She pulled the chain upon which the ring rested from beneath her blouse, and wrapped her fingers lovingly around it, letting it burn against her palm. Could she do this? Could she uncover his bones and not fall to pieces at the sight of them?
She’d only known him one night. And that was all it took to fall.
Whatever shame and sadness she wore as a coronet before was no comparable tragedy to the past few days she’d spent waiting for him to appear.
Awaking in the sunshine after a Scottish storm, alone in the bed they’d shared, had just about broken her spirit.
He was lost to her, of that she had no doubt. Lost so soon, when she’d only just found the one man to whom she’d consider relinquishing both her name, her hand, and her heart. A man who’d transfixed and teased her. Who’d pleasured and protected her. A man to whom true honor meant more than reputation.
He’d only ever asked one thing of her.
But it was a cruel thing.
She closed her eyes and took a fortifying breath, filling her lungs with the loamy scent of earth and frost and a hint of decay. She released the ring, letting it settle between her breasts, a comforting weight around her neck.
One she’d have to give up.
She could do this. She’d done difficult things before.
She set the lantern onto the earth and discarded her gloves beside it before placing her hands on the stone slab above his coffin and pushing with all her strength. She groaned and strained, even let out a few curses, but it didn’t budge.
Blast. She’d need leverage. Perhaps a—
Strong arms seized her from behind, drawing her back against a body as hard as iron. One arm locked beneath her breasts, the other around her throat.
“I’ll give you two breaths to tell me what you are doing here, before I snap your neck.” The growl was ferocious, arrogant, and alarming.
And no sound had ever been so dear.
“John?” she whispered around the tightness of her heart throbbing in her throat. She turned her face to the side, instinctively searching for his warmth. “John, is it really you?”
“A woman?” As quickly as she was seized, she was released. Cast away from the embrace she craved with the strength of an opium fiend.
She turned to see him, drinking in the sight of him with the thirst of someone finding an oasis in the desert.
Before her glowered a man of pure flesh and blood. Sinew and strength. His golden hair was cut in neat layers, even though it now spiked in wild disarray, as if he’d rolled out of bed only minutes prior. It suited him, the lord of Lioncross. The structure of his body was achingly familiar. The same long frame, the same wide shoulders and tapered waist accentuated by a dark wool coat thrown over a hastily buttoned shirt.
Aside from deeper brackets around his hard mouth and longer sideburns, he was John.
Except.
His eyes were perfectly dull and flat. So empty a blue as to almost be called grey as they assessed her with all the emotion one might attribute to a shark.
“You address me so informally, madam,” he said over an imperious look.
Her heart gave one powerful, painful thump, before sputtering and dying. “I’m sorry,” she gasped. “I can explain.”
One golden brow arched over a look of recognition. “We’ve met before.”
“Y-yes,” she stammered. “At Lady Bainbridge’s fete.”
Recognition flared in the dim lantern light. “You’re Veronica’s sister.”
Just when she thought her heart could sink no lower. “Yes. I am.”
He made a rumbly, pensive sound, half between a purr and a snarl. “I still don’t understand why they call her the pretty one.”
“What?” Suddenly it was impossible to breathe.
He shook his head, blinking as if trying to clear it. “Sorry. Do you mind telling me what the bloody devil you’re doing in my crypt on Christmas?”
“I um…” She itched at her hair beneath her cap, wondering just how to get herself out of this predicament without being thrown in an asylum. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
He leveled her a droll look, propping his shoulder against a stone wall. “Try me.”
She gazed at him a long time, at the lantern light splashing deep hollows beneath his chiseled cheekbones. Something in the imperturbable stillness of his gaze told her she could say anything.
So, she attempted the truth.
“I took refuge at a place in the Highlands of Scotland called Balthazar’s Inn on solstice night. While I stayed there I…met…” She sputtered and stalled out a bit. It was impossible to express her experience without choking up, so she reached behind her neck and unclasped the chain, letting the lion head ring slip from it into her palm. “I happened upon this, and was told it belonged to Johnathan de Lohr, the one who was lost at Culloden. I was…tasked to return it.”
Those heartless, ruthless eyes affixed on the ring, and she thought she might have read a spark of life in them.
But only just.
“The Lion’s Head.” His voice had become deeper, like a monk’s at prayer. “All this time. All these many generations have searched for it…and it just walks into Lioncross at Christmas.” He reached for it. Paused. And flicked his eyes back to hers. “May I?”
“It’s yours.” She offered it to him reluctantly, loath to let go all she had left of her lover.
He handled it as if it were made of spun glass, tilting it to unveil an inscription on the inside, which she’d never noticed. “Ever faithful.”
She leaned over to take a closer look, immediately aware that if either of them tilted their heads a fraction, their lips would meet.
“I’ve seen so many drawings. We’ve always assumed the ring was lost at the battle of Culloden. This was crafted in the Holy Land and gifted to the Lionclaw to always adorn the hand of the Earl of Hereford. In fact, a replica was never made because this one meant so much. They said there was a bit of magic crafted with it.”
Swallowing a surge of grief, Vanessa looked longingly at the coffin behind her. “I suppose I should have given it to you. I just thought…Well I wanted to return it to its rightful owner.”
The corner of his mouth tilted, and for a moment she thought she might burst into tears.
“That is good of you.” He hesitated, drawing a hand through his mane in an attempt to tame it. “It’s freezing out. Might I invite you in for some warm tea?”
She shook her head, needing to lick her wounds. Unwilling to have to look at him in the brilliant winter sun. “Oh. I don’t want to take up any of your—”
“Please,” he murmured, capturing her hand. “It’s a rather large castle, and it’s just me, now. The last de Lohr…well of my line, anyhow. You’d be doing a solitary man a kindness on Christmas.”
She swallowed a spurt of pity and called it ridiculous. He was one of the most eligible bachelors in the Empire. If he wanted companionship, he’d only have to crook a finger.
“I’m no sort of company,” she argued. “And not someone you’d want to be seen socializing with, besides.”
The tiniest hint of an azure flame flared behind his eyes, causing them to glow like black sapphires in the dark. “I’m a de Lohr. I do as I fucking wish.”
Worry crimped her forehead. “Perhaps you haven’t heard about me.”
“Oh, I heard,” he said meaningfully. “I saw the pamphlet that blackguard, Woodhaven, passed around my club.” His voice took on a savage bite to match the ferocity of his features. “I burned them all and got his bloody membership revoked.”
She smiled at that. “Well…maybe one cup of tea.”
He took up her lantern and turned away, so she followed his shoulders up the stone steps, blinking against the brightness of the morning.
Which was why she bumped into him.
It was like running into a boulder.
Jostled by her, he dropped the ring, and it rolled between his feet as he took a few steps before he realized
.
Vanessa bent to pick it up, and a snowflake landed on the tip of her nose as she straightened. She blinked and looked around, mesmerized by the drifting crystals of frost dancing toward the earth. It was as if the sky had released little diamonds, and they’d chosen to land in the Lioncross gardens, adorning them with indescribable wealth.
“Odd,” he remarked, tilting his neck up. “It wasn’t snowing when I followed you down here. In fact, it was a clear morning.”
Something gripped her at the sight of his throat arched to the sky. Something both foreign and familiar, and she cleared her throat to dislodge any gathers of emotion and the odd impulse to fall upon it like a vampire.
“Here,” she offered, taking the ring between her thumb and fingers and reaching for his hand.
He looked down at her and relinquished his hand to her grip. It was so similar to the one she’d become acquainted with, she thought she might expire. A few different marks and calluses, but nothing remarkable enough.
She slid the ring over his knuckles.
A perfect fit.
She wanted to rip it off again. To claim it for her own. Because it didn’t belong to him, this man with the empty eyes and kind, familiar smile. It belonged to John. Her John. The ghost who’d been somehow more full of life than even this magnificent specimen of a man.
She wanted to go back down into the crypt and sit with his bones. She wanted to go back to Scotland and sleep in the bed she’d shared with him. And mourn. Wail. Cry.
She knew it was pathetic, and she couldn’t bring herself to care, because he was gone. She could feel not only his body but his soul missing the moment she’d awoken after the solstice.
Perhaps he was finally at rest.
“Vanessa.”
She jumped at the sound of his voice. Looked up into his face.
His face.
The hollows had disappeared and…the eyes! The eyes were the same. No longer a grey/ blue but sharp with that familiar larkspur brilliance.
His name escaped her on a choked whisper.
John.
She jumped into his arms and he caught her against his chest, sweeping her around in the cheerful flurry before setting her back down.
“How is this—? What are—? Is he still—?” She couldn’t seem to finish a sentence, she was too incandescently happy.
He put his hand to his temple and then threaded it through his hair, testing locks much shorter than his had been. “It isn’t just him. That is, it’s me. But also him.”
“I don’t understand,” she croaked, fighting tears of hope and disbelief.
His smile could have eclipsed the sun. “I can’t say I do, either. All I can tell you is…when we, you and I, met at the Bainbridge ball all those years ago, I wanted you then. But I’d already planned not to marry because I didn’t have a heart nor a soul to give to a woman, and you deserved everything of that and more.”
Johnathan de Lohr, the Earl of Hereford lifted his face to the sky once again, allowing snowflakes to gather on his eyelashes as if he enjoyed the sensation for the very first time.
“I was born empty,” he told the clouds. “It would scare my mother to look into my eyes. She said she didn’t think I had a soul. It was why she never had more children. And I felt it too…”
“And now?”
He captured her with his gaze. “Now, I think I was always a vessel. I am Johnathan de Lohr. Perhaps was meant to be him—me—whatever. I still have my memories.” He gave her a hot look that threatened to scorch through her trousers. “I have his memories, as well.”
She tried to believe it, though her mind couldn’t seem to grasp just what was happening, and then she realized. “I never told you my first name.”
“Vanessa. I am the man you spent solstice with. You showed me photographs of locomotives and of what I now understand to be gas lamps. You stood with me in the Chamber of Sorrows and made love to me while a tempest raged around us.”
A tear slid down her cheek as the marvelous truth of it slammed into her with all the power of that locomotive at full tilt.
Vanessa’s entire body stilled. Her lungs froze in her chest and her heart forgot to beat as one word settled into her soul, looking for a home.
Made love.
Love… Dare she hope?
His expression was so full of tenderness it threatened to melt her into a puddle of pure, blissful sentiment. “It’s as if for one hundred and fifty years, one hollow note was playing in my ear, driving me mad, and then you blew in on a blizzard and brought with you every symphony I could hope to hear. You are my match, Vanessa. I never needed more than a moment to know it with unquestioned absolution. And I want to see the world with you, if you’d let me.”
He captured her hand and held it to his lips, pressing a worshipful kiss into her palm before he continued. “Like I said, I am that Johnathan de Lohr, and this one, who also lived an entire lamentable life without you. Since the moment I met you, you haven’t been far from my thoughts. I might not have the same body you became acquainted with, the same scars or history. I don’t have the hands that touched you. The mouth that tasted you, not exactly. But I have the soul that adored you from the first moment I laid eyes on you.”
Eyes. Ye gods what immaculate and incandescent light beamed at her from those eyes.
What life.
“I like these hands,” she whispered, fondling the ring, then she lifted it to her own lips to return his kiss, before peeking up at him from beneath coy lashes. “I would not mind acquainting myself with the rest of you. It is not as if my reputation can’t handle going into your castle unaccompanied.”
“Wait.” He stopped her, held her back from marching toward Lioncross. “I would invite you in only with the understanding that my intent is to carry you across the threshold as my Countess as soon as possible. I would defend your honor, Vanessa, and restore your good name.”
A smile engulfed her entire being, even as snowflakes landed on her heated cheeks like chilly little blessings from heaven.
“Let’s start with tea and see where that takes us,” she teased, knowing that the moment he proposed properly, she’d have no other answer for him but yes.
Yes. Forever yes.
“Kiss me, Vanessa,” he growled, dragging her against his inflamed body. “Kiss me because it’s Christmas and you’re in my arms. Kiss me because I’m the luckiest soul to ever live and then live again.”
Yes, she thought as she was swept away by the potency of his kiss. Entranced by the same magic she’d experienced that first time in the Highland storm.
It was Christmas.
And never would a gift mean so much as the soul of the man she loved.
* THE END *
About Kerrigan Byrne
Kerrigan Byrne is the USA Today Bestselling and award winning author of several novels in both the romance and mystery genre.
She lives on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington with her wonderful husband and Willow the Writer Dog. When she’s not writing and researching, you’ll find her on the beach, kayaking, or on land eating, drinking, shopping, and attending live comedy, ballet, or too many movies.
Kerrigan loves to hear from her readers! To contact her or learn more about her books, please visit her sites:
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The Earl of Christmas Past (A Goode Girls Romance Book 5) Page 8
