Mistletoe Magic (11 page)

‘She probably wants to chastise me on behalf of her son.’

‘No, the glance is one more of a measured curiosity.’

‘Then perhaps she was a particular friend of Albert Paget and is trying to work out how I did away with him.’

‘Well, no doubt we will discover the truth in a moment. She seems to be heading this way.’

‘Alone?’

‘Very.’

‘Mr Clairmont.’ Jean Taylor-Reid’s voice carried across the room around them and, ignoring Hawkhurst altogether, she went straight to the heart of what was worrying her. ‘I think my niece seems to have taken up your cause as a man who needs improvement and so I have come to warn you. There are many here who say that the misdemeanours of your youth would make it difficult for you to fashion a future here in London.’

‘Is that what they say, Lady Taylor-Reid?’ He looked around pointedly. ‘England has long since ceased to frighten me with its obsession with the importance of family name and fortune.’

‘Then you are inviting problems for yourself.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

Ignoring his perplexity, she carried on. ‘The protection offered by a family name is irrefutable and the name of Davenport is one I should wish to keep untainted. If my son Daniel has done anything to offend you…’ She swallowed back tears and stopped, and Luc, who could not for the life of him work out where she was going with this, remained silent.

‘I would plead with you to ignore him. He may not be the easiest person to like, but if he should die…’ Her voice petered out, but, taking a breath, she continued more strongly. ‘I would, of course, offer you something in return. There are whispers, you see, that you are more involved in the Paget death than you let on. Perhaps this might be a wise time to simply return to America—slip out on the next tide, so to speak. There is a ship leaving
for Boston in the morning that has a berth which is paid for.’ She pressed a paper into his hands. ‘You will find all the details here, Mr Clairmont, and the captain is amenable to asking no questions.’

‘Leaving both your son and niece safe from my person?’

‘I think we understand each other entirely.’

She did not wait to see if he agreed, but moved away, back to the side of Lillian’s father who watched with open anger. A small greying woman with a slight stoop and the iron will of a doyenne who would do anything to protect the reputation of her family.

‘Perhaps Davenport learned the art of getting his own way in everything from the unlikely breast of his mother.’

Luc laughed at Stephen’s reflection, though Lilly pointedly looked away from him, the tip-tilt of her nose outlined against the wall behind.

Beautiful. And careful. A woman whose life was lived and measured by the right thing to do. He should take note of Jean Taylor-Reid’s warning, should leave Lillian Davenport to the faultless standards of an exacting
ton
and to a fiancé who would for ever be circumspect and judicious. But he could not, not when she had whispered her feelings to him after she had fainted and her guard was down, not when she had admitted that her favourite colour was orange when it was so plainly not.

He finished his glass of lemonade and placed the container on a low-lying table beside him. If he did not act tonight, tomorrow might be too late, the aunt’s pro
clivity to interference worrying and his own problems with Davenport throwing him into a no-man’s land of wait and see.

He had never let anyone close, his wife’s death a part of that equation in a way he had not understood before. Lillian was drawing something out of him that he thought was gone, shrivelled up in the miserable years of both his youth and his marriage. But it had not. Tonight as he watched her across the room in her white dress and with the candlelight in her hair, the hard centre of his heart had begun to thaw, begun to hope, begun again to feel the possibility of a life that was…whole.

Swearing to himself, he turned away from Hawk and strode out on to a balcony near the top of the room.

The strains of Mozart rent the air, soft, civilised, a thread of memory from an England that had never quite left him. A great well of yearning made him swallow. Yearning for a home. Yearning for Lilly and her goodness, and sense and trust and honesty.

In the window of a salon downstairs he could see a Christmas tree glowing, the candles on its bough promising all that was right and good with the world. Elizabeth had never fussed with such traditions, preferring instead an endless round of visiting. A woman who found solace in the busy whirl of society.

He ran his hand through his hair. If he was honest he had married her for her looks, a shallow reason that he had had much cause to regret within the first year of
their life together. But he had been nearly twenty-seven and the land he had spent breaking in with Stuart had taken much of his time since first arriving in America. When she had come after him with her flashing eyes and chestnut curls he had been entranced.

He had never loved her! The thought made him swear because even in his darkest hours he had not admitted it to himself. Why now, though? Why here? He knew the answer even as he phrased the question. Because in the room beside this one a woman whom he felt more respect for than any other he had met in his life laughed and danced and chatted.

‘I think my niece seems to have taken up your cause as a man who needs improvement and so I have come to warn you.’

The old woman’s voice rang true in his conscience as he opened the door and searched the space inside, and as luck might have it Lilly separated herself from her family group and retired to a small alcove at one end of the room. Had she seen him coming? Lucas did not know. All he knew was that he was beside her in the quiet dimmed space and that her warmth beat at his coldness, living flame in her pale blue eyes. He could no longer be circumspect.

‘Your aunt has just warned me away from you. She thinks I may be a corrupting influence.’

‘And are you, Lucas? Are you that?’

He shook his head, her very question biting at certainty. He wanted to say more, but found himself
stymied; after all, there had been much he had done in his life that she would not like. As if she could read his mind she faced him directly.

‘I do not understand what this thing is between us, but how I wish that it would just stop.’ She laid her hand across her chest as if her heartbeat was worrying her, and the sensation building inside him wound tighter, dangerously complete. There was no room left for compromise or bargain.

‘I want you.’ Sense and logic deserted him as his thumb traced a line down the side of her arm, the silver of her hair falling like mist across the blackness of his clothes.

Fragile. Easily ruined.

Even that thought did not have him pulling away, not tonight with this small chance of possibility all that was left to him. Now. Here. Only this minute lost in the luck of a provident encounter and a hundred-and-one reasons why he should just let her go. Her fingers joined his thumb and he chided himself, the thin daintiness of white silk sleeves falling over his fist like a shroud. Hidden.

‘Lord.’ He pulled back as he closed his eyes and swore, a softer feeling tugging at lust and settling wildness.

‘Lilly.’ Her name. Just that. He could not even whisper what it was he desired because even the saying of it would take away the beauty of imagination and, if memory was all he was to be left with, he would not spoil even a second of it by a careless entreaty.

He had both power and restraint. The disparity suited him, she thought, as the heat inside her crumbled any true resistance and the incomprehensible fragment of time between separation and togetherness ended. Like a dream, close as breath. Melding simply by touch into one being. She heard the echo of his heartbeat, fast and strong, felt the tremble of his fingers as they trailed down silk and met flesh beneath the lace at her elbows. Her own breath shallowed, roughly taken, the very start of something she could no longer fight, no words to deny him. Anything. She had had enough of denial and of pretending that everything she felt for him was a ruse.

Tears welled as she swallowed. ‘If you kiss me here, I shall be ruined.’

There was no choice left though, for already her body leaned across, breasts grazing his shirt beneath an opened jacket, nipples hardened with pure and simple desire. He was her only point of connection in the room, her north to his south, balanced and equal. Even facing havoc she wanted him, wanted him to touch her, to kiss her as he had before and show her what it was that could exist between a man and a woman when everything was exactly as it should be.

Before it was all too late. She did not dare to fight it any longer for fear of a loss that would be more than she could bear! A single tear dropped on to her cheek
and she felt its passage like a hot iron, wrenching right from wrong, and changing before to after. No will of her own left. Just what would be between them, here in this room, fifteen feet from her father and fiancé and from three hundred prying eyes.

‘Ah, Lilly, if only this were the way of it.’ His voice was sad with a hint of resignation in the message as he lifted her hand and kissed the back of it. She felt his tongue lave between the base of her fingers, warm and wet with promise. When he moved back she tried to hold him, tried to catch on to what she knew was lost already. But he did not stay, did not turn as he left the alcove, light swallowing up both shadow and boldness.

Gone.

Alone she trembled, her fists clenched before her, the words of a childhood prayer murmured in a bid for composure, and her nails biting into the heated flesh of her palms.

Life is like a river and it takes you where you are meant to be.

Here. Without him!

She looked out into the night, a myriad of stars above shifting bands of lower cloud. The weather had changed just as she had. She could feel it in her blood and in the rising welling joy that recognised honour.

Lucas Clairmont’s honour just to leave her, safe. Taking a deep breath for confidence, she turned and almost bumped into the Parker sisters, cold horror on their faces. The beat of her heart rose so markedly that
she felt her throat catch in fear. Coughing, she tried to find speech. Had they seen? Could they know?

‘It is a lovely evening.’ Even to her ears the words sounded forced, the tremble in them pointing at all that she tried so hard to hide.

But they did not answer back, did not smile or speak. No, they stood there watching her for a good few minutes until the youngest girl burst into copious tears and she knew that the game was up.

A woman she presumed to be a relative hurried quickly to their side and then another woman and another, watching and pitying.

‘Miss Davenport let Mr Clairmont kiss her hand and she was standing close. Too close. She is after all betrothed to Lord Wilcox-Rice and I am certain that he would not like this.’

‘Hush, Miriam, hush.’ Another woman now came to their side, and the voice of reason and restraint might have swayed resolve had the older sister not also begun to sniff.

The whispers of interest began quietly at first, spreading across the ballroom floor like the ripples in a still summer pond after a large stone was thrown in carelessly. Wider and wider the curiosity spread, the fascination of intrigue shifting the weight of anger away from sympathy.

Her father’s face was pale as he came towards her and there was a violent distaste on John’s as he did not. Lillian saw her Aunt Jean frown in worry and heard the music of the orchestra wind into nothingness.

The sounds of ruin were not loud!

The colours of ruin were not lurid!

They were bleached and faded and gentle like the touch of her father’s arm against her own, his fingers over hers, protective and safe.

‘Come, Lillian,’ he said softly, ‘I shall take you home.’

L
uc left the Billinghurst town house and walked through the night, deep in his own thoughts as to what he should now do.

Lord, what might have happened had he stayed? He would have kissed her probably, kissed her well and good, and be damned with the whole effort of crying off.

‘God help me.’ The strain of it all made him breathe out heavily as he turned into a darkened alley affording a quick way back to his rooms.

Would Lillian have slapped his face and demanded an apology?

He could not risk it. Not yet. Not before she had had a chance to know his character and make her own choice as to whether she might want something more.

He swore again. He had always been a man who had carefully planned his life and made certain that the
framework of his next moves were in place before he ventured on.

But here…he did not know what had just happened. How had he lost control so badly that he would risk her reputation on a whim?

In retrospect the full stupidity and consequences of his actions were blatantly obvious.

Lillian had not looked happy. She had not caught at his hand to hold him back, glancing instead towards the others in the room, towards her fiancé and her father, as her eyes had filled with tears.

How could he have got the whole thing so very, very wrong? Why the hell had he risked it all, anyway? Anger began to build. He was a colonial stranger with little to recommend him and a woman who sat at the very pinnacle of a society making much of material possessions would hardly welcome his advances in such a very public place.

‘If you kiss me here, I shall be ruined.’
Had she not said that to him as she had drawn back? Ruined by his reputation, ruined by his lack of place here, ruined by the fact that he had never truly fitted in anywhere save the wilds of Virginia with its hard honest labour and its miles of empty space.

Lord, he had lost one wife to the arms of another man because he had never understood just exactly what it meant to be married. Commitment. To stay in one place. Time. To nurture a relationship and sustain it even in the hours when nothing was easy. The example of his own
parents’ marriage was hardly one to follow and his uncle had never taken a wife at all.

He had never understood the truth of what it was that made people stay together through thick and thin, through the good times and the bad. Indeed, incomprehension was still the overriding emotion that remained from the five years of his marriage.

A noise made him turn and three men dressed in black stood behind him. His arm shot out to connect with the face of the first one, but it was too late. A heavy wooden baton hit him on the temple and he crumpled, any strength in his body leached into weakness.

As he fell he noticed a carriage waiting at the end of the alley, and he knew it to be the Davenport conveyance. For a second he was heartened that perhaps they were here to save him, but his hopes were dashed as a heavy canvas sack was placed over his head.

‘The woman said to take him to the docks and that a man would meet us there.’

The woman?

She?

Lillian?

As the dizzy spinning unreality thickened he welcomed the dark whirl of nothingness, for it took away the bursting pain in his head.

Lucas Clairmont did not come as Lillian thought that he would. He did not come the first morning or the second and now it was all of five days past and every
effort her father had made to find him had been fruitless. A man who had walked from the ballroom and out into the world, leaving all that was broken behind him.

He was not in his rooms in London and neither Lord Hawkhurst nor the St Auburns had any idea as to where he had gone. She knew because her father had spent the hour before dinner in her room explaining every ineffective endeavour he had made in locating the American.

‘It is my fault all this has happened,’ he said solemnly, running his fingers through what little was left of his hair. ‘I pushed you into something untenable and your mind has lost its way.’

This melodramatic outburst was the first thing that had made Lillian smile since they had left the Billinghurst ball.

‘I think it is more likely my reputation that is lost, Father.’

Ernest Davenport stood, the weight of the world so plainly on his shoulders and the heavy lines on his face etched in worry.

‘I don’t think Wilcox-Rice will forgive you. Even his sister is making her views about your transience well known.’

‘I did not wish to hurt them.’

‘But you did.’

No careful denial to make her feel better. She imagined the Wilcox-Rice family’s perception of her with a grimace.

‘And the worst of it is that you did it all for nothing.
I do not now know, daughter, that you will ever be married. I do not think that avenue of action is open to you after this.’

‘But you will support me…’ Fear snaked into the empty sound of her voice.

‘Jean says that I should not. She says that you are very like your mother and that your lustful nature has been revealed.’

‘No. That’s not true, Father.’

‘Everyone is speaking of us. Everyone is remembering Rebecca in a way that I had thought forgotten. We are now universally pitied, daughter. A family cursed in relationships and fallen from a lofty height.’

‘All for a kiss on the back of my hand?’

‘Ah, much more than that, I think. At least here in this room between us I would appreciate it if you did not lie.’

She remained silent and he inclined his head in thanks, honesty a slight panacea against all that had been lost.

‘I think a sojourn in the north might be in order.’

‘To Fairley Manor?’ The same place as her mother had been banished to.

Her father’s face crumpled and he drew his hands up to cover the grief that he did not wish her to see, and in that one gesture Lillian realised indeed the awful extent of her ruination and the folly of it.

‘If you could find Lucas Clairmont, I am certain—’

Ernest dropped his hands and let irritation fly. ‘Certain of what? Certain that he will marry you? Certain that this will be forgotten? Certain that society
will forgive the lapse in judgement of someone whom they looked up to as an example of how a young woman should behave? You do not understand, do you? If it had been some other less-admired daughter, then perhaps this might have blown over, might have dissipated into the forgotten. But for all your adult life you have been lauded for manners and comportment. Lillian Davenport says this! Lillian Davenport does that! Such a stance has made you enemies in those who have not been so admired and they are talking now, Daughter, and talking loudly.’

She stayed silent.

‘Nay, we will pack up the townhouse and retire to Fairley. At least there we can regroup. Jean, Patrick and Daniel will of course accompany us with the Christmas season almost here.’

Lillian’s heart sank anew.

‘And then we will see what the lay of the land is and make our new plans. Perhaps we could have a trip somewhere.’

So he would not abandon her after all. She laid her fingers across his.

‘Thank you, Father.’

He drew her hand up to his mouth and kissed the back of it, a gesture she had not seen him perform since before her mother had left and the small loyalty of it pierced her heart.

When he was gone she pulled out a drawer in her writing desk and found a sheet of paper. She could not
just leave such a silence between her and John and Eleanor Wilcox-Rice. With a shaking hand she began to apologise for all the hurt that she had caused them; when she had finished she placed the elegant gold-and-diamond ring in its box next to the note, pushing back relief. She would have it delivered in the morning. At least in the vortex of all that was wrong she was free of this one pretence.

Lucas Clairmont was gone. Back to America, perhaps, on a ship now heading for home? He had not contacted her, had not in any way tried to make right the situation between them.

Ruined for nothing!

The mantra tripped around and around in her head, a solemn and constant reminder of how narrow the confines of propriety were, and how completely one was punished should no heed be taken of convention.

Lord, she could barely believe that this was now the situation she would be in…for ever? Even the maid bustling into the room failed to meet her eyes, stiff criticism apparent in each movement.

Lunch that afternoon was a silent drawn-out affair, each person skirting around the disaster with particular carefulness.

Her youngest cousin Patrick was unexpectedly the one who remained the kindest, setting out all his
faux pas
across the years with an unrivalled honesty.

‘It is an unfair world, Lillian, when women are dis
advantaged for the actions of a cad. If Luc Clairmont should walk through this door right now, I would bash his head in.’

‘Please, Patrick.’ Jean’s protests fell on deaf ears.

‘And then I would demand retribution, though God knows in what form that might take, given his light purse—’

‘I think your mother would prefer to hear no more.’ Her father’s voice was authoritative and Patrick stopped, the loud tick of the clock in the corner the one sound in the room.

‘The Countess of Horsham’s good opinion that no American is to be trusted has come to pass,’ her aunt continued after a few moments. She lifted her kerchief and wiped at her watering eyes. ‘And now we shall have no trip to Paris. For the wedding gown,’ she qualified, noticing the puzzlement of the others.

‘I should think that the lack of a shopping excursion is the least of our worries,’ Ernest said, waiting as the servant behind reached over to remove his empty plate. ‘But if we are to have any hope of weathering this disaster, we also need to put what is past behind us and move on.’

‘How?’ Jean returned quickly. ‘How is it that we should do that?’

‘By the simple process of never mentioning Lucas Clairmont’s name again.’

Her aunt was quick to agree and Patrick followed suit. ‘And you, Lillian?’ her father said as he saw her muteness. ‘How do you feel about the matter?’

‘I should like to forget it, too,’ she answered knowing that in a million years she would never do so, his pointed lack of contact a decided rejection of everything she had hoped for.

But as the days had mounted and the condemnation had blossomed, even amongst those who had no reason to be unkind, anger had crawled out from underneath hurt.

Why had he followed her into the dim privacy of the alcove if all he meant to do was leave her? Surely his actions had not been that mercenary?

Lilly.
The way he had said her name, threaded with the emotion of a man whose control was gone, and whose touch had burnt the fetters off years of restraint, leaving her vulnerable. Exposed.

Her father’s voice interrupted her reveries.

‘We will leave for Fairley in the morning and shut the house here until the end of January. Some of the servants will stay to complete the process before they come on to us. If we are lucky this…incident may not have filtered out to the country and perhaps we may even entertain on a smaller scale. I hope, Patrick, that you in particular will not find the sojourn too quiet.’

Lillian gritted her teeth, though she was hardly in a position to remind her father of her own need for some company. The winter stretched out in an interminable distance: Christmas, New Year, Twelfth Night and Epiphany. All celebrations that she would no longer be a part of, her newly purchased gowns hanging in the wardrobe for no reason.

As the terrible reality of her situation hit her anew she pushed back her plate and asked to be excused. The eyes of her family slid away from her agitation, another sign of all that she had cost them in her error, for the invitations that had once strewn the trays were now dried up, and the few that pertained to a time in the future cancelled by yet another missive.

Her entire family had become
personae non gratae
and she had not stepped a foot outside the house in all of five days. Even the windows overlooking the park had been out of bounds—she often saw curious folk looking up and pointing.

Poor Lillian Davenport. Ruined.

Suddenly she could not care. She could not hide for ever. She was twenty-five, after all, and hardly a woman who had been caught in flagrant
déshabillé.

Pulling on her heavy winter coat, her hat and her gloves, she called for the maid and the carriage to be ready to leave.

‘I am not certain that the master—’ The girl stopped when she noticed her expression. ‘Right away, miss.’

Within the hour she was at her modiste trying on a dress she had ordered many weeks ago and Madame Berenger, the dressmaker, was polite enough not to ask anything personal, preferring instead to dwell on the fit and the form of the gown.

‘It is beautiful on you, Miss Davenport. I like the back particularly with the low swathe across the bodice.’

Turning to the mirror, Lillian pretended more interest in the dress than she felt because a group of women she recognised had entered the shop.

An awkward silence ensued and then a whispering.

‘It is her.’

‘Has she seen us?’

Lillian tried not to react, though the hands of the modiste had stopped pinning the hem as though waiting for what might occur next.

‘Perhaps now is not a good time to be here.’ Christine Greenley spoke loudly, but the young assistant who had rushed to attend to the new arrivals assured her that there were seamstresses ready to help them.

‘That may very well be the case, but will Miss Davenport be here long?’ Lady Susan Fraser was not so polite. ‘I should not wish to have to speak to her.’

No more pretence as silence reigned, the sound of a pin falling on to the wooden floor louder than it had any need to be.

Lillian thanked the woman kneeling before her and picked up the skirt of her gown so that she would not harm the fragile needlework. ‘Please do not leave on my account, Lady Fraser, for I have finished.’ The walking distance seemed a long one to the welcomed privacy of the curtains in the fitting room, her ingrained manners even giving her the wherewithal to smile.