Once Upon A Regency Christmas: On a Winter's Eve / Marriage Made at Christmas / Cinderella's Perfect Christmas

‘He was much older than you were.’

Julia nodded. ‘I suppose I hoped for a substitute father. I soon learned that he couldn’t even be a decent parent to his own daughter, let alone comprehend the fears and needs of a young bride.’

They came to a gap in the planting. Julia waved at Miri, who now had a line of five snow bodies in descending order of size. ‘I think Miri is building a snow family. She was the one bright spark at first. Her mother died when she was fifteen so she was shut away in the women’s quarters. She is four years younger than me, the sister I never had.’

‘And your husband was not a successful man?’

‘He was self-indulgent, indolent and had made himself ill by surrendering to all the temptations of the east. The food, the drugs, the women. He did not have to lift a finger to live a comfortable life, so he did not. He never saw it was his fault that he did not achieve the wealth of other merchants, who did apply themselves.’

They reached the corner of the shrubbery and Giles ducked under a snow-laden branch and into the shelter of the plantings. With the evergreens arching overhead the winding path was almost clear of snow.

‘It was not as bad as it might sound.’ His silence had left a space that she seemed compelled to fill. Giles wondered whether she had bottled all this up for so long that she was confiding things that she never had to anyone else. ‘You can live much better in India on little money than you can over here. I rapidly learned to be a housekeeper.’

‘It must have been hard, even so. A strange and alien land, marriage to a man like that.’ He felt caught up in her story. Here, for the first time in a long time, was a woman who told the truth without artifice, just as she had asked for his kiss with total simplicity.

‘I learned to fill my time.’ Julia made a business of adjusting her shawl. ‘So that is my story. Now you must tell me yours, Captain Markham.’

‘Is it not to be Giles, this morning?’ He snapped off a sprig of holly, laden with berries, and tucked it in her bonnet.

‘No. You know why not. I made an error of judgement last night.’ She put up her free hand, touched the holly as though to pluck it out again, then left it where it was.

‘The timing, perhaps, with us both tired, was not ideal.’ She had kissed like a virgin and he had reacted instinctively to distance himself, he realised. Giles tried a little cautious fishing. ‘You miss some aspects of marriage, no doubt.’

That provoked a sudden burst of laughter. He had never heard her laugh before and he grinned back, enjoying the way those blue eyes sparkled, the curve of that lush mouth. All the severity in her face vanished, just for a second. Then the laughter was gone.

‘By the time he married me my husband’s amorous days were long past. His health would not allow him to make a great deal of effort, especially as I think he found the whole exercise humiliating. I had none of the training of the Indian courtesans he was used to. They can pretend passion, feign an amorous attraction that it was completely beyond me to attempt.’ She shrugged. ‘These past four years I might as well have been a widow.’

‘There were no children?’ He regretted asking the moment he saw the way her face tightened and her shoulders braced.

‘No.’ Julia released his arm, reached out to pluck an ivy tendril and began to fashion it into a circle. ‘I cannot think how I can speak so frankly to a man about this.’

‘I am a stranger. You’ll never see me again.’ And we are met by chance on this snow-covered island of ours, bound together for a few days. He felt his body stir and harden as the temptation began to form into intention. If she is willing…

Giles picked more ivy and held the strands out one by one for her to add to her wreath, enjoying the concentration on her face as she wove the whippy lengths, struggling with the thickness of her gloves. Her brows were drawn together, her teeth were closed on the fullness of her lower lip and she looked sensual, intelligent and flustered, a heady combination. ‘I imagine you found no shortage of gentlemen willing to offer you diversion.’

He surprised a short, bitter laugh from her. ‘I had married the man and, whatever his faults, he gave me shelter when I was desperate. Besides, I made myself too busy to be tempted. There was a business to run.’

‘You managed your husband’s affairs?’ That he could well imagine.

‘Hardly. Humphrey would never have allowed a woman to make decisions. But I acted as his representative, travelled on his behalf, carried out his instructions. That gave me freedom, the chance to see more of India.’

Her face was vivid with remembered pleasure, the colour up in her cheeks. He had no idea how she could denigrate her appearance, mourn her lost beauty. Didn’t the woman have a looking glass? ‘You could travel safely?’

‘I had two huge wrestlers as bodyguards. No one would have dared rob or attack me when they were there, I assure you!’

Julia held up the wreath, head on one side as she studied it. ‘Not bad. It will make a base for some holly and fir cones and I will hang it on the door to greet our numerous callers.’ She looped it over her wrist, then took his arm again. ‘Now you tell me your story, Captain Giles Markham.’

What to tell her? The truth, he supposed. To a point. ‘Only son of a country clergyman, destined for the church and determined on the army. I don’t know where that came from, but I rode almost as soon as I could walk. I learned to shoot, enjoyed swordplay. Led my friends into trouble and, I suppose more helpfully, out of it. I knew I hadn’t the faith to be a clergyman, but the army seemed to offer excitement with honour.

‘My godfather bought me my first commission, saying I might as well have his legacy to me while he was alive and I needed it. Then last year I received a field commission to captain. Two months ago it became clear I needed to come home for family reasons.’ Home to an inheritance of debts. He had more than a little in common with her cousin.

‘You must have done something outstanding to merit a field commission, I know that. A Forlorn Hope? Is that what they call those appallingly dangerous attacks where everyone is a volunteer and if it succeeds against all the odds the survivors are almost guaranteed promotion?’

Giles shrugged. He was never comfortable talking about fighting. The battle was against fear and against bad luck and it sounded like cant to prate about courage and honour. Those were private things. ‘I wasn’t going to get promotion any other way, there was no more money to buy one and I had no intention of spending my career as the oldest lieutenant in the British army.’

That day he had felt that nothing else mattered beyond winning promotion because nothing else in his life was true. The softer things—a woman, love, a family—they were not for him because he could not trust his own heart, his own judgement. From then on, if he survived, the army would be his life. For life.

He had fought until he arrived filthy, tattered and bloody, on top of the breach, the standard in one hand, his sabre in the other, his feet on rubble and dead bodies and a French officer surrendering to him. Afterwards they had praised his courage, his leadership, his gallantry. He told himself that was all that mattered.

He had been silent too long, lost in his thoughts. ‘An appalling experience, I imagine,’ Julia murmured.

His face must have been betraying him as much as his still tongue. ‘After a few days I realised I had lost whatever naïve ideas I still had about war. I’d been down into hell and survived. It made me a better officer.’

‘And yet when we first met you said you were late of the dragoons. After going through hell to gain your promotion, you left it.’

The unasked questions struck at his pride. Did she think he had lost his nerve, couldn’t face fighting any more? He had led a forlorn hope to secure his career as an officer and within months another kind of duty had made all that meaningless.

‘My family needs me,’ he said. ‘Things have changed. People depend on me.’ He did not understand that duty yet. It had never been intended that he should. But now it was on his shoulders and he would have to learn to carry it.

‘That is good to hear.’ The hand tucked under his arm tightened for a moment. ‘A man who will make a sacrifice for his family, put his own ambition aside for them. You must love them very much.’

I don’t know them, he wanted to say. They are strangers who will resent me. He could tell her what he had inherited, tell her anything, he sensed. But then he would not be Captain Giles Markham any longer, he would be the stranger he must become, and he wanted to hold on to the man he was now, just for a few more days. That isn’t too much to ask, is it?

They had reached the glade at the centre of the shrubbery. Giles turned and positioned Julia in front of him, toe to toe. He could forget the army, forget what lay ahead, in a brief affaire with this woman, if that was what she wanted, too.

‘What do you think you are doing?’ she demanded, the sharp question enchantingly at odds with the uncertainty in her eyes.

‘Remember I told you I could have fled screaming when you kissed me?’

‘Yes.’ She looked at him warily, but she did not move. Yes, she wants me at this moment just as much as I want her.

‘If you look behind you will see the path out of the clearing. A perfect escape route if this provokes the urge to scream.’ He took off his hat, then, hands at his sides, he leant in, brushed his lips over hers, closed his eyes.

Julia gasped. The pressure of warm lips on hers increased, but his hands stayed still. Her decision then. Flee screaming as the provoking man suggested, or…not. She jerked at her bonnet ribbons, tipped the thing off her head and into the snow, flung her arms around his neck and returned the pressure. Giles took one staggering step backwards, then his arms were around her.

‘Steady,’ he murmured. ‘There’s all the time in the world.’

Oh, yes. Julia made herself relax, eased the stranglehold, as all her senses flooded back to her. She knew how to assess the quality of silks and cottons by touch, the variety of wood by its weight and strength. Under her hands his hair was silk, a rough, wild variety turning into velvet where it was cropped closer at the nape. His neck was teak, so were his shoulders, his chest. She did not dare think about his thighs, pressed against hers.

She had learned to grade perfumes, spices and essential oils by their scent, by the subtleties of taste. Her tongue stroked over his and discovered tea and that spicy, tantalising man-taste again. He smelt of man, too. Clean linen, slightly musky skin warming under her hands, an overtone of leather, a hint of pepper.

Giles held her, his hands unmoving, only his mouth caressing her, creating an infinite variety of subtle touches and provocations. She had thought a kiss would be an exchange of heat and desire, straightforward, blatant even. But this… She sighed into his mouth and he caught her lower lip between his teeth, gently worrying it as he sucked at the fullness.

She sighed again and he groaned, deep in his chest and finally, wonderfully, his hands moved, slid down. Cupped her behind through the layers of clothes and lifted her against him. Warmth and steady strength and something very like trust. And excitement. She needed to tear his clothes off. She wanted him to tear hers off.

‘The weather is an excellent chaperon.’ Giles released her. ‘There is no danger of things getting out of control when every flat surface is under snow.’

He was making light of this, treating that kiss as though it had been a fleeting moment of flirtation. Nothing to be embarrassed about, simply something that two adults might exchange when they found a mutual attraction. Julia found she could smile. ‘We would sink without trace.’