Christmas Betrothals: Mistletoe Magic

But she felt nothing!

The shock of it hit her and she pulled away, amazed at the singular smile of ardour on John’s face.

‘I will consider that as a troth, my love, and I will treasure the beauty of it for ever.’

The sound of a maid coming with tea had him moving away and taking his place on a chair opposite her. Yet still he grinned.

A gentleman, a nice man, a good man. And a man whose kisses made her feel nothing.

She lay in bed that night and cried. Cried for her mother and her father and for herself, trapped as she was by rules and rituals and etiquette.

John’s fragrant flowers were on the table beside her bed, but she missed the ugly single orange bloom. Missed its vigour and its irreverence and its unapologetic raw colour. Missed the company of the man who had given it to her.

He had had a wife who had died quite recently according to the gossip. Lord, how had he dealt with that? Badly, by all accounts, as she thought of his gambling and his obvious lack of funds.

Closing her eyes, she brought her hand to her mouth and kissed the back of it as John Wilcox-Rice had kissed her lips today. There was something wrong with the way that he had not moved, the static stillness of the action negating all the emotion that should have been within it.

Lord, she had never in her life been kissed before and so she was hardly an expert, but a part of her brain refused to believe that that was all that it was, all that was whispered about and written of. No, there had to be more to it than what she had felt today, but with Christmas on its way and the honouring of a promise to find a spouse, she was running out of time to be able to truly discover just what it was.

A new and more daring thought struck her suddenly.

Perhaps she could find out? Perhaps if she invited Lucas Clairmont to call and offered him a sum of money for both his service and his silence, she might discover what she did not now know.

To buy a single kiss!

She smiled, imagining such a wild and dangerous scheme. Of course she could not do that! Lucas Clairmont was hardly a man to bargain with and any trust she might give him would be sorely misplaced. Or would it? He had melted into the background at the Lennington ball and she had heard no gossip of her conversation on the Belgrave Square balcony. Indeed, when she had seen him in the street yesterday he had barely acknowledged her. But was that from carefulness or just plain indifference?

She moved her hand and slanted her lips, increasing the pressure in a way that felt right. A bloom of want wound thin in her stomach, the warm promise of it bringing to mind the dangerous American.

Quickly she sat up, hard against the backboard of the bed, pulling the bedding about her shoulders to try to keep the cold at bay.

This was her only chance to find out. She had been in society for nearly eight years and not once in all that time had she lain here imagining the things she did now about any man.

Forty-two days until she would give a promise of eternal obedience and chastity to a man whose kisses left her with … nothing.

Her teeth worried her top lip as she tried to imagine the conversation preceding the experiment. It hardly seemed loyal to tell him of her reaction to John’s kiss and her need to see if others would be the same, and yet if she did not he might think her wanton. A new thought struck her. Could men kiss well if they thought that they were being compared in some way? Would it not dampen a natural tendency?

And how much should she pay him? Would he be offended by fifty pounds or thankful for it? Would he want a hundred if he kissed her twice?

The hours closed in on her, as did the fact that Luc Clairmont would be gone after Christmas. A useful knowledge that, for he would be a temporary embarrassment only, should her whole scheme founder!

The thought of Christmas turned her thoughts in another direction.

Mistletoe!

That was it. If she hung the mistletoe Ellie had bought her yesterday above the doorway and angled herself so that she stood beneath the lintel in front of him … Just an accident, a pleasant interlude that would mean nothing should his kiss rouse as little feeling in her as John’s had.

She sat up further.

Would he know of the traditions here in England? Would he even see it?

Could she mention the custom if he did not? Her brain turned this way and that, and the clock in the corner struck the hour of two. Outside the echo of the other clocks lingered.

Did Luc Clairmont hear them too? Was he awake with his swollen eye and wounded leg?

She slipped from her bed and walked to the window, pulling back her heavy cream curtains and looking out into the darkness.

Park Lane was quiet and the trees across the way were bleak against a sodden sky. Tonight the moon did not show its face, but was hidden behind low clouds of rolling greyness, gathering in the west.

A nothing kiss in a rain-filled night and the weight of twenty-five years upon her shoulders.

If she did not take this one chance, she might never know, but always wonder …

Sitting at her desk, she pulled out a piece of paper and an envelope and, dipping her pen in ink, began to write.

The letter had come a few minutes ago and Luc could make no sense of it. Lillian Davenport had something of importance to ask him and would like his company at three o’clock. The servant who had brought the message was one of Stephen’s so he presumed it to have gone to the Hawkhurst town house first. The lad also seemed to be waiting for a reply.

Scrawling an answer on a separate sheet of parchment, he reached for his seal. Out of habit, he was to think as he placed it back down, for of course he could not use it here. ‘Could you deliver this to Miss Davenport?’

The young servant nodded and hurried away, and when he had gone Luc lifted Lillian’s missive into the light and read it again.

She wanted to speak to him about something important. She hoped he would come alone. She wondered about the Christmas traditions in America and whether mistletoe and holly were plants he was familiar with.

He frowned. Though he grew trees for timber in Virginia, the subject of botany had never been his strongpoint. Holly he knew as a prickly red-berried plant but mistletoe … Was that not the sprig that young ladies liked to hang in the Yuletide salons to catch kisses? A different thought struck him. What would it be like to kiss Lillian Davenport?

He chastised himself at the very idea. Lord, she seemed to be very familiar with Wilcox-Rice and he was leaving in little more than a month.

But the thought lingered, a tantalising conjecture that lay in the memory of holding her fingers in his own and feeling the hurried beat of her heart. He guessed that Lillian Davenport was a warm and responsive woman beneath the outward composure, a lady who would be pleasantly surprised by the wonders of the flesh.

Raking his hand through his hair, he stood, wincing at the lump on the back of his head. Four men had jumped him on returning to his lodgings three nights ago and it was only his training in the army that had allowed him the ability to fend them off until help arrived.

He wished that Hawk had not persuaded him to take a walk the other day, the same walk that had brought him face to face with Lillian and her friends. Damn, he had seen in her eyes the censure he had noticed in every single one of their meetings and who could blame her?

The charade of his visit here began to press in. He would have liked to tell Lillian that he was not a bad man, that he had been a soldier and that he held great tracks of virgin land in Virginia filled with timber. But he couldn’t because there were other things about him that she would not countenance.

Still, for the first time in a long while he felt alive and excited, the inertia in Richmond replaced by a new vigour.

He came through into the small yellow downstairs salon like one of the sleek black panthers she had once seen as a statue in an antique shop in Regent Street, all restless energy and barely harnessed menace, but she also saw he limped.

‘Miss Davenport!’ Today his injured eye looked darker, the bruising worsened by time, though he neither alluded to it nor hid it from her. Her letter was in his hand, she could see her tidy neat writing from where she stood and there was a question in his stance.

‘Mr Clairmont.’

Silence stretched until she gestured him to sit, the absurdity of all she had planned, now that he was here, screaming in her consciousness. How did she begin? How did one broach such a situation with any degree of modesty and honour?

‘Thank you very much for coming. I know that you must be busy—’

‘Card games happen mostly at night,’ he interrupted and she swore she saw a glimmer of amusement in his velvet eyes.