Madelina found her hands trembling so badly she couldn’t affix the holly to the kissing bough. “I-I have forgotten something.” She rose swiftly, clutching the bough before her like a holy relic. “I-I must see to the boxes for tomorrow. For the servants,” she said when Maman frowned.
“You could not have sorted this earlier? I thought you were belowstairs most of the day, putting things in order.”
“Just one or two few last things. Forgive me. Do not wait dinner on me, I will return soon,” she lied.
The unexpected sting of tears in her eyes nearly blinded her as she rushed out of the room. This continued down to the basement, which is why she collided with the tall form that wheeled unexpectedly out from the hallway at the bottom of the kitchen stairs.
“Mrs. Bird, I meant to ask you if—oof.”
The tall form reached out to steady her so she didn’t tumble down the last two steps of the flight.
“Mrs. Bird is currently unavailable, as she is running away to be married to me,” said a deep, masculine voice. “She’s got a plum pudding hangingandshe made mince pie.”
Madelina’s arms burned where he touched her, and her heart thumped, no doubt from the sudden shock. She blinked several times, not sure she hadn’t conjured the apparition before her by wishing.
“Oh, isthatwhat it takes to make you want to marry a girl,” she said, the words slipping out before she had time to think better of them.
Immediately the past roared to life between them, quick and hot as a live coal waiting to be fanned. She was wrapped in a veil of fire, and as she looked into his eyes that oldwhooshsoared through her, like an inferno bellowing with air.
He was older, yet exactly the same. Still in possession of those large eyes, deep and liquid, with lashes too long to belong on a man and framed by wide, expressive brows. His nose had matured with the rest of him, a long, arrogant slash, but his mouth was even more finely shaped in contrast, the upper lip bowed, the lower a plump cushion.
His hair was as unruly as ever, dark brown curls spilling over his brow and ears. He smelled of tobacco and leather and the Green on a summer day when a breeze stirred up the scentof warm earth and clover. Madelina just managed to restrain herself from leaning forward to press her nose against the fashionably wide lapel of his coat.
“Mrs. Bird is already married,” she added, like the ninny she instantly became in his presence. Mrs. Bird had a husband, children, and a swarm of grandchildren back in Kents Hill, and she had been their plain cook for as long as Madelina could recall.
“Mother’s French chef ruined the plum pudding with bechamel sauce,” he said. “So I snuck over to pinch yours.”
“Just one more item for which to hold the French to account,” Madelina said.
She registered with her sensible mind, fast and fleeting, that this conversation was absurd. She had not seen him in over three years. She was a young lady of breeding. He was a man fully grown out of his puppyish ways—he had been when she’d proposed to him, that momentary madness.
And his hands were still clasped around her arms, his warm palms a heavy weight against the skin not covered by her elbow-length gloves.
“Are you not coming up for dinner?” Now she sounded hurt. She was turning more nanny goat by the moment.Notthe way to prove, beyond a doubt, that she had recovered from him completely.
Wariness entered his dark eyes. “Of course I am coming up. I do not intend to insult your family. We’re too close of neighbors for that.”
“And shall be in one another’s pockets all the more so now,” Madelina said. “Shall I salute you as the new Lord Warin?”
His face hardened. “Hardly a prospect I wished for.”
She knew that, because she had grown up with this boy, even if she didn’t understand the man he’d become. Bartholomew had been older than both of them, an adultalready when they were children, and bred from birth to the title his father had wrested for himself when he served the King’s Cause at Dettingen. Garrick and Madelina had expressed their affection by poking fun at Barty’s pompous ways and self-conscious airs. Though Garrick was his heir presumptive, the family and their friends assumed that Bartholomew would eventually come round to his duty and marry a proper girl. Maman had quite frequently voiced the hope he would choose Madelina.
“It was quite sudden. Barty’s passing,” she said. “We were all terribly shocked.”
None more than Madelina, who found herself at Bartholomew’s bedside, his own mother being absent in Italy for the air, Agnes terrible in the sickroom, and Maman too nervous to make a reliable nurse. It had fallen to Madelina to hold his hand at the last, this man who had always seemed grand and forbidding to her and in the end was no more than frail human flesh, like the rest of them.
Bleakness came and went in Garrick’s eyes. “I suppose everyone fell apart save for you, Mad.”
Now how should he know that? Howcouldhe know that? And how could he invoke the old name now, the pet name only he had called her, when she was a grown woman and he was entirely unsuitable and all her dreams were gone and broken. And at Yuletide, to boot.
Unthinking she placed a hand on his arm, as if they were still children sailing their corsair ship down the Ouzel, herding sheep across the Green pretending they were Hannibal invading Rome. As if she still had some claim on him, after all this time.
“You must tell me,” she said. “What do you know of Constantin?”
The wary expression flashed back into place. “Your brother?” He retreated a step. It was either cling to his arm or let go. “I know nothing.”
She let her arm drop.
