Gifts of the Season: A Gift Most Rare / Christmas Charade / The Virtuous Widow

“Indeed,” said Revell, as dry and discouraging as he could be, but the other man plowed onward undaunted.

“Indeed, yes, my lord,” he maintained, slyly winking at Miss Talbot and her décolletage. “Why, I hate to consider the pleasure we would have missed if Lady Fordyce hadn’t drummed her daughter’s governess into playing the pianoforte so Miss Talbot could have her music—”

“She made her governess play for Miss Talbot?” asked Revell, incredulous. “Last night, in the drawing room?”

“Oh, my, yes, my lord,” answered Miss Talbot, practically purring to have finally gained Lord Revell’s attention. “I must have sung for simply hours. The kind gentlemen wouldn’t let me stop, my lord.”

“And Miss Blake—the governess—played for you the entire time?”

“Yes, my lord.” Miss Talbot smiled winningly. “It was Lady Fordyce’s wish and order that she accommodate me. And though I am more accustomed to the touch of a true lady’s hand upon the keys, for one evening that sour little wren’s skills were adequate enough for—”

“Forgive me, Miss Talbot, but I must, ah, leave, leave directly.” Revell rose so fast he nearly toppled his chair backward, and as he bolted from the room to amazed gasps and outraged murmurs, he didn’t bother to look back, leaving Andrews to console the indignantly abandoned Miss Talbot.

At this hour of the morning Sara and Clarissa must be on their morning walk—”regular as clockwork,” the maid had said—and if he hurried, he might meet them before they returned home. Having Clarissa there wouldn’t let him speak as freely as he would have done last night, but it would still be far better than if he had to seek her out inside the crowded house. He raced to his room for his coat and gloves, past more startled servants and guests with his coattails flying about behind him, before he reached the back door and opened it himself, not waiting for the footman who belatedly hurried to do it for him.

A light dusting of new snow had fallen in the night, softening and smoothing the outlines of the landscape, but also making any new footprints sharp and clean by contrast. Revell crossed the yard near the stables, heading in the direction where he’d seen Sara and Clarissa yesterday. A wide trampled path of muddied snow showed where Albert had ridden out with his friends earlier, but there, off to one side, Revell found what he’d sought: two sets of prints walking closely together, one small, one smaller, and both framed by the sweeping trail of long petticoats.

He found them in a small copse of ancient holly, the leaves glossy and dark green against the snow, the berries crimson. In the snow sat a large willow basket that Sara and Clarissa were filling with branches Sara was cutting from the holly to take back to the ballroom. The little girl laughed with excitement, clapping her red-mittened hands as she kicked her feet in an impromptu dance in the snow.

Yet as pretty a scene as this was, Revell still hesitated to interrupt. While Sara’s role as an impromptu accompanist was certainly a plausible explanation for why she hadn’t joined him, she could just as easily have chosen to play over meeting him. Nothing was certain, but then nothing concerning Sara was.

Except, of course, that he wished it to be.

Sara turned, tossing another branch into the basket, and now that Revell could hear the song she was humming, without thinking he began singing along with her, the words coming back to him from at least a lifetime away.

“‘Green grow’th the holly,

So doth the ivy,

Though winter blast’s blow ne’er so high

Blow ever so icy,

Green grow’th the holly.”’

She looked up swiftly, found him on the edge of the copse, and her face lit with the most radiant smile imaginable, free of any shadow of uncertainty or second thoughts.

“Lord Revell!” cried Clarissa gleefully, loping through the snow toward him. “You did come! Miss Blake said you wouldn’t bother with us, not anymore, but you did!”

“Miss Blake is a wise woman, Clarissa,” said Revell with mock severity, his gaze never leaving Sara’s face. Strange how he was still speaking to the child—even making perfect sense, too—while so much else unsaid was vibrating between him and Sara. “But not even your Miss Blake knows everything, especially not about me.”

But if she’d only give him half a chance, a quarter of a chance, he’d offer her every last morsel of fact that there was to learn, plus his heart and his soul and the world in the bargain.

“Sing your song again, my lord,” begged Clarissa, hopping up and down with anticipation. “It’s exactly right for picking holly.”

“It’s not his song at all, Clarissa,” said Sara, rubbing her gloved hands together to warm them. Her cheeks were very pink, her eyes very bright, and the exertion of the bough-cutting along with her hood had tousled her hair into wispy tendrils around her face, most disordered for a governess and, decided Revell, altogether charming. “It’s a very famous song written long ago by King Henry the Eighth.”

“Then he must be a relative of yours, my lord,” said Clarissa sagely. “Miss Blake says dukes are next to princes and kings, which makes you almost family with King Henry himself.”

Revell laughed, both at the ridiculousness of the connection and because, in his present giddy—giddy?—state, he couldn’t help it.

“Not precisely, no,” he said. “My family’s muddled enough without claiming old King Hal and all his mischief into the tawdry mix. There’s only myself and two brothers left among us Claremonts, and I can assure you that that is plenty.”

“Then you are an orphan, too, just like Miss Blake,” said Clarissa with appropriate solemnity. “We are her family now, you know, especially at Christmas. Mama says she has nowhere else to go.”

“Oh, my, Clarissa,” said Sara, her smile perhaps more poignant than she intended, her unabashed joy clearly faltering. “You would have me be a stray dog that no one wishes to claim!”

“I did not say you were a stray dog, Miss Blake,” said Clarissa indignantly, “only that you had nowhere else to go, and you don’t, and neither does Lord Revell. I suppose we can look after him, too, same as we do you. Mama always says kindness must begin at home. Here now, my lord, bend down.”

Mystified but obedient, Revell bowed his tall shoulders to Clarissa’s level. He didn’t really consider himself an orphan, not at his age and with his less than warm memories of his long-dead parents, and he hardly felt in need of befriending because of their absence. But then hadn’t he accepted Albert Fordyce’s invitation for exactly that reason—to experience the kind of loud, cheerful, traditional family Christmas that he and his brothers had never really had for themselves? Wasn’t he every bit the footloose mongrel dog that Sara had just described, always roaming, without a home to call his own?

“There, my lord,” said Clarissa, scowling with concentration as she stuck a small sprig of holly into the top buttonhole of his coat. “Now you truly belong with us all at Ladysmith, at least until Twelfth Night.”

Slowly he straightened, patting the holly sprig as he wondered where his lighthearted smile had gone, and with it Sara’s rosy-cheeked exuberance. Now she looked as if a score of private sorrows had pinched and drained the color from her face, memories that he didn’t share and perhaps never would.

More unexpected strangeness, this, that the little girl’s attempts at aping her mother’s grand lady-of-the-manor kindness could touch him—and Sara—so deeply. Perhaps they were both the stray dogs no one would claim, and though he tried to laugh again at the sheer lunacy of such a notion, he couldn’t. Miracles and elephants, stray dogs and plum pudding and holly for Christmas: who could sort out the significance in so much foolishness?

“Mama says to be truly happy, my lord,” continued Clarissa, “you must have someone to care for, and someone to care for you. Isn’t that so, Miss Blake?”

But for once Sara left a question of her student’s unanswered. “Clarissa, I believe I must have left my scarf back at the walnut tree. Would you please oblige me by going to fetch it?”

“Yes, Miss Blake,” said Clarissa, nodding with gleeful anticipation. She was so seldom permitted to go anywhere unattended, even twenty feet to the walnut tree, that she was off before Sara could change her mind, crashing through the brush and snow.

But Sara was crashing ahead, too, her words racing in a breathless rush, knowing she wouldn’t have long to explain. “About last night, Rev, about—”

“I don’t care,” he said, coming to stand close before her, gently pushing back her hood.

She was trembling with anticipation. “But, Rev, I want you to know that—”

“That’s enough,” he said softly, and then he was kissing her, his lips warm on hers in the chilly air, his fingers tangling in her hair as he cradled her head. She should have pulled away, she should have protested, but instead she closed her eyes and surrendered with only a faint, fluttering sigh that was lost between them.

She tipped her head and hungrily parted her lips, welcoming him deeper as the rush of well-remembered pleasure and intimacy slipped through her body. Her head and her reason might have tried to forget him, but the rest of her had clung to his memory with fervent loyalty, making the years they’d been apart slip away as nothing. One kiss, and she realized how much a part of her Revell still was, and always would be.

“Ah, Sara,” he murmured, his voice rough with desire as at last he broke the kiss, keeping her face close to his. “How can you know how much I have missed kissing you?”

She smiled through a blur of tears, her emotions almost too strong for lowly words. She felt shaken and uncertain, as if she’d been turned inside out and back again, without any notion of what would come next. Yet even so she still heard Clarissa’s return behind her, and just in time she pulled away from Revell.

Her cloak blown back from running, the girl rubbed her nose with the thumb of her mitten and gazed up at Sara accusingly. “Your scarf wasn’t there, Miss Blake.”

“It wasn’t?” asked Sara, her heart racing as she self-consciously tried to smooth her hair back into place. Even without turning she could sense Revell beside her, and it took all her willpower not to reach for his hand.

How could one kiss cause so much damage? She’d done well enough for years without Revell at her side. What was it about him that could turn her into such a dreadful, quivering mess, especially when he’d only promised to linger in her life through Twelfth Night? Didn’t he realize how disastrous this game could be to her, or did he simply not care? They had to talk: they had to talk now, certainly before he tried to kiss her again.

And heaven preserve her if she were still even halfway in love with him….

“It wasn’t.” Clarissa sighed and pointed dramatically at the basket with the ivy clippings and the missing scarf looped over the handle. “Your scarf wasn’t near the walnut tree, Miss Blake, because it was here all the while, and if—Miss Blake? Are you ill, Miss Blake?”

“Of course I am well, Clarissa,” said Sara quickly, convincing neither the girl nor herself. “Have you ever known me to be ill in all the time I’ve been with you?”