To Wed His Christmas Lady (The Heart of a Duke Book 7) (8 page)

He let fly a curse to match the ones the lady herself had uttered in the privacy of her chambers. In his years of traveling, and all the women he’d kissed, never before had one slipped into his thoughts and dug in with this tentacle-like grip. In large part due to the life he’d lived, traveling. There was no place for emotional entanglements. Even less place when there was a lady his parents would see him wed.

And after but a handful of meetings with the lady he’d first taken for the manner of cruel, unkind miss his future betrothed was purported to be, he’d been silenced by the very real truth—there was, just as the innkeeper had said, more to the lady than a mean-spirited mistress who ordered her servants about.
I have no right peeling back the layers to discover who the lady truly is…
For nothing could ever come of knowing anything more of Cara, the young lady who’d refused to give him so much as her surname. Another life awaited him. Just as another life awaited her.

Will curled his hands tightly at his back. His father had been far more lenient than any other duke ought with his son and heir gallivanting about the globe. How much of that leniency had been born of parental guilt at that unofficial, but not unspoken, contract they’d have him enter into with the Duke of Ravenscourt’s daughter? He’d long resented the expectation for him to join himself with that woman. Though not one given to gossips, it would be hard to ignore the whisperings as they pertained to the woman his parents would see him wed. Words lent credence by his own father’s confirmation about the lady’s character. Still for that, his mother’s bond to Lady Clarisse Falcot’s late mother was such that she’d ask him to overlook a wife who was cold, cruel, and calculated because there was more there than any of Society saw of the lady.

He snorted. His mother had long been hopeful, seeing the best in all. He gave his head a shake. Those charges about a young woman, coming from her own godmother before she’d even made her Come Out were hardly endorsements where his future bride was concerned. And for two days he’d not given a thought to the grim future awaiting him, but rather the tart-mouthed lady who challenged him one moment, and the other moments eyed him with a soft, doe-eyed expression that could drive a man to madness.

For only madness could account for this hungering after Cara. From the windowpane, his packed saddlebags reflected mockingly back at him. That same insanity required he leave, winter storm and all. But twenty miles from his family’s estate, the ride would be slow and arduous but hardly impossible. He sighed. A man who’d endured a trek in Nova Scotia during the heart of winter could certainly manage twenty miles or so by horseback. The longer he remained here with her, the more his world was thrown into question.

It was time to leave.

A sharp rapping at the door cut into his thoughts. With a frown, Will strode to the door and pulled it open. The innkeeper stood, worrying his hat between his hands. Concern glimmered in his rheumy eyes. A knot tightened in Will’s stomach that came from years of intuitive preparedness of danger. “What is it?” he asked, when the man remained fixed in silence.

“It is the lady,” the servant blurted. He continued on a rush, “She’s gone out.”

He cocked his head. By God, just twenty-six, there was no way his hearing was faulty and yet it had sounded as though the man had said—

“In the storm, my lord. She’s gone out in the storm. And my wife urged me to go fetch you because the lady’s driver is off hiding from the lady and I knew you could likely bring the lady back with a good deal more ease than myself—”

Another blast of winter wind shook the thin walls and William sprang into action. With the man still rambling on, he started around the wizened innkeeper and took off at a quick run. He clenched and unclenched his teeth as he surged through the narrow halls. The wooden floors groaned and creaked in protest as he bounded down the stairs and charged for the door. Will jerked it open with such force it shook the frame. Snow stung his eyes and momentarily blinded him. He slammed it shut behind him.

Fear warred with frustration in his chest and he fed all annoyance with the lady. For as he trudged through the snow, more than a foot deep, panic licked at him. He damned the high banks that slowed his pace. The bloody, foolish chit. What in bloody hell was she thinking? Did she not have the sense God gave an ant?

He squatted and the freezing snow penetrated his breeches, stinging his flesh with the wet cold. A pressure squeezed at his chest. What protection did the lady have? Her cloak and some too-thin gown she’d borrowed from the innkeeper? He ran his gloved palm over the small footstep left in the otherwise undisturbed snow. Will lifted his gaze and followed the steps as far as he could with his eyes, squinting into the thick swirl of snow. Coming to his feet, he then set out in pursuit of those smaller prints, footsteps belonging to a bloody, foolish chit.

What business did she have going out in—?

He came to a stop and narrowed his eyes. “Her belongings,” he hissed. Will cursed again and then resumed his determined path for the lady. Fury ate away his earlier fear and he funneled it into that far safer sentiment. As he made his way to the road, he’d have wagered the joy he found in traveling these years, just where Cara had gone off to.

Sure enough, as he converged on a clearing a few moments later, the carriage pulled into focus. The doors hung open with the wind battering them. Cara stood perched precariously on the edge, with her gloved fingers straining for the black trunk atop. A thick haze of red clouded his vision.
This
is what the lady would risk life and limb for? “What in blazes are you doing?” he shouted into the wind.

Cara emitted a sharp shriek and flailed her arms. She crashed backward into a small drift and her bonnet flew from her head and sailed noiselessly into the snow.

“Cara!” Fear roughened his voice. Anger forgotten, he trudged the remainder of the way to the carriage, damning his strides slowed by the thick snow.

He reached her side. William braced for the vitriol in the young lady’s eyes at finding herself indignantly sprawled in the freezing snow. Instead, a wide smile wreathed her face. That unfettered happiness sucked the thoughts from his head and he just gazed down transfixed. She lay upon the cold earth with her blonde curls blanketed about her and her sapphire blue skirts vibrant in an otherwise colorless landscape. Snow clung to her golden eyebrows and, but for the reddened tip of her nose, she may, in this instance, very well be the ice princess he’d professed her to be—magical and fey, she’d sucked the breath from his lungs.

Their gazes caught.

“Y-you s-startled me.” All the lady’s sure attempts at bravado were spoiled by the loud chatter of her even, pearl white teeth.

That snapped him to the moment. He cursed. “What in hell are you doing out here?”

She opened her mouth, but promptly closed it as he bent and picked her up. Through the dampened fabric of their garments, the crush of her breasts against his chest sent heat spiraling through him. Unnerved by this inexplicable pull, he cursed again. “You are so fixed on your blasted belongings that you’d risk your foolish life?” He set her down on her feet and she sank into the snow.

Cara nodded once. “Yes.” She yanked the hem of her skirt up.

Ice slapped at their faces, leaving a painful sting to the flesh. Will ignored that slight discomfort. “Yes?” he seethed. Disappointment and anger filled him. For just then, he despised that she’d proven herself, once more, to be a woman to so value those useless items that sat atop her fine carriage.
So
cherish them that she’d place more value on them than her very life.

She nodded once more. “Y-yes.” Had that tremble been attributed to unease with his sudden silence he’d be somewhat mollified. Except, she turned awkwardly in the snow and gestured to the top of the black lacquer carriage. “As you are h-here, would y-you be s-so good as to take down my trunk?”

Will narrowed his eyes. Why, she was out of her living mind.

W
ill was displeased. Shivering in the snow with the wind buffeting her flimsy cloak, Cara took in the muscle ticking at the corner of his right eye. She fiddled with her skirts, burrowing into the largely useless fabric of her wet cloak. Nay, the man was a good deal more than that. She’d only once before bore witness to such disappointment and fury—the day she’d gotten her half-sister sacked from Mrs. Belden’s, Mrs. Munroe had looked at her with a like expression.

She cocked her head. She’d been very clear as to what had earned the other woman’s upset. Now, with Will, she could not account for the taut line of his mouth and his palpable fury. She widened her eyes. Of course. Given his lessons on proper treatment of servants, he’d expect some courtesy, on her part. “P-please,” she blurted.

He puzzled his brow.

Humph. The lout expected more in terms of her gratitude. She inclined her head. “Will you
please
help collect my trunk?”

Will leaned down, shrinking the space between them. With a hairsbreadth of space between their mouths, her lips tingled with the fresh memory of his kiss. “Do. You. Think. I. Am. Angry. Over. Your. Lack. Of. Manners?”

By the manner in which he bit out those terse words, she’d wager not. Another gust of wind slammed into them and whipped the fabric of her cloak and gown against his leg. “You are d-displeased o-over something else?” She shivered, the winter chill seeping past the momentary warmth his nearness provided.

An ominous grumble climbed this fierce once-more-a-stranger’s chest and stuck in his throat. Cara took several faltering steps back and stumbled over herself in her quest to get away from this glowering figure. She gasped and shot her arms out to steady herself. However, he only marched past. In one effortless move, he climbed onto the driver’s perch and then hefted her trunk down.

It landed in the snow with a soft thump.

Emotion swelled in her breast. Ignoring the cold, she scrambled over and fell to her knees. Her fingers, numb from the cold, shook and she damned the uselessness of those chilled digits.

“Here,” Will barked, pulling her attention up. He leaned down and, in one fluid movement, worked the latch open. “There,” he spat. He slashed a hand furiously at her trunk. “Collect whatever it is that is so precious to you, princess.”

She hesitated, as with that last, jeering endearment, he transformed her once more into that callous ice creature he’d taken her as…and with good reason. That unfeeling lady she’d been groomed into after her mother’s passing was, in fact, the person she truly was. With that angry truth, she fished around the neatly folded gowns of white satin. Where in blazes was it? Her heart thundered in a panicky rhythm as she sought that hidden pendant. Then her fingers collided with the hard metal and she sent a prayer skyward. With tremulous fingers, she withdrew the necklace. The ruby, a crimson mark of vivid sadness upon the stark, white winterscape, tugged at her.

“Ah, so
that
is why you’d risk your life.” William’s regret-tinged words brought her neck back with such alacrity she wrenched the muscles.

She winced. And where he’d judged her before and been correct in his harsh suppositions, in this he was wrong. He saw her as nothing more than a lady, enamored of her precious stones and gems. William held an arm out and effectively quashed the defensive rebuttal on her lips.

“Come,” he said gruffly.

Silently, she wrapped one hand about his arm and curled her other around the last gift she’d ever been given. They moved slowly. Cara’s breath came fast, stirring the winter air as she labored to lift her foot from the wet snow and take another step. She’d no doubt Will could run the distance to the inn without so much as an extra breath taken, and yet, he remained at her side—a woman, who by the sneer on his lips and glint in his eye, he clearly despised.

They broke through the copse of juniper trees and the inn pulled into focus. “Why?”

Cara didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “I’m greedy, Will,” she said, giving him the truths he expected. She leaned against him in a futile bid to steal his body’s heat. “I- I could not sleep all night in fear of my cherished diamonds.” Pain stabbed at her heart. That was how little he thought of her. And why shouldn’t he? What manner of avaricious creature had she proven herself with her orders to the earl’s driver a day earlier? The world saw a person the way one might through a frosted pane; hazy and blurred, distorted.

He brought them to a stop. “It was a ruby.”

He’d noted that small detail. She fisted the heart pendant in her hand. The edges of that stone bit painfully through the fabric of her glove. “And there were other jewels and a trunk of satins and silks.”

Those miserable pieces paid for by her father. She hated everything and anything connected to the vile reprobate—including herself who by the very nature of blood made her an extension of that foul figure.

She looked at Will squarely. His face may as well have been a mask he’d donned, so little she could tell from his expression. “It was,” she said tightly. Or rather… “It is a ruby.” He pierced her with his gaze and with the intensity of his stare, he may as well have looked inside and plucked all those sorry pieces of her existence and made them his. No one had ever looked at her so closely. No one. It left her open and vulnerable, filled with a tumult of emotions she didn’t know what to do with. Her feet twitched with the urge to flee. Cara made a hasty move to step around him.

Will placed himself between her and escape, effectively blocking her forward stride. For one of his impressive size, he moved with a surprising agility. Cara folded her arms close to her chest and hugged herself tightly, praying he attributed that small protective gesture as a bid to find warmth.

“Why?” he asked quietly.

Why should he ask? Did he see a glimmer of the person she’d once been and secretly, with the tiniest sliver of her soul, wished to again be? One who felt and loved and longed to be loved in return? She bit the inside of her cheek hard. “Why does it matter?” That raspy question tore from her throat.

He palmed her cheek. Cara longed to jerk her chin away and shake free of his intimate caress. With his tender touch, he threatened to shatter the carefully constructed defenses she’d built about her heart.

“It matters.” That low pledge rumbled up from his chest.

Oh, God.

Perhaps the sliver of her soul that craved warmth was far stronger than the rest of her cold, miserable self, for she ached for him to keep touching her in this soft, searching way.

After her mother’s death, Cara had retreated into herself. The perils in sharing anything personal had been made clear when, as a girl, her own father had rejected that offering. “Why?” She turned a question on him. Her mind warred with the need to give Will details about her past and those intimate parts of her pathetic life story.

For a long moment, she expected he’d ignore the query she put to him in return.

But then, he passed that penetrating gaze over her face and lingered on her eyes. “I took you to be a self-centered lady.”

Bitterness surged in her breast. “I
am
.” Those were the truest words she’d ever spoken to another person since her mother’s passing.

Will dipped his head and layered his brow to hers. Their breaths mingled and the puffs of white escaping each of their mouths melded as one. “Do you know what I believe, Cara mia?”

Cara stood immobile, as frozen as the sharp icicles hanging from the sign outside the inn. She could not so much as muster nod. “What?” Her breath emerged as a breathless whisper.

“I believe there is more to you than you’d have people know.”

How could this man see so much of her when the world saw nothing more than the icy façade she presented? The part of herself that had spent years keeping people out wanted to lash out at him for his knowing. Yet, for the first time in more years than she could remember, no stinging diatribe sprung from her lips.

“What do you see?” she whispered, aching to know, and more, be that person he took her as.

“I see a woman who loves to smile but who fears doing so.” With his words, he reached inside her heart and fanned that long-cold organ with a contagious warmth that spread its beautiful heat to other parts of her too-long chilly being. “I see a woman who is so very afraid of being whispered about and talked of that she presents an empty, unlikeable façade to the world.”

The unerringly accurate words speared her. She parted her lips in silent shock.

He brushed his thumb over her lower lip. Of their own volition, her lashes fluttered and then drawing in a deep breath, she let him in. “It was my mother’s.”

William stilled, his thumb pressed to Cara’s full, lower lip.

It was my mother’s.

Not is.
Was
. Pain dug at his belly, as with the glimmer of sadness in her expressive eyes, Cara’s dogged tenacity in collecting her belongings now made sense. As though unnerved by the thick silence between them, she stepped away.

She unfurled her small hand. The crimson ruby stood vivid on her kidskin gloves. “The clasp is broken.” To demonstrate as much, Cara fingered the intricate and clearly damaged clasp. He studied her head bent over the piece. “It was my mother’s,” she repeated, the murmur so very soft, the winter wind carried with it nearly all sound. “She died when I was seven.”

At the faint tremble of her fingers, the evidence of her stoic grief, pressure weighted his chest, making it difficult to draw breath. How could this woman, a mere stranger two days ago, and one he’d not much liked upon first meeting, have caused this dull ache, as though her pain was his?

Her eyes grew distant and by the sad, little smile on Cara’s lips, her mind danced back to those times when she’d been happy. “My father insisted I don only diamonds.” She gave her head a wry shake. “I despise them. I could not understand why anyone would wish to wear those clear, colorless stones. Not when there are far more vibrant and interesting gems.”

The wind tugged at her bonnet strings and knocked it backwards on her head. With the burden of her necklace in her hands, she attempted to right it. William reached for it.

Cara recoiled. “What are you doing?” She eyed him warily.

Ignoring her, he unfurled the long, red ribbons and carefully lifted the velvet bonnet. He set it atop her riot of golden curls. His movements slowed by the chill in his fingers, William retied the strands underneath her chin.

“Th-thank you.” Was the tremble to Cara’s words a product of his touch or the winter cold?

The rules of propriety rang in his ears, urging him for the first time since he’d entered this inn to turn on his heel, escort Cara safely back, and then leave as fast as his mount could possibly carry him. “Then how did your mother come by the ruby?” he asked, instead, his tone gruff. How much easier it had been when she’d been nothing more than the materialistic, grasping lady who valued her personal belongings before the lives of her servants.

“Oh, it was her mother’s,” she said with a matter-of-factness that raised a smile. “My mother said I should wear it and always remember there is far more beauty in being colorful than in…” She let her words trail off and looked past him.

William captured her hand in his and raised it. “Than in what, Cara?”

She unfurled her palm, displaying that cherished piece. He stared at the crimson heart. “Than in being a colorless piece that inspires no emotion in anyone.” She spoke of herself. Is that truly how the lady saw herself? How could a woman who’d charge into a dark hall to challenge a person she’d believed laughed at her, or stalked off in the midst of a storm to rescue her own possessions, not see the strength of her own spirit?

“Forgive me,” he said quietly.

She opened and closed her mouth several times like a fish floundering on shore.

“Again, Cara, are you surprised I am capable of an apology?”

Cara shivered and then hugged her arms to her once again. “I am surprised
any
man would be capable of such.”

He frowned. As with that admission, and the story of her heart pendant, she let him inside a world she’d lived. A world where her father had sought to quash her spirit and churn her into a cold, vapid lady whose sole purpose was the match he’d no doubt make from her. By her bold actions at the inn these two days, the man had tried and failed. And with that revealing piece, she once again threw into question everything he’d believed about her.