, if one was willing to climb a steep slope of pebbles and then a slightly more gradual slope of scrubby grass. If she could just get up there, she would be able to walk back to the village along the top instead of having to pick her way back across these very tricky stones.

  Her weak leg was aching a bit, she realized. She had been foolish to come so far.

  She stood still for a moment and looked out to the still-distant line of the incoming tide. And she was hit suddenly and quite unexpectedly, not by a wave of water, but by a tidal wave of loneliness, one that washed over her and deprived her of both breath and the will to resist.

  Loneliness?

  She never thought of herself as lonely. She had lived through a tumultuous marriage but, once the rawness of her grief over Vernon’s death had receded, she had settled to a life
of peace and contentment with her family. She had never felt any urge to remarry, though she was not a cynic about marriage. Her brother was happily married. So was Lauren, her cousin by marriage who felt really more like a sister, since they had grown up together at Newbury Abbey. Gwen, however, was perfectly contented to remain a widow and to define herself as a daughter, a sister, a sister-in-law, a cousin, an aunt. She had numerous other relatives, too, and friends. She was comfortable at the dower house, which was just a short walk from the abbey, where she was always welcome. She paid frequent visits to Lauren and Kit in Hampshire, and occasional ones to other relatives. She usually spent a month or two of the spring in London to enjoy part of the Season.

  She had always considered that she lived a blessed life.

  So where had this sudden loneliness come from? And such a tidal wave of it that her knees felt weak and it seemed as though she had been robbed of breath. Why could she feel the rawness of tears in her throat?

  Loneliness?

  She was not lonely, only depressed at being stuck here with Vera. And hurt at what Vera had said about her and her lack of sensibilities. She was feeling sorry for herself, that was all. She never felt sorry for herself. Well, almost never. And when she did, then she quickly did something about it. Life was too short to be moped away. There was always much over which to rejoice.

  But loneliness. How long had it been lying in wait for her, just waiting to pounce? Was her life really as empty as it seemed at this moment of almost frightening insight? As empty as this vast, bleak beach?

  Ah, she hated beaches.

  Gwen gave her head another mental shake and looked, first back the way she had come, and then up the beach to the steep path between the cliffs. Which should she take? She hesitated for a few moments and then decided upon the climb. It did not look quite steep enough to be dangerous, and once up it, she would surely be able to find an easy route back to the village.