Page 2 of Christmas Wore Plaid

He would know better, wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t dare claim a kiss in front of so many guests as well as his parents and Emerson’s aunt. Even Romeo and Juliet’s kiss had been struck from the play. They weren’t to do more than touch each other’s hands “with the space of one half of a yard betwixt you” as the rector had declared, for not everyone thought the play—or coeducational schools for that matter—proper, and the rector wished their school to be a success. But Emerson’s Aunt Bess had always encouraged her to seize the day. And because none of Brady’s siblings had survived beyond infancy, his parents gave him latitude and indulged his every whim. But Brady didn’t have a reputation for kissing the lasses. He wouldn’t defy propriety now…

He touched her hand covering her cheek.

Her heart popped to her throat. Reflexively, she whipped her hand away. But his fingers lingered on her cheeks, trailing up to her eyebrow. Then her forehead. Then he dragged his fingers down her nose and around her head to toy with the ruby-red bow she’d been so excited to don tonight.

“Well, I never!” A woman groused, her sentiment echoed by others.

Clara’s hand grabbed Emerson’s again. Her knuckles whitened as she gripped Clara’s lifeline. Background whispers and the roaring hearth blended together into nothingness. The candles flickering upon the mantel draped in evergreens and holly—the latter a symbol of the MacInnes clan of olden days—blurred behind him. The light illuminated his dark blond hair, making it shine like barley in the sunset. She felt his hand drag from her bow back around to her cheek, then to her lips, where they lingered. Then the pad of his finger dropped.

“Emerson Lindt.” Brady guessed her name softly, and for once, he didn’t make a show of himself.

The room chorused congratulations. He pulled off his blindfold, casting his hair into disarray. A grin split his mouth wide. He looked down at her with thoughtful brown eyes.

“Or should I say, my lady Juliet,” he whispered, his grin twisting devilishly.

Her cheeks burned anew at his teasing. She looked down, relinquishing Clara’s hand when her friend yelped in pain. Goodness! She had been squeezing Clara too hard.

“What’s his prize?” someone called.

“Aye, Romeo, what’s your prize?” snickered one of his friends.

Emerson rolled her eyes. There it is, the Shakespeare reference. Someone had beaten Clara to the punch and Brady chuckled, flashing an impish dimple at her. Then the lads started chuckling and pointing. The girls gasped hard. Emerson noted people looking up at the ceiling. She looked up, too. Her stomach dropped and she swallowed miserably at the lump that jumped into her throat. Mistletoe hung on a satin ribbon directly over their heads.

“Oh dearest heaven,” she whispered.

Her cheeks, stained with embarrassment before, splotched heavily now. Her normally quick wit fled her tongue, leaving her daft for anything to say. Even Brady seemed embarrassed as he glanced up, then down at her. He quickly stepped back.

“That’s quite enough.” Lady MacInnes laughed and clapped her fan into her palm like a schoolmistress slapping a ruler. “I shall have no young ladies’ names besmirched in the spirit of Christmas fun! Nor shall I have my son doing the besmirching!”

The tension in the chamber dissipated. Brady retreated to the refreshments to request a glass, leaving his back to her. The group of lads flocked around him, as the young women engulfed Emerson, barraging her with chatter. She couldn’t speak to answer them, and somehow, she found herself guided to a settee. Now sitting on the cushion with a cup of wassail in hand, she turned to her friend, untying her tongue.

“He never claimed a prize.”

It would have been customary for him to be given a trinket, a biscuit, something.

“Goodness, what did you hope he’d do? Kiss you?” Clara clamped her palm over her mouth at the mere mention of a kiss, as if thinking it would damn her. “Not even the rector will allow such to happen in the name of art, and yet, you’d welcome Brady’s kiss in front of all?”

Emerson snorted. Clara dramatized everything. “A grammar school Shakespeare production is hardly art.”

The evening wore on but Brady never looked her way again, even though he laughed heartily with others. She watched the parlor games, watched the adults indulge in snapdragon around the burning brandy to fish for currants while blue flames lapped across the liquor, illuminating their faces like demons in the dimmed light. Yet her eyes trailed back to Brady to see if he might look at her. After what had happened, she’d hoped he would have the decency to at least give her a cursory glance. The coward. He was avoiding her. Was he embarrassed? The stiffness with which he stood for the remainder of the evening on the periphery was curious, for he was never on the periphery of life.

Eventually, the festivities ended. Emerson walked on Aunt Bess’s arm while she bid everyone a goodnight. A wealthy, professed spinster and daughter of a marquess, Aunt Bess aged and moved slowly. Still, Brady did nothing more than glance their way from the back of the gathering as they walked above stairs to their guest chambers, and she tried not to allow disappointment to leak into her heart.

The hour late, Emerson finally sat in her nightgown before the vanity while Aunt Bess unpinned her bow.

“What’s the matter?” Emerson asked, noticing her aunt looking around her feet.

Her aunt clicked her tongue. “I used two pins to hold your bow on tonight, but I can only find one. I fear it’s fallen to the carpets, and you know my poor eyes. I can barely see the tip of my nose.”

Emerson giggled and fell to her knees to help search. Her nightgown billowed around her in folds of linen, and she fought to hold it out of the way so as to sweep her hands across the carpet pile. The last thing she wanted was to step on it in the dark and prick her foot. But there was no pin to be found.

“It must have come loose at the party whilst you allowed the MacInnes lad to chase you around like a squawking peacock—”

Emerson burst out laughing. “I dare say, Auntie, that Clara was the one squawking for all to hear, not me.”

“She was indeed.” Bess chuckled. “Ah well, the pin is lost. I do hope Lady MacInnes’s maids sweep thoroughly.”

Her aunt took to brushing out Emerson’s chocolatey curls until they shone, and prattled on about their excursion to the churchyard on Christmas day with their generous bounty of charity coats. At long last, Bess bid her good night, retreating through the connecting doorway to the next room. Emerson turned down her oil lamp and snuffed the candle in the sconce, then pulled back the luxurious covers of the guest bed, when a tapping sound startled her.