“I don’t want convenience.” He laced their fingers together. “I want you. I want you not because of what you can give me, but because you make me happy. You bring light into my darkness, Caroline. So I want you. Just you. For the rest of my life.”
“What are you doing?” She stared at him in disbelief when he dropped down to his knee and pulled the gold band she’d tried to throw into the fire out of his pocket.
“Asking you to marry me. Properly, this time.” He looked up at her countenance, and whatever he saw in the swirling depths of her gray eyes made him smile. “Lady Caroline Elizabeth Wentworth, would you do me the great honor of being my wife?” He paused. “Again.”
“Well at least you remembered my name this time,” she said, blinking back tears.
“Is that a yes?”
“Yes.” She dashed her knuckles beneath her lashes. “Yes, I do believe it is.”
He gently slid the ring onto her finger and then leapt to his feet to pull her into a hard, lingering embrace. “I love you,” he said fiercely. “I love you so bloody much. And I’m going to spend the rest of my life proving it to you.”
“I love you too,” she said, smiling through her tears. “I love you too.”
Together they lit the Yuletide log and stood wrapped in each other’s arms as it caught fire and started to burn. With a contended sigh Caroline rested her head on Eric’s shoulder, and he pressed his lips to her hair. It wasn’t the Christmas either one of them had been expecting.
But that was what made it so perfect.
Natalie’s
Christmas Rogue
Chapter One
Was that a bloody peacock? Slowly lowering his flute of champagne, Lord Benjamin Hawthorne, Earl of Souderton, watched in disbelief as a teal colored bird with a long tail strutted boldly across the middle of the ballroom.
Navigating the crush of bodies with impressive aplomb, the exotic bird paused to admire its reflection in one of the gleaming marble floor tiles before marching past the long refreshment table and out onto the terrace where it disappeared from sight.
A peacock at a party. Shaking his head, Ben tossed back the rest of his champagne and immediately raised his hand at a passing servant to indicate he’d like another. Just when he thought he had seen everything…but then this was Lady Essex’s ball, and if Lady Essex was known for anything it was her extravagance. One had only to look at the fifty foot yew tree in the middle of the room to know this was no ordinary evening at Almack’s.
Lady Essex had spared no expense – or peacock, for that matter – in decorating her home for Christmas. Although the champagne could have been a little stronger.
Pulling out a small silver flask from the inside pocket of his waistcoat, Ben added a small dash of brandy to his drink. He would have liked to add more, but he took his duty as a chaperone quite seriously. Which reminded him that he really ought to find out where his sister had wandered off to.
He wasn’t worried he would find Sophia in a compromising position with a duke in some study somewhere (even though he was willing to bet the rest of his brandy that’s what their dear mother was praying for). Unfortunately for Lady Souderton, however, her only daughter was more interested in mutts than men. If there was an animal anywhere within a quarter mile vicinity then chances were his sister was trying to find some way to stuff it into her reticule and bring the poor thing home with her.
Last week she’d gone for a carriage ride in Hyde Park and returned with a litter of kittens. Two weeks before that she’d snuck into Tattersall’s and bought a donkey.
A donkey.
The expression on his mother’s face had almost been worth the annoyance of having to drag the braying beast all the way back to the auction house.
Now Sophia had disappeared yet again, and he could only imagine what sort of creature she’d come back with this time if left to her own devices long enough.
Bringing his flute of champagne with him, he followed the peacock’s path through the middle of the ballroom, careful to avoid eye contact with any woman under the age of seventy as he set off in search of Sophia.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like women. He did. Very much. Probably a little too much. It was just that these women in their virginal ivory dresses with dreams of marriage dancing around in their pretty little heads were not his sort. At all. Which was why he did his best to avoid social functions. Alas, given her relationship to the family (she was a cousin of a cousin of someone’s aunt), Lady Essex’s Annual Christmas Eve Ball was unavoidable.
Rather like the plague.
“Pardon me,” he said pleasantly to a trio of young women wearing varying shades of white and gazing longingly at the couples swirling around on the dance floor. They were a veritable trifecta of ‘I bloody well think not’. “You are blocking the door to the terrace.”
“Yes!” the tallest one cried, throwing herself forward such so much enthusiasm that had he not stepped neatly to the side he would have found himself with an armful of enthusiastic debutante. Undeterred, the young woman caught her balance and whirled back to face him. “Yes, I will dance with you.”
Ben blinked. “Excuse me? That wasn’t a–”
“He wasn’t asking you to dance, Helen. He was asking me. Isn’t that right?” This from the debutante in the middle who was eyeing him up as though he were a particularly tasty treacle tart.
“Er…”
“He wasn’t asking either one of you.”
Ben’s gaze veered to the woman on the end. And stopped. In fact, everything in him stopped. His heart. His lungs. His throat. Unable to breathe, speak, or swallow, he could only stare. Stare at the most exquisite creature he had ever seen in all of his twenty-six years.
She was small. Smaller than him by at least a foot, and delicate in all the ways the most beautiful – and the most breakable – things were. Her skin was as smooth and pale as the freshly fallen snow outside, the only color a tinge of rose in her cheeks and the soft pink of her lips. Her cheekbones were high and arching. Her nose and chin dainty. The largest thing about her was her eyes. Framed with thick black lashes and as blue as the sky on a clear, crisp winter day, her eyes captivated him like nothing else ever had.
He saw pain in those eyes. Pain and hope and the tiniest glimpse of humor. He willed her to smile at him. Just one smile, that was all he wanted. One smile, and if he was run over by a carriage on the way home he would die a happy man. But her mouth remained flat and her eyes solemn even as he tried to coax out a grin with one of his own.
“He wasn’t asking any of us to dance,” she continued, her blue gaze unwavering. “Isn’t that right?”
Ben’s chest was beginning to ache, reminding him that he had stopped breathing. Dragging in a lungful of air that smelled of evergreen and perfume, he shook his head.
“No,” he managed to croak.
A slender brow, several shades darker than the thick mane of mahogany she had twisted in a chignon at the nape of her neck, arched towards her hairline. “No?” she repeated. “I heard you quite clearly. You asked us to move so you could go outside.”
“Yes, that is what I said, but I…” His raked his brain for a clever innuendo that would charm her or a compliment that would bring a blush over those beautiful cheeks. Usually he was quite good at both, but for some reason – perhaps the temporary lack of oxygen – he could come up with neither. The woman had, quite simply, rendered him incapable of coherent thought.
“Dance with me,” he blurted.
Glancing down at the arm he’d thrust towards her as if it were something mildly unpleasant she’d discovered on the bottom of her shoe, the blue-eyed fairy shook her head. “No thank you.”
Ben’s rakish grin slowly faded. “What?”
“I said no thank you.” Seeing his confusion, she elaborated, “I do not accept your invitation to dance, although I do appreciate the offer.”
“I’ll dance with you.” Slipping her arm through the crook of his elbow and latching ont
o his jacket with all the slippery strength of an eel, the tall debutante half walked/half dragged him towards the middle of the ballroom. Short of giving her a direct cut, there was nothing he could do but allow himself to be pulled along.
He looked back over his shoulder, desperate for one more glance at the beauty that had stopped his heart. She was still standing in front of the terrace doors. A flicker of emotion rippled over her face when she met his gaze, leaving two faint lines in the middle of her forehead. Lines he wanted to smooth out with his thumb and then brush away with a kiss, for someone as stunning as she shouldn’t have had a single worry in the world. And yet, in that moment, it appeared as though she carried all of the worries in the world on those slender shoulders.
“Who is your friend?” he asked the tall debutante.
“That’s Natalie,” she said, following the direction of his stare. “Natalie Rigby. Her brother is Captain James Rigby. He fought Napoleon at Waterloo.”
“Natalie Rigby.” He spoke her name as if it were a prayer, and the debutante’s eyes narrowed.
“You are wasting your time if you think to court her,” she said with a haughty toss of her head.
Forcibly dragging his gaze away from Natalie, Ben looked down at his partner and frowned. Their dance had begun – a waltz, of course it had to be a bloody waltz – and it was all he could do to keep her hand from slipping off his forearm and down his backside. “Is she married?”
“Natalie?” The debutante threw back her head and laughed. “Do not be ridiculous. Natalie abhors men. She always has. A few more years and she’ll be a spinster living in a house filled with cats.”
“Maybe she just hasn’t met the right man yet,” Ben murmured. They’d nearly completed a full circuit of the room and were approaching the terrace doors. But when he looked at the spot where Natalie had been standing, she was gone.
Chapter Two
“Who was that gentleman you were speaking with?” Violet eyes bright with curiosity, Lily Rigby – Natalie’s much adored sister-in-law – cornered her by the refreshment table and slipped an arm around her waist. “He was very handsome.”
“Was he?” Natalie demurred. Picking up a lemon tart, she brushed the powdered sugar off the top so as not to stain her dress before taking a small bite. “I hadn’t noticed.”
It was a lie, and a poor one at that. Of course she’d noticed how handsome he was. She would have had to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to.
Tall and broad shouldered with thick, wavy hair the color of roasted chestnuts and eyes a few shades lighter than warm brandy, he was easily one of the most striking men at the ball. Which was why she had been discreetly watching him for most of the night.
From a distance, of course. Always from a safe distance. When he’d walked right up to her as if he somehow knew she’d been looking at him it had taken all of the courage she’d worked so hard to achieve over the past four years not to turn on her heel and bolt in the opposite direction.
She was proud of herself for not running. Even prouder for speaking without a stutter. But actually dancing with him…well, that was where she drew the line.
He could have been the handsomest man in all of London – in all of England, for that matter – and she still would have refused his invitation to dance. Now she was forced to watch him dance with someone else while she stuffed her face with lemon tarts.
It was the same old sad story that had been played out dozens of times. Her friends danced while she faded further and further into the background until some days she wondered if anyone saw her at all. Her only consolation was that she was better. Better than she’d been yesterday, better than she’d been last week, better than she’d been last month. Each day showed a marked improvement over the last. But not matter how better she got, she would never be the same. Not completely. Her uncle’s midnight visits to her room when she was no more than a girl, too weak to defend herself, too innocent to know what was happening, too young to stop it, had seen to that.
He was dead now. Had died four years ago, the very same week her brother married Lily. With his death had come relief, and the release of fear that held her captive for most of her life. Fear that had persisted even though he’d been an old, crippled man incapable of leaving his bed by the time he had passed.
But the tricky thing about fear was that even after its source was gone, fragments of it still remained, buried so deep under the skin she knew she’d never get them out. So she’d learned to live with them. Learned to live with the stuttering when she became nervous. The clammy palms when a man approached her. The trickle of ice down her back whenever a man touched her, whether he be friend or foe.
For better or worse – and she dearly hoped she kept getting better – this was her life. Her burden to carry. And if it meant she had to watch while a handsome stranger, a stranger who had stirred to life something inside of her she’d never felt before, danced with someone else…well, that was another burden.
“You may not have noticed him, but he certainly noticed you.” Helping herself to a platter of scones, Lily selected the biggest one and crammed it into her mouth and moaned. “I cannot seem to help myself. Being this large requires an excessive amount of food. Sweets in particular.”
“You’re not large,” Natalie protested. “You’re expecting.”
“Expecting a baby elephant, perhaps.” But Lily’s face took on a soft, maternal glow as she touched her growing belly. “James is convinced it’s a girl. I’ve bet him five shillings it is going to be another boy. A mother should know what gender her own child is going to be, don’t you think? What about you, Natty? Any guesses?”
“About what?” The handsome stranger with the brandy eyes had just whirled past, and he’d taken Natalie’s attention with him.
“He fancies you, you know,” Lily said with a knowing glance at the stranger.
“Who does? I – I am certain I have no idea who you are talking about.”
“The man you’ve been staring at all night. Don’t deny it,” her sister-in-law said sternly when Natalie opened her mouth to do just that. “If I wasn’t happily married to your brother, I’d stare too. But I am happily married, which means I can’t stare – or at least, I really shouldn’t – which means you’ll just have to stare for the both of us. Although I really think you should do more than stare.”
Natalie bit her lip. “You know I can’t.”
“I know you think you can’t.”
“You don’t understand.”
“No.” Lily squeezed Natalie’s waist before she stepped to the side. “I don’t. No one can, except for you. Which is why you’re the only one who can decide when you are ready.”
Natalie looked down at her feet as a familiar knot of anxiety tightened inside of her chest. “What if I’m never ready?” she whispered. “What if I can never have a husband, or children of my own? What if I live alone for the rest of my life?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. First of all, I’ll make sure you have enough cats so that you’re never alone. Secondly, if you want a husband, then you can have a husband. There’s no one saying you can’t except for yourself. And that gentleman you’ve been pretending not to look at all night – well, I’d say he’s as fine a candidate as any. Go,” she said, giving Natalie a gentle push. “I’ll be right here if you need me.”
The knot in Natalie’s chest grew tighter. “What if I stutter?” she said helplessly. “Or have one of my attacks?”
“Then I’ll take you home and we’ll have a glass of sherry in front of the fire like we do after every ball. And if you have a wonderful time and dance until your feet ache then we’ll still go home and have a glass of sherry in front of the fire like we do after every ball.” Lily gave Natalie another kind but determined push, a mother duck nudging her duckling out onto the pond even as it tried to cling desperately to the shore. “It is Christmas Eve, Natty. If there was ever a time for a little magic and romance, it’s tonight.”
“What have you done?�
�� James’ growled huskily into his wife’s ear as he looped his arm around her waist and drew her back into a private enclave. Before she could answer he spun her around to face him and claimed her lips in a long, slow kiss that left her weak in the knees and yearning for more.
Four years married, she thought with a delicious shiver, and every time he kisses me it feels like our wedding night all over again.
“Well?” James prompted, sitting back on his heels and canting his head to the side. A large man with distinguished features and dark hair that was beginning to gray at the temples, he never ceased to take Lily’s breath away. While their courtship had been unconventional – a good a word as any to describe the tumultuous affair – she couldn’t imagine herself with anyone else. James may have been a grumpy, cantankerous ex-soldier with only one arm…but he was her grumpy, cantankerous ex-solider with only one arm and she wouldn’t change a single thing about him.
“What makes you think I’ve done anything?” she said coyly, arching a brow.
James snorted. “Is the sky blue?”
“Well, at the moment I’d say it’s more black than anything else.”
His eyes narrowed. “You know what I meant.”
Of course she had, but she did so love to antagonize him. “I haven’t done anything other give your sister a little encouragement.”
“Encouragement to do what?” he said suspiciously.
“To dance with a handsome stranger.”
“Lily.”
“She needs this, James.” Placing a restraining hand on her husband’s chest when he would have marched past her in search of his sister, Lily gazed beseechingly into his eyes. “You know it as well as I. Why do you think she continues coming to these balls, if not to dance? She wants to feel ordinary, James.”
“But she isn’t ordinary.” His jaw clenched. “You know what happened to her.”
Regency Christmas (Holiday Collection) Page 40
