To her annoyance, she could think of no answer to make. And in her attempt to cover up her confusion, she lifted her glass to her lips, forgetting that her hand would shake. It did so and she had to lower the glass, the cider untasted. She wondered if he had noticed.
“How did you know,” he asked, seeming to change the subject, “that Veronica hides inside herself? I begin to think you must be right, but how did you realize it?”
“She is too quiet, too docile, too obedient for a child,” she said.
“Did you know it from experience?” he asked.
“I…” She swallowed. “Is this an interrogation, my lord? I am not accustomed to talking about myself.”
“Why not?” he asked. “Does no one ever ask you about yourself? Does Miss Phillpotts believe she does you a favor by keeping you on at the school?
And do the teachers and pupils take their cue from her? Do they all call you Craggs, as Deborah did until recently? Does no one call you Jane?”
For some reason she felt as if she had been stabbed to the heart. There was intense pain.
“Teachers are not usually called by their first names,” she said.
“But teachers should have identities apart from their career,” he said.
“Should they not, Jane? For how long have you been in hiding?”
“Please.” She set her hardly tasted cider on the small table beside her and got to her feet. “It is late, my lord. It is time for me to say good-night.”
“Have I been very impertinent, Jane?” He, too, stood, and somehow he possessed himself of both her hands. “No, you do not need to answer. I have been impertinent and it has been unpardonable of me when you are a guest in my home and when you have been very kind to both Deborah and my daughter and when you have brought Christmas to this house for the first time in years. Forgive me?”
“Of course,” she said, trying to draw her hands free of his without jerking on them. She felt again as if she were suffocating. His closeness and his maleness were overpowering her. “It is nothing, my lord.”
“It is something,” he said. “It is just that you have intrigued me during the past few days, Jane. You are like two people. Much of the time you are a disciplined, prim and-forgive me-plain teacher. But sometimes you are eager and warm and quite incredibly beautiful. I have been given the impression that the latter person has come bubbling up from very deep within. Is she the real person, the one you hide from the world, the one you have never had a chance to share with anyone else?”
“Please.” She dragged at her hands but was unable to free them. Her voice, she noticed in some dismay, sounded thin and distressed. She sounded on the verge of tears.
“He was a fool, your father,” he said. “He had you to love and let opportunity pass him by.”
She forgot herself instantly. She looked up into his face, her eyes wide. “And are you going to make the same mistake?” she asked. “You too have a daughter to love.”
“But the situation is different,” he said. “I am not going to abandon her to an orphanage or a school. I am going to find her the very best parents I can.”
“But she is four years old,” Jane said. “Do you not think she will remember, however hazily? She will remember that her mother disappeared mysteriously and she will try to persuade herself that she died and did not merely abandon her. You need to tell her the truth. However cruel it seems now, she needs to know. And she will remember that her father was titled and wealthy and that he cared enough to provide for her physical needs but did not care enough to provide for the only need that mattered.”
“And that is?” He was frowning and she thought that perhaps he was angry. But so was she. She would answer his question.
“The need for love,” she said. “The need to know that to someone she means more than anything else in the world.”
“But she is illegitimate.” He was almost whispering. “She is the daughter I fathered on a mistress. Do you understand, Jane? Do you know anything about what is acceptable and what is not in polite society?”
“Yes,” she said. “Oh, yes, I know, my lord. I am such a daughter too, remember. No one in my memory has ever wanted to know me as a person. No one has ever hugged me. Or kissed me. No one has ever loved me. I am three-and-twenty now, old enough to bear the burdens of life alone, but I would not want another child to have to live the life I have lived.
Not Veronica. I hope she will remember that you have kissed her cheek and rubbed your hand in her hair and carried her home from church inside your greatcoat. I am not sure it will help a great deal, but I hope she remembers even so. I wish I had such memories.”
“Jane,” he said, his voice shaken. “Oh, my poor Jane.”
And before she knew what was to happen or could do anything to prevent it, his hands had released hers and grasped her by the shoulders instead, and he had pulled her against him. And before her mind could cope with the shock of feeling a man’s warm and firmly muscled body against her own, his mouth was on hers, warm and firm, his lips slightly parted.
For a moment-for a fleeting moment after her mind had recovered from its first shock-she surrendered to the heady physical sensation of being embraced by a man and to the realization that she was experiencing her first real kiss. And then she got her palms against her chest and pushed firmly away from him.
“No,” she said. “No, my lord, it is not poor Jane. It is poor Veronica.
She has a father who could love her, I believe, but who feels that the conventions of society are of greater importance than love.”
She did not give him a chance to reply though he reached for her again.
She whisked herself about and out of the room and fled upstairs to her bedchamber as if being pursued by a thousand devils.
It had snowed a little more during the night. The viscount stood at his window, eager to go downstairs to begin the day, yet wanting at the same time to stay where he was until he could safely escape to the Oxendens’ house. He wanted to go downstairs because he had told her the truth last night. She had brought Christmas to his home for the first time in many years, and he found himself hungry for it. And yet he dreaded seeing her this morning after his unpardonable indiscretion of the night before.
And he dreaded seeing Veronica. He dreaded being confronted with love.
He had decided six years ago to the day that he must be incapable of loving enough to satisfy another person. He had confined his feelings since then to friendships and to lust.
She was wrong. It was not that he put the conventions of society before love as much as that he did not believe he could love his daughter as well as a carefully chosen couple would. He wanted Veronica to have a happy childhood. Because he loved her. He tested the thought in his mind, but he could not find fault with it. He did love her. The thought of giving her up to another couple was not a pleasant one. And that was an understatement.
He was the first one downstairs. Before going to the breakfast room he went into the drawing room to take the parcels he had bought in a visit to a nearby town two days before and a few he had brought home with him and to set them down beside the rudely carved but curiously lovely Nativity scene with its Mary and Joseph and babe in a manger and a single shepherd and lamb. They had been set up last night. He was seeing them for the first time.
He looked about the room. And he thought of his irritation at finding himself saddled with his niece for Christmas and of her sullenness at being abandoned by her parents and left to his care. And of the terrible aloneness of Veronica as she had sat in his hall, like a labeled parcel abandoned until someone could find time to open it.
Yes, Jane had transformed his home and the three of them who lived in it with her. Under the most unpromising of circumstances she had brought the warmth and joy of Christmas. He wondered if it was something she was accustomed to doing. But he knew even as he thought it that that was not it at all. If she had been about to spend Christmas alone at the school this year, then surely she must have spent it alone there last year and the year before. His heart chilled. Had she ever spent Christmas in company with others? Had she always been alone?
Was all the love of her heart, all the love of her life being poured out on this one Christmas she was spending with strangers? With three other waifs like herself? But she was so much stronger than they. Without her, he felt, the rest of them would have wallowed in gloom.
But his thoughts were interrupted. Deborah burst into the room, parcels in her hands. She set them beside his
