A Timeless Romance Anthology: Winter Collection Read online

  Matches yer eyes. That he even knew the color of her eyes came as both a surprise and a comfort. Perhaps she’d not been so overlooked all those months. “Ya had to have purchased this before the party last night.” Before Miss Kilchrest made her nature quite clear.

  Isaac nodded. “I decided on a lot of things before last night, though the evening firmed up my resolve on most of them.”

  How she hoped one of those decisions was to toss aside Miss Kilchrest in favor of her.

  She pinned the watch to the front of her coat, careful to clasp it securely. “Will it do, do ya think?”

  “Lovely.” But he wasn’t looking at the watch. “I don’t know how I didn’t see it before.”

  “Blinded by ambition, ya were.”

  He nodded solemnly. “And by my own stupidity.”

  “Aye. That, as well.” She set a hand on his chest for balance as she stretched on her toes and placed a single, brief kiss on his cheek. “I thank ya for the fine Christmas present. I’ll cherish it always.”

  “Will ya let me cherish you, Alice?” One of his arms wrapped around her, keeping her nearby. “Will ya at least let me prove to ya that I can, that I will? All these months, I’ve grown to care more for ya than any person I know. I tell ya my thoughts and worries. I trust ya with my concerns. I miss ya when ye’re away and worry over ya when ye’re not close by. All these months, and I never realized—”

  “Ya talk too much, Isaac Dancy.” She took hold of the scarf about his neck and pulled him within an inch of herself. “It’s not words I’m needing just now.”

  His smile tipped a bit roguishly. “I’m most happy to oblige.”

  And he was. And did. His lips met hers in a caress so gentle at first, she hardly knew he’d begun kissing her. But his efforts quickly grew more urgent. Alice slid her arms around his neck and held fast to him.

  Here was the affection she’d longed for from him, the reassurance that he cared for her just as she cared for him. ’Twas home.

  Flakes of snow drifted softly and slowly down around them as they sealed quite a few unspoken promises with a fine bit of kissing on a peaceful Christmas morning on the road to Cavan Town.

  About Sarah M. Eden

  Sarah M. Eden read her first Jane Austen novel in elementary school and has been addicted to historical romance ever since. An avid researcher, she loves delving deep into the details of history. She was a Whitney Award Finalist for her novels Seeking Persephone (2008) and Courting Miss Lancaster (2010). Visit her at www.sarahmeden.com.

  Other Works by Sarah M. Eden

  Seeking Persephone

  http://www.amazon.com/Seeking-Persephone-ebook/dp/B005JU5SQM/

  Courting Miss Lancaster

  http://www.amazon.com/Courting-Miss-Lancaster-ebook/dp/B005EOCET2/

  The Kiss of a Stranger

  http://www.amazon.com/Kiss-Stranger-ebook/dp/B004HD6E42/

  Friends and Foes

  http://www.amazon.com/Friends-and-Foes-ebook/dp/B006UKH7KU/

  An Unlikely Match

  http://www.amazon.com/An-Unlikely-Match-ebook/dp/B009M84FL6/

  It Happened Twelfth Night

  By Heidi Ashworth

  Prologue

  Luisa waited behind the tree with bated breath. Percy, a black handkerchief about his eyes and arms outstretched, was close enough to touch. Did she, however, wish to be found? To be discovered by the grazing of his fingers against her gown amidst shrieks of his friend’s laughter would be delicious. Yet to win the day and carry forth the trophy (this year it was a basket of delightfully pink blooms) had been one of her heart’s desires for almost every one of her eighteen years.

  Percy’s father and mother, Sir Walter and Lady Brooksby, loved a good celebration and eagerly availed themselves of every opportunity to welcome throngs of people to the abbey. This June day was the 74th birth anniversary of old King George and, though he was not likely to have been the least aware of it, it was a long standing tradition to invite the entire village to a celebration at the abbey on His Majesty’s behalf. The itinerary was the same every year: lawn games were followed by the unveiling of tables groaning with delectable foodstuffs both sweet and savory, each dish interspersed with pitcher after pitcher of tart lemonade. The pure white batiste cloths adorning the tables, so long they swept the green blades of grass, were so beautiful they made Luisa’s heart ache.

  In point of fact, in her eyes, everything Sir Walter and his Lady set out to create was executed to perfection, including their eldest son, Percy. Those golden tresses! Those smoky eyes! That chiseled chin! Luisa was persuaded there was never another like him in all of England.

  But now it seemed she was to be caught after all. The idea was every bit as intoxicating as she had hoped, especially since he seemed to know at once whose waist was suddenly between his warm palms as he spun her around to face him. Pulling the cloth over his head, she looked up at him, a question in her eyes. His slow answering grin caused a fluttering in her stomach, a sensation with which she had been most familiar of late. She couldn’t be certain when Percy-her-friend had become Percy-her-beau, but there was no mistaking the gleam in his eye as he tugged her by the hand and led her to the relative privacy of the summerhouse.

  Leaning against a shadowed wall of the round stone structure, Luisa tried to catch her breath, but the way Percy was looking into her eyes was, for her lungs, a bit of a dilemma. For Luisa herself, it was nothing of consequence; who needed whole draughts of air when one could be gazed at in such a searching way? As for herself, all she was able to find, to see, to dwell on, was the perfect pink of his lips as they descended upon her own. Her eyes fluttered shut, and all sound was reduced to a rushing in her ears; all thought tuned to the rhythm of his heart hammering in unison with hers.

  “I love you, Luisa Darlington, and when I return from this unforgivably interminable trip abroad, I shall look for you, right here, directly upon my return.”

  Luisa opened her eyes to find his gaze locked on hers. Unaccountably, she began to giggle. “Won’t the summerhouse be shut up for the winter? Shan’t I wait for you in the abbey instead?”

  “No, right here! While we are parted, I shall think of you every minute of every day just as you are, your hair divinely tousled and your lips swollen with desire. Vous avez l’air parfait comme vous êtes.”

  “You know I don’t comprehend a word of French,” Luisa murmured, secretly hoping he would be just as content to discover her by the blazing fire in the library on that long-to-come December day.

  He must have seen doubt cloud her eye, for he took her by the shoulders, and with a little shake, said in a voice full of urgency, “Swear it! Luisa, you must!”

  “Yes! Of course! Did I not say so?” she asked with a buoyant smile calculated to dispel all misgiving. A barely audible moan of longing escaped his lips before he once more pressed them to hers with great affect.

  Taking her again by the hand, he said, “It is settled, then. You shall be here when I return, and only then will I feel truly happy.”

  How Percy would convince his parents that she, daughter of the keeper at the abbey gate, was a suitable bride for their son was a question that nibbled at the edge of her mind, but she put it aside. His father was a baronet, not an earl or marquis. “It is an accord,” she replied with a squeeze of his hand and with a gentle tug, Luisa led him back to the gaiety of the party, her heart swollen with love and her mind full of the knowledge that true happiness had already found her.

  Chapter One

  Luisa knew herself to be lost. Yet, how could she be? Though not an inhabitant, she was nearly as familiar with this house as her own. She and Percy had spent countless hours racing through the halls, playing Hunt the Slipper in the conservatory (Lady Brooksby did not regard playing such games in the abbey with much favor) and eating jam tarts straight from Cook’s oven. Long, rambling walks had commenced from the gothic front doors and concluded by stumbling with fatigue through the full-length windows of Sir Walters’s lib
rary. Though Percy’s mother and father didn’t exactly wish for Luisa to be forever underfoot, the strength of her friendship with their son led them to treat her as a bit of a fixture, something to be accepted and abided, if not fully appreciated. Their attitude towards her was of no consequence to Luisa; Percy had loved her, and that was enough.

  However, she now felt more than a bit out of place. Not only did she not recognize the passageway upon which she had stumbled, but Percy was nowhere to be found. The decline in her social standing in the past six months since Percy had gone abroad had made her quite melancholy, and his neglect to call upon her since his return had driven her nearly to madness. This in spite of the bitterly cold afternoon, she had trudged from Darlington Cottage, home of her ancestors since time immemorial, through the abbey parkland to the summerhouse where she waited until her feet froze, and she was finally forced to seek asylum in the kitchen, only to learn that Percy had gone to a party. She had left him a note, but there had been no reply.

  Christmas came and went without so much as a quaff of wassail shared between them. Therefore, it was with extraordinary joy and anticipation that she accepted the invitation to attend the annual Twelfth Night party at the abbey.

  Now that she was here, returned to the scene of so many happy memories, not a soul would speak to her. As for Percy, he had barely acknowledged her presence. Could the news of her best friend’s scandalous flight to Gretna with her dancing master have tarnished even Percy’s regard for her? It was monstrously unfair that local society, that of sleepy little Wymondham, had painted Luisa with the same brush as the silly Sally Constable, but the inhabitants of villages had little to do but determine who should sit below the salt and who should go in to dinner on the arm of Wymondham’s most eligible bachelor. It would seem that Percy’s ears were tuned to the wagging of catty tongues, turning his dog-like affection to whichever cat was closest.

  At dinner she had done her best to behave exactly as if she were part of any number of conversations occurring around her at table, but once the dessert course had been consumed and the ladies were sent to the parlor to await the gentlemen, she felt it no use and gave up all pretense at social inclusion. Choosing the darkest corner in which to pine, she pinned her hopes on having a chance to speak to Percy privately, just the two of them, as it always used to be. Presently the cold shoulders and disapproving glares of the other ladies proved too much, so she fled out the door, her eyes obscured with tears, and ran until she could no longer discern evidence of merriment from any quarter.

  Realizing she must have unknowingly passed through the baize door to the servant’s quarters, an action nearly as beyond the pale as eloping with one’s dancing master, she began to panic. It was in this morbid state that, through a haze of tears, she ascertained the approach of a dark, masculine shape from the far end of the hall. Believing it to be the butler, her friend of long standing, or one of the footman to whom she had handed off her cloak and gloves any number of times over the years, she ran forward with a cry of relief.

  As the shadow approached, however, it loomed larger and larger in the dim light and took on an odd and eerie structure. What had seemed the indistinct form of a man now appeared to be a bear with, unaccountably, a large bird riding his head. She shrank against the wall, her tears vanishing as swiftly as they had come, and prayed she would not be seen by whatever this apparition might be.

  Despite closing her eyes tightly and sending aloft a prayer on wings of hope, her wish, like so many others of late, went unconsidered. When she once more opened her eyes, she barely repressed a shriek of terror as the apparition slowed and the great bird, an enormous black crow with dark and shining eyes, turned to gaze down at her.

  She could not have been more astonished when a melodious voice of a pleasing timbre issued forth from the shadows gathered beneath the crow’s perch, but her heart hammered so that she was powerless to decipher a single word. Whether he spoke English, German or Italian, she could not have said, but she recognized the courtesy in his voice, and owned that it felt pleasant to be spoken to, whatever the language.

  “Pray forgive me, sir,” she said at the top of a deep sigh, “I do not perfectly understand, but I would be grateful for some assistance. Which is the way back to the party?”

  In answer, he offered her his arm, but she was loath to add one iota of scandal to her already heavily blotted copybook. To descend on the elite of Wymondham under the protection of whatever kind of creature this must be would only add fuel to an already raging fire.

  “No thank you, sir. I am most aware of your kindness, but I wish to abide a few moments more to catch my breath.”

  The birdman inclined his head and pointed straight across, towards a door she could now see was indeed of baize green and designed to delineate the barrier between the portion of the house meant for the occupants and that of the servants. She murmured her gratitude, and, with mingled trepidation and fascination, was unable to tear her gaze from him as he passed her by in the narrow corridor, so close that his voluminous cape brushed the tips of her petal-pink dancing slippers. Just before he swept through the door, he looked back, and the light from the wall sconce picked up what could only be his eyes. They were like two emeralds swimming in a box of deepest black velvet. The overall affect only added to the otherworldliness of the man. It was with great difficulty that Luisa suppressed a cry of alarm.

  The last thing Luisa wanted to do was to follow the bear-like man through the door. However, neither did she wish to remain in the forbidden passage. With fear and trembling in her heart, Luisa inched open the door to survey her options. The strange man was nowhere to be seen. Coaxing the door to stand ever so slightly more ajar, she risked a long look down the opposite hall that led to the grand salon, where bursts of laughter and general merriment could be heard. She had to time her emergence just right so none who might pass would know of her faux pas. Idly she wondered who the man could have been that he felt so comfortable in both parts of the house. Only a servant would wander about with such confidence, but he was dressed like no servant she had ever seen.

  Taking a deep breath, she was just about to push the door wide enough to allow her passage but was stopped short by the sounds of a muffled conversation bearing down on her.

  With a snap, she allowed the door to swing to and pressed herself against the adjacent wall. The voices drew closer until it became sickeningly clear that they belonged to Percy and Miss Cassandra Gardner.

  “Now, where to meet?” Percy asked in an urgent whisper.

  “The summerhouse?” Cassandra suggested.

  “No, the summerhouse is far too cold! We wouldn’t want those silky eyelashes to break like so many icicles, now would we?”

  Luisa felt her heart turn to ice and burn with rage all at once. How was the freezing summerhouse good enough for her, but not for Miss Gardner? Weren’t Luisa’s eyelashes just as worthy of Percy’s protection?

  “The stables, then,” Cassandra murmured. “But pray, not until after the entertainments. I am persuaded that all will be disappointed should you not appear in the Mummers Play!”

  “Why should I choose to play the mummer when I could be making these delightfully plump lips my own?” Percy demanded.

  Luisa’s gasp went unheard, as it burst forth in unison with Cassandra’s own. “Percy!” she said, followed by what sounded like a stamp of her foot. “You go a bit too far. Please return me to the party. If I am not mistaken, the pistachio ices are about to be served, and I do so adore Italian ices.”

  Through the wall, Luisa heard Percy heave a sigh. She imagined his smile of chagrin as he conceded to Cassandra’s wishes. There came a rustling of skirts as they wordlessly returned from whence they had come, the very part of the house Luisa must now return to if she were to sample one of the ices under discussion. She waited a few moments more, so as not to let on that she had been privy to what could have only been a private conversation, Cassandra having been betrothed to Donald Adamson this age.
It wasn’t enough for Percy to have every girl in the village following him around like so many sheep; he must need enslave girls who were spoken for as well?

  It was all Luisa could do to refrain from fetching her cloak and walking home alone in the cold, dark air. However, her mother, never a particular comrade of Lady Brooksby’s, and therefore warming her widow’s weeds by the fire of her own cottage, would scold Luisa for abandoning the shelter of the abbey at night without so much as a chaperone or a lantern to light her way. The fact that snow had begun to fall shortly before she had arrived meant she would need to remain until the end and beg a ride home. Stay at the party she must, so, gritting her teeth, Luisa found her way to the warm, brightly lit salon and secured herself a shadowy corner in which to pass the remainder of the night’s revelries.

  “It took ye long enough,” came a voice from just behind her right shoulder.

  With a start, she whirled around to find herself once again staring directly into a pair of impossibly green eyes set below two well-shaped, jet-black eyebrows. Farther up, a row of matching curls danced across a broad brow that merged into a thatch of the blackest, thickest head of hair through which Luisa had ever yearned to run her fingers. It seemed a chore to look elsewhere as the flash of a set of decidedly white teeth bracketed by a pair of devilish dimples claimed her attention, a circumstance that caused her no regret. The fact that his nose was neither too long nor too snub, and his skin without blemish, was all of a piece. In the face of all this masculine glory, Luisa was at a loss to remember his remark entirely.

  “I beg your pardon?” she managed to stammer.

  Thrusting a glass into her hand, he said, “Here, have some orgeat. Something tells me ye’ve had a bit too much of the so-called ‘punch’ being ladled out in yon corner to a scandalous number of unsuspecting young ladies.”