her fortune as a governess.
Lilias. He had not expected her to come to this. He looked down at her as she walked silently at his side. She had not grown since the age of sixteen. Her head still barely passed his shoulder. Her hair was still smooth and fair beneath her bonnet. But she was thinner. Her hand, even inside its glove, was too slender on his arm. Her face was thin and pale. Her dark-lashed gray eyes seemed larger in contrast. She really did look as if she were half- starved.
Damnation!
“I wanted Christmas for my daughter,” he told her, realizing with a jolt as he heard his own words that that was exactly what she had said to him four days before about her brother and sister. “Christmas as I remembered it. I thought I would find it here. But I chose just the year when there is no snow. Only this infernal cold and damp.”
“But it did not always snow,” she said, looking up at him. “Just very rarely, I think. It was especially lovely when it did. But Christmas was always wonderful anyway.”
“Was it?” He frowned.
She drew breath as if to speak, but she seemed to change her mind.
“Yes,” she said.
“I have your watch,” he said. “It is at the house. I shall see that you have it before you leave after tea.”
She looked up at him again, bright-eyed. “Thank you,” she said.
Here we go, he thought. He had supplied her with the perfect opportunity to heap upon his head reflections on how happy the boy would be during the coming years and how he would be able to remember his sisters and their life together every time he pulled the watch from his pocket. He clamped his teeth together and felt his jaw tighten.
He felt guilty suddenly. She so obviously was very poor, and it was so obviously true that the three of them were to be separated after Christmas. He just wished she had not decided to use the pathos of her situation to win herself a rich and gullible husband.
Except that he was not gullible. Not any longer.
She half-smiled at him and shifted her gaze to the three children, who were now quite a distance ahead of them. She said nothing.
Dora was skipping along, he was surprised to notice when he followed the direction of Lilias’s eyes.
“This is where we got the holly yesterday,” Megan announced a while later when they came up to the thicket. And then she looked at Lilias, a hand over her mouth, and giggled.
Andrew was laughing too. “We were not supposed to say,” he said, darting a mischievous look at the marquess. “We were trespassing.”
Lilias was blushing very rosily, Bedford saw when he glanced at her. She looked far more as she had looked as a girl.
“But these ones don’t have as many berries as yours,” Dora complained.
“All the good branches are high up,” Andrew said. “We could not reach them yesterday. Even Lilias.”
“It seems that I am elected,” the marquess said. “Thank goodness for leather gloves. This looks like certain self-destruction.”
Megan giggled as he stepped forward and his coat caught on the lower branches of holly. He had to disengage himself several times before he could reach up to cut the branches that were loaded with berries. His upturned face was showered with water. Dora was giggling too.
Lilias had stepped in behind him to take the holly as he handed it down.
Her gloves and cloak were not heavy enough to protect her from hurt, he thought, and clamped his lips together as he was about to voice the thought.
“Ouch,” Dora cried excitedly, and giggled even more loudly. “I have almost as big an armful as you, Andrew. I have more than Megan. Oh, ouch!”
“You must not clutch them,” Andrew said. “Just hold them enough that they do not drop.”
“Well,” the Marquess of Bedford said when he paused and looked behind him. “You look like four walking holly bushes. Do you think you can stagger back to the house with that load? Only now does it strike me that we should have had a wagon sent after us.”
“Oh, no,” Andrew said. “That would spoil the fun.”
“This is such fun, Papa,” Dora said.
“Let me take some of this load,” Bedford said, reaching out to take some from Lilias’s arms, “before you disappear entirely behind it.”
Her eyes were sparkling up at him.
“But, Papa,” Dora wailed. “The mistletoe.”
“Oh, Lord,” he said, “the mistletoe. I shall go and get some. You all start back to the house.” But she was loaded down. She would never get back without being scratched to death. “Better still, drop your load, Lilias, and show me where this mistletoe is. You children, on your way.
We will catch up to you.”
God, he thought, turning cold as she did what she had been told-considering her load, she had had little choice-he had called her Lilias. The witch! Her wiles were working themselves beneath his guard despite himself. His jaw hardened again.
She led him around past the thicket of holly bushes, past the old oaks, to the mistletoe, which he had forgotten about. The old oaks! He had climbed them with her, to sit in the lower branches, staring at the sky and dreaming aloud with her. He could remember lifting her down from the lowest branch of one-he could not remember which- and kissing her, her body pressed against the great old trunk, her hands spread on either side of her head, palm to palm against his. He could remember laughing at her confusion because he had traced the line of her lips with his tongue.
“It was all a long time ago,” he said abruptly, and felt remarkably foolish as soon as the words were spoken. As if he had expected her to follow his train of thought.
“Yes,” she said quietly.
He gave her the mistletoe to carry, being very careful not to lift it above the level of her head as he handed it to her. And on the way back he took the large bundle of holly into his own arms, against her protests, to carry to the house.
“My coat and my gloves are heavier than yours,” he said.
She brushed her face against the mistletoe as they walked.
“I suppose,” he said harshly after a few silent minutes, “you do not get enough to eat.”
She looked up at him, startled. “My lord?” she said.
“Your brother and sister do not look undernourished,” he said. “I suppose you give all your food to them.”
Her flush was noticeable even beneath the rosiness that the wind and cold had whipped into her cheeks.
“What a ridiculous notion,” she said. “I would have starved to death.”
“And have been doing almost that, by the look of you,” he said, appalled at his own lack of breeding and good manners.
“What I do is my own business, I thank you, my lord,” she said. Her voice was as chill as his own, he realized. “I do not choose to discuss either my appetite or my means with you.”
“You were quite willing to do so a few days ago,” he said.
“Only enough to explain why I had to bring up the matter of that old debt,” she said. “And I take it unkindly in you to refer again to a topic I confided only with embarrassment and reluctance.”
He strode on, knowing that he was walking too fast for her, but doing nothing to slacken his pace.
“Stephen,” she said. She sounded close to tears. “Why do you hate me?”
Stephen. No one had called him by his given name for years, it seemed.
Lorraine had never called him anything but Bedford. He slackened his pace so that she was no longer forced almost to run at his side.
It was clever. Very clever. It almost unnerved him. It was too clever.
She had overplayed her hand.
“I do not hate you, ma’am,” he said, thankful to see the house close by.
The children must be inside already. “What possible reason would I have to hate you?”
