Mistletoe Magic

Chapter Eleven

No one was speaking to Lucas Clairmont, Lillian saw as she walked into the Billinghurst soirée that evening and found it was divided into two distinct camps.

Oh, granted, the Earl of St Auburn and Lord Hawkhurst leaned against the columns on his side of the room, the smiles on their faces looking remarkably genuine, but nobody else went near him.

It was the death of Lord Paget, she supposed, and the fact that much was said about the card games Lucas Clairmont was involved with. Gossip that did not quite accuse him of cheating, but not falling much short either.

‘Mr Clairmont does seem to inspire strong feelings in people, doesn’t he?’

Lillian looked around quickly, trying to determine if her friend was including herself in that category.

Lucas Clairmont looked vividly handsome on the other side of the room, dressed in a formal black evening suit that he looked less than comfortable in.

‘If he is here and not languishing in a London gaol, my guess would be the police thought him to have no knowledge of Lord Paget’s death.’

Anne Weatherby at her side laughed at the summation. ‘You are becoming quite the defender of the man, Lillian. I heard it was your testimony at the St Auburns that had the Pagets fleeing in the first place.’

‘And for that I now feel guilty.’

‘Well, your husband-to-be seems to have no such thoughts. He looks positively radiant this evening.’

John crossed the room towards them, Eleanor on his arm, and indeed he did look very pleased with himself.

‘I have it on good authority that Golden Boy is set to run a cracking first at Epsom this year and as he is a steed I have a financial stake in the news is more than pleasing. Is your father here, Lillian? I must go and impart the news to him.’

Eleanor watched as her brother chased off again across the room and entwined her arm through Lillian’s.

‘I do believe that John loves your father almost as much as he loves you. He is always telling me that Ernest Davenport says this and Ernest Davenport says that. My own papa must be getting increasingly tired of having the endless comparisons, I fear, though in all honesty John hasn’t seen eye to eye with him for a very long time. The inherent competition, I suspect, between generations so closely bound. I often wonder if a spell in India or in the army might have finished my brother off well? Pity, perhaps, that that avenue is no longer available.’

Lillian tried to imagine John in the wilds of the Far East and found that she just could not. He was a man who seemed more suited to the ease of the drawing room.

Lucas Clairmont on the other hand never looked comfortable confined in the small spaces of London society. Oh, granted, he had a sort of languid unconcern written across him here as he conversed with his friends, but he never relaxed, a sense of animated vitality not quite extinguished. He also always stood with his back against the wall, a trait that gave the impression of constant guardedness. The guise of a soldier, perhaps, or something darker. She had read the stories of Colquhoun Grant and there was something in the character of Wellington’s head of intelligence that was familiar in the personality of the man who stood opposite her.

As if he sensed her looking at him, his eyes turned to meet her own, dark gold glinting with humour. Quickly she looked away and made much of adjusting the pin on her bodice. When she glanced back, he no longer watched her and she squashed the ridiculous feeling of disappointment.

Turning the ring John had given her on her betrothal finger, she tried to take courage from it as she listened to the conversation between Anne and Eleanor.

‘I hear that congratulations are in order,’ he said in a quiet tone as they met an hour later by one of the pillars in a largely deserted supper room. ‘Your groom-to-be must have made great strides in the art of kissing a woman.’

‘Indeed, Mr Clairmont,’ Lillian replied, ‘and although you may not credit it, there are, in truth, other things that are of much more importance.’

‘There are?’ His surprise made it difficult to maintain her sense of decorum.

‘A man’s reputation for one,’ she bit back, ‘is considered by a careful bride to be essential.’

‘And are you a careful bride, Lilly?’

‘Lillian,’ she echoed, ignoring the true intent of his question. ‘And careful in the way of being certain that John has at least never been a suspect in murder.’

‘Because he plays everything as safely as you do?’

She turned, but he caught at her arm, not gently either, the hard bite of his fingers making her flinch. ‘Perhaps you might wait till the findings of the police are made public before naming me guilty.’

‘Why?’ she retaliated. ‘If you keep the company of gamblers and card sharps and are often covered in the bruises and markings of a man who goes from one squabble to the next, why indeed should I give you any leeway?’

‘Because I hope you know by now, Lilly, that I am not quite as black as you would paint me.’ His accent was soft but distinct, the cadence of the new lands on his tongue.

‘Do I, Lucas? Do I know that?’

It was the first time she had called him by his Christian name and the warm glow in his eyes alarmed her. There was something else there too. A vulnerability that she had not seen before, an unprotected and exposed need that tugged at her because it was so unexpected.

‘Marrying one man because of the faults of another is not the wisest of choices.’

‘So what is it then you would suggest?’

He laughed, the sound filling the empty space around them. ‘Come away with me instead.’

The room whirled, a yearning ache in her body that she was completely astonished by. If only he meant it. If only the laughter that the invitation had been accompanied with did not sound quite so offhand. So casual!

‘And spend the rest of my life wondering when a noose would be placed about your neck?’

‘I had nothing to do with the death of Paget, if that is what you are implying.’

‘You were asked to leave Eton.’

‘I was a boy…’

‘Who stole a watch?’

Again he began to laugh. ‘Such a crime…’ But she allowed his amusement no further rein.

‘I am the only heir to Fairley Manor, Mr Clairmont, and in England we protect our assets by marrying wisely.’

He tipped his head and in the light of the room Lillian saw the beginnings of a reddened scar that snaked from his right ear into the collar of his shirt.

‘A long-ago accident,’ he qualified as he saw her uncertainty.

But she was transfixed. This was no simple wound that would take a day or two to mend. She imagined both the pain and the tenacity needed to recover from such an injury and in her conjecture also saw the wide and yawning gap that lay between them. Who had tended him in his hours of need, wiped his brow and brought him water? She had heard it said he had left for America as a boy, but there had been no mention of any family.

‘Did your parents go with you to the Americas?’

He looked puzzled at her change of topic. ‘My parents?’

‘The Earl of St Auburn implied that you were barely above fourteen when you left Eton and that you sailed from England very soon afterwards.’

‘I had an uncle there already.’

‘So you took passage alone?’

‘Worked my way there actually as a deckhand on the Joanna. Forty days was all it took between London and New York-the seas and winds were kind.’

Marvelling at his description, she imagined a child making his way across the world to a different shore, the mantle of being labelled a thief on his shoulders and alone. Why had his parents not gone with him? She sensed he wanted no more questions as he stood there, the candles above setting his hair to a shade of lighter brown amongst the ebony, curling long against his nape.

‘Wilcox-Rice will never make you happy.’ The words seemed dragged from him.

‘Whereas you will?’

He smiled at that. ‘There are things more important than a certain cut of cloth or which fork one uses at a banquet table, Miss Davonport.’

‘You think that is what defines me?’

‘Partly.’

She hated the truth in his words and the answering echo of it in her own mind. ‘The sum of my pieces must be awfully galling to you then, Mr Clairmont, just as the sum of your own is as equally trying to me. I think a passably good kiss in a man who seems to eschew every other moral principle would not sustain a relationship for even as long as a month.’

‘Do you now?’ Ground out. Barely civil.

Lillian stood her ground. ‘Indeed, for it has come to my ears that the whisper of friendship and respect is a most underrated thing in any marriage.’

‘Which unfulfilled brides have told you that nonsense?’

Shock held her rigid. ‘Perhaps it was naïve of me to expect that you might consider such a sentiment with an open mind.’

‘An open mind?’ He laughed. ‘When your own has just condemned me as a murderer.’

‘Paget was a man you seemed to have much reason to hate.’

‘I concede. Put like that my case seems hopeless and if a thought is as lethal as a bullet…’

When she allowed a smile to blossom he took the small chance of it quickly.

‘Stay the night with me, Lillian. See what it is you will miss if you marry John Wilcox-Rice.’

The shock of his question was only overrun by the stinging want in her body. ‘I could start with ruination-’

He broke into her banter. ‘I would never hurt you, at least believe that.’

She saw the way he looked about to make certain no person lay in earshot, saw the way too he kept his hands jammed in his jacket pockets and his face carefully bland. They could for all intents and purposes be discussing the weather should a bystander take the time to watch them.

‘If by some misguided logic I should chance to consider such a risky venture, where would you imagine this tryst to take place? I should not wish to shed my inhibitions in a dosshouse, after all.’

‘Someone has told you my address?’

The dimple in his cheek was deep and she tried not to let the beauty of his face daunt her.

‘Come away with me, then. I have a house in Bedfordshire.’

‘I could not possibly…’

‘You could buy a kiss when you barely knew me. Take that one step further.’

John Wilcox-Rice’s voice sounded behind her. ‘Lillian, I have been looking for you.’ His words were wary and distrustful.

‘Mr Clairmont has just extended an invitation to us to call in at his house in the country.’ She watched as amber flared, catching her glance in a hooded warning.

‘I doubt we shall be in the district, Clairmont, and I thought I had heard it said that you were taking passage home very soon.’

‘Unless the police have need to keep me in London.’

John stuttered at such nonchalance. A challenge. A provocation. A carefully worded gauntlet thrown into the ring between adversaries and John with no notion at all as to what he fought for.

Her!

The beat of Lillian’s heart thickened in the dawning realisation that she was the prize, a situation that she had not had the experience of since her first year of coming out, and the band of white gold and diamonds on the third finger of her left hand felt tight, a small message of control and limit that constricted everything.

Oh, for the chance of another kiss? No, there wasn’t the possibility for any of it, especially here with her father and aunt close and a fiancé who allowed her not a moment’s respite. If only she might lay her fingers in those of the American opposite and simply walk, now, away from it all.

Like her mother had!

She shook her head and the moment of madness passed, evaporated into expectation and duty. Lillian or Lilly. The white and careful promise of obligation and discretion counterbalanced against the wilder orange flair of excitement and thrill.

The very same choices Rebecca had mismanaged all those years before and look where it had taken her: a deathbed racked with self-reproach and contrition.

She inclined her head as she allowed John Wilcox-Rice to take her arm and lead her out into the ballroom proper, the music of Strauss settling her fears as it swirled and eddied about them. Many in the pressing crowd smiled at them, the illusion of a wondrous young love, not such a difficult one to pass off after all.

John leaned in as they performed the waltz, the ardour that had been apparent at the St Auburns’ the night he had escorted her to her room as obvious here.

She felt his fingers splayed out across her back.

‘This is the dance of lovers, Lillian. Appropriate, don’t you think?’

It took all of her composure not to break his hold and pull away.

‘If you could give some consideration about naming a date for our nuptials, and preferably one in the not-too-distant future, you would make me the happiest of men.’

Lillian faltered. ‘With all the Christmas preparations I have been busy’

‘What of February, then?’

‘I had thought of the summer,’ she returned and his face fell.

‘No, that is too long.’ The forceful tone in his voice surprised her. ‘It needs to be earlier.’

Nodding, she retreated into silence. Earlier? The very word was like a death knell in her heart.

‘If you don’t approach her soon the night will be gone, Luc.’ Hawkhurst’s voice was insistent. Already the clock was nearing the hour of two.

‘I think I made myself more than clear to Miss Davenport an hour or so back, Hawk.’

‘And she wanted none of you?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Well, that’s a first. So you’re going to give up just like that?’

‘I am. She intimated that she thought I had some hand in the death of Paget.’

‘You are here for a month and life becomes interesting again. To my mind, however, Lillian Davenport seems downright miserable and the stuffed shirt of a fiancé looks as though he is hanging on to her arm for dear life. Even her father looks bored with his conversation and that’s saying something.’ He stopped, and Luc didn’t like the way he smiled. ‘Her aunt on the other hand is eyeing you up with a singular interest.’

‘She probably wants to chastise me on behalf of her son.’

‘No, the glance is one more of a measured curiosity.’

‘Then perhaps she was a particular friend of Albert Paget and is trying to work out how I did away with him.’

‘Well, no doubt we will discover the truth in a moment. She seems to be heading this way.’

‘Alone?’

‘Very.’

‘Mr Clairmont.’ Jean Taylor-Reid’s voice carried across the room around them and, ignoring Hawkhurst altogether, she went straight to the heart of what was worrying her. ‘I think my niece seems to have taken up your cause as a man who needs improvement and so I have come to warn you. There are many here who say that the misdemeanours of your youth would make it difficult for you to fashion a future here in London.’

‘Is that what they say, Lady Taylor-Reid?’ He looked around pointedly. ‘England has long since ceased to frighten me with its obsession with the importance of family name and fortune.’

‘Then you are inviting problems for yourself.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

Ignoring his perplexity, she carried on. ‘The protection offered by a family name is irrefutable and the name of Davenport is one I should wish to keep untainted. If my son Daniel has done anything to offend you…’ She swallowed back tears and stopped, and Luc, who could not for the life of him work out where she was going with this, remained silent.

‘I would plead with you to ignore him. He may not be the easiest person to like, but if he should die…’ Her voice petered out, but, taking a breath, she continued more strongly. ‘I would, of course, offer you something in return. There are whispers, you see, that you are more involved in the Paget death than you let on. Perhaps this might be a wise time to simply return to America-slip out on the next tide, so to speak. There is a ship leaving for Boston in the morning that has a berth which is paid for.’ She pressed a paper into his hands. ‘You will find all the details here, Mr Clairmont, and the captain is amenable to asking no questions.’

‘Leaving both your son and niece safe from my person?’

‘I think we understand each other entirely.’

She did not wait to see if he agreed, but moved away, back to the side of Lillian’s father who watched with open anger. A small greying woman with a slight stoop and the iron will of a doyenne who would do anything to protect the reputation of her family.

‘Perhaps Davenport learned the art of getting his own way in everything from the unlikely breast of his mother.’

Luc laughed at Stephen’s reflection, though Lilly pointedly looked away from him, the tip-tilt of her nose outlined against the wall behind.

Beautiful. And careful. A woman whose life was lived and measured by the right thing to do. He should take note of Jean Taylor-Reid’s warning, should leave Lillian Davenport to the faultless standards of an exacting ton and to a fiancé who would for ever be circumspect and judicious. But he could not, not when she had whispered her feelings to him after she had fainted and her guard was down, not when she had admitted that her favourite colour was orange when it was so plainly not.

He finished his glass of lemonade and placed the container on a low-lying table beside him. If he did not act tonight, tomorrow might be too late, the aunt’s proclivity to interference worrying and his own problems with Davenport throwing him into a no-man’s land of wait and see.

He had never let anyone close, his wife’s death a part of that equation in a way he had not understood before. Lillian was drawing something out of him that he thought was gone, shrivelled up in the miserable years of both his youth and his marriage. But it had not. Tonight as he watched her across the room in her white dress and with the candlelight in her hair, the hard centre of his heart had begun to thaw, begun to hope, begun again to feel the possibility of a life that was…whole.

Swearing to himself, he turned away from Hawk and strode out on to a balcony near the top of the room.

The strains of Mozart rent the air, soft, civilised, a thread of memory from an England that had never quite left him. A great well of yearning made him swallow. Yearning for a home. Yearning for Lilly and her goodness, and sense and trust and honesty.

In the window of a salon downstairs he could see a Christmas tree glowing, the candles on its bough promising all that was right and good with the world. Elizabeth had never fussed with such traditions, preferring instead an endless round of visiting. A woman who found solace in the busy whirl of society.

He ran his hand through his hair. If he was honest he had married her for her looks, a shallow reason that he had had much cause to regret within the first year of their life together. But he had been nearly twenty-seven and the land he had spent breaking in with Stuart had taken much of his time since first arriving in America. When she had come after him with her flashing eyes and chestnut curls he had been entranced.

He had never loved her! The thought made him swear because even in his darkest hours he had not admitted it to himself. Why now, though? Why here? He knew the answer even as he phrased the question. Because in the room beside this one a woman whom he felt more respect for than any other he had met in his life laughed and danced and chatted.

‘I think my niece seems to have taken up your cause as a man who needs improvement and so I have come to warn you.’

The old woman’s voice rang true in his conscience as he opened the door and searched the space inside, and as luck might have it Lilly separated herself from her family group and retired to a small alcove at one end of the room. Had she seen him coming? Lucas did not know. All he knew was that he was beside her in the quiet dimmed space and that her warmth beat at his coldness, living flame in her pale blue eyes. He could no longer be circumspect.

‘Your aunt has just warned me away from you. She thinks I may be a corrupting influence.’

‘And are you, Lucas? Are you that?’

He shook his head, her very question biting at certainty. He wanted to say more, but found himself stymied; after all, there had been much he had done in his life that she would not like. As if she could read his mind she faced him directly.

‘I do not understand what this thing is between us, but how I wish that it would just stop.’ She laid her hand across her chest as if her heartbeat was worrying her, and the sensation building inside him wound tighter, dangerously complete. There was no room left for compromise or bargain.

‘I want you.’ Sense and logic deserted him as his thumb traced a line down the side of her arm, the silver of her hair falling like mist across the blackness of his clothes.

Fragile. Easily ruined.

Even that thought did not have him pulling away, not tonight with this small chance of possibility all that was left to him. Now. Here. Only this minute lost in the luck of a provident encounter and a hundred-and-one reasons why he should just let her go. Her fingers joined his thumb and he chided himself, the thin daintiness of white silk sleeves falling over his fist like a shroud. Hidden.

‘Lord.’ He pulled back as he closed his eyes and swore, a softer feeling tugging at lust and settling wildness.

‘Lilly.’ Her name. Just that. He could not even whisper what it was he desired because even the saying of it would take away the beauty of imagination and, if memory was all he was to be left with, he would not spoil even a second of it by a careless entreaty.

He had both power and restraint. The disparity suited him, she thought, as the heat inside her crumbled any true resistance and the incomprehensible fragment of time between separation and togetherness ended. Like a dream, close as breath. Melding simply by touch into one being. She heard the echo of his heartbeat, fast and strong, felt the tremble of his fingers as they trailed down silk and met flesh beneath the lace at her elbows. Her own breath shallowed, roughly taken, the very start of something she could no longer fight, no words to deny him. Anything. She had had enough of denial and of pretending that everything she felt for him was a ruse.

Tears welled as she swallowed. ‘If you kiss me here, I shall be ruined.’

There was no choice left though, for already her body leaned across, breasts grazing his shirt beneath an opened jacket, nipples hardened with pure and simple desire. He was her only point of connection in the room, her north to his south, balanced and equal. Even facing havoc she wanted him, wanted him to touch her, to kiss her as he had before and show her what it was that could exist between a man and a woman when everything was exactly as it should be.

Before it was all too late. She did not dare to fight it any longer for fear of a loss that would be more than she could bear! A single tear dropped on to her cheek and she felt its passage like a hot iron, wrenching right from wrong, and changing before to after. No will of her own left. Just what would be between them, here in this room, fifteen feet from her father and fiancé and from three hundred prying eyes.

‘Ah, Lilly, if only this were the way of it.’ His voice was sad with a hint of resignation in the message as he lifted her hand and kissed the back of it. She felt his tongue lave between the base of her fingers, warm and wet with promise. When he moved back she tried to hold him, tried to catch on to what she knew was lost already. But he did not stay, did not turn as he left the alcove, light swallowing up both shadow and boldness.

Gone.

Alone she trembled, her fists clenched before her, the words of a childhood prayer murmured in a bid for composure, and her nails biting into the heated flesh of her palms.

Life is like a river and it takes you where you are meant to be.

Here. Without him!

She looked out into the night, a myriad of stars above shifting bands of lower cloud. The weather had changed just as she had. She could feel it in her blood and in the rising welling joy that recognised honour.

Lucas Clairmont’s honour just to leave her, safe. Taking a deep breath for confidence, she turned and almost bumped into the Parker sisters, cold horror on their faces. The beat of her heart rose so markedly that she felt her throat catch in fear. Coughing, she tried to find speech. Had they seen? Could they know?

‘It is a lovely evening.’ Even to her ears the words sounded forced, the tremble in them pointing at all that she tried so hard to hide.

But they did not answer back, did not smile or speak. No, they stood there watching her for a good few minutes until the youngest girl burst into copious tears and she knew that the game was up.

A woman she presumed to be a relative hurried quickly to their side and then another woman and another, watching and pitying.

‘Miss Davenport let Mr Clairmont kiss her hand and she was standing close. Too close. She is after all betrothed to Lord Wilcox-Rice and I am certain that he would not like this.’

‘Hush, Miriam, hush.’ Another woman now came to their side, and the voice of reason and restraint might have swayed resolve had the older sister not also begun to sniff.

The whispers of interest began quietly at first, spreading across the ballroom floor like the ripples in a still summer pond after a large stone was thrown in carelessly. Wider and wider the curiosity spread, the fascination of intrigue shifting the weight of anger away from sympathy.

Her father’s face was pale as he came towards her and there was a violent distaste on John’s as he did not. Lillian saw her Aunt Jean frown in worry and heard the music of the orchestra wind into nothingness.

The sounds of ruin were not loud!

The colours of ruin were not lurid!

They were bleached and faded and gentle like the touch of her father’s arm against her own, his fingers over hers, protective and safe.

‘Come, Lillian,’ he said softly, ‘I shall take you home.’