The Heart Of Christmas: A Handful Of Gold / The Season for Suitors / This Wicked Gift

“Thank you, my lord.” Her voice was low, melodic. Seductive, and deliberately schooled to sound that way, he guessed. Her eyes looked candidly—and shrewdly?—back into his. He did not for a moment believe she was a virtuous woman. Or that what little virtue she had was not for hire.

“I have just been commending Miss Heyward on her talent and grace, Folingsby,” Netherford said. “Damme, but if she were in a ballroom, she would put every other lady to shame. No gentleman would wish to dance with anyone but her, eh? Eh?” He dug one elbow into his lordship’s ribs.

There were appreciative titters from the other gentlemen gathered about her.

“Dear me,” his lordship murmured. “I wonder if Miss Heyward would wish to court such—ah, fame.”

“Or such notoriety,” she said with a fleeting smile.

“Damme,” Netherford continued, “but one would love to watch you waltz, Miss Heyward. Trouble is, every other man present would want to stand and watch, too, and there would be no one to dance with all the other chits.” There was a general gust of laughter at his words.

Julian raised his quizzing glass to his eye and caught a suggestion of scorn in the dancer’s smile.

“Thank you, sir,” she said. “You are flatteringly kind. But I am weary, gentlemen. It has been a long evening.”

And thus bluntly she dismissed her court. They went meekly, after making their bows and bidding her good-night—three of them out the door, one to join the crowd still clustered about Hannah Dove. Julian remained.

Blanche Heyward looked up at him inquiringly. “My lord?” she said, a suggestion of a challenge in her voice.

“Sometimes I find,” he said, dropping his glass and clasping his hands at his back, “that weariness can be treated as effectively with a quiet and leisurely meal as with sleep. Would you care to join me for supper?”

She opened her mouth to refuse—he read the intent in her expression—hesitated, and closed her mouth again.

“For supper, my lord?” She raised her eyebrows.

“I have reserved a private parlor in a tavern not far from here,” he told her. “I would as soon have company as eat alone.” And yet, he told her with his nonchalant expression and the language of his body, he would almost as soon eat alone. It mattered little to him whether she accepted or not.

She broke eye contact with him and looked down at her hands. She was clearly working up a refusal again. Equally clearly she was tempted. Or—and he rather suspected that this was the true interpretation of her behavior—she was as practiced as he in sending the message she wished to send. A reluctance and a certain indifference, in this case. But a fixed intention, nevertheless, of accepting in the end. He made it easier for her, or rather he took the game back into his own hands.

“Miss Heyward.” He leaned slightly toward her and lowered his voice. “I am inviting you to supper, not to bed.”

Her eyes snapped back to his and he read in them the startled knowledge that she had been bested. She half smiled.

“Thank you, my lord,” she said. “I am rather hungry. Will you wait while I fetch my cloak?”

He gave a slight inclination of his head, and she stood up. He was surprised by her height now that he was standing close to her. He was a tall man and dwarfed most women. She was scarcely more than half a head shorter than he.

Well, he thought with satisfaction, the first move had been made and he had emerged the winner. She had agreed only to supper, it was true, but if he could not turn that minor triumph into a week of pleasure in Norfolkshire, then he deserved the fate awaiting him at Conway in the form of the ferret-faced Lady Sarah Plunkett.

He did not expect to lose the game.

And he did not believe, moreover, that she intended he should.

IT WAS a square, spacious room with timbered ceiling and large fireplace, in which a cheerful fire crackled. In the center of the room was one table set for two, with fine china and crystal laid out on a crisply starched white cloth. Two long candles burned in pewter holders.

Viscount Folingsby must have been confident, Verity concluded, that she would say yes. He took her cloak in silence. Without looking at him, she crossed the room to the fire and held out her hands to the blaze. She felt more nervous than she had ever felt before, she believed, even counting her audition and her first onstage performance. Or perhaps it was a different kind of nervousness.

“It is a cold night,” he said.

“Yes.” Not that there had been much chance to notice the chill. A sumptuous private carriage had brought them the short distance from the theater. They had not spoken during the journey.

She did not believe it was an invitation just to supper. But she still did not know what her answer would be to the inevitable question. Perhaps it was understood in the demimonde that when one accepted such an invitation as this, one was committing oneself to giving thanks in the obvious way.

Could it possibly be that before this night was over she would have taken the irrevocable step? What would it feel like? she wondered suddenly. And how would she feel in the morning?

“Green suits you,” Lord Folingsby said, and Verity despised the way she jerked with alarm to find that he was close behind her. “Not all women have the wisdom and taste to choose clothes that suit their coloring.”

She was wearing her dark green silk, which she had always liked though it was woefully outmoded and almost shabby. But its simple high-waisted, straightsleeved design gave it a sort of timeless elegance that did not date itself as quickly as more fussy, more modish styles.

“Thank you,” she said.

“I fancy,” he said, “that some artist must once have mixed his paints with care and used a fine brush in order to produce the particular color of your eyes. It is unusual, if not unique.”

She smiled into the dancing flames. Men were always lavish in their compliments on her eyes, though no one had ever said it quite like this before.

“I have some Irish blood in me, my lord,” she said.

“Ah. The Emerald Isle,” he said softly. “Land of redhaired, fiery-tempered beauties. Do you have a fiery temper, Miss Heyward?”

“I also have a great deal of English blood,” she told him.

“Ah, we mundane and phlegmatic English.” He sighed. “You disappoint me. Come to the table.”

“You like hot-tempered women, then, my lord?” she asked him as he seated her and took his place opposite.

“That depends entirely on the woman,” he said. “If I believe there is pleasure to be derived from the taming of her, yes, indeed.” He picked up the bottle of wine that stood on the table, uncorked it and proceeded to fill her glass and then his own.

While he was so occupied, Verity looked fully at him for the first time since they had left the theater. He was almost frighteningly handsome, though why there should be anything fearsome about good looks she would have found difficult to explain. Perhaps it was his confidence, his arrogance more than his looks that had her wishing she could go back to the greenroom and change her answer. They seemed very much alone together, though two waiters were bringing food and setting it silently on the table. Or perhaps it was his sensual appeal and the certain knowledge that he wanted her.

He held his glass aloft and extended his hand halfway across the table. “To new acquaintances,” he said, looking very directly into her eyes in the flickering light of the candles. “May they prosper.”

She smiled, touched the rim of her glass to his and drank. Her hand was steady, she was relieved to find, but she felt almost as if a decision had been made, a pact sealed.

“Shall we eat?” he suggested after the waiters had withdrawn and closed the door behind them. He indicated the plates of cold meats and steaming vegetables, the basket of fresh breads, the bowl of fruit.

She was hungry, she realized suddenly, but she was not at all sure she would be able to eat. She helped herself to a modest portion.

“Tell me, Miss Heyward,” the viscount said, watching her butter a bread roll, “are you always this talkative?”

She paused and looked unwillingly up at him again. She was adept at making social conversation, as were most ladies of her class. But she had no idea what topics were suited to an occasion of this nature. She had never before dined tête-à-tête with a man, or been alone with one under any circumstances for longer than half an hour at a time or beyond a place where she could be easily observed by a chaperone.

“What do you wish me to talk about, my lord?” she asked him.

He regarded her for a few moments, a look of amusement on his face. “Bonnets?” he said. “Jewels? The latest shopping expedition?”

He did not, then, have a high regard for women’s intelligence. Or perhaps it was just her type of woman. Her type.

“But what do you wish to talk about, my lord?” she asked him, taking a bite out of her roll.

He looked even more amused. “You,” he said without hesitation. “Tell me about yourself, Miss Heyward. Begin with your accent. I cannot quite place its origin. Where are you from?”

She had not done at all well with the accent she had assumed during her working hours, except perhaps to disguise the fact that she had been gently born and raised.

“I pick up accents very easily,” she lied. “And I have lived in many different places. I suppose there is a trace of all those places in my speech.”

“And someone,” he said, “to complicate the issue, has given you elocution lessons.”

“Of course.” She smiled. “Even as a dancer one must learn not to murder the English language with every word one speaks, my lord. If one expects to advance in one’s career, that is.”

He gazed silently at her for a few moments, his fork suspended halfway to his mouth. Verity felt herself flushing. What career was he imagining she wished to advance?

“Quite so,” he said softly, his voice like velvet. He carried his fork the rest of the way to his mouth. “But what are some of these places? Tell me where you have lived. Tell me about your family. Come, we cannot munch on our food in silence, you know. There is nothing better designed to shake a person’s composure.”

Her life seemed to have become nothing but lies. In each of her worlds she had to withhold the truth about the other. And withholding the truth sometimes became more than a passive thing. It involved the invention of lie upon lie. She had some knowledge of two places—the village in Somersetshire where she had lived for two-and-twenty years, and London, where she had lived for two months. But she spoke of Ireland, drawing on the stories she could remember her maternal grandmother telling her when she was a child, and more riskily, of the city of York, where a neighborhood friend had lived with his uncle for a while, and about a few other places of which she had read.

She hoped fervently that the viscount had no intimate knowledge of any of the places she chose to describe. She invented a mythical family—a father who was a blacksmith, a warmhearted mother who had died five years before, three brothers and three sisters, all considerably younger than herself.

“You came to London to seek your fortune?” he asked. “You have not danced anywhere else?”

She hesitated. But she did not want him to think her inexperienced, easy to manipulate. “Oh, of course,” she said. “For several years, my lord.” She smiled into his eyes as she reached for a pear from the dish of fruit. “But all roads lead eventually to London, you know.”

She was startled by the look of naked desire that flared in his eyes for a moment as he followed the movement of her hand. But it was soon veiled behind his lazy eyelids and slightly mocking smile.

“Of course,” he said softly. “And those of us who spend most of our time here are only too delighted to benefit from the experience in the various arts such persons as yourself have acquired elsewhere.”

Verity kept her eyes on the pear she was peeling. It was unusually juicy, she was dismayed to find. Her hands were soon wet with juice. And her heart was thumping. Suddenly, and quite inexplicably, she felt as if she had waded into deep waters indeed. The air fairly bristled between them. She licked her lips and could think of no reply to make.

His voice sounded amused when he spoke again. “Having peeled it, Miss Heyward,” he said, “you are now obliged to eat it, you know. It would be a crime to waste good food.”

She lifted one half of the pear to her mouth and bit into it. Juice cascaded to her plate below, and some of it trickled down her chin. She reached for her napkin in some embarrassment, knowing that he was watching her. But before she could pick it up, he had reached across the table and one long finger had scooped up the droplet of juice that was about to drip onto her gown. She raised her eyes, startled, to watch him carry the finger to his mouth and touch it to his tongue. His eyes remained on her all the while.

Verity felt a sharp stabbing of sensation down through her abdomen and between her thighs. She felt a rush of color to her cheeks. She felt as if she had been running for a mile uphill.

“Sweet,” he murmured.

She jumped to her feet, pushing at her chair with the backs of her knees. Then she wished she had not done so. Her legs felt decidedly unsteady. She crossed to the fireplace again and reached out her hands as if to warm them, though she felt as if the fire might better be able to take warmth from her.

She drew a few steadying breaths in the silence that followed. And then she could see from the corner of one eye that he had come to stand at the other side of the hearth. He rested one arm along the high mantel. He was watching her. The time had come, she thought. She had precipitated it herself. Within moments the question would be asked and must be answered. She still did not know what that answer would be, or perhaps she did. Perhaps she was just fooling herself to believe that there was still a choice. She had made her decision back in the greenroom—no, even before that. This was a tavern, part of an inn. No doubt he had bespoken a bedchamber here, as well as a private dining room. Within minutes, then…

How would it feel? She did not even know exactly what she was to expect. The basic facts, of course…

“Miss Heyward,” he asked her, making her jump again, “what are your plans for Christmas?”

She turned her head to look at him. Christmas? It was a week and a half away. She would spend it with her family, of course. It would be their first Christmas away from home, their first without the friends and neighbors they had known all their lives. But at least they still had one another and were still together. They had decided that they would indulge in the extravagance of a goose and make something special of the day with inexpensive gifts that they would make for one another. Christmas had always been Verity’s favorite time of the year. Somehow it restored hope and reminded her of the truly important things in life—family and love and selfless giving.

Selfless giving.

“Do you have any plans?” he asked.

She could hardly claim to be going home to that large family at the smithy in Somersetshire. She shook her head.

“I will be spending a quiet week in Norfolkshire with a friend and his, ah, lady,” he said. “Will you come with me?”

A quiet week. A friend and his lady. She understood, of course, exactly what he meant, exactly to what she was being invited. If she agreed now, Verity thought, the die would be cast. She would have stepped irrevocably into that world from which it would be impossible to return. Once a fallen woman, she would never be able to retrieve either her virtue or her honor.

If she agreed?

She would be away from home at Christmas of all times. Away from Mama and Chastity. For a whole week. Could anything be worth such a sacrifice, not to mention the sacrifice of her very self?

It was as if he read her mind. “Five hundred pounds, Miss Heyward,” he said softly. “For one week.”

Five hundred pounds? Her mouth went dry. It was a colossal sum. Did he know what five hundred pounds meant to someone like her? But of course he knew. It meant irresistible temptation.

In exchange for one week of service. Seven nights. Seven, when even the thought of one was insupportable. But once the first had been endured, the other six would hardly matter.

Chastity needed to see the physician again. She needed more medicine. If she were to die merely because they could not afford the proper treatment for her illness, how would she feel, Verity asked herself, when it had been within her power to see to it that they could afford the treatment? What had she just been telling herself about Christmas?

Selfless giving.

She smiled into the fire. “That would be very pleasant, my lord,” she said, and then listened in some astonishment to the other words that came unplanned from her mouth, “provided you pay me in advance.”

She turned her head to look at him when he did not immediately reply. His elbow was still on the mantel, his closed fist resting against his mouth. Above it his eyes showed amusement.

“We will, of course, agree to a compromise,” he told her. “Half before we leave and half after we return?”

She nodded. Two hundred and fifty pounds before she even left London. Once she had accepted the payment, she would have backed herself into a corner. She could not then refuse to carry out her part of the agreement. She tried to swallow, but the dryness of her mouth made it well nigh impossible to do.

“Splendid,” he said briskly. “Come, it is late. I will escort you home.”

She was to escape for tonight, then? Part of her felt a knee-weakening relief. Part of her was strangely disappointed. The worst of it might have been over within the hour if, as she had expected, he had reserved a room and had invited her there. She felt a deep dread of the first time. She imagined, perhaps naively, that after that, once it was an accomplished fact, once she was a fallen woman, once she knew how it felt, it would be easier to repeat. But now it seemed that she would have to wait until they left for Norfolkshire before the deed was done.

He had fetched her cloak and was setting it about her shoulders. She came to attention suddenly, realizing what he had just said.

“Thank you, no, my lord,” she said. “I shall see myself home. Perhaps you would be so kind as to call a hackney cab?”

He turned her and his hands brushed her own aside and did up her cloak buttons for her. He looked up into her eyes, the task completed. “Playing the elusive game until the end, Miss Heyward?” he asked. “Or is there someone at home you would rather did not see me?”

His implication was obvious. But he was, of course, right though not in quite the way he meant. She smiled back at him.

“I have promised you a week, my lord,” she said. “That week does not begin with tonight, as I understand it?”

“Quite right,” he said. “You shall have your hackney, then, and keep your secrets. I do believe Christmas is going to be more…interesting than usual.”

“I trust you may be right, my lord,” she said with all the coolness she could muster, preceding him to the door.

Chapter Three

JULIAN WAS FEELING weary, cold and irritable by the time Bertrand Hollander’s hunting box hove into view at dusk on a particularly gray and cheerless afternoon, two days before Christmas. He would feel far more cheerful, he told himself, once he was indoors, basking before a blazing fire, imbibing some of Bertie’s brandy and contemplating the delights of the night ahead. But at the moment he could not quite convince himself that this Christmas was going to be one of unalloyed pleasure.

He had ridden all the way from London despite the fact that his comfortable, well-sprung traveling carriage held only one passenger. During the morning, he had thought it a clever idea—she would be intrigued to watch him ride just within sight beyond the carriage windows; he would comfort himself with the anticipation of joining her within during the afternoon. But during the noon stop for dinner and a change of horses, Miss Blanche Heyward had upset him quite considerably. No, that was refining too much on a trifle. She had annoyed him quite considerably.

And all over a mere bauble, a paltry handful of gold.

He had been planning to give it to her for Christmas. A gift was perhaps unnecessary since she was being paid handsomely enough for her services. But Christmas had always been a time of gift giving with him, and he knew he was going to miss Conway and all its usual warm celebrations. And so he had bought her a gift, spending far more time in the choosing of it than he usually did for his mistresses and instinctively avoiding the gaudy flash of precious stones.

On impulse he had decided to give it to her in the rather charming setting of the inn parlor in which they dined on their journey, rather than wait for Christmas Day. But she had merely looked at the box in his outstretched hand and had made no move to grab it.

“What is it?” she had asked with the quiet dignity he was beginning to recognize as characteristic of her.

“Why do you not look and see?” he had suggested. “It is an early Christmas gift.”

“There is no need of it.” She had looked into his eyes. “You are paying me well, my lord, for what I will give in return.”

Her words had sent an uncomfortable rush of tightness to his groin, though he was not at all sure she had intended them so. He had also felt the first stirring of annoyance. Was she going to keep him with his hand outstretched, feeling foolish, until his dinner grew cold? But she had reached out a hand slowly, taken the box and opened it. He had watched her almost anxiously. Had he made a mistake in not choosing diamonds or rubies, or emeralds, perhaps?

She had looked down for a long time, saying nothing, making no move to touch the contents of the box.

“It is the Star of Bethlehem,” she had said finally.

It was a star, yes, a gold star on a gold chain. He had not thought of it as the Christmas star. But the description seemed apt enough.

“Yes,” he had agreed. He had despised himself for his next words, but they had been out before he could stop them. “Do you like it?”

“It belongs in the heavens,” she had said after a lengthy pause during which she had gazed at the pendant and appeared as if she had forgotten about both him and her surroundings. “As a symbol of hope. As a sign to all who are in search of the meaning of their lives. As a goal in the pursuit of wisdom.”

Good Lord! He had been rendered speechless.

She had looked up then and regarded him very directly with those magnificent emerald eyes. “Money ought not to be able to buy it, my lord,” she had said. “It is not appropriate as a gift from such as you to such as I.”

He had gazed back, one eyebrow raised, containing his fury. Such as he? What the devil was she implying?

“Do I understand, Miss Heyward,” he had asked, injecting as much boredom into his voice as he could summon, “that you do not like the gift? Dear me, I ought to have had my man pick up a diamond bracelet instead. I shall inform him that you agree with my opinion that he has execrable taste.”

She had looked into his eyes for several moments longer, no discernible anger there at his insult.

“I am sorry,” she had surprised him by saying then. “I have hurt you. It is very beautiful, my lord, and shows that you have impeccable taste. Thank you.” She had closed the box and placed it in her reticule.

They had continued with their meal in silence, and suddenly, he had discovered, he was eating straw, not food.

He had mounted his horse when they resumed their journey and left her to her righteous solitude in his carriage. And for the rest of the journey he had nursed his irritation with her. What the devil did she mean it is not appropriate as a gift from such as you? How dared she! And why was it inappropriate, even assuming that the gold star was intended to be the Star of Bethlehem? The star was a symbol of hope, she had said, a sign to those who pursued wisdom and the meaning of their own lives.