A Regency Christmas Pact Collection

by Ava Stone

  “He seems capable of a great deal more than merely managing the running of an estate,” the other man replied.

  Chair legs scraped against the floor, and then a stack of papers shuffled, the fluttering sound matching Freddie’s breathing as she inched closer to the door again.

  “I still can’t believe my fortune in finding him. Danby suggested him, you know. He’s some sort of relation…I’m not certain of the precise connection, but the duke seemed sure no one would be better suited to the task.”

  Danby! This butler must be related to Thomas. Good heavens.

  “Interesting,” the other man murmured, though his attention seemed to have been drawn to something else.

  Once more, Freddie scanned the corridor to make certain no one had come upon her. It was still blissfully empty of anything but possessions—tables, portraits, other sorts of wall hangings. Not a living, breathing soul was there but her.

  “I thought this was to be a family holiday,” the unidentified man said. “Yet your home is filled to the brim with young ladies.” He sounded tense, his words clipped and short.

  “Stalbridge’s sisters,” Upton Grey said. “There are only two of them here, you know—Lady Frederica and Lady Edwina. The other two are married and with their husbands. I wouldn’t quite call that ‘filled to the brim.’” The last was delivered with a bit of a chuckle.

  Hearing her name, and Edie’s, on her host’s lips sent Freddie into a panic…but nothing could have caused her to panic as much as hearing them talk about Percy. Did they know she was out here listening? She pressed her back firmly against the wall, holding the palms of her hands against the smooth silk wall coverings.

  “He hasn’t just neglected his duties to the Lords. He’s apparently been neglectful of his mother and sisters. Rachel couldn’t bear the thought of them spending Christmas at Bexley Court when she wasn’t sure they would have a proper holiday.”

  She allowed herself to breathe again. They hadn’t discovered her presence. Not yet. She couldn’t waste any more time floundering in the hallway, though. Freddie bit down upon her lower lip and inched closer, craning her neck around the corner.

  What she saw when she finally got her head far enough around the corner to see in the room literally took her breath away. Too literally. As soon as she heard her own gasp, she pulled her head back and dashed away.

  A chair scraped against the floor again as she ran, but she didn’t slow or look back.

  “What was that?” the strange man asked, his voice fading in the distance.

  As she raced through the long corridors, hating the loud clicking sounds of her half-boots against the marble floors, the image of a golden cross kept flitting through her mind. The dimension was quite inconsiderable—only the size of her hand and arm, at most—but the detail and structure had been exquisite.

  Freddie was so caught up in thought that she nearly ran headlong into a wall, turning just in time to avoid a very sore, quite red, and potentially bloodied nose. She darted up the stairs to return to her chamber, the glimmer and glint of gold seemingly seared into her mind.

  A golden cross? Was it solid gold all the way through? It would have to be terribly heavy if it was, even though it was rather small. But no…now that she took a moment to think, it had been lying upon a spindly-looking occasional table, a table whose legs seemed incapable of supporting any sort of great weight. Surely it wasn’t solid all the way through.

  Was it hollow, then? A box of some sort? Freddie recalled a golden bust Papa had called a reliquary (which, now that she thought of it, was no longer situated in Percy’s library as it had been since Papa placed it there). The top of the head had opened up, allowing storage of ancient relics. That bust hadn’t been very heavy at all.

  Surely this cross must be a reliquary. But then Freddie began to wonder what ancient relics had once been housed within it.

  Not that such a thing mattered in the slightest. It wasn’t hers. It belonged to Lord Upton Grey…well, now it belonged to this other man. Regardless of who it belonged to, it couldn’t help Freddie and her family. She needed to stop thinking about it.

  She closed the door to her chamber behind her, leaning against it while she tried to slow her breathing and calm her racing thoughts.

  No matter what she did, though, a phrase kept pushing its way to the forefront of her mind: five thousand pounds.

  As soon as Preston entered the drawing room before supper, both Rachel and Mary rushed over to draw him into a hug, with Rachel even pushing herself up on her tiptoes to kiss him upon the cheek.

  “I’ve been near desperate to see you again,” his eldest sister said when she pulled back. “Your travel was all right? How are you faring after Arrington’s funeral?”

  Mary gripped his hand tightly within her own. “But you don’t really wish to speak of funerals right now, do you?”

  Every word from both of his sisters was said with such motherly affection, he couldn’t begrudge them for hovering. Any thought of that had fled him so long ago he could scarcely remember it. The two of them had banded together to rear him after their parents’ deaths. Rachel and Mary didn’t quite know how to stop mollycoddling him, even though he was now a man of thirty and more than capable of taking care of them both, instead of the pair of them taking care of him.

  Their overprotectiveness had annoyed him when he’d first gone away to Harrow. Arrington, Berkswell, Findley, and the rest of the boys in his house had been blessed with parents who saw fit to leave them to their own devices. None of their parents were constantly sending letters to the headmaster about every little thing. For that matter, Upton Grey was Preston’s guardian, and the earl couldn’t be bothered with such trivial matters as Rachel and Mary seemed to make almost daily concerns.

  Preston’s view on the matter had changed significantly when he’d returned home after the first term in his second year to find Rachel bearing bruises which had come at the hands of her then-husband, the Marquess of Charmouth.

  On that very day, Preston had decided he could withstand any amount of cossetting his sisters felt it was necessary to provide.

  He had also decided he would never sit idly by while a woman suffered at the hands of her husband, the man who should be protecting her from harm. That had formed the beginnings of what would one day become Darlingshire House, a safe haven for women whose husbands believed it their right to beat them. The act may be legal, but that didn’t make it right. Once he’d come of an age where he could take his seat in the Lords, he’d even started pressing for a change to laws that would allow women more legal protections.

  He was still pressing for them today, and imagined it would be quite some time before any of his goals came to fruition. As a general rule, peers thought it should be their right to do as they wished.

  But when he’d seen Rachel like that…

  It still vexed him, since he had been merely a boy, that he’d been unable to protect his sister. Preston had gone to Upton Grey with his discovery, asking for advice on how to handle the matter.

  His guardian had told him not to worry.

  Not worrying was easier said than done, however, yet they made it through his entire holiday from Harrow without another incident.

  A fortnight after he’d returned for the second term, he’d received a letter from Upton Grey informing him that Lord Charmouth had met an untimely end. A year later, after Rachel completed her period of mourning, Upton Grey had asked for her hand.

  There had been no more bruises.

  There would be no more bruises.

  There was no gentleman in all of England Preston held in higher regard than Upton Grey. Ellingham had proven to be equally as upstanding. He could trust his sisters’ care to them without fear for their safety.

  Just now, though, he held out an arm for each of his sisters to take, led them to a spot on the chintz sofa nearest the window, and answered every question they saw fit to ask of him. When their curiosity was finally appeased, he took his c
hance to appease his own.

  “I thought this was to be a family Christmas.”

  Rachel let out an inaudible sigh, the slight lines around her eyes crinkling as she gave him the look she always had which commanded his forgiveness. “It was,” she said softly. “But Lady Stalbridge is on the board of my ladies’ charity, you know, and we had our annual meeting last month. She arrived in a hired carriage, not one belonging to Stalbridge, which I thought rather odd. And she didn’t bring a lady’s maid with her, even though we were there for the better part of the week. I finally pulled her aside after tea one day, hoping to get the truth of it out of her. She wouldn’t speak a word against her son, however, though it was as clear as day to me that he’s the problem. I got the impression, though she wouldn’t confirm it, that funds are rather limited for Lady Stalbridge and her daughters at the moment. I just wanted the Bexley-Smythe family to have a nice holiday...”

  Preston doubted the situation was as dire as all of that, but he held his tongue. Standing by while others suffered was not a trait any of the Hounslow siblings had inherited.

  If there had been any true sense in his mind that Stalbridge was neglecting the ladies in his care, Preston would have done precisely what his sister had done and more. He would have removed them to Darlingshire House, where they could be safe and well looked after. Neglect could be just as damaging to a person as physical abuse.

  Whether the Bexley-Smythe ladies were truly suffering or not—and Preston was leaning more towards believing they were not—his eldest sister had it in her mind that they were.

  Throughout Rachel’s speech, Mary had sat on his other side, nodding vigorously and hemming at appropriate moments, as though her agreement was required for Preston’s understanding. They all knew it was unnecessary, though.

  Blast Stalbridge for being a degenerate. Preston had known for quite some time the marquess held loose morals. Now the man was convincing people he was even more dissolute and debauched than he likely was.

  “I see,” he said at long last, hoping to convince them he wasn’t upset that he wouldn’t have the quiet family time he’d been hoping for. Or perhaps he was attempting to convince himself of such a thing. “Dare I ask how long you invited them to stay?”

  Both of his sisters let out visible sighs of relief, and Rachel took his hand into her own again. “I knew you would understand! Upton Grey warned that you might not be very forgiving, considering that you’re mourning a friend, but I couldn’t bear the thought…” His sister’s eyes flitted across the room to where the two young ladies—both of them blonde and lovely and laughing entirely too much for his comfort—sat with their mother, deep in conversation.

  Preston bit his tongue to prevent himself from grimacing. “Of course you couldn’t.”

  “That wasn’t your only thought in inviting them, Rachel,” Mary said cautiously, her eyes flitting up to meet Preston’s with a sizeable portion of implied meaning in her gaze.

  Good God.

  “You were hoping I might form a tendre for one of them…”

  Rachel squeezed his hand with such imploring fervor she was liable to stop the blood from flowing through his veins. “The elder sister, actually…Lady Frederica. I’m afraid that Lady Edwina is not yet out. But you do need to take a bride. There has to be an heir—”

  “Jeffrey is my heir.”

  “Jeffrey is our cousin, not your son. He’s working as a barrister and is quite happy to continue doing so.” Rachel finally eased her grip. “You know as well as we both do that he’d prefer not to have the marquessate fall to him. The responsibility…”

  Responsibility and duty, and the idea of having the estates and investments and servants all fall to him…those were all things which would terrify Jeffrey Hounslow. The young man much preferred being responsible only for himself.

  It had always been that way.

  But Jeffrey was young and teachable and far more biddable than any female Preston had ever known in his entire life. He’d proven he could learn to do things he never thought himself capable of, and he could learn to be the Marquess of Preston.

  He would have to.

  Every peer must learn how to do it, and who better to teach his cousin than Preston himself? He’d started learning to fulfill the requirements of the role at the tender age of four when his parents had died. Jeffrey could damned well begin to learn at the not nearly-so-tender age of four-and-twenty.

  “Jeffrey is my heir,” Preston repeated more firmly, ignoring the way Rachel’s hopeful expression faded before his eyes.

  Then he changed the topic of conversation, preferring instead to discuss the latest developments and accomplishments of all his nieces and nephews.

  His sisters’ offspring were a far safer conversational subject than the Bexley-Smythe women. He already knew the children held him in great esteem and affection, and would never use a fire poker around him for any purpose other than to stoke the fire.

  After what Stalbridge had put his sisters through over the last several years, God only knew what the chits were capable of…

  Without conscious thought on his part, Preston scanned the room until his gaze settled upon the hearth and the neat arrangement of tools situated beside it. A new thrill of fear clutched his heart, squeezing like a vise. The fire poker. Both of those young ladies were seated much closer to it than he was.

  Then the eldest of the Bexley-Smythe sisters met his gaze. She smiled at him in a way that lit up her warm eyes and sent a chill racing through his extremities towards his loins.

  God’s teeth.

  Before Preston’s thoughts could run any more rampant than they already had, Goddard came into the drawing room to announce that supper was served. They all ushered out into the corridor, Preston urging his two sisters forward until the three of them were at the very front of the exodus.

  He wanted as much distance between himself and the fire iron as he could get.

  What an utterly odd gentleman this Lord Preston was proving himself to be. While he may be Lady Upton Grey’s brother, after spending the entirety of dinner seated next to him there was simply no other conclusion Freddie could draw about the man.

  He’d conversed politely enough—the gravelly nature of his voice proving him to be the unknown gentleman she’d overheard talking with Lord Upton Grey—and had seemed knowledgeable and cordial and all the various and sundry things one must strive to be at all times when in polite company. And yet, every time Freddie had commented in any way upon any of the gentlemen in her acquaintance, a panicked expression had taken over Lord Preston’s otherwise handsome features.

  She’d lost count of how many times his distressed hazel eyes, now nearly gray in color, had flitted away from her to stare at some random spot near the hearth when she would speak. It was the most uncanny thing she’d ever in her life experienced.

  Most gentlemen would take care to look at a lady when the lady in question spoke to him. It was only polite, after all.

  Yet Lord Preston did not.

  He’d done the same thing in the drawing room before supper, as well, and all she’d done there was simply look at him. She hadn’t said a single word!

  Freddie didn’t appear to be the only one having such a profound and confusing effect upon the man, either. Any time Edie said something, or laughed, or did anything at all it seemed, she elicited the same reaction.

  Was this strange behavior merely how the marquess reacted to all women who were not his relatives?

  But that didn’t really make much sense as an explanation for his odd behavior, because Mama’s behaviors did not garner similar results, and she was just as unrelated to Lord Preston and Freddie and Edie were.

  Perhaps it was young ladies, then. Or unmarried ladies.

  She could only imagine what must have happened to him in order to be so petrified of young, unmarried ladies. Had he been jilted at the altar? Did someone attempt to entrap him into marriage through a compromising situation? Did he have a jealous mistre
ss who wanted to keep him and his attentions all to herself?

  Freddie’s thoughts about Lord Preston and his curious aversion to young, unmarried ladies ran rampant all throughout supper, which only caused her to stare at him far more thoroughly than was prudent.

  His eyes were perhaps his most striking feature, a combination of startling hazel intensity and warm, golden flecks, the effect of which gave him an entirely caring demeanor. His auburn hair, ever-so-slightly longer than was fashionable, curled slightly at the edges in a manner which made her think of scandalous things like reaching out her hand to feel if it was as soft as it appeared. Yet his face consisted almost entirely of hard, angular lines, making her thoughts turn to places she had no business allowing them to wander. Then she realized how very much taller he was than she (and like her sister Georgie, Freddie was quite tall for a lady), and she thought more fully about all the hard, angular lines he must possess in other locales.

  When she felt a flush of heat creeping up her neck, she knew she must absolutely turn her thoughts in a different direction, and quickly lest he notice her blushing. Granted, then he would more than likely simply stare across at the hearth again. It might not be all bad.

  As such, when Lady Upton Grey had arisen from her seat and announced it was time for the ladies to retire to the drawing room and leave the gentlemen to their port, Freddie had found it difficult to repress her unladylike sounds of relief.

  She was not accustomed to spending such an inordinate amount of time pondering the oddities of any gentleman apart from her brother Percy, no matter how dashing and debonair the gentleman in question might appear.

  Appearances, after all, did not tell the whole story of a man. She knew that as well as anyone, after observing the changes in Percy since Papa had died.

  She silently thanked the heavens when, after the gentlemen had joined the ladies in the drawing room, Lord Preston had decided to play cards with three of the others, well away from Freddie and her sister.