Miss Lottie's Christmas Protector

by Sophia James

  He removed them from their box and fastened them around her neck. She felt the gold take up the warmth of her skin and her fingers ran across the line of the piece.

  ‘This is beautiful.’

  ‘Like you are.’

  ‘And expensive.’

  ‘I am wealthy.’

  ‘Yet these are an heirloom.’ She wanted to add the words ‘for your wife when you marry’, but this was too hard to say. As the silence lengthened Lottie could feel the tension of his thoughts.

  ‘I would give you my whole world if I could, Charlotte. I hope you know that.’

  She frowned because she did not understand him and for a moment he looked as if he might explain, but then he didn’t.

  Instead he took her hair in his hand and gently pulled her down, rolling on top of her in a single fluid movement.

  ‘I should have met you when I was younger.’ His breath was on her cheek, warm and close.

  ‘You did.’

  He laughed and kissed her nose and her cheeks and finally her lips. A playful teasing kiss that was different again to all the others he had bestowed upon her.

  ‘How old were you? Then?’

  ‘Fourteen and with all the grandiose ideas of being almost a woman. I wished for years that you might have climbed the stairs and snatched me up from behind the banisters to ride on your white horse to some far-off estate where no one else would have ever found us.’

  ‘I was twenty-five. Full of my own importance. Impatient for life, but I do remember you there.’

  ‘I followed your progress covertly through my brother when he was your apprentice. Afterwards when Silas left your company I still wrote down every scrap of information I ever heard about you and it turned into quite a tome.’

  ‘So that’s how you knew of Meghan? I wondered how you realised I would be at the charity Christmas event this year, seeing as I have never attended another before.’

  ‘Well, that was much by chance. Mama mentioned your name because she was supposed to be going, but she cancelled a few weeks ago because she’d accepted an invitation to Lady Alexandra Malverly’s instead. I didn’t know anything about Verity Alworthy breaking your heart, though.’

  He kissed her lips again, this time lingeringly. ‘An exaggeration, I think, and the laudanum had a lot to do with my overwrought reaction. Hers was a hand that might have pulled me up from the hole I was in and when she left I thought I should never escape it.’

  ‘But you did.’

  ‘Eventually and through much exertion and when I was better I realised what a lucky escape I had made from both the laudanum and from Verity Chambers.’

  He kissed her mouth as he said this, a longer kiss, underscored with the same passion as last night. Not a timid kiss or a gentle one.

  Then there was no more talk at all save for the communication between their bodies.

  Chapter Thirteen

  In the morning she awoke to find him sitting fully dressed in a chair to one side of the bed.

  ‘When you are ready to go home, Charlotte, my driver will take you. I am sorry I cannot accompany you myself, but I have some business to attend to.’

  Jasper did not look well. He looked pale and strained and the quiet tone of his voice held none of the life it had in the previous hours.

  Had she done something terribly wrong? Was he only now seeing that in their lovemaking some boundary had been crossed and he wished it had not been? The daylight seemed to leach out their secrets, replacing ease with awkwardness and delight with a squalid and shabby truth.

  He wanted her gone. He wanted to send her home. Her nakedness beneath the sheets was suddenly difficult given his own full attire and she did not feel like rising before him and parading her wares.

  ‘Can you turn around?’

  ‘Of course.’ He looked away towards the window, an isolated and detached man, the only movement visible the beat of his three middle fingers against the soft arm of his chair.

  Counting the seconds until she was no longer there just as they had counted the space between thunder and lightning and the sultry beauty between their kisses.

  ‘Will I see you again, today?’ She had to ask because if she didn’t she would sit there at the Foundation waiting.

  ‘No. I am afraid not. I shall be occupied for a few days.’

  He knew she needed to depart for the country and was expected at the Malverly house party within a few days.

  ‘I see.’ These words were dragged from a grief that was rising, but he gave that no matter either. After a few moments when he saw that she was dressed as well as she was able to manage alone he picked up a small silver bell on the table beside him and rang it.

  A servant materialised almost immediately.

  ‘I have asked for my carriage to be brought around. Can you find Miss Fairclough’s cloak and accompany her to the conveyance please, Larkin? Then see that she is returned safely home.’

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He looked at her as he said this and she turned to collect her hairpins still on the bed, slipping the necklace he had given her beneath a pillow, tucked into safety. If he had bequeathed it to her in the throes of passion, he would definitely want it returned in the cold indifference of this morning.

  She would take nothing.

  She made a point of not looking at him as she passed, her heart shattering as he let her by without saying a word.

  * * *

  He listened to her footsteps, at the door, in the corridor and then down the staircase, small light sounds that took Charlotte from him, inch by inch until there was only silence.

  He tried to breathe and find air, tried to sharpen the blur of the room and the growing lack of sound that whirled about him.

  His leg howled with pain, twisting into his very centre, a hot core of agony dragging him down into the mire. At least she would not know. At least she was gone. At least when he fell to the floor writhing, she would not see him and she would only imagine him cold-hearted and fickle.

  He could fix that when he saw her next. He would even explain about his leg and how the pain made him insulated and solitary. He would say that he did not wish for her to be upset or dismayed and he would go and visit a doctor as soon as he could just in case there was some new treatment that could be tried.

  But he could never mend her seeing him as a ‘tortured cripple’ as Verity once had written. She had happened upon him in the middle of an attack and he had seen the look of horror on her face, the empty hope, the disgust and repulsion and the panic. His polite and loving fiancée had run from him with all the haste of one who had seen a demon and perhaps in that she was not far from wrong.

  He never remembered how he acted caught in the centre of his pain, but he did know that which his butler and his valet had told him. He screamed and swore, any vestige of being a gentleman long gone under the influence of his affliction. He hit out when anyone touched him so that they always left him alone to run out the worst of it, a feral bestial version of a human, the blood route in his leg distended and blocked.

  This time the renewed and howling discomfort was uncharacteristically close to the episode of a few days ago, but he had been making love for hours last night and the movements had aggravated the injury.

  He’d known the moment his groin pained him that the fragment had shifted. Like the red-hot torture of a firebrand pulled down his skin until the very form of his leg began to melt.

  He’d left the bed with Charlotte asleep in it and walked, trying to work out the pain with exertion, trying to loosen the tightness. But nothing had worked and so he had done the next best thing that he could.

  He had dressed himself as well as he was able and sat, waiting in the chair for her to awaken, keeping absolutely still because at least in immobility there was protection.

&nb
sp; When she had opened her eyes to find him he’d seen the softness in her face, the shyness and the beauty, and his heart broke all over again. He knew his distance had wounded her. He knew that. He had left her wondering about his intentions, the priceless gift of her virginity devalued by his apparent apathy.

  Swearing, he took in air. He could not fight on two fronts just at the moment, when every part of his being was trying to ward off the pain. He hated the hope of keeping her with him even as he knew that there would be no such choice.

  He’d tried to hold her at a distance, tried to tell her that his freedom was important to him.

  But Charlotte had crept under his guard, into the soft place inside of him, the place where truth lingered.

  He loved her.

  He loved her as he had never loved another woman in his life and that was the quandary. He was a cripple with an injury that was worsening and his time was running out.

  The doctor he’d seen a few years ago had told him that these episodes would increase in pain and in occurrence and that, apart from severing his leg off entirely, there would be nothing to be done about any of it.

  She was twenty-two and beautiful and he should have understood the wrongness of taking all that she had offered him, but he hadn’t been able to stop himself.

  A short knock on the door had him looking over and Larkin was back, a blanket in hand.

  ‘It’s cold this morning, sir. I think this might help.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He waited as the warm wool was tucked in about him.

  ‘Did Miss Fairclough leave?’

  ‘She did, sir, but she asked me to give this to you.’

  His butler held out a letter that was folded in on itself, his name in capitals on the outside. Mr King. Not Jasper. When he took the missive he shoved it in his pocket, vowing to look at it only when he was alone.

  ‘Should I call the doctor back, sir?’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Your sister, then? Should I let her know...?’

  ‘Absolutely not. If I sleep I will feel better and I will ring for you if I have a need. Under no circumstance are you to let anyone into the house and if Miss Fairclough does return tell her that I have left London for a few days and that I shall call upon her when I am back.’

  ‘I shall, sir.’

  ‘There is one other thing you could do for me before you go. Bring the brandy bottle over with a glass. I am sure I will have a need of it.’

  When that was done and the door was shut behind the departing servant, his hand reached into his pocket for the letter.

  Unfolding the sheet, he began to read.

  No legacy is as rich as honesty.

  I hope we can find this between us again.

  Not a recrimination, but a gentle reminder of what was important and so like Charlotte that he laid his head back against the soft brown leather and closed his eyes, the prayer that he might have said dying on his lips.

  He did not know what to pray for, that was the truth. He did not wish to hurt her again and he could not quite yet chance honesty.

  Gripping the small note so hard that his fist began to shake, he got up and dragged himself to the door to lock it.

  * * *

  Lottie arrived home just as the sun rose, the King servant seeing her safe and waiting until the door opened before he tipped his hat and left.

  Claire stood there with a deep frown on her face.

  ‘I don’t want to hear what you have been doing, Miss Lottie. I don’t want to have to lie to your mother and pretend when she returns so we shall say nothing more of this night. We shall simply forget that it has happened and leave for the Malverly Christmas party first thing tomorrow morning when we are packed and well rested. There, in the company of your mama and your sister, you might remember again sense and decorum and a little of the wisdom you used to have before you met Mr King.’

  Lottie did not want an argument and after the last half an hour could not have withstood a further emotional outburst, so she nodded and made for the stairs.

  ‘I will help you undress and bathe—’

  ‘No,’ she interrupted her maid because she knew that her body was marked with Jasper’s lovemaking and she did not wish for Claire to see it. ‘I shall simply get into bed and sleep. I have a headache.’

  ‘I see.’ The words came quietly, but Lottie was past caring about how she had disappointed yet another person. On reaching her room she simply shut the door behind her, falling back against the wood as she did so and listening to the departing steps of her maid.

  Thank goodness she was alone. Thank goodness Mama was not here, nor Amelia. Swallowing back tears, she began to take off her clothes. Her bonnet. Her cloak. Her jacket. Her gown. Her underwear. Her stockings and her boots. They all dropped in a pile around her feet, each layer shedding more in the way of armour and inviting in the guilt.

  When she was naked she walked across to her mirror and stood there, bare and small, the red whorls of passion across the white of her skin. This was who she was now. This person. Different from before. Branded. Ruined.

  ‘No.’ She shook away that word because even now after being sent from his house she would still not change what had happened. She had known paradise. She had walked the pathways of bliss and given Jasper back as good as she got. Her small smile heartened her. It had not been all one sided, remembering the marks on his back from her nails, her lust imprinted upon him just as visibly as his was on her. Her finger covered one of the whorls at her neck and she tipped back her head, feeling in the movement echoes of her want. Still.

  ‘Jasper.’ She whispered his name into the empty space as if she might conjure him. Why had he sent her home? Why had he not accompanied her? Why had he simply sat there looking pale and indifferent and uncaring after such a night? When she yawned she knew she was too tired to think properly now. She needed to sleep. Needed to regroup, the shock of his response dulling the energy she more normally held.

  The sheets were welcomed as she crawled into bed, the pillows soft and the dawn light muted. She should wash, she knew that, but she could not find the strength to, the smell of him on her body, his seed inside her. She wondered about that, for he had used protection the first time and then nothing afterwards. Had he simply forgotten?

  The thought came that perhaps even now her womb might be cradling the first beginnings of life, though her menses had only just finished. Was it possible she could be pregnant?

  Her hands came across her stomach and she held the roundness of it close.

  ‘Please God, let it be.’

  A prayer of deliverance and liberation. A child who might be the best of both of them and a way for them to stay together. Surely if he knew there was a baby involved Jasper would behave honourably? He would offer marriage and a home and a future.

  Another part of her pushed such thoughts away. A trap to ensnare a man was a poor and inadequate thing that seemed like a wrongness.

  Perhaps he thought her wanton? Perhaps most other young woman would not have allowed him the adventure of the sensual, the languid lethargy in the experiment of differing positions, the granted consent no matter what they asked each other. She had been shameless and abandoned and licentious, any chasteness dissipated under the thrall of his touch.

  He would have recognised her lack of experience, though, because she had seen the blood between her thighs after the first time and so had he.

  God. Her body clenched at that reminder and an ache deep inside her began to throb. Just the thought of him made her impious and a different woman from the one she’d been before. Claire had guessed her secret simply by looking at her.

  She tried to imagine what had been so very obvious to her maid. It was not as she might have thought and what she’d overheard her mother and Nanny Beth once say.

  ‘When a girl loses her
virginity before marriage there is a sadness in her.’

  All Lottie could feel was joy and the hope of more, a secret knowledge that was too new to hide. A treasure.

  Her thoughts then returned to the topaz necklace, the stones wrought intricately into tea-rose gold. His mother’s? Not an inconsequential gift, then, but one of great value and personal worth.

  Nothing made sense. There was no logic in what had just happened.

  She would go back to see him this afternoon, to talk, and to try to understand his feelings. She knew hers, after all, and love was much too important to simply throw away on an error or a misconstruction.

  On that decision she felt the world around her soften and she yawned, burrowing into the pillows and pulling up the blankets so that she had a cocoon of warmth.

  ‘I love you.’ These words accompanied her into the realm of slumber.

  * * *

  Only pain held him now, wrenching him this way and that, the loss of himself more terrible than it had ever been before as he shoved a pillow across his face and screamed into linen and feathers.

  The bang on his door infuriated him and made him take in breath, a shaky furious movement that exacerbated the pain and made his leg reel in protest.

  ‘Go...away.’

  His valet’s voice came quietly through an inch of wood. ‘Miss Fairclough insists on seeing you, sir. She says it is important.’

  ‘No...’ This was almost groaned.

  Oh, please, God, do not let her come...do not let her be there through the door...please do not let her in.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Go...away...now.’

  This was all he had left as the remnants of sense leaked into unconsciousness. He could feel the pain taking him, leading him to a place that was black and still and quiet. Silence heartened him as he groped for the brandy and swigged it straight from the bottle. Some of it ran from his lips down on to his shirt, soaking the whiteness and staining it. He liked the cold.

  Would they break down his door? Could they?