His Christmas Pleasure (27 page)

“How did he even know we live here?” Andres said, asking the question that had been haunting him.

“From me,” Celeste admitted with a sigh. “I wrote my mother in London about how much we enjoyed ourselves as your guests. You are a bit of an infamous person there. According to my mother, the women are still talking about you.”

Andres made a face. He didn’t want to hear this. “They mean nothing to me.” He paced the distance from the hearth to the center of the room, and then stopped. “She left me.” He had trouble believing it.

“She didn’t leave you,” Celeste said, coming up beside him. “You left her.

She’s gone to see to her mother’s welfare.”

“Without telling me? Without saying one word? What did she do for money?

How did she travel?”

The maid appeared at the doorway holding a tray of sandwiches and some cider.

Andres moved away from Celeste, pushing a distracted hand through his hair. “Set it anywhere, Ginny.”

The maid did as told and bobbed a curtsey before leaving.

Celeste sat on the settee and began preparing plates of food.

“I’m not hungry,” Andres said.

“Of course you are,” Celeste countermanded him. “Please sit.”

He didn’t want to, yet he did not know what else to do. Abby had left him.

Celeste handed him a mug of cider. Andres held it without raising it to his lips. She placed a plate on his knee. He could barely look at the food.

“Disappointment is difficult, is it not?” Celeste said cheerily.

“Disappointment?” Andres almost choked on the word. Was that all she thought he felt?

“You expected me to be your wife returning,” Celeste said, “and to be honest, Andres, you are being very pouty about it.”

“Pouty?” Andres came to his feet. The plate on his knee fell to the floor. He threw the mug at the fireplace. “My wife leaves me and you call me pouty?”

“Her mother is ill, Andres. When you love someone, you go to them when they need you. Can you understand that?” She answered her own question as she studied him. “You don’t understand, do you?”

He didn’t know what to say. He was angry and, yes, pouty.

“Do you love her?” Celeste demanded.

The question penetrated the emotions roiling inside him. Celeste sat on his settee like a pagan priestess meting out justice.

“She’s my wife,” Andres said.

“Do … you … love … her?” Celeste repeated, drawing out each word as if he’d been simple and she’d had to make herself clear.

Andres felt cornered. He felt vulnerable.

Her expression softened. “You poor man,” she said. “You are so afraid.”

He started to deny it, then realized there was nothing he could say. Celeste saw right through him.

Funny, that Abby didn’t.

“Both of you are too fragile,” Celeste said. “She’s certain you won’t come after her, that you don’t care.”

“She knows differently.”

“Does she?” Celeste placed her plate on the tray and leaned forward. “And how does it feel to have your pride and no wife?”

Anger flashed through him. He reached for it. Anger felt better than being vulnerable. “You know nothing of us.”

Celeste didn’t take offense at his tone. Instead, she rose with a sound of resignation. “I know when a man is being too stubborn for good sense. And how futile it is to talk to any of your sex when you are in this state. But understand, Andres, I have come here as a friend. I don’t like my cousin. He thinks he is some Captain Sharp. And I am distressed at the thought that one such as him could come between two people who so obviously care for each other.”

Her words found their mark. The anger ebbed. He tried to keep hold of it.

“If she cared, she’d be here.”

“Because it is too much of a risk for you to go there?”

Her challenge hung in the air between them.

“I can’t go to London,” he said. If he went and Dobbins discovered his presence, he would lose Stonemoor.

But he couldn’t say that to Celeste. She’d think worse of him than she already did.

“When we love someone, we take the first step,” she said, her expression carefully neutral. “We go to them.” She gave him a small, sad smile. “I’ll be leaving now,” she said quietly. “Andres, please, your pride is not worth losing what the two of you have. I didn’t come here to badger you but to assure you that Freddie means nothing to Abby and he never will. You walked out on her, my lord. Now it is up to you to make the first step.” She didn’t wait for his response but left the room.

He stood very still. He should have gone with her to see that she had safe transportation home, but he couldn’t move.

A moment later, he heard the sound of horses riding away, and he was alone.

All of his life, he’d dreamed of a place like Stonemoor, and now he had it.

But the dream was hollow without Abby.

Andres raised a hand to his chin and frowned as his fingers brushed the spot he’d shaven, surrounded by his beard. No wonder Celeste had so accurately read him. He was a mess.

“It is up to you to make the first step.”

The doubt of his own worth, the sense that he would never measure up to his father’s expectations, the fear that Abby could not respect him, collected into a hard knot in his chest.

Could it be that his fit last night—because that was what it had been, a fit—

had had more to do with jealousy than he wanted to admit? Could it be that he’d hurt her as much as he was feeling abused? Could it be that Abby thought he didn’t care?

She had to know he did….

If she had been here, he’d have told her how he felt.

If he went there, he could lose Stonemoor. Andres sank down onto a side chair, his brain buzzing with a desire to go after his wife and bring her back, and the fear that she wouldn’t come back. Then he would have lost all for nothing.

In the end, he decided to write. He would put in a letter the feelings he had not spoken.

Andres sat down to the task. It did not go well. He even attempted writing in Spanish, a language more conducive to what he felt in his heart.

But words failed.

He waited a day, hoping for another solution, watching the road, expecting her to return home. She didn’t.

Andres spent the following day cursing his fates and his wife. He’d never needed anyone in his life. He told himself that he didn’t need anyone now.

By the third day, he knew he was wrong.

It was the mistletoe that made up his mind.

In five days’ time it would be Christmas. The servants had put up holly and evergreens, decorating in the manner Celeste had done her house. They’d even put mistletoe up, right over the front door.

Cook had told him of the English tradition of kissing under the mistletoe.

Andres had no one to kiss. And he was tired of an empty bed. He didn’t like this life he was living. He missed the life he’d had with Abby. Perhaps he didn’t need her, but he wanted her close. He wanted to share the activities of his day with her, to sit across a table and watch her eyes light up when he thought of something amusing to tell. He wanted to tuck her body in close to his and hold her while she slept, protecting and keeping her.

And if it meant risking all he owned to let her know how he felt and bring her back, then so be it.

He saddled a horse and left with all haste.

Because when you love someone, you go to them no matter the cost. He prayed he wasn’t too late.

The trip to London was almost unendurable for Abby.

She wept most of the way, frustrating herself for not being stronger—and yet she couldn’t help but sense that she was making a grave mistake.

The Landsdowne coach was well sprung and very good for travel. The servants could not have been kinder.

They made excellent time. After three days of hard travel, she arrived in London shortly after noon. As the Landsdowne servants retrieved the bag she’d brought from the boot, Harrison, her family butler, opened the door.

“Miss Abigail?” He came outside. “Thank God, Miss Abigail, it is you.”

“Harrison, how is my mother?”

“Sad, very sad. Come in out of the cold and I’ll hurry you upstairs to her.”

This concern from the usually composed butler frightened Abby. “Please see to the Landsdowne servants,” she said.

“I will, but please hurry. Please. We’ve waited for you to return home.”

Inside the house, Abby took the steps two at a time up the curving staircase that led to the hall where her mother’s room was located. The housekeeper, Mrs. George, saw her and rushed to open the door. “We are so glad you’ve returned,” she whispered as Abby whisked by.

A fire burned in the grate. The heavy velvet curtains were pulled against the cold. The air was overheated and oppressive. This was not like her mother.

Her mother relished fresh air, always claiming that a little cold kept the blood pumping.

Abby looked to the bed. It was made. Her mother was not there, and Abby felt a small measure of relief. She went around the corner to the small sitting room that overlooked the garden.

Here again the drapes were pulled. Her mother sat in a rocking chair in the corner, her face pale in the room’s murky light. She did not act as if she was aware of anyone being in the room with her. She wore a mobcap over her hair and her black mourning gown. Abby had seen her like this one other time—when she had been in mourning for Robert, the oldest son, who had died in battle. “Mother?” Abby said softly.

Her mother’s brows came together. She looked up at Abby, as if not believing her eyes.

Abby walked to the chair and knelt. Her mother’s hands were cold in hers.

Her mother squeezed

her hand hard. “Abby?” “Yes, Mother, it’s me.”

Tears poured from her mother’s eyes. She fell into Abby’s arms, holding her close. “I feared I would not see you again. This was the same as losing your brother. Heath returned from Scotland and said you were as good as dead to us. I can’t lose my daughter. I can’t lose another child.”

“You haven’t lost me. Father was very angry.” Abby took the kerchief from her mother’s hands and used it to wipe her mother’s tears. “I’m home now.

All is well.”

“This is the best gift I’ve ever received,” her mother whispered. “Tell me what you’ve been doing? Are you all right? Did that Spaniard do something terrible to you?”

He’s only broken my heart, Abby thought to herself, but she wouldn’t share that with her mother. She had to be loyal to Andres.

Instead, Abby started telling her mother about Stonemoor and the horses. “I appreciated your journal of household advice,” she said. “It has rescued me more than once.”

Her mother laughed, the sound carefree. Abby opened the curtains, and some of the oppressive gloom dissipated from the room. Already her mother’s color looked better. “I had hoped it would be meaningful for you,”

her mother said.

“I am so sorry to have caused you pain,” Abby replied.

“It was the fear of not seeing you again,” her mother said. “And also my own regrets.”

“What regrets are those?”

“At last I understood how my parents felt when I ran away. I was so frightened for you, Abigail. I didn’t know where you were, and when your father returned and said you’d married, I thought my heart was going to stop. I had wanted to be at your wedding. Your father and I have dreamed of it. I now understand why my father cut me off. He’d been hurt. And I was so happy, I was completely callous to him.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“We didn’t mean to chase you away. We of all parents understand eloping.

But we were in love, Abigail. From the moment I met your father, I knew my life was tied to his. Everything made sense when I was with him.

Certainly he wasn’t the man my father wished me to marry. We had no choice but to elope. But you had a choice.”

“Did I?” Abby asked. “Father was so set on Lord Villier.”

“I would have talked him out of it,” her mother said softly.

“And who would Father choose after him?”

Her mother shook her head. “It’s the earl of Bossley’s son, isn’t it? You are in love with him the way I was with your father. In spite of what your father and I thought of him, you loved him.”

Abby gave her mother’s hand a squeeze. “I don’t love Freddie Sherwin.”

“You don’t?” her mother questioned in disbelief. “You always said you did.”

“Because I wasn’t thinking clearly. Oh, Mother, this is all so confused, and none of it is your fault, or Father’s. I did love Freddie, but he never loved me. Not in the way Father cares about you.”

“We knew that.” Her mother dabbed her eyes. Her voice had become animated.

“But I didn’t know. I thought if I confronted Freddie with my feelings, he would see he was making a mistake asking for my cousin. And I believe he does care for me, Mother … in his way.”

“Is that enough?”

“No. In fact, it is far worse than if he just didn’t care. And I think that, on some level, I understood. Then Father arranged for a match with Lord Villier, and well, Andres’s offer for a marriage of convenience seemed far more attractive. It took me away from London, away from where people didn’t believe I mattered.”

“You’ve always mattered to your father and I—”

“I know that, but to a silly young woman, and that is exactly what I was, a parent’s care and love is no match for what other people think of her.” Abby rested a hand on her mother’s shoulder. “I don’t feel that way now. I know I’ve hurt you and I am sorry for it. Please forgive me.”

Her mother’s tired face became a wreath of smiles. “We forgive you all. And it is a blessing you are home. Please, don’t worry about that horrid Spaniard.

I know your father will be able to do whatever is necessary to remove him from your life.”

“Mother, I don’t want him removed.”

“You don’t?” Her mother sat back.

“No,” Abby said, “I love him.”

“Love him?” Her father’s voice surprised both of them.

Abby turned. Her father had come around the corner. He still wore his hat and coat and smelled of London’s sooty air. She nodded. “Yes, hopelessly.”

Admitting it never ceased to amaze her. Her love seemed to grow stronger with each declaration.