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Gift-Wrapped Governesses: Christmas at Blackhaven Castle / Governess to Christmas Bride / Duchess by Christmas
Marguerite Kaye

ANNIE BURROWS

Sophia James


Christmas at Blackhaven CastleIn disguise, penniless Lady Seraphina Moreton seeks sanctuary at the Duke of Blackhaven’s castle just days before Christmas. Trey swore never again to be beguiled by a beautiful face, but as governess Seraphina gets close to his unruly, motherless children, he wants the festive joy she brings to stay beyond Christmas Day…Governess to Christmas BrideLord Chepstow hasn’t seen Honeysuckle Miller since she was a plain, awkward schoolgirl. Now she’s not so plain and is looking after the host’s children at a lavish Christmas house party. And the one thing Lord Chepstow wants on his Christmas list is the prim governess! Duchess by Christmas Masquerading as a governess to help the brooding Duke of Blairmore find a wife is not how Regan Stuart expected to spend Christmas! Then he steals an unexpected kiss, endangering Regan’s heart…unless Gabriel can see beyond her dowdy costume and realise she’s his perfect Christmas bride!











ALL HE WANTS FOR CHRISTMAS …




Gift-WrappedGOVERNESSES


Three magical dreams come true from favourite authors Sophia James, Annie Burrows and Marguerite Kaye!


Praise for the authors ofGIFT-WRAPPED GOVERNESSES

SOPHIA JAMES

‘James weaves her spell, captivating readers with wit and

wisdom, and cleverly combining humour and poignancy with

a master’s touch in this feel-good love story.’

—RT Book Reviews on High Seas to High Society

‘An excellent tale of love, this book is more than a romance;

it pulls at the heartstrings and makes you wish the story

wouldn’t end.’

—RT Book Reviews on Ashblane’s Lady

ANNIE BURROWS

‘A compelling read from beginning to end. This is a

beautiful, poignant, sensual story of two lonely

hearts finding each other at last.’

—RT Book Reviews on A Countess by Christmas

‘Burrows cleverly creates winning situations and attractive

characters in this amusing romance.’

—RT Book Reviews on The Earl’s Untouched Bride

MARGUERITE KAYE

‘Kaye delights readers with a heated seduction and fiery

games that burn up the pages when her heroine takes

‘The Captain’s Wicked Wager’.’

—RT Book Reviews on The Captain’s Wicked Wager

‘[A]n innocent Englishwoman swept away by a marvellous

hero into a life and a passion she has never known’

—RT Book Reviews on Innocent in the Sheikh’s Harem





Gift-WrappedGovernesses

Christmas at Blackhaven Castle


Sophia James




Governess to Christmas Bride


Annie Burrows




Duchess by Christmas


Marguerite Kaye






www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)




Christmas at Blackhaven Castle


Sophia James




About the Author




SOPHIA JAMES lives in Chelsea Bay on Auckland, New Zealand’s North Shore with her husband, who is an artist, and three children. She spends her mornings teaching adults English at the local migrant school and writes in the afternoons. Sophia has a degree in English and history from Auckland University and believes her love of writing was formed reading Georgette Heyer with her twin sister at her grandmother’s house.




Chapter One







‘Everywhere and at all times, Christmas has been the season of miracle and surprises …’

Blackhaven Castle, Essex, England

19 December, 1812

Lady Seraphina Moreton came to Blackhaven Castle on the edge of the worst storm to hit Essex in living memory. Hailstones as large as golf balls had pelted the carriage roof and the snow at each side of the winding country lane was deep.

‘Not an omen, not an omen,’ she whispered to herself, repeating it over and over again as the coach jolted violently and stopped. Before her the castle loomed, walls tall and dark. A single light was held by a figure standing on the large front portico.

Blackhaven. It suited its name, forbidding and isolated. Seraphina drew in breath. She must not be seen to be criticising. She must place a smile on her face and be unremittingly merry. Was that not what Mrs Jennings at the agency had impressed upon her? ‘No sour faces in this profession, miss. The client is always right and beggars cannot be choosers.’

Beggars like her! The panic that lay beneath her careful veneer was only just buried. She wanted to run from this place across the frigid ground and away from a world that was increasingly indecipherable to her.

Instead, she waited until the door was opened, lifted the hem of her velvet cloak and stepped out into the night, the servant with the lamp indicating the care needed on a patch of frozen ice as she followed him into the house.

Trey Linton Stanford, the sixth Duke of Blackhaven, stood against the windows in his library, turning as the woman entered, accompanied by his man Elliot. He had seen her alight from the coach, her hair the colour of the burnished angel wings that graced the stained-glass panels in the family chapel and bright in the falling dusk. He hoped like hell that she was not beautiful, was not young and was not one of those governesses who placed a false smile upon their lips and never let go of it.

When she came closer, however, and pale blue eyes met his own, he knew himself to be sorely disappointed on all three accounts. He swore soundly beneath his breath.

‘Welcome to Essex.’ He could hear the lack of charity in his words, but did nothing to alter the tone. Six governesses in three years and this one looked to be the most fainthearted of the lot. His sons would eat her up in a day. ‘I am Blackhaven.’

‘I thank you for the kindness of the offer of a position here, my lord. My name is Miss Sarah Moorland, and I hail from London.’ She curtsied with grace, her voice holding the cadence of a genteel upbringing as she went on. ‘I shall, of course, do my very upmost to be the sort of teacher you desire for your children, sir, as this post has arrived at a most opportune time for me.’

Trey almost smiled at that. Almost. He could see desperation in her eyes. ‘You have experience, then, in the role of a governess?’

The flush in her cheeks told him she had not, though to give her her due she did try to dredge up something. ‘I have often minded the children of friends, my lord, and found the experience most rewarding.’

‘Indeed.’

Silence followed the word, though a frown deepened on the delicate lines of her forehead as he came into the circle of bright light thrown from the lamp on his desk. Damn, he kept forgetting about his appearance in the company of strangers until he saw the reaction on their faces.

‘I was hurt in Corunna under Moore, and I apologise for any fear such a visage might engender.’ The explanation was the one he gave to all who looked at him in the way she did, word for word rolling off his tongue like a remembered poem.

‘Oh, it is not your countenance I frown over, my lord. My brother was killed in Rueda in the same campaign you mention and such an injury reminded me of him. You were lucky to at least be able to come home.’

A surprise. He seldom enjoyed them any more. To be called lucky was a new experience, too. For the first time in a long while he laughed. The sound was rusty and broken.

‘You say this post arrived at an opportune time. Why?’

‘My father has recently passed away and my only remaining brother found he had not the space to house me.’

‘Marriage was not an option, then?’

Her face reddened from top to bottom, fear in the quiet blueness of her eyes. Deciding now was not the time to pursue such a topic, Trey switched subjects altogether.

‘My boys are nine, seven and five. They need tight control and good discipline. They wake at six and go to bed at eight. If you can teach them something of literature, mathematics and science, I should be well satisfied.’

The uncertain nod of her head told him such subjects were probably as much a mystery to her as they were to his sons, though under the circumstances he could ill afford to be strident. Someone to watch over chaos was the most he could ask for. Eton should see to the rest. ‘Your room will be on the same floor as the children’s though a night nurse is employed. Breakfast will be served in the downstairs salon at seven and the hours of schooling are between nine and six. Weekends, apart from Saturday morning, shall be your own; if you wish a ride to the nearest village you only need ask. Are there any questions?’

He watched while Miss Moorland mulled the rules around in her head and was surprised when she nodded. None of the other governesses interviewed had ever asked anything more of him.

‘Do you travel back to London much, sir?’

‘Never.’

Waiting for chagrin, he got relief instead and as she pulled at the front of the cloak he noticed that her fingernails were short.

His leg ached from standing and he longed to sit, the cold gnawing into his bones as pain. All he wanted was some solitude and a stiff brandy, but she did not look as though she were finished.

‘I would also like to ask if you would allow me to bring a small dog into your house, my lord? She has nowhere else to go, you see, and …’

‘How small?’

The cloak fell back and the russet head of a mongrel came out from between balding velvet.

‘It seems one is already in my house, Miss Moorland.’

‘I know and I am terribly sorry, sir.’ Her cheekbones were hollowed in anxiety, eyes beacons of absolute entreaty as she stared at him. ‘But I promise she is the quietest dog in the whole world and she loves children.’

‘A paragon, then.’ The disordered world of his house was becoming even more disorderly. Miss Moorland’s bare hands were white knuckled and shaking, but short of throwing the small animal out into the cold there was very little else that he could do. God, the dog looked as frightened as its mistress with its timid stare and down-turned mouth. The only hound he had ever owned was his father’s cast-off mastiff and that canine had been both surly and dangerous.

He did not like dogs. He did not like surprises. He did not like forced joviality or the further promise of future chaos.

However, the newcomer was not quite finished. ‘Would there be any chance, sir, of a tit-bit from the kitchen for Melusine? I know it is late, but she is hungry and it has been a very long journey.’

Two things hit Trey simultaneously at her request and both interested him. She was as hungry as her dog but had not asked for her own succour, and she knew the obscure legends from the house of de Lusignan.

Melusine. The dragon princess. A beautiful woman by daylight and a serpent by night. Beautiful and secretive. The same might be said of Miss Sarah Moorland.

‘You will both be fed in a few moments and your duties tomorrow shall only be light ones whilst you recover from the trip.’

Lord, what had made him say that—the tip-tilted nose or the dimples deepening in her cheeks every time he did her a small kindness? Her hair in the light of his lamp was shining spun gold, a few of the pins loosened and allowing strands to fall unbound to her waist. He wondered what his wife might have made of her and then dismissed the thought completely. Catherine Stanford had been a woman who seldom thought of anyone else, her death mirroring her selfishness in life.

She had caught pneumonia in a gown that would have been better suited to a London whorehouse. She had gone to a party, riding home on horseback afterwards through the darkness with a neighbouring lord. Trey had arrived at Blackhaven three days later, war-shocked and sickened from the storms the British sea transports had endured across the Bay of Biscay, his left cheek red, raw and infected.

He might have taken her to task for such inappropriate actions had she lived beyond the following week. But she had not and the rumours of her faithlessness had swirled about the chapel even as he had buried her, the neighbouring earl inconsolable in the front pew.

On the day before the coming of the Twelfth Night, no less. He had always hated the Christmas season since.

Seraphina turned away from him, trying to regroup. Do not cry, she told herself firmly. All men hate tears and this one will be no exception. But she was tired and hungry and scared and the bravado she had worn like a shield all the way from London was beginning to crumble at an alarming rate. Melusine’s warm body next to her own was shaking, a result, she suspected, of too little food and too much travelling. If her dog should be sick on the expensive Aubusson rug beneath her feet, they would both be tossed out. The thought made her swallow as the duke watched her intently.

He was beautiful, though the scar across his cheek gave the comeliness an edge of menace and threat. No small wound that, no easy recuperation either. His wife had died three years before at Christmas, the woman at the agency had impressed upon her, so this time of year would hold hard memories.

Yet he had not bade her gone, even with her dog, and had also promised them both some supper. She swallowed again and felt some small hope return. He did not travel to London at all, and this place was as isolated as they came. Perhaps she would be safe for a little while until she could devise a better plan and escape England altogether.

No. She could think of none of it until she ate something for the dizziness was back, whirling around her head in a cloud.

The door had opened, too, three small children peering through behind it, their eyes as dark as their father’s.

Reaching for the back of the sofa to steady herself, Seraphina’s fingers felt too strange to grip and then she was falling down and down and down, the room spinning as she went.

Trey caught her, scowling at the knowledge that she was hardly even the weight of his oldest son. The threadbare velvet in her cloak enveloped him and her animal had made a last-moment leap for safety and sat panting in one corner of the library, the whites in her eyes brushed with fear. Her tail had a strange bend to it.

‘A dog?’ Gareth, his youngest son, rushed over to sit before it, his hand reaching out with care whilst his brother David tossed a variety of cushions from the old sofa, leaving a bed on which to place this unexpected visitor. Terence, his middle child, did nothing but stand and stare and Trey’s heart tumbled in recognition of the familiar lack of response.

Already Miss Moorland was coming around, the colour in her cheeks pale. A thin beading of sweat covered the skin above her top lip and plastered her fringe to her forehead. She looked younger and more vulnerable than she had done awake, the darkness of her lashes a contrast to her hair. When Trey untied the fastening on her cloak to try to give her more air, he saw that the white dress she wore was at least two sizes too big. The pieces of the puzzle of Miss Moorland were not adding up somehow, for the leather in her boots was fine and skilfully fashioned—as fine as her voice and the one pearl she had on a silver chain hanging around her neck.

‘I fainted?’ Her query was laced with horror as she tried to sit up.

‘I would stay lying down for a moment if I was you.’

She ignored him. ‘Melusine?’

‘Is in the corner looking about as alarmed as you are. My son is tending to her.’

‘Thank you.’ The pulse at her wrist raced and Trey thought she might very well faint again. Placing her hand down, he stood.

‘Gareth, bring the hound to Miss Moorland, please. Pick her up. I am assured by this lady that she is the kindest of dogs.’

His youngest son pulled the small animal towards him by the collar, making his best attempt at lifting it, but just as he was about to secure it in his arms, the thing bounded straight out of them and on to the circular table next to the sofa, tipping both it and the ancient urn of Great-Uncle Tobias, with the ornate porcelain-twisted handles and painted woodland scenes, and sending them headlong to the floor.

A thousand pieces shattered around the room in a single loud explosion, causing the hound to simply draw into itself and urinate all over the rug, her whines of apprehension becoming more insistent as a hush fell in the library.

Then Terence began to laugh, a sound Trey had not heard him make in three long years and so foreign that he could not believe he was hearing it. The dog, understanding that one member of the human population in the room was not about to kill it, sidled immediately up to his middle son and waited patiently to be lifted into a careful embrace.

A miracle.

A wonder.

The answer to his prayers.

Though Miss Sarah Moorland, newly arrived from London and now sitting open mouthed on his burgundy-velour chaise-longue, looked very much as if she was going to be violently sick.




Chapter Two







‘Is she a Christmas fairy, Papa? Is that how she mended Terry’s voice?’

The smallest boy stood in front of her, dark eyes watching warily. The oldest child joined him.

‘Did she bring us the dog as a present?’ His voice was imbued with the hope that only children knew how to engender. Even the one who held Melusine looked interested in her answer, though the spell was broken as the Duke of Blackhaven shepherded them away to a further distance.

‘This is your new governess, Miss Moorland, and her dog, Melusine.’

‘How old is she?’ The finger pointed at her puppy looked decidedly grubby, a large and untended cut across the skin above the thumb and Seraphina sat forwards, her mind clearer and the dizziness in her head lessened now, though nausea still roiled in her stomach.

‘A year old. She was born in late November and I found her on my bed on Christmas Day.’

‘Who put her there?’

She had never quite understood how Melusine had come to be asleep in her chamber with a spotted ribbon tied beneath her chin as the sun had come up. Certainly it would not have been her father’s or her brother’s doing and her mama had been a long time dead.

‘Someone who knew I needed her, I think,’ she replied, and left it at that. She suspected it to be the cook at Moreton Manor, for the woman had always been a faithful servant.

Blackhaven was watching her carefully, measuring her person, weighing her up. After such a start, Seraphina was afraid that she would be thrown out on her head before the night fell properly, the darkened freezing landscape of Essex completely foreign. If this was to be the case, then it had all been for nothing, this flight, this subterfuge, this foolish dash into the countryside with terror on her heels and freedom on the horizon. The wet patch on the rug seemed to be growing before her eyes.

She had failed. Miserably.

‘Did you come down the chimney, then?’ The oldest child observed her person as though she might disappear, and looking at her smudged white gown Seraphina could see how such a thought could occur. The part of her personality that found a story in everything resurfaced, surprising her, for it had been a long while since the joy of fantasy had taken her in its grip, and she could not understand how, in the middle of one of her darkest hours, such a trait might flourish.

‘No, for I would have been much dirtier if I had, of course. Real fairies would make themselves so tiny so that not a single spot of grime might spoil their dresses because everyone knows that fairy wings are very accurate in the art of flying.’ Trey Stanford looked away, though not before she saw the waning hopes of her teaching the exact sciences to his sons written on his face in a heavy frown. But she could not care. Imagination had a place, too, in the minds of small boys such as these ones.

‘Miss Moorland will be here until you go up to Eton after the Yuletide season and I expect the best of manners from each of you.’

Lord Stanford sounded as if he had had enough of conjecture, a man who dealt only in facts and reason, and when an old woman came to the door he instructed her to take his children along to their room despite all amount of protest. As the portal shut the silence lengthened.

Melusine had gone with them, trailing behind the boys with a decided interest. Seraphina hoped her dog would be safe, but under the circumstances thought it unwise to voice her worries. Finally, the duke spoke.

‘My son Terence has been mute since his mother died. A laugh was a good start, I think.’

Seraphina was left speechless at the enormity of this confession.

‘I had not thought of a pet, you see, but your dog seems to have broken through his reserve. My children have had a great loss and their reactions to it have all been different.’

Given the tone of his voice, she thought that the loss had been his as well, a man left now struggling with the remains of life. Lord, and how well she understood that difficulty, the tattered remnants of her own torn into shreds.

Trey Stanford was tall, much taller than she had first thought him to be; as the light scent of spice filled the air between them she breathed in, a feeling of safety garnered in the action. His library was filled to brimming with books and a piano stood to one end of the room, ivory keys well used and worn—a home that was not just a showpiece. Did he play? He did not give the impression of a man who spent a lot of time indoors, his body hewn into the hardness of much exercise. She looked away quickly as she noticed he watched her.

Shards of porcelain beneath her boot brought her back to reality. Would wages be docked for the breakage of such an expensive treasure and should she as ‘help’ be offering to clear away this mess?

The rules had changed around her as well and she chastised herself for not taking more notice of the hierarchy of service in her father’s house. The place of a governess was undoubtedly strictly observed in a ducal mansion such as this one. Another problem to overcome. She had not foreseen the enormity or the complexity of her change in station when she had decided upon it. Sitting here, she wondered if she should have run for the port of London instead and jumped on the first ship on an outgoing tide.

A trolley heavily laden with food arrived, the aroma of chicken and coffee and newly baked bread making her mouth water.

‘I can take it from here, Mrs Thomas.’

The servant’s eyes flicked across to her own, curiosity and regard written within them, the ghost of a smile on her lips before she bobbed and turned towards the door. Another younger maid came to quickly tidy the broken urn and mop up the unfortunate puddle, finishing the task in less than a moment and following the older woman out.

Lord Blackhaven indicated the fare on the table. ‘After you help yourself we will talk, Miss Moorland. Your dog shall be fed in the kitchen.’

Relieved that Melusine was to be given a meal, Seraphina piled her plate with food as high as she deemed polite and sat down.

‘What was your brother’s name?’ His lack of small talk made caution surface, his presence filling the room to bursting.

‘Andrew.’

‘Andrew Moorland? Which regiment did he serve with?’

‘The 18th Light Dragoons, sir.’ Lord, pray that the duke was not a soldier within those ranks as well or her ruse would be up.

When he shrugged his shoulders and leant back against the chair, she relaxed. In another life she might have asked what regiment he marched with and what the conditions had been like on the Peninsula at that particular time, just to give herself a better idea of the place where her beloved brother had fallen. But that life was long lost to her and a servant who had come to care for children would have no place in the asking of it. So instead she stayed silent. She was aware that he was observing her most closely.

‘Have we met before? You look … somewhat familiar.’

She reddened again, the curse of her fair skin and blonde hair. She remembered him, of course, for she had seen him once a good seven years ago, before he was injured and when his wife Catherine had conquered the ton with her beauty. Seraphina had been thirteen and gauche when he had stopped her wayward mount from bolting across a newly laid garden off the Row in Hyde Park. She had thought then that he was like the princes in her storybooks, handsome, kind, brave and wonderful.

He would not remember. It was her mother he would have some recall of. Elizabeth Moreton. A rival of his wife. An Original. Every man who had ever laid his eyes upon her was entranced by her beauty and kindness, except for her husband, Seth Moreton.

But she wouldn’t think of this now, here in a room full of books and music and the smell of spice, here in a castle far from London and the dangerous jealousies of men. Swallowing, she took a drink of lemonade.

‘There are probably many others who look like me, sir.’

She had the feeling he wanted to say something else, but did not. The clock at one end of the room ticked loudly into the silence and farther away in the house there was the sound of a crying child. She saw how he tilted his head to listen until the noise stopped.

A watchful father. In this light the scar on his cheek was wide and reddened—the mark of fire, perhaps, or a wound that had festered and been left untended. She did not dare to ask him of it.

‘Did the agency tell you that you are number six in a long line of governesses?’

‘They did, sir.’

‘And did they tell you of the reason many left without notice?’

‘No.’ Seraphina shook her head. The woman at the agency had cited unresolved differences when she had asked and made it clear that she would divulge nothing further.

‘The Castle is haunted, it seems. The science of such a possibility belies any rational thought, but belief is injudicious and once an idea is seeded …’ She saw resignation on his face, a man who spoke of the supernatural with no true belief in any of it, but she could not leave it just at that.

‘I have always been interested in the metaphysical, my lord, and there is much in life that cannot be simply explained away.’

‘Such as?’

‘Six governesses, perhaps?’

His brows rose alarmingly and she fancied the dent of a dimple in his chin. ‘Your dog, of course, is named after the Phantom Lady of the de Lusignan family.’

‘I am surprised you should know of this, sir, without having the need to revert to a book. Usually I have to explain the connection.’

‘Melusine, one of three sisters cursed with an undisclosed flaw.’ He shifted on the seat and looked directly at her. ‘I think I comprehend the secret nature of your dog already, Miss Moorland.’

‘And what is that, my lord?’

His answer was quick and firm. ‘Chaos.’

Her laughter was like music, soft and real, as joy lit her face. Where had he seen her? How had he known her? Trey’s mind sifted back through the years, but he could make no placement whatsoever. Moorland? The name was without memory. He would ask around, of course, though he had no wish to return to the crush of the city.

Catherine had dragged him down to London a number of times and it had always been the same. She had loved it and he had loathed it. He wondered how he had ever been foolish enough to ask such a woman to be his wife. Granted, she had given him heirs to inherit the Blackhaven fortune and titles, but little else in joy or comfort—a woman whose looks belied a nature that was selfish and cold.

He had vowed to stay well away from beautiful women ever since and yet here was one now laughing in his library, her dirtied white gown many sizes too big and an honest, self-confessed belief in the truth of ghosts.

Sarah Moorland had worn rings on her fingers until quite recently, the sun-touched skin on the first joints of her third and little digits showing white. Both hands now pulled at the fabric in her skirt. Nerves, he supposed. Every fingernail was bitten to the quick.

It was the small details that gave a person away, he ruminated, the experience he had gained during his time with Wellesley as an intelligence officer brought into play. Sometimes he wished it was not there, this innate distrust of human nature that kept him isolated from the sort of discourse that others favoured.

‘You seem well schooled in the classics, Miss Moorland. What brought you into the profession of governess?’

‘Necessity, sir.’ The truth of such an answer was written all over her face.

‘Where was it your brother lived?’

There was a slight hesitation before she offered up the name of Oxford.

‘My sister is from those parts. Once I knew the area well.’

Worry filled blue eyes and the same wash of redness that he had come to expect when she gave him any personal information whatsoever made her face flame.

Another thought chased the first one as memory clicked into recognition: Lady Elizabeth Moreton!

That was the woman she reminded him of; her colour of hair and eyes were exactly the same. But it was more in the way she looked at him, chin tilted upwards with regard. Almost regal.

Sarah Moorland’s mother? Moreton and Moorland. Anderley Moreton, a young man shot through the head under the push forwards by General Stewart at Rueda, when the 18th Light Dragoons had surrounded the village after dark. Her brother? Andrew? Lord, it all fitted save for one thing.

Why was this Moreton daughter here posing as a governess of no means and little substance when clearly she was a lady of the very first water?

Necessity, she had said and looked as if she meant it. Tipping up his glass, he swallowed the remains of his fine brandy as his housekeeper came into the room and announced that the new governess’s sleeping quarters were ready and that she was there to show the way.

The chamber Seraphina was led into was beautiful, large and airy with tall windows looking out onto the hills, the view reminding her a little of Moreton Manor, the Moreton country seat.

The housekeeper continued to fuss about, plumping cushions and picking up non-existent lint from the scrupulously clean waxed floorboards. When the woman turned towards her there was curiosity in her dark brown eyes.

‘If there is anything else you might wish for, you just need ask, Miss Moorland.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Thomas, I shall.’ This seemed to calm the servant, though as she gained the door she stopped, a look of resolution on her face.

‘The boys have imaginations, miss, vibrant imaginations that set all the other governesses to odds with them because they could not understand enchantment. But I’d be thinking you can see things bright in the air around you that others tend to miss. At least I hope you do.’

With that she disappeared and Seraphina stared after her. The whole day had been awash with emotion and this small part of it was as confusing as the rest.

She had slept in the corner of a building on her last night in London, tucked under the overhang of an eave and frightened out of her wits in case anyone should find her there; now she was here in a room that was more than adequate with a servant confiding much about the nature of her charges.

Sitting on the bed, she felt a cloud of comfort envelop her, the icy rain beating against the windows as though it might never cease. Everything here was a warm reminder of how her life had been once before …

No!

The only way she had survived the past weeks had been to not think. She shook her head, but with this small quiet amidst the larger chaos her mind returned again to the horror of her last days in London.

Lord Ralph Bonnington, the Earl of Cresswell. Even the name scared her. Her father had made certain that they were left alone in the front room of the London town house, no care given for her safety; the large florid-faced man with the balding pate and beady eyes telling her exactly what he wanted out of this unexpected opportunity. She had bitten his lip when he had pressed in unbidden, demanding much more than she was willing to give, his hands ripping the bodice of her best gown in a rough attempt to sample that offered by her father in an agreement to save Moreton Manor. The sight of her skin had sent the earl into frenzy and he had forced her to the couch and laid himself on top of her, his hand across her mouth to stifle noise.

The heavy metal ewer had come into her grip as she struggled against him and she had used it to good effect on the shiny top of his head. It had been easy then to simply open the window and escape.

Her father, Seth Moreton, the Earl of Banbury, had shot himself the next evening; she had seen it in the papers as she roamed the back streets of London, trying to decide what to do. Mrs Whittle’s Agency for Prospective Governesses had solved the problem.

Lying back, Seraphina felt hot tears scald down the side of her eyes and disappear into her hair at the temple. ‘Mama,’ she whispered softly, ‘Mama, I need you.’

Trey sat in his library, listening to the rhythms of his house: the creak against timber from the elm-tree branch too low on the eaves; the hiss of a spark in the grate where a final ember flared. Heavy rain slanted in from the west, widening the Crouch River, he supposed, as it made its way to the sea.

The natural progressions of nature on land held in the Stanford family name for centuries, and his sanctuary.

In the hallway outside the library a servant hummed a carol softly. Crossing to the piano, Trey laid his hands down on the ivory keys, letting them sink into other music to block out the Yuletide notes.

Once he had loved Christmas. The thought surprised him, but Catherine had found the season a burden with all the effort required and so it had been largely forgotten about altogether. He was certain that Lady Moreton would be the sort of woman who might attack the idea with vigour: the Christmas pudding, the decorations, the charity visits and the long table full of food and family.

Standing, he walked to the window, looking at the snow deep around the house, bands of rain slanting against the light from his library. Terence had made the jump from the land of the still and the silent and his governess had undone years of aristocratic manoeuvring by mysteriously leaping backwards into an unexpected servitude. Uncertainly, he lifted his finger to the shadow of himself in the glass. He should send her back to London on the morrow, the trail of intrigue woven about her wearisome and unwanted, but there was something that stopped him.

She was Elizabeth Moreton’s daughter and her ghost would not allow him to simply turf her out into the winter cold. Besides, there was something about his new governess that was beguiling. Swearing under his breath, he turned to find his best bottle of brandy.




Chapter Three







20 December

The maid brought her down to the dining room in the morning and Seraphina saw that the duke sat there already, a plate of breakfast before him and no one else at the table.

Surely as a governess he did not wish for her to be joining him for the first meal of every day? She remained still as she gained the room, uncertain as to what was expected.

‘Please have a seat, Miss Moorland, for I would like to talk to you,’ he said as he folded away the paper he had been reading. When she hesitated, he looked around. ‘I take it your dog has been whisked off by the boys. A jaunt through the park should do Melusine no harm and a full breakfast may do you some good.’

The servant held out her chair and Lord Blackhaven waited as she sat, his calm menace more easily seen in the new light of day. The scar across his eye was reddened, the angled planes of his cheek moving under a pull of muscle and there was a tick visible around the damage. As if by magic the two footmen who stood at attention to each side of the hearth disappeared, though she had seen no sign from him to make this happen. Outside through the tall windows the day looked much brighter than it had yesterday.

‘Your references are more than salutary, Miss Moorland, though were I to guess their origin I would say that they all came from the same hand.’

The drink Seraphina had taken a sip of was swallowed with a gulp at his words, shock leaping where caution had lingered. ‘I do not know what you mean, sir.’

His dark-velvet eyes caught her own. ‘The hand of a woman who, by her own admitted necessity, took this position of governess and far from London?’

When she did not speak he went on regardless. ‘I worked in intelligence and part of my mission in Europe was deducing which written orders were fakes and which ones were original. The job requires a special attention to the sweep of letters, you understand, and the repeat of line. Put succinctly, I do know a forgery when I encounter one.’

‘I see.’ Her heart was thumping wildly. ‘Under the circumstances, would you like me to leave then, my lord?’

He smiled. ‘And have Terence revert again into silence when your dog disappears with you? Oh, I think not … Lady Sarah?’

She stood at that, barely able to breathe. He knew her name and station as well? He knew exactly who she was? Would he turn her in as an impostor and send her back? Would he summon the law and have them deal with something he would have no mind for? A hundred questions surfaced and she wanted to run, but her feet seemed carved of wood. The reputation she had in London was hardly salubrious.

‘You could flee from this room and this house as certainly as you fled from London, my lady, or you could sit down and listen to what I have to say to you. Which is it to be?’

Seraphina sat, the sweat between her breasts building in fear.

‘Good, I had rather hoped that you might do that. We both have our secrets, I would guess—undisclosed mysteries that tie us to a particular path or a preferred option. You need employment and I need a governess, for the probability of finding another with your long list of accomplishments would be slim until well after the Epiphany. So I propose a truce. You stay and tutor my boys until the end of January, after which I shall see to it that you are transported to the place you next wish to travel to and nothing more said of any of it. A month. Lodging. Food. A wage and no questions?’

She could only nod, for his terms were more than generous.

‘Is Sarah your first name or is that a lie, too?’

‘Seraphina. It can be shortened to Sera, though the spelling is different.’

‘Then can you promise me that the law shall not arrive on my doorstep any time soon demanding recompense for some ill doing on your behalf?’

Horror threaded her words. ‘If wrongdoing was committed, it was not my own, my lord.’

‘Your father’s, then. Seth Moreton, the Earl of Banbury. I had heard that he was having money problems before he … died.’

He was kind in the description of death, she thought. ‘Lengthy card games tend to encourage bankruptcy, just as brandy addles the brain. He had a hankering for both.’

‘Such excesses had come to my attention.’ His anger was evident. ‘My sister will arrive in three days’ time, for as the daughter of an earl I should not wish your reputation to be ruined by the lack of a chaperone, even given your reduced circumstances. A letter has left this morning asking for her presence here.’

Ruined? Sera looked up. There were some things the powerful Lord of Blackhaven had no notion of, after all.

‘Margaret is a stalwart for the correct and the acceptable. With her residence in the house your name shall stay safe.’

Safe? As in the same argument of shutting the gate after a rampaging stallion? At this moment all she wanted was to be in her sitting room at Moreton Manor, next to her beautiful mother, embroidery in hand. The way it used to be before everything changed. Instead, she was in the home of a duke who was as clever as he was dangerous, hiding from a miscreant who in all probability was even now prowling the streets trying to find her.

Time.

She was running out of it as fast as the Duke of Blackhaven was guessing every sordid detail. She couldn’t breathe with the worry of it all, the woman she had been once replaced by a stranger she barely recognised.

To her alarm tears welled in her eyes, pooling and rolling down her cheeks to fall upon the soiled bodice of her much-too-big gown, and she could not stop them as all the horror of the past few weeks came crashing in upon her. Here, she was safe for one whole long month, no questions asked and board and wages given.

It was a miracle.

‘Essex is a long way from London, Lady Seraphina, and the heavy snows of winter are making themselves felt. If it is security you are worrying about …?’

She shook her head as he went to stand by the window, the furthest point in the room from her. He was embarrassed by such a show of emotion, probably. He wanted a competent governess for his boys; instead he had got a watering pot of a woman who was not only a bland copy of her beautiful mother, but a pauper to boot.

She must not forget her station again, so she was careful in her reply as she gathered her lost composure. ‘I should wish for anonymity here if this is at all possible, my lord?’

‘You prefer to stay as Miss Moorland, then?’

‘I do, sir.’

‘Sense tells me that there must be a further reason for your flight?’

The clock on the mantel ticked loudly as he waited, the caution in his eyes illuminated by the windows. Because he did not press her as he was justly entitled to, she found some of the truth to give him. ‘Moreton Manor, the Banbury country seat, was lost by my father on a single game of cards, so he tried to retrieve it by offering another inducement to the man with the winning hand.’

She saw the exact moment he worked it out.

‘You.’

When she nodded he swore.

‘Lord Ralph Bonnington was not one with any sense or honour, you understand.’

‘Did he hurt you?’

‘I left before he could.’

‘So you would hide for the rest of your life because of the poor judgement of your parent and the disgraceful behaviour of a card sharp?’

Some plane of guilt shifted inside Seraphina at his interpretation of the whole conundrum. She was penniless and homeless, but her father’s demise had been of his own making and not of hers. Still, there were parts of her explanation that were missing and she had hit Bonnington hard.

‘No, my lord, but I would like a job that allowed me the time to consider my options.’ She felt stronger already, more in charge, her more-familiar hopefulness reasserting itself at his calm and measured sense.

When he smiled she felt her cheeks flush. Even with his ruined cheek he was easily the most beautiful man she had ever seen, the lines in his face angled to perfection. Thankfully, though, a movement outside the window caught her attention. Melusine approached the house along the drive, two pink ribbons tied to her tail and three small boys jostling behind her. As she came closer Seraphina saw she carried a bird in her mouth.

Every motherly instinct surfaced and she was out of the room and away, hurrying to save the tiny prisoner before Melusine tired of it.

Trey watched her, running again and almost tripping on the hem of a gown that looked as though it had been made for a woman a good six inches taller than she was and at least two stone heavier.

She was so damned alone, save for the mongrel dog with the crooked tail. That was it. And now it looked as though she was after another soul to rescue. Lord, there would be a whole menagerie of creatures at Blackhaven for Christmas, he thought, like some emptying of the Holy Ark at the very end of a bleak and frozen world. Despite meaning not to, he called to his man to bring a blanket and followed.

The shoes she wore allowed her little traction on the ice though she regained her balance as she almost lost it and pressed forwards, shouting instructions to the dog who seemed to have no mind to obey.

She shouldn’t have come outside in these satin slippers Seraphina thought, as she met the noisy incoming group, because already her feet were freezing and she was sliding on the ice.

‘Drop it,’ she said, her voice as gruff as she could make it, though her hound seemed to have no intention of obeying her. ‘Drop it,’ she said again, but Melusine simply ran the other way, the hysterical squawks of the bird egging the dog on. The boys tried to catch her, but missed as a flurry of snow from a nearby tree whitened the scene.

‘Stop.’ Blackhaven’s order.

For the first time ever the dog obeyed a command, sidling over to the voice of authority and laying the wet bird carefully at his feet.

‘Good dog.’ The duke’s hand came down to pat Melusine’s ears before he lifted the now-silent bird into his palm, his sons picking themselves up and gathering around him to look.

‘Melusine jumped into the pond, Papa. I think she was saving the bird because it was caught in the middle of the ice.’

‘There were no others there, either.’ The youngest child joined in David’s story. ‘And it was shivering and cold, like it is now.’

‘It … is … scared—’ Terence had his own interpretation of events ‘—because its mother … is dead.’

Like his own, Seraphina thought, and saw the duke reach out to bring his second son closer, his hand curling around thin shoulders.

‘We shall make certain then that she is fed when we are back inside,’ she said, ‘for all birds love mash, fruit and vegetables finely sliced. It is a known fact.’

Four sets of identical eyes fastened on to her own at this imparted knowledge.

‘Is she another girl, then?’ Gareth asked the question.

‘I am not exactly certain.’

The small bird struggled suddenly, then stood and spread its wings before flying up into the air and away. Heartfelt laughter rang around the bowers of pines and bare oak branches as they watched its flight, ungainly at first, but growing in competence with practice. Such mirth echoed the spirit of the season, amusement softened by the deep snow of December.

Like a real family, happy at Christmas. Oh, how Seraphina wished it could have been true!

Her feet came from beneath her as she took a step to watch the trajectory of flight; finding a hidden ditch, she fell into a soft snow drift. When the duke turned and smiled she rolled a ball of the whiteness before she could stop herself and sent it straight at him. The missile exploded against his legs and he stooped to make his own projectile. The boys followed. She was outnumbered and outclassed, but, as the sister of two older brothers who had perfected the art of martial attack, she was more than able to defend herself.

‘Do you surrender?’ she shouted as one of her snowballs hit Gareth in the chest.

‘No,’ he yelled back and came closer, rolling one huge missile. Both other boys followed suit, though she had Trey Stanford in her camp now, before her, sheltering her, the flurry of his shots matching his sons.

She could hardly speak for laughing, the barks of Melusine adding to the noise, and behind on the top step of the porch she noticed a row of servants observing the chaos.

Life.

This was how it should be.

Not hiding out for fear of what others might say about the loss of Moreton Manor and the death of her father, but living it regardless with laughter and energy and four days left until Christmas.

She would never forget this moment, she thought to herself: the joy of it and the fun, though drips of freezing ice down her back made her gasp.

‘That’s enough, now.’ The boys obeyed their father as surely as Melusine had and when he bent to help her up his hand was as cold as her own.

‘Do you surrender?’ The same words she had used before, but said differently, and her heart beat in her throat as a sharp ache of want pierced her body, for him, for Trey Stanford and his steady, honest goodness and his offer of safety for a month. She could barely breathe with the promise of it and her grip tightened.

The moment was lost, however, as Terence moved forwards to give his help.

‘Thank you, kind sirs,’ she said, threading her arms through each of theirs and, with Melusine and the other two children running in front, they repaired to the portico where Mrs Thomas, the housekeeper, called out the enticing promise of hot chocolate and sugar-covered currant buns in the blue salon with a roaring fire.

Much later Trey lay down upon his bed fully clothed and booted, his valet dismissed for the evening whilst he mulled over the extraordinary day. His childhood had been dour and strict and he had let his own children go wild after their mother had died because of it. All advice had railed at him to send them up to school, but he had not wanted to let go of them.

He had revelled in seeing them as he had today in the snow, joyous, happy and carefree, the small dog yapping her head off and Seraphina Moreton aiming her snowballs like a professional.

He found it difficult to understand how she had managed to stand upright for so long in those ridiculous smooth slippers of hers, for even in boots with a thick and furrowed sole he had had trouble with the balance.

Wiping his hand across his face, he frowned. Lord, if Terence had not appeared when he did he might have picked Lady Seraphina up, daring the world to hurt her again or make her sad.

Leaving the thought there, he rose, gazing at the lights in the opposite wing of the castle. She would be in the room now, overlooking the valley. He wondered if she looked across the rolling hills to the ocean and its islands close in beside the promontory of rocks.

Blackhaven was his land and his home. Catherine had always hated the isolation. He could not have imagined her running out to save a wounded bird or throwing a snowball and laughing when the ice crept in down her back. The artifice of court seemed muted in the only daughter of an earl renowned for his pretensions and his imprudent ways.

Aye, Lady Seraphina Moreton was a puzzle.

Over hot chocolate she had told the boys that they could help her find holly tomorrow, pine boughs and mistletoe to decorate the castle’s hearth for Christmas. His sons had looked at him, expecting a refusal, but the bright anticipation in his new governess’s face was hard to deny.

The quiet sound of music came from beneath him, the servants in the kitchens, he supposed, singing of Christmas hope and glory, the stars above and the Stanford property spreading out below as far as the eye could see.

Star of wonder, star of night,

Star with royal beauty bright

Westward leading still proceeding

Guide us to thy Perfect Light.

Exactly here!

What did Lady Seraphina sleep in? he wondered, for the bag she carried when she arrived had been small. Did she take her slumber in nothing at all?

God, the woman was making him into a man he did not recognise. She had come as his governess, a position she had gone to great lengths to reassure him she wanted, and as the lord of the house he had a duty to allow her safety at Blackhaven.

He was a gentleman who understood the responsibility of honour and power. She was here for the while it might take to send her onwards and he only wished that the swelling region around his groin might recognise the fact.




Chapter Four







21 December

Seraphina opened her bag and brought out the only other dress she owned. The white gown was beyond repair and she doubted that even Mrs Thomas with her varied skills could rectify it.

Her sister-in-law, Joan, had given it to her as she had explained the difficulty in housing even one more family member. Seth Moreton’s gambling had taken a toll on everyone, she had lectured, when she had extracted the yellowing garment from the back of her wardrobe and handed it to Seraphina—a replacement for the one Bonnington had ruined.

‘The man should be shot, of course. He should be hanged, drawn and quartered for his ill use of you, but who are we now to demand it? It is finished, Seraphina. Your brother is washing his hands of everything that was his birthright and you would be more than wise to do the same.’

Bernard had not appeared, but Seraphina had seen her eldest brother’s shadow beneath the door in the hallway outside and she had known that he was hiding. Confrontation disturbed him, but the thought of a penniless dependent probably worried him more.

The Moretons had neither money nor land left and a city that prided itself in both would not receive them well. Joan had even refused the use of a carriage to take her back into London, reasoning that every pound was to now be counted if they were to survive the penury that would surely follow. Seraphina had left the house and walked the mile into town, her hat pulled full down across her face so as to avoid any notice.

There had been marriage proposals, of course. Her first Season had been awash with offers, but her father had demanded she wait for the one that could not be refused and when his own foolishness had tarnished their name, all promises had been quickly withdrawn.

Even before Bonnington she had been an outcast, she realised, the few dresses that her father had allowed her to procure constantly changed by her own hand to make them appear different.

The dark-blue gown she took out now was one of those dresses, three years old but well cut and made of worsted velvet, which she had to admit was in places thinning badly. The cook had smuggled it out with Melusine when she had chanced one final call at the Moreton town house before leaving London.

At least she would not trip over the hem, she thought, combing her hair and winding it into a long plait tied with a bright red ribbon. But she must be very careful with the condition of the dress; after this, there was nothing else left.

The duke was waiting downstairs, but this morning he looked ill at ease, a man caught by company he did not desire. When she smiled at him his frown deepened.

‘Good morning, my lord.’

‘Miss Moorland.’

As he remained silent she filled in the awkward space between them with chatter.

‘Today with the children I shall begin on a lesson of botany. The plants that signify Christmas all have their own tales attached and the boys should enjoy the stories as we gather them.’ She added a ‘sir’ when he still declined to answer, for the détente that had been so apparent yesterday had disappeared overnight.

‘Then I hope you have a fruitful day.’

‘You will not accompany us?’

He shook his head and stepped back. ‘Don’t go down by the pond the children spoke of yesterday. The ice is thin and my men cannot begin the job of placing up a barrier until the morrow.’

‘Of course, my lord.’

‘The hills to the back of the castle can also be cold and windy. Do you have a thicker cloak than the one you arrived in, Miss Moorland?’

‘I do not, sir.’

‘Then ask the housekeeper to make one of my late wife’s available to you. She had quite an assortment from memory.’

‘Oh, it would hardly be—’

He cut her off. ‘My marriage was not a love match, Miss Moorland. I would divest myself of all Lady Blackhaven’s clothes if I could do so easily, but Mrs Thomas insists they have hardly been worn and that it should be a great travesty. You would be doing me a favour by taking at least one garment off my hands.’

Some of his words held an accent of Europe, Seraphina thought when he spoke, and she wondered just how long he had been stationed there. His hair was wet this morning, pulled back into a tight queue, a style far from fashionable. It suited him entirely.

He looked like a man too big for the room, though there was a grace about him that was also apparent. She imagined him on the battlefields, sword drawn and at the ready. He had been decorated for bravery on the Heights of Penasquedo in the final fiasco before the British retreat at Corunna. Perhaps it was there his cheek had been injured.

Not a love match! There had been rumours of the lack of emotion between the Lord and Lady of Blackhaven, but Catherine Stanford had played the part of duchess with aplomb, her clothes always of the latest vogue and her face unmatchable. Every man had adored her. Even her mother had been outshone by the beauty of the woman.

‘David informs me that you wish to decorate the castle hearth with bounty from the forest. I will assign a man to help you with the cutting and another to drag back what is found.’ His eyes were caught by a movement as Melusine slunk in behind her and sat at his feet.

‘It seems your hound has finally been tamed, Miss Moorland.’

‘I promised her a bone if she was obedient.’

When he laughed their eyes met. In London she had been plagued by dandies, their only thoughts those of the elegance of their clothes and the pleasure of the moment—minions who followed the Regent into hedonistic pursuits of little importance: Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we may die.

Trey Stanford was different. Even as a thirteen-year-old she had been able to recognise the fact. Had her mother, as well?

Lord, were Elizabeth and he once lovers? Is that why he had helped her mother so substantially when nobody else would? The thought was horrifying. Was this also the reason he was pulling back this morning, an edge of wariness on his face and in his words? Like mother, like daughter, though Elizabeth’s vivacity and joie de vivre had always eclipsed her own.

The bright and joyous world she had built up in her mind overnight came crashing down upon her. Lord Blackhaven would not join them in their search for Christmas greenery and he was very obviously readying himself for a coach ride away from the castle.

Another thought chased in upon that one. Would there be news of Ralph Bonnington, the Earl of Cresswell, at the destination he was bound for? Please God, let the man not have died from the blow to his head! No, the impact of the ewer had been substantial, but the bone of his scalp had held and there had been many a time with her brothers as a youngster when she had clouted them as hard. Worry swamped reason and of a sudden she wanted Trey Stanford to stay close, away from the gossip and a world that was not kind.

As a governess, however, she had no mandate to question his movements or ask for his presence here. She was a nobody now, a pauper mired in debt and scandal.

‘I shall be back before the evening sets properly. Is there anything you might wish for in Maldon?’

She shook her head and then stopped, her mind running on to the pursuits of the day. ‘Ribbon, my lord, and sweets. I have promised the boys a tree, you see, like the one King George allowed Charlotte. My mother used to speak of it—a giant yew erected inside the Queen’s Lodge at Windsor with its sweets and nuts and candles.’

‘I am astonished such a tree did not burn down the palace.’

When she smiled the air between them lightened. ‘Ours shall be an evergreen fir bough, my lord, and the candles can stay on the mantel.’

‘And where shall this tribute to the oncoming Yule be placed?’ The tone in his voice suggested resignation.

‘Mrs Thomas proposed the room downstairs to the left of the front portico.’

‘My father’s favourite haunt. I imagine him turning in his grave at the thought of the Christmas spirit displayed in the very spot where his ancestors railed against anything festive.’

‘It could, of course, be changed, my lord?’

‘No, leave it, for there is a certain retribution at the thought.’

‘You did not like your father?’ The new habits of servitude were not ingrained yet and there was a sadness about him that was beguiling.

‘I impose few rules on my sons because as a child I had to obey so many. He was a good man underneath, though, a moral man.’

‘Then you were fortunate that he cared enough to worry. My own papa barely knew my name.’ Until he signed it away on a piece of paper, promising her into unholy matrimony. Like horseflesh at Newmarket, no emotion save greed in any of it.

‘That I find hard to believe,’ Trey Stanford said obliquely, knocking his hat against his thigh. ‘But for now I bid you farewell, my lady.’ The lines around his eyes creased at her title as though he found irony in her situation; indeed, in a gown that had been remade and remodelled so many times the stitching lines were beginning to fray, Seraphina felt perhaps there was.

‘Thank you.’

He turned at her words. ‘For what?’

‘For allowing me to keep at least a measure of pride here.’

‘One cannot take away that which was never lost in the first place, my lady.’

‘I will bear that in mind when I wrap myself in the borrowed cloak then, my lord.’

‘Aye,’ he said, ‘you do just that.’

This time he did not tarry as his man came forth and they both disappeared through the portal that led to the front steps.

She never said or did what he expected her to, Trey thought as he walked through the snow to the carriage. He wondered if it was deliberate, this knack of hers to throw him out just when he was beginning to understand her, her pale blue eyes laced at times with the fear of saying the wrong thing or inciting anger.

Hell, he would like to have laid his hands around the neck of her father and brother and squeezed hard, so little care they had taken with her. The dress she wore today was, if possible, even worse than the one she had on yesterday, the seams on the side of the bodice showing through to her white chemise. A ruffled velvet over-layer hid some of the damage, but the overall effect was unlike anything he had ever seen a lady wear before.

Catherine had been a woman whose wardrobe was full to bursting and one who was never happier than when taking a new shipment of ornate and expensive clothing. He grimaced. Would Lady Seraphina be slighted if he asked Mrs Thomas to select a few of the winter gowns his wife had never worn and take them to her room for appraisal?

Pulling his hand across his eyes as he felt the movement of the coach, he breathed in. He wanted Seraphina Moreton happy. He liked her smile and the deep dimples in each cheek, apprehension and alarm making way for the sort of joy he had long since forgotten. Part of him wanted to bang on the roof of the carriage and order it back so that he might go and find the Christmas greenery that she had spoken of, and the laughter. But he had promised her ribbon and candles and sweets and the look in her eyes when he had done so made the mission as important as any he had ever undertaken.

She seemed to be pulling them together, all of them, the boys, the dog, the servants and … him. Even the castle was to get a Christmas face of festive greenery and colour. He should say stop, of course, should halt such a transformation before the shape of their lives changed in such a way that they would be for ever stranded when she left them.

Which she would!

This isolated backwater of Essex would cease to be a haven for her before too many weeks had passed and the city and all its pleasures and amusement would call again. Was that not the way of beautiful young ladies, even one who was temporarily down on her luck?

The sun on the snow was harsh and the eye above his damaged cheek watered as it often did against such brightness. The gunpowder had burnt into his skin in Corunna, the sea voyage on the retreat through the storms of the Bay of Biscay stinging the weeping open wound with salt. He had arrived back in Essex just on the end of the Epiphany to find his wife had cuckolded him before dying, his sons left alone for months whilst their mother had sashayed her charms in London with numerous and adoring swains.

A hopeless wife and mother. Sometimes he wandered down to Catherine’s marking stone in the small graveyard just to make sure that she was actually gone. Such a sorry thought made him sit forwards and he was glad that his man rode on the box seat outside.

Loss. Love. Beauty. Betrayal. Death. And now nearly Christmas.

The thought had him turning to look at the fir trees lining the driveway of Blackhaven, his practised gaze picking out one that might be the perfect specimen for candles, nuts and sweets.




Chapter Five







The evening drew on and still Trey had not come back to Blackhaven Castle; the children were tucked into their beds and the light had faded long past into darkness. Seraphina had made some ground with the boys today, yet they remained distant and suspicious of her, despite all that she had done to try to win them over. Terence had been a little more forthcoming but the others had made it plain that they should like her gone. Still, she was not a person to give up easily and tomorrow when they decorated the front parlour she would make certain to tell them all the stories she had read of Christmas cheer.

She had thought of the duke many times through the day, expecting to see him in the mid-afternoon. But he hadn’t arrived even as the clock ticked on into midnight. Was he safe? Had the coach overturned? Did he freeze in the snow, waiting for aid that would not come? Cursing her vivid imagination, she shook away such doom-say and stood at her window, searching for a light. ‘Lord, let him be safe,’ she prayed over and over again, the flames in the hearth burning down to embers before she saw movement.

A moment later there was a flurry of action beneath her window as people ran out, the horses lifting their heads and prancing to try to keep the cold at bay. Packages were transferred into waiting hands and then Trey alighted, his cloak billowing as he mouthed instructions she could not hear.

When she changed her position to see him better he looked up and Seraphina knew that he saw her, but was unable to move. The force of his glance had left her shaking.

Why had she not met him three years ago on her first Season out when he might have seen her as she wanted him to, her father still solvent and a hundred suitors at her feet? Now, life bent her into a different woman, worry written in her eyes every time she looked in the mirror.

It was so ironic. When all seemed lost and hopeless she had arrived at the house of an honourable man who would help her as her own family had not, who would shelter her without question until the end of January. The truth of it made her frown.

‘Please God, do not let him have been my mother’s lover.’ The words tumbled into the dark, standing on the edge of it like arrows piercing a growing want that blossomed inside her. For him. For Trey Stanford, the sixth Duke of Blackhaven. Seraphina had known her mother had a suitor because Elizabeth had told her so, once late at night when she had come to her mama’s room and found her crying. The ring on her finger had not been her father’s, and her anguish was such that no amount of help could assuage it.

The following week they had buried her and her father had taken to the bottle in earnest.

Her parents, lost to death and to scandal. Biting at the nail on her thumb, she sat down again on her bed and listened as the noises below faded into silence.

Trey had seen her face at the window looking down, caught into stillness, her hair like a halo around her head, gold and wheat and pale pure flaxen. He would have liked to mount the stairs and knock on her door to see her blue eyes widen as she heard the reason as to why he had returned so late.

Ralph Bonnington, the Earl of Cresswell, was telling the world that Lady Seraphina Moreton had attacked him, unprovoked and unexpected, her anger at the loss of Moreton Manor so acute she could not countenance his windfall. He had been found by two of his friends, almost unconscious, according to the paper, and now demanded she be brought to trial.

Running his hands across his face, Trey strode into his library, helping himself to a liberal brandy to chase away the cold. For now, the winter protected Seraphina, kept her safe away from others and all the gossip that had ensued.

Each paragraph on the first two pages of The Times had speculated as to where Lady Seraphina had gone. Beneath the banter was another more dangerous thread. Trey imagined Cruikshank’s caricatures in ‘The Scourge’ depicting the fallen daughter of a bankrupt family engulfed in ignominy, ruined and exposed to the delight of those who exchanged tittle-tattle on the dance floor. A young woman’s reputation would not recover from such a public drubbing and Seraphina Moreton looked too fragile to weather any of it.

Refilling his glass, he sat before the fire, thinking.

Margaret and her husband were due to arrive in two days’ time and his sister was no fool. She would recognise Lady Seraphina and when she did …?

Small footsteps behind had him turning. Gareth stood in his nightwear, his hair tousled and his eyes sleepy.

‘I noticed your light from my window when I woke up, Papa, and I needed to ask you something.’

Trey already knew what was to come next. It was always the same question, every single time.

‘Mama loved us a hundred thousand times over, didn’t she?’

Settling his smallest son on his lap, he brought a blanket from the chair beside him to wrap away the cold.

‘A millions times over,’ he replied in the same vein, the truth of Catherine in London caring not a jot for her three small boys nowhere near his words.

‘Terry thinks Miss Moorland likes us, too?’

Now this was new. He nodded and waited.

‘He thinks we should, maybe, keep her?’

God, sometimes his children almost broke his heart with their want for a mother, though the small pitterpatter of paws saved him an answer as Melusine’s head poked around the corner.

‘Her dog wishes that you were in bed with him, Gareth,’ he replied as he stood to carry his son back to the nursery.



22 December

The Duke of Blackhaven looked different this morning as Seraphina came to the breakfast table, for his hair was loose around his face, giving the impression of a pirate from the dangerous South Sea Islands. However, his jacket was double breasted and the beige superfine in his trousers well ironed.

Her own attire was unforgivably dowdy, the rips on her skirt repaired badly and her only pair of boots still damp from the deep snow.

‘Mrs Thomas says that you declined the use of the gowns she laid out on your bed?’

‘I did, sir, for the ones I own shall suffice.’

‘If it is because you do not wish to wear my wife’s clothes, my housekeeper assures me she could fashion something from the many bolts of fabric that are stored in the attic. She is an expert seamstress by all accounts.’

Seraphina felt herself hesitate. A new gown that was neither too big nor badly torn for Christmas was tempting and she was so very tired of wearing what she had.

‘I could take the cost of the fabric from your wages.’

His suggestion made her blush because she knew that such a thing would be far and above any money she was earning as a governess.

Yet temptation lingered. Reaching for her grandmother’s single pearl on the chain around her neck, she slipped it off so that it lay in the palm of her hand. She had always worn this piece since Elizabeth had died and it was undeniably precious. Yet reality beckoned, too, in the shabby dress she had on, the seams beneath her left arm so frayed she could no longer repair them.

‘If I put this down as a surety for the sum of the fabric, I could accept your offer.’

He shook his head. ‘I have no need for it.’

Her gaze met his, amber-gold in the daylight, drawing her in. She felt her body respond to his glance, a throb of want dancing like flame warmth across her skin. When he stepped back the disappointment stung.

‘You look like your mother. Did you know that?’

Her heart thumped at the question, coming as if on the surge of desire. ‘Were you her lover, then?’

Discomfort shadowed his face. ‘How much did you comprehend about Elizabeth’s life?’ His voice was wary.

‘Enough to realise she was unhappy with my father. Enough to see her spend hours getting ready at night and not return until the morning.’ She had never told anyone that before, but it did not feel disloyal here to speak of such things. The duke had known Mama, after all, and he had helped her when others had turned away. Besides, it might have been he who kept her occupied nightly.

‘People deal with an unhappy relationship in different ways and for Elizabeth it was through enjoying the company of my cousin before he died. Terence. His name was Terence.’

Relief allowed the breath she hadn’t realised she was holding to escape. ‘The same as your son?’

‘Aye, he was named after him. We were brought up together like brothers and the last thing he said to me was “look after Lizzy”.’

‘So you gave her money when Papa would not?’

‘The bills were piling up and your father had refused to pay them, but in the end it was not such largesse she needed at all …’

Seraphina understood what he was saying. Her mother had gone to Moreton and raced her horse fast across the track above the cliffs. Fast enough for it to lose its footing and for Elizabeth to be transported to the place her lover had already been taken to? Other things became explained as well: her father’s lack of grief, an escalating gambling habit and his anger.

‘Thank you for telling me the truth.’

He smiled and held her gaze, just the two of them here in the breakfast room, the day drawing into coldness and the new snow falling outside. Buffered by nature and locked in by the forces of winter as it laid its arms about the countryside in a white blanket of cold, Seraphina felt … altered.

Life at Moreton had been fraught and uncertain, the arguments and anger constant. She had always been frightened. She knew this absolutely because here, at the castle, she wasn’t, the disquietude of her home life replaced by hopes and promises drawing her in as she anticipated what was to come.

But there was something today in his gaze that was hidden, and when he began to speak she knew that the details of the past few weeks had caught up with her.

‘Yesterday in Maldon I saw a copy of The Times. The man you mentioned, Ralph Bonnington, is telling the world that you struck him when he offered you all the assistance and support that your father had not.’

‘Assistance? My God.’ She stood as she said it, a sick feeling of horror slicing into disbelief. ‘He said that?’ Anger darkened her vision. ‘I hit him on the head with a silver ewer because he was trying to …’ She could not go on.

Trey came closer and reached out, putting her hand into his, the gentleness felt in the action making her heart ache. ‘The man is a charlatan and a cheat—as no one knows where you are yet it seems you are safe.’

Relief flooded through her and her fingers clutched his. She wished he might bring her closer and kiss her hard on the lips, like the men in the romances she sometimes read at night, no choice in it but need and want and taking.

But his fingers stayed still, a light pressure denoting only comfort and consolation. She wanted to push up against him and demand so much more, a breathless hunger nearly undoing her. Instead, she moved back, smoothing out her rumpled skirt for something to do before she had to look at him.

‘He is a large man with a lot of money. If he comes here to make trouble …?’

‘He won’t.’

The certainty in Trey’s voice was so comforting. There were, after all, many other things he could have said and to have someone watching out for her was a new experience. A wonderful one! When her glance finally met his she reddened and looked away, his integrity and decency stealing into her bones as delight. She wanted to thank him for such belief, wanted to bring him into the joy of the Christmas preparation that she had spent much time in planning.

‘We are dressing the tree this afternoon, my lord. The children would be happy if you might come and help us.’

‘And you, Miss Moorland. Would you be happy, too?’

Confusion made her stammer. ‘Your h-h-height would be a great aid in placing the angel on the very top of the tree.’

When he smiled she felt her world turn and hated all the hopes that rose unbidden.

Her reputation was lost and she was without a dowry. Her wealth consisted of what she wore, which was far less than satisfactory, a single pearl that did have some worth and a dog who was only now learning to sit still. A hundred pounds, she reasoned, the few notes she owned tucked into her pocket after pawning all her rings and a bracelet—the sum total that stood between her and ruin.

Resolution swept through her. Trey Stanford, the Duke of Blackhaven, could not possibly be interested in her and she could not jeopardise this posting by imagining that he might be. Regaining her lost composure, she smiled at him in the way of an employee who was both professional and distant and excused herself from his company.

Three hours later the smell of pine filled the room as Mrs Thomas brought in a plate of Christmas pies.

‘Baked in the dozens to strengthen their charm,’ she said, ‘and good luck for the twelve months of the New Year, sir.’

Surrounded by red-and-green ribbon, a pile of gold-and-silver paper and balls made from the dry branches of last year’s climbing wisteria, Trey was knee-deep in spangle as he looked at the tree.

Ginger-and-butter shortbread had been strung with twine, the delicacies embellishing an already over-embellished greenery.

Seraphina Moreton had no pattern of demanding the fir dressed in a particular way as Catherine had been wont to on the few times she had bothered. Everything went, according to the governess’s philosophy, so that even the broken offerings the boys had put their hearts into creating took their place alongside the expensive and irreplaceable heirlooms collected by the Blackhaven ancestors for generations.

There was hardly a pine needle still on show and the angel on the top that he had had the task of securing looked down on a hotchpotch of colour.

His children loved it.

‘Have you ever seen such a tree, Papa?’ David asked him and his father shook his head in honesty.

‘Never.’

Seraphina Moreton laughed as he looked over to find her watching him, Melusine jumping at the foil on a lower branch, then nestling in a pile of paper.

‘I like the red apples best.’ Terry pointed out his efforts, three matching misshapen balls with sprigs of gold drunkenly hanging from the top.

As leaves, he supposed. He made much of nodding.

‘The stars are mine, Papa.’ Gareth brought a folded silver shape away from the riot of others behind it. ‘Miss Moorland helped me draw them. I could make some for your library tomorrow.’

‘Indeed.’

‘We have mistletoe as well.’ David took a sprig from a box at his feet and placed it carefully on his hand. ‘Where should we hang it?’

‘Above Miss Moorland,’ Gareth screeched. ‘Then we can all give her a kiss.’

‘Above Papa,’ Terence amended. ‘Then she could give him one.’ His oldest son was already counting as he walked over with the mistletoe.

‘Twelve berries. Twelve kisses. You can have the first one, Papa.’

A vibrant red blush crept up Lady Seraphina’s cheeks, but with three boys baying for a kiss Trey felt it easier to do so. He had meant to place a light peck on her cheek, just a small token to fulfil an expected duty, but he found the soft fullness of her mouth instead and his world exploded.

She felt his finger against her cheek, light as air, question in the last second before his lips slanted against hers, the full force of an unexpected magic making her press in. Trey Stanford was hers for this moment under a tree laden with Christmas and in a world of colour, the taste of him strong and real, his fingers at her nape, the shape of his body full down the front of hers, as a deep pain of need entwined itself into all the corners of her heart. He was neither careful nor gentle nor calm. He was masculine fervour tempered with steel, a man who knew his way around a woman and taking the chance of appetite even with his three children watching on.

Seraphina was breathless when he broke away. Kissing was nothing like she had heard it to be: tepid, shallow and lukewarm. It was hot and ardent and fierce, the meeting of souls through a joining of spirit, a giving and a taking. As amazement bloomed she heard the shouts of the boys and David plucked one berry and threw it in the fire. It sizzled against the embers, a slight puff of smoke and then gone.

When she chanced a quick look at the duke, he seemed unaffected by all that had just happened as he took the mistletoe and placed it above the door-well a good few feet away. He did not look in her direction once.

‘Aunt Margaret and Uncle Gordon should arrive tomorrow. We will surprise them beneath it.’ His voice was even and mellow.

Gareth screwed up his face. ‘No, they are too old to kiss, Papa.’

‘No one is ever too old, my lad. You’ll find that out one day.’

All the boys laughed as Melusine barked, chasing her damaged tail around and around until she caught it, teeth clamped in dark red hair. She had been a quiet dog until she had come to Blackhaven, slinking around beneath the anger of Seth Moreton and the distant haughtiness of the Moreton servants. Here she hardly ever stopped, following the boys from room to room.

The kinder face of chaos, she thought, remembering Trey Stanford’s words about her dog. The Christmas pies Mrs Thomas had made were still warm and the smell of spiced ale drifted in from the kitchen.

Last year she had been alone all of the day, her father asleep with a headache that he had acquired through a late night of gambling and the only food that was special a cake procured a good month before the season began. She had stood at the window of the Moreton town house overlooking the park and thought that she had never been as lonely.

This year the joy of the season shone on the boys’ faces, the decorations they had spent all morning fashioning bright and festive.

And she had been kissed. Her first ever. The throb of it still covered her lips, though she did not dare lift her fingers to touch them in case the duke noticed.

Her glance went to the mistletoe surreptitiously. Eleven berries left! Eleven kisses left! The thought made her blood rush fast.

Trey saddled his horse and rode across the frozen afternoon whiteness towards the river, the same place he often went when he needed to think, the gnarled avenue of bare brown oaks both peaceful and ancient.

He should not have kissed Lady Seraphina, should not have allowed such a thing to happen because now it was all that he could think of, her softness and her warmth and the startling force of energy that had passed between them unbidden.

‘God help me!’ His words to the grey and leaden sky as the consequences of such action unfolded in his head. He wanted to feel again what he just had, the ache of something other than the indifference and inertia that had hounded him for so long in his marriage to Catherine. He had never loved nor even liked his wife. A marriage arranged by his parents and hers to amalgamate the lands around Blackhaven into one solid and powerful block. When he looked to the horizon in every direction the soil was his—paid for in deceit and sham and loneliness.

Catherine had been unfaithful from the first month of their marriage and he should have left then, but David was already on the way and there was some honour in him that he could not just sever.

He had gone to Europe the following year and stayed there until the night Terence was conceived. Gareth was the child of one of her many other lovers when all relations between them had broken down, but he had never told anyone this and raised the boy as his own.

Secrets. How they destroyed one with the bile of anger and disappointment.

And now more secrets, dangerous ones with the weight of the law behind them and a man who was after his own scrambled retribution. Seraphina Moreton would need to be protected and she would require help to win against such a one as the Earl of Cresswell. Her fragility required armour and someone fighting in her corner who did not obey the rules.

Like him.

But how? The kiss under the mistletoe was a start because she must have felt exactly as he did. She had not met his eyes after it and he had not wished to find hers. Some things were better left for the quiet chance of talking later, so that she was not frightened again as she had been in the lurid attempts on her person by Ralph Bonnington.

Promise beat under his musings. He wanted her beneath him, knowing the curves of her body and the scent of her womanhood.

There had been other women since Catherine, he could not deny it. The sweet opiate of forgetfulness was easily procured, even with a ruined face.

But not for a while. It had been months since he had left the county of Essex and he had never liked to bed the local women. Too close to home. Too complicated.

Until now. Until a woman installed in the very centre of his world had whet with a single kiss an appetite long dulled under a sprig of mistletoe and the watchful eyes of his sons.

God in heaven. He swore again, but this time he laughed too. He felt alive again, interested, the ennui that had plagued him for so many years lifted.

‘Seraphina.’ He shouted her name and heard his voice echoed back to him through the barren outcrop of rock and muffled in the deep and thick December snow. It had the ring of salvation.

Mrs Thomas knocked on her door in the afternoon and she held a candle encased in glass because the skies had darkened and rain was threatening.

‘The master asked me to show you the bolts of fabric in the attic, Miss Moorland. He said you might choose some material for a Christmas gown and if we are to have any hope of finishing it we would be best to get on to it as soon as we can.’

The thought crossed Seraphina’s mind that Lord Blackhaven might be regretting his earlier kiss and allowing her some recompense in return for it. She swallowed down such a conclusion and tried to take stock of her situation.

‘I haven’t the means to pay you for the work, Mrs Thomas, and I am not certain yet of the amount of my wages.’

‘Oh, never mind that,’ the housekeeper returned softly. ‘The boys are happier than I have seen them in a long while and that is the best payment I could ever receive. Now, come along and we will see what we can find.’

Ten minutes later Seraphina felt as though she were in some Aladdin’s cave, myriad rolls of fabric leaning against the walls, some still bound in tissue paper but many partly unravelled as if the person who owned them had just been there deciding on her choice of colour.

‘Lady Stanford was a woman who liked a great deal of selection. She was always buying from the travelling salesmen or the gypsies, as well as getting fabric sent up from London. Velvet, as you can see, was a special favourite of hers, and lace. The Brussels lace here cost a right fortune, I can tell you.’

‘Then perhaps I should look at something less costly?’

‘And have the moths burrow their way through this? Nay, the hue will show up the depth in the gold velvet of the gown and would suit the shade of your hair. If we do not cut into it now, it could stay unused for another decade and by that time there would be nothing of it left at all. Save dust. Such a waste.’

Unravelling the bolt, Seraphina felt her breath hitch. Catherine Blackhaven’s taste in fabric was unparalleled and she had rarely seen lace so fine. Still, tempting as the gift was, she wondered at her own ability to pay back the cost of it.

‘The duke said you could have your choice, Miss Moorland. Were it to be mine, I should most certainly select these ones.’ The Brussels lace was in her left hand and the golden velvet in the right.

Without waiting for a reply, she bound the length around Seraphina’s waist. ‘If the skirt was full and the bodice tighter, you could use the lace here and here. Lady Catherine always favoured a scandalously low décolletage, but on you we could fashion a gown in a manner that was more classical.’

Mrs Thomas’s words gave her an opening. ‘The duke’s late wife was a beautiful woman. I saw her in London a few times with my mother.’

‘And the beauty went to her head until it was all that she could think of. It was why the master was in Europe for so long, with a bride who cared for nothing save herself.’

‘But the children?’

As if catching sense, Mrs Thomas shook her head. ‘I am the housekeeper, Miss Moorland, and I should remember my place.’ Winding back the gold so that even more of the colour was on show, she nodded sagely. ‘Blackhaven Castle needs laughter and joy again and if the cost of that is a few yards of fabric, then it comes cheap.’

When Mrs Thomas undid the handles on a sewing bag she had placed on the floor, Seraphina saw scissors, pins and thread, and the promise of a gown that was neither too big nor too tight overcame reticence. With real anticipation she slipped off her old dress and stood in her many-times-patched chemise and petticoats as the measuring and fitting began in earnest.

The wind had died down and the rain had held off, though the clouds were thick and dark above as Seraphina sat on a wooden bench in the ornate inner gardens of Blackhaven as the evening was about to fall.

Reaching out to the bare wood of a bush beside her, she smiled as she touched the vibrant orange of a rosehip, the only colour besides green and black and grey in the snow-tossed square. It was good to be outside at the end of a long and noisy day, the silence of the place welcomed as she tucked her chin into the worsted wool of her borrowed cape.

The kiss from the morning turned in her mind, again and again, compelling and intense. She had kissed Trey Stanford back, too, pressing herself against his body like a wanton woman. The thought had her eyes opening and she stared into the amber glance of the very man she dreamt of.

‘I saw you come out here through the window of my library,’ the duke explained, gesturing to a room behind a row of barren espaliered fruit trees, light showing through diamond-panelled windows.

His hair this evening was tucked carelessly into the generous collar of a military coat: a soldier, a hero, a man whose very accent summoned the amount of years that he had served in Europe for England. She imagined just what he must have experienced.

‘It was quiet out here, my lord, and a sheltered place to rest.’ She wondered if she should invite him to sit, but he seemed restless, his fingers playing against intricate gold buttons in a line down his front, the same fingers that had caressed her neck and threaded through her hair as he had kissed her.

No. She must not think of this now, for she sensed a barely held anger broiling beneath the careful surface.

‘My sons like you, Lady Seraphina. Gareth informed me last night that he wished we might keep you.’

Astonishment leapt quick, though he was not finished.

‘I have no wish for them to be disappointed again, for they would not weather it. The boys’ mother was …’ He hesitated. ‘She was not the sort of woman who held the maternal instincts in high regard, you understand, and they have suffered. Therefore, if you feel in the light of what happened today that you no longer wish to remain at Blackhaven Castle until the end of January, I would provide you with transport back to London and a generous stipend for the trouble taken for coming here in the first place.’

For the only time since she had met him he looked slightly abashed, a peer of the land who was also a father and a man.

‘I should also like to say that I have come into the gardens to find you in order to personally apologise for my lack of regard.’

‘You speak of our kiss?’ Anticipation sizzled amidst an unsettled anger. If he should say their kiss was a mistake or an error or a lapse in judgement, she would scream because to her it was none of those things. To her the very soft rightness of it still made the blood race in her veins, and the hope of more was in her answer. ‘I could have refused your advances, Lord Stanford, easily, but I found myself not wishing to.’

At the words Seraphina stood, the evening wrapping around them both and her breath white in the half-light when she spoke. ‘I do not consign what happened under the mistletoe as an error, but see it as a gift that was precious to me beyond words.’ The vulnerability creasing his face made her reach up to his cheek and place her finger across the hard angles.

He felt warm even despite the chill, a twelve-hour stubble roughening his skin: a man who was solid and reliable and honourable. ‘If, indeed, there is anything I might say, it would be to ask you to kiss me again,’ she simply stated, standing on her tiptoes so that he might have better access to all that she offered him. She could no longer be careful or circumspect or judicious. She wanted him, his taste, his feel and his warmth. She wanted to know again that which she had in the room full of Christmas, the ache of delight filling every part of her body with heat.

The shards in his eyes lightened from brown to gold, melting into response, and his lips came down to hers, the slam of need attesting to a control he had suddenly lost hold of.

His tongue met her own, duelling against entry as he deepened the kiss, changing that which she offered into something else. Wonderment and lust. She felt his hips move even through the thick layers of wool between them, asking for what men and women through all the centuries had sought to understand in an elemental promise. When she answered back, his voice broke hoarse into the silence, her name whispered fiercely before his lips returned to take—only them in the world, only this feeling of an utter and precise truth, far away from the specifics of any dividing fact or faith. Together, and for this moment, everything was perfect.

A wintry blast of wind brought her back though, the facade of Blackhaven looming above, darkened in the dusk and watching. The bricks of the newer annexe addition glowed almost black and she fancied the shadows of those at work in the castle flickering across some of the small light in its windows.

Understanding her reticence, he let her go.

‘You are right, for this is neither the place nor the time.’ She thought he might stop there and walk away. She could see he meant to from the gleam of distance in his eyes, but he did not go. Rather, he began to speak again and in a tone she had never heard him use before. ‘I am only a man, Lady Seraphina, and every time I look at you I am reminded of the fact, but know that if you wish me to stop any of what has begun between us … I will.’

The memory of Ralph Bonnington, she supposed. It was Trey Stanford’s way of telling her that he was nothing at all like him. She was speechless as he bowed his head and left because his troth was exactly that which she wanted, and because the compliments he had given her were so unexpected.

He liked her and so did his sons! Even a new blast of snow did nothing to diminish her happiness as she turned the strange conversation over and over in her mind. He had promised her so much more than she thought he might, and although the gardens were not the place to press anything further, Seraphina was certain they would soon find another occasion.

Laying her fingers across her lips, she smiled behind her hands, a joy rising from deep within her. She was overwhelmed with the astonishment of one who finds herself in exactly the place that she had long hoped to be. Her eyes wandered across the high-and-ancient walls of Blackhaven, the patina of stone worn in places from time and weather, hundreds of years of protection imbued in their very strength. When she had arrived here she had found the castle forbidding and hostile. Now all she could see was the beauty of it.




Chapter Six







23 December

Voices brought Seraphina from her room early the next afternoon to be confronted directly by a large group of strangers in the salon at the foot of the stairs.

She recognised one of them as Lady Frobisher, an inveterate gossip and snoop and her heart sank accordingly. Lord Blackhaven did not look pleased at all as three young women leaned in towards him and amongst their company she saw exactly how he would be received in London. It would be with complete and utter delight, for his form was nothing at all like the fops that overran the social halls and ballrooms with their mincing ways and effeminate habits.

Nay, Trey Stanford with his night-black hair, amber eyes and danger would be like a panther amongst kittens. The Titian-haired beauty next to him had her hand upon his arm. Proprietary and challenging!

‘I should love you to come to our place for Christmas, my lord. Mama has made a great show of the decorations and our cook came highly recommended.’

‘I think not, Lady Lydia.’ His fingers unlinked her hand and he moved back.

The Frobisher matriarch, however, was having none of it. ‘You said the same last year, my lord, and we heard that you had hardly celebrated the season. Besides, my daughters and I would be most happy to see you at our table with the children, of course.’

The girl she presumed to be Lydia coloured dramatically. There was not much of an age difference between them, but Seraphina felt a hundred years older. Not wishing to be caught in the awkward position of an uncertain exit, she came forwards. Helen Frobisher raised her monocle, peering up at her with a quizzical expression and Seraphina saw the exact moment she recognised her.

‘Good God, Stanford. This gel on your staircase is the lost Moreton chit, is she not? What on earth is she doing here and in such awful clothes when the whole of London town is searching for her? Come down, gel, and let me see you better.’

The mouths of the three younger ladies behind were wide-open, eyes filled with shock as Seraphina moved to the last step. She was glad for the slight height that kept her above them all—it meant she did not have to meet their glances so directly.

‘Why is she here, Blackhaven?’ The older lady’s voice had taken on a shrill tone, the flinted anger in her words mirrored in her eyes. ‘If she is alone in your company, then she is exactly as her mother was—a whore who pretended to be a lady.’

‘No, you have it most wrong.’ Seraphina finally found her voice at such a brutal criticism. ‘I am at Blackhaven Castle because—’

‘Because she is my intended.’ Trey Stanford finished the sentence for her as he strode forwards, taking her hand in his and pulling her close. ‘Just this morning, Lady Seraphina has done me the honour of agreeing to become my wife.’

Seraphina felt the pressure in his fingers bearing down on her own. Keep quiet, they said, and we may yet get through this. Her heart was beating so fast at this unexpected new turn of events that she doubted speech could have come anyway.

‘Your intended? There are rumours she is promised on the bequest of her father to Ralph Bonnington, the Earl of Cresswell, and now you say she is also your bride-to-be? If this is a trick, Stanford, you will pay for it. My Lydia was under the impression that it was her hand in marriage you had sought and to be so rudely compromised …’

The young woman in question began to sob, softly at first, but then building, until the whole room was filled with her anguish.

Trey stepped forwards. ‘I have been largely reclusive in Essex, Lady Frobisher, and I am sorry if you were under the impression that my one meeting with your family in town a month ago constituted anything like a proposal of such permanency. It was not my intention at all.’

‘Lydia said there were other more clandestine arrangements made?’

The howling heightened.

‘I see.’ The woman pulled herself together and faced Seraphina straight on, the chagrin on her face because of her daughter’s lies sharpening her query. ‘I take it that you are without a chaperone?’

Seraphina was relieved when the Duke answered for her. ‘My sister Margaret, Lady Westleigh, and her husband are in residence and she is a stickler for the correct.’ His lie sounded eminently authoritarian, but short of demanding the presence of these others, Lady Frobisher had no way of accounting for the truth or otherwise.

‘Then be careful, Stanford, that this betrothal is not as foolish as your last one and hope that the daughter of Elizabeth Moreton failed to inherit the wanderlust her mother was cursed with.’

The stillness in the Duke of Blackhaven was more menacing than any raised shout. ‘You have said enough, Lady Frobisher. It would be wise if you went now before you say more.’

‘Now listen here, my lord …’ A man at the rear of the group had taken up the argument, his face florid with anger.

But the Duke was at the very end of patience. ‘Get out.’

With a heavy click of her fan the woman turned, then thought better of it. ‘I feel it to be my God-ordained duty to let the magistrate in Maldon know of this contretemps. If I were you, Stanford, I should keep all the silver ewers well out of sight before you, too, feel the heavy weight of the Moreton temperament descend upon you just as Cresswell did.’

With that they were gone, the door shut behind them and a servant Seraphina did not recognise standing at attention by the door.

Trey unlaced his grip on her hand in a quick movement and waved the man away, the tension in the room building as all the shouted insults of the woman were remembered. Finally, he spoke.

‘Lady Frobisher will probably calm down once she has had the time to think things over. I doubt she will want to alert the magistrate.’

‘How could she know anything about me?’

‘The papers are full of the mystery of your disappearance from London and with you gone …’

He stopped as she looked up at him.

‘With you gone anyone can say anything. And they have.’

‘I see.’ He had not mentioned the matter of her being his intended at all. Rather he moved back and poured himself a drink from a decanter on a small desk. Brandy, Seraphina thought by the colour, so shocked that she had begun to shake. Trey Stanford swallowed his tipple in a single shot and poured another. This one he handed to her.

‘I find a clear mind often only makes matters worse, Seraphina.’ The first time he had ever used her Christian name and she liked the sound of it off his tongue. Upending the liquid just as he had, she coughed as the burn crawled down her throat.

‘Lady Frobisher is a woman who could ruin your reputation in a heartbeat,’ he said at length. ‘And to find you here at Blackhaven without a chaperone would constitute a great scandal.’

She smiled, fortified by the effects of the drink, for if only everything could be so very easy.

‘Oh, I think my reputation is already ruined, my lord.’

‘Perhaps not. The world will be wary of the word of a man who is both a gambler and a heavy drinker. Although Ralph Bonnington might say you attacked him, he is without witnesses. Conjecture is all anyone has to work with.’

Seraphina had had enough. ‘I can see no conjecture bigger than the false news of the betrothal you confided to the group who have just left, sir.’

He laughed at that. ‘Surely you understand that a governess looking as you do would be fodder for endless debate. No one would believe you were here merely to watch over my children and you would never again be accepted back into the society you are used to.’

‘I had no mind to go back, my lord.’

‘Your mother said exactly the same thing to me after Terence died, but she was at odds to find another place to be at peace in, no matter how hard she tried to.’

This truth made her sad, but she could not leave it there. ‘My parents’ marriage was as false as you profess your own to have been and both ended badly. I should never agree to marriage unless there was love.’

‘Indeed, those are my sentiments exactly.’

Such words confused her and a hope long missing from her life bounded into possibility. Was he saying he could love her? Did he mean to keep to the words given to Lady Frobisher because of such an emotion? She shook her head. A man like him would have the choice of any woman he wanted, one spotless of reputation and from a family well able to bring in a substantial dowry.

But what if it was she he desired? What if even for this small moment she might be his?

The clock on the mantel struck the hour of four and outside she could hear heavy rain against the window, melting the snow. The boys would be being readied for a bath by the night nurse and supper was more than three hours away.

Here, then, for this time she was cocooned in a room with a man who had stood up for her in front of strangers. No, more than that even—a man who had placed his own name on the line for hers, protective and honourable. The kisses from yesterday still burnt into her lips and the drink she had taken made her bones feel languid and heavy.

Lord, she was so very beautiful, the blue of her eyes fanned by a pale grey ring and her nose sprinkled with freckles, true and straight. As beautiful outside as she was inside, the soft honesty of her words in the garden still rang in his brain. She had admitted her share of the depth of feeling between them and had told him directly that the kisses they had enjoyed in the gardens were a gift. Catherine would have allocated only blame and reproach, but Seraphina Moreton spoke of truth and love.

The pad of his thumb drew along her jaw carefully and up across her swollen top lip and her gaze did not falter as her lips came to meet him, sampling, pushing forwards.

He knew that he should pull away, but it was too late for that, too late for anything altruistic or honourable because he wanted Lady Seraphina Moreton as he had never wanted anyone else before in the whole of his life.

Helen Frobisher’s false and perfidious assumptions were everything he hated in society. Lord, his wife had been a master at gossip and innuendo and the memories of those hurt by her sharp tongue were numerous. Seraphina, in contrast, was an innocent, crucified by all those about her who held a duty of protection and had neglected such obligation. As his hands tightened about her arms, his mouth came down upon hers.

Soft warmth met him in an equal measure, his lips slanting hard, seeking entry and finding it, no mind now for anything save the feel of loving, the promise making his heartbeat quicken. Aye, bodies had their own particular language and the feel of her skin, lustre smooth and unblemished, made him groan.

She was like rain after a long drought, moisture to fill all the dried and lost recesses of heart and soul. The words he had given to the Frobishers burned between them too, thrust into a kiss that was unequalled, a stack of papers on his desk falling around them as he inadvertently knocked them over, no sense in anything save that which nullified reason, the melding of two souls long left alone. He pressed in closer, his manhood swelling, all time and place lost as each sought the promise of more. He felt her shaking, moving, wanting, her fingers threaded through his hair as she drew him in, the honesty of her tender touch shattering the cold anger that had resided in him.

Released and unfettered.

When he pulled away he cradled her head against his chest. Protection had its own voice too, and it was not one that thought only of the heat of the moment. Seraphina neither deserved nor needed that.

‘Lord, help me,’ he said even as he meant not to, frustration cresting against pure and utter lust. The buds of her nipples showed hard against the perished blue velvet of her bodice and he softened his grasp.

‘My sister and her husband should have been here by now.’ Words of warning and intent. Words to take the sting from any perceived pressure and leave her with a choice she had long seemed bereft of. To do just as she wanted!

The blue of her eyes filled with question. ‘The Moreton name does not hold the power it once did. She might hate me, this sister of yours, as much as the Frobishers. She might hear of the false promises you have made and believe that you meant them.’




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