The Earl of Christmas Past (A Goode Girls Romance Book 5)

by Kerrigan Byrne

  Or, rather, captive. But who was she to split hairs?

  His feet levitated some six inches off the ground, and his hands locked behind his back in a posture befitting an officer of his class. He looked down at her from over his aristocratic nose and she had the sense he mentally disassembled her for examination whilst she assembled her tripod.

  “I eavesdropped on you and Bess before,” he admitted.

  “Oh?” She wasn’t quite certain how she felt about that, so she remained silent on the topic.

  “I’m given to understand you didn’t go to Paris with your family because you’d rather stand on the frigid shores of the deepest lake in the world and try to photograph a creature that only exists in folklore?”

  She glanced up from where she screwed on the mounting bracket. “And?”

  He gave a rather Gallic shrug. “It can’t be astonishing to you that someone might remark upon the decision. It seems…rather out of the ordinary.”

  Vanessa tried not to let on that his assessment stung, as if she weren’t aware that her behavior was remarkable. That she was doing what she could to make the most of her exile without advertising it. She didn’t allow herself to look up at him as she pulled the accordion-style lens and box from her case with a huff. “I’m a woman who is only interested in extraordinary.”

  “Evidently.”

  She cast him a censuring look as she affixed the camera to the tripod. “So says the iridescent apparition levitating above me.”

  “Touché.” He twisted his mouth into an appreciative sort of smile as he studied her. “So, you believe in ghosts and lake monsters. What else? Fairies? Vampires? Shapeshifters? Dragons?”

  “And why not?” She crossed her arms, wishing he didn’t make her feel itchy and defensive. “Did you know a woman, Mary Anning, found dinosaur bones the size and shape of the long-necked mythos of the Loch Ness Monster only decades ago? Which means creatures like Nessie have existed, and perhaps still do.”

  She held her hand up against his reply. “And if you go to church, they’ll tell you about angels and demons. Saints and spirits. Like you, for example. I’ve done extensive readings on the supernatural, and the stories are eerily similar across all sorts of nations and civilizations. If the native peoples of Australia and also the Scandinavians have similar myths of flying serpents and dragons, doesn’t it seem like their existence might be possible? Probable, even?”

  His mouth pulled into a tight, grim hyphen, even as his eyes twinkled at her. “Historically, I’d have said no, but at the moment it does seem ridiculous to argue the point.”

  “‘There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’” she quoted, wagging a finger in the air like some mad scientist as she bustled around her camera, checking bits and bobs. “Truer words were never written.”

  When she looked back up at him, he’d drifted close. Too close. Close enough that the fine hairs on her body were tuned to him, to the inevitability of his touch.

  A touch that never came.

  “People still quote Shakespeare?” he murmured.

  She swayed forward, and had he been real—or rather, alive—she’d have bumped into him. Instead, her shoulder sort of just…passed through his and she was fascinated with that same odd sort of sensation she’d had in the bath.

  Not contact but—but what? An impression?

  She swallowed around a dry tongue. “Always. People will always quote Shakespeare.”

  Ye gods, it had been a long time since she’d been alone with a handsome, virile man. One who looked at her like that. Who crowded her and invaded her space in a way she didn’t find the least bit irritating.

  Overwhelming, yes. But in the best of terms.

  She’d forgotten the heady experience of it. The places in her body that would come alive, and demand attention.

  Once again, he retreated, floating backward to give her space to work. “What do you call yourself? A mystic investigator of some sort? You travel the world looking to make these realistic portraits, these…photographs of the unexplainable?”

  “Not exactly. I travel the world searching for adventure. I just like to capture these adventures in effigy. Because it’s sort of like capturing a memory, isn’t it? Sometimes that means a Grecian ruin or a Galapagos tortoise, and sometimes…” She snatched the dark cover she had to put over her head in order to see through the lens. “It means a ghost or a relic of something supposedly extinct.”

  He made a deep, appreciative sound in his throat. It plucked a chord inside of her that vibrated deep. Deeper than church bells or bagpipes or the crescendo of the most tragic opera. Deeper into the recesses of her body and soul than she dared contemplate just now.

  She retreated beneath the dark cloth, looking through the lens of the camera, turning the dial to focus it.

  When she spied him, she let out a little sound of triumph. “Put your hand to your lapel,” she directed. “And levitate perhaps…three more inches toward the ground.”

  He leveled an abashed look somewhere above the lens, then tried to peek around it as if looking for her. “You’re not—trying to photograph me, are you?” He seemed as if the idea had curdled his cream.

  “I’ve heard any number of mediums have photographed ghosts. They say you can capture ectoplasm in photographs, and that’s supposed to be a gelatinous sort of goo left by spirits and ghosts. You’re ever so much more than goo.”

  “Do try to contain your effusive admiration.” His voice could have dried the Amazon into the Sahara. “I’m endlessly flattered to be placed above ectoplasmic goo in your estimation.”

  She giggled, a mischievous part of her wanting to trap the pinched and offended look on his savage features for posterity. “Come now, don’t be missish. You look so smart in your uniform. Handsome, I’d dare say.”

  He straightened a bit, blinking this way and that as if looking for somewhere to place her compliment for safekeeping. “You think so?”

  She looked him over, from his chagrined expression to his shiny boots. He was so tall and broad, almost offensively so. No one would call him elegant; he was too ferocious for that. But no one could call him wild; he was too regal for that.

  So, what was he? Who was he?

  So many questions almost choked her mute until one was allowed to spill out.

  “How did you die?”

  He stalled.

  She poked her head up from beneath the camera. “Oh, lands. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be uncouth. I just… Well you don’t look at all injured. I’d have assumed your coat would be riddled with bullets, or you’d have some ghostly axe sticking out of your head. I suppose I read too many penny dreadfuls.”

  He didn’t move, except to tug at his collar before he returned his hand to rest on the lapel of his jacket. “It was a bayonet to the neck,” he informed her with almost no inflection at all.

  “Oh…” Vanessa was sorry she asked. But his neck didn’t at all look—bayonetted. So that was lucky for them both, she supposed. He would have made for ghastly company. “Don’t move,” she directed before pointing the flash at him and shooting.

  He flinched.

  “I thought I said not to move,” she admonished him.

  “You didn’t bloody warn me it would be as loud as a musket blast,” he muttered. “Can I move now?”

  “You might as well,” she sighed.

  She was going to have to get used to the silent way he sort of—floated around her. It just wasn’t seemly for a man of his stature.

  “When do I get to see the photograph?” he asked, a boyish sort of anticipation making him appear years younger as he peeked over her shoulder.

  A frown tugged at her lips as a heavy stone of sadness landed in her belly. “Well, you won’t. After a few minutes, a negative impression will appear on a pane of glass, and I can get that developed into a photograph when I go back to the city. But—you’ll only see shadows and light on the glass. I’ll bring the photo back he
re, though, if it actually captured you.”

  “Perhaps it did,” he said blithely with a smile that didn’t at all reach his bleak, sapphire eyes. “For I am just like your negative…shadows and light.”

  A knock at the door saved her from bursting into tears. Vanessa shooed at him as she hurried to unlock it and opened to an anxious Bess.

  “I heard the blast!” she fretted. “I came to make sure the ghost hadna gotten to ye.”

  “The ghost and I are getting along just famously,” Vanessa said with what she hoped was an encouraging smile. “I was merely testing the camera to make sure the storm hadn’t damaged it.”

  “Aye, well.” Bess itched at her cap. “Would ye like to come through to the common room for stew, so Balthazar and Dougal can haul your bathwater away?”

  “Of course, thank you.” She turned to the ghost. The Earl…

  John.

  “I’ll be right back,” she promised him.

  Bess leaned into her room and eyed the device warily. “Ye’re really attached to that contraption, aren’t ye? Talking to it and the like.”

  “Oh, no, I was talking to—” Vanessa looked over to see that he’d disappeared. “Well, actually, yes. It’s my most prized treasure.”

  Bess regarded her askance, but ultimately shrugged. “I talk to me oven sometimes,” she admitted. “It’s a mite smarter and more useful than me husband and less temperamental, too.”

  Vanessa laughed merrily as she followed the woman through the adjacent storeroom and toward the front. “You called your husband Balthazar, but I heard you refer to him as Rory not too long ago.”

  “Aye well, the keepers of this inn have had Balthazar in the name since back when this part of the world was Caledonia. Since it is the name of the place, they all seem to take it on.”

  “I see,” she murmured, not seeing at all.

  Because the Douglasses were getting even more drunk and sloppy by the fire, Vanessa eschewed the mostly empty tables for the bar, at the end of which the two gentlemen in fine suits were nursing drinks and playing cards.

  Bess placed a steaming bowl of stew in front of her and hovered as Vanessa tucked into it immediately.

  “How do ye like it?” the proprietress asked, pretending to shine a glass.

  “Oh, this is…” Delicious wasn’t the word. She luckily had some incredibly fibrous and gamey meat to chew as a stall tactic. “It’s really filling and—erm—flavorful.”

  “Aye, it’ll put some meat on yer bones.” Bess winked. “I gave that driver of yers something extra in his stew. He’ll be up all night heaving into a chamber pot for leaving ye in the storm like a blighter.”

  Vanessa suppressed both a giggle and a spurt of sympathy for the man while she reminded herself never to get on Bess’s bad side.

  Even after only a moment away, Vanessa was antsy to get back to her room.

  To Johnathan. However, she thought this an excellent time to do a little sleuthing for his sake. “So, Bess, you were saying, about the inn. It was here during the Jacobite rebellion? And the battle of Culloden?”

  “Och, aye!” Bess said, obviously delighted to have someone to tell, as she was a natural raconteur. “Like many crofts and castles around here, it was a safe haven for the Jacobites, to be sure.”

  “But, not the English?”

  Bess’s features wobbled as she narrowed only one eye at her. “Well, no offense to yer countrymen, but after the battle at Culloden, the English were everywhere were they not? They stayed at the inn, to be sure, as it was sedition to deny them entry. But, they never found our secret spots, did they?” She tapped her head as if she’d thought of those secrets herself.

  Vanessa perked up. “Secret spots?”

  “Just so. Like Carrie Pitagowan’s Chamber of Sorrows.”

  “Chamber of Sorrows?” Vanessa echoed. “Now that sounds deliciously ominous.”

  Bess leaned closer, her chins wobbling in agreement. “Aye, Carrie worked beneath these old rafters during the days of Culloden. A saucy minx she was. Curious, like you. Always looking for something more.”

  Vanessa winced. Was she that obvious?

  Bess seemed not to notice, continuing with her story. “Carrie would go to Jacobite battlefields and strip the English soldiers of their treasure. It was about this time of year back then, another blizzard, another Na Fir Chlis when ’twas said she cursed that room. Warned all who would listen that a lion lived there and would devour any who stayed.”

  Chills spilled over every part of Vanessa, and she took another bite just to distract herself from them.

  Oblivious to her discomfiture, Bess continued, “Of course each new generation doesna believe in Carrie’s lion, but every time we try to let that room, the occupants are haunted right back out of it again.”

  At this, Vanessa frowned. “Why let it to me, then?”

  Bess cast her eyes down as she drew her fingernail through the pit in the wood of the bar. “I doona ken, lass, if ye want the honest truth. I couldna leave you out in the storm and…something told me the Chamber of Sorrows would welcome ye, and the lion with it.”

  Vanessa swallowed the dry meat in a lump that made its uncomfortable way down her esophagus, and drank a long swallow of dark ale to force it down.

  She could see Johnathan de Lohr as a lion. Fierce and golden haired. Not only a conqueror but commander, ruler of all he surveyed.

  And well he knew it.

  “Ye’ve known a bit of the longing that lives in that room, I wager.” Bess lowered her voice to the decibel of confidants. “And yer fair share of sorrow, too. Else why would ye be here alone what with Christmas bearing down on ye? If ye doona mind me asking, why’s yer family in Paris without ye?”

  Her pitying look speared Vanessa through the ribs as she cast about for an answer. “Well I—”

  “Tell me the young, cheap whisky isn’t making me see things, Priestly,” a nasally, masculine, British voice slurred with a bit of a lisp. “Tell me this isn’t little Vanessa Latimer, wot?”

  Vanessa turned to see that the men who had been playing cards at the edge of the bar now crowded close around her, effectively trapping her onto the tall stool upon which she perched. They each had an empty glass in their hands, and the one who’d addressed her swayed, dangerously.

  “By Jove.” His dark-haired friend—Priestly, she presumed—might have been passably handsome but for sporting a pathetic, thin mustache. He leered down at her from marble-dark eyes held way too close together. “I thought she looked familiar when she blew in, but she was in such a state of disarray I didn’t care to look at her. She cleans up rather well, though. I could almost believe she was respectable.”

  “Yes,” the first one intoned, combing his hands through fair hair made greasy with too much pomade. The scent of it was nearly overpowering. “Quite respectable. But we know better, don’t we?”

  The food turned to ashes in her mouth. Vanessa locked everything down just as she’d taught herself to when preparing for just one such encounter.

  “Gentlemen,” she greeted soberly. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced and, therefore, it is not polite to approach me thusly.”

  Priestly’s eyebrows shot up. “My, aren’t we all grown up and putting on airs? What do you say to that, Gordie?”

  Gordie’s watch chain gleamed as he leaned in obscenely close, his breath reeking of scotch. “We’ve heard tell you spend your time galivanting to exotic places. Learning, no doubt, exotic skills.”

  Priestly all but tossed his glass to Bess. “I’d take a whisky, but not the kind that tastes like we’ve licked a peat bog. The good stuff you’re no doubt hiding back there. And I’ll make a bloody ruckus if you water it down.”

  Vanessa let out an outraged breath, ashamed of her countrymen. “That’s beneath you, gentleman, talking to a proprietress like that.”

  Gordie leaned even closer, forcing her to bend over backward to escape him, which caused her to bump into Priestly. “I’d rather you w
ere beneath me.”

  “I beg your pardon!” she huffed. She’d been heckled before, but not so publicly. Nor so rudely.

  “Really, Gordie, don’t be vulgar; we’re sharing a room in this shitehole, there’s not privacy at all.”

  Gordie’s suggestive expression caused the gorge in Vanessa’s stomach to rise into her throat. “We can share other things. We’ve done it before.” He raked her with a glare miraculously overflowing with both disdain and desire. “Woman like her will let you put it anywhere you like.”

  Before he even finished his last word, her entire bowl of stew lurched from the table and was heaved into his face, the scalding gravy latching onto his skin.

  A shrill scream erupted from him as he clawed at himself, trying to wipe it off.

  Vanessa’s hands were still clenched at her sides. She’d never even reached for the bowl.

  She looked across the bar at Bess in time to see that the whisky bottle she’d retrieved was snatched from Bess’s hands and smashed over Priestly’s head. The jagged neck hung in the air as if brandished by an invisible hand, ready to plunge into the man’s throat.

  “Sweet Christ in heaven.” Bess crossed herself and made a few other signs against evil as well.

  It was her ghost. Even though she couldn’t see him, there was no denying it.

  “John,” Vanessa gasped into the empty air next to the floating bottle. “Johnathan, don’t.”

  The bottle dropped.

  Priestly turned on her. “You putrid slag! You’re worth no more than a—”

  His entire body flew back as if it had crumpled. He landed on the table by the fireplace, splintering it and scattering half a dozen drunk and slightly dozing Douglasses.

  The highlanders launched into action, leading with their fists, assuming, no doubt, they’d nearly missed a tavern brawl.

  Gordie managed to wipe mutton out of his eyes in time to catch a fist to the jaw, dropping him to the floor immediately.

  Vanessa whirled to Bess, who wiped her hands on her apron and reached beneath the bar. “Go back to yer room, dearie. I’ll restore order here.” When she extracted a plank the size of an oar, Vanessa quickly retreated. She passed Balthazar on her way, grinning and rolling up his sleeves as if eager to join the fray.