A Christmastide Courtship

Table of Contents

Book Description

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Author’s Note

Book List

Copyright Statements

This book is dedicated to the memory of my godmother—

who loved Christmas, and who would have understood Catherine’s heart.

Chapter 1

December 1814

Christmas. Ruddy Christmas. If not for that infernal holiday, thought Lord Piers James Renfroe Winters, he would be tucked warmly in his—or someone else’s—bed in London, instead of jolting along the highway in a hired carriage two hours before dawn, chilled to the bone and already developing a headache. His head should be glad of the cold, since it kept the roads frozen and therefore less bumpy. He pulled his greatcoat tighter and couldn’t summon any gratitude. Riding might not have been as bad as it had sounded during yesterday’s freezing rain.

Enthusiasm for this visit home also lay in scant supply. Piers dutifully journeyed to his father’s seat for certain events every year. Christmas. Michaelmas. His mother’s birthday. Easter. He would commit in writing to a fortnight’s visit, and he would be gone before dawn on the fifteenth day. If he left his departure to his own whim, he would leave after approximately three days. That time was usually all it took for him to realize he could no longer stand his father’s house.

This Christmas would, no doubt, be exactly the same as the last three: his father complaining about the war, or the weather, or the taxes—anything at all except his own poor decisions—that had ruined his income again this year, and Piers’ mother haranguing him about taking a wife.

Piers was not yet eight and twenty, for God’s sake. He was hardly about to expire of dotage without siring an heir, though Lady Bassingstoke seemed convinced such a tragedy loomed in his near future. After every visit with her now, he would spend the hours of travel back to London composing witty retorts that revealed the absurdity of her arguments.

He’d made the mistake of using one in September. After Piers commented that his father must be the world’s laziest ghost, if Bassingstoke men passed to the afterlife by thirty years, she had burst into tears. His father’s ward, Miss Catherine Trotham, had hastened to Lady Bassingstoke’s side to comfort her. Piers had felt like an ass. There had been a glimmer of redemption, though, from Miss Trotham. She had looked up at him from the couch after embracing the viscountess, and Piers had seen amusement in her eyes. At least he was not the only person who found his mother’s logic ridiculous.

And Sebastian would be home this year. The Peninsular War was finally over, and Sebastian would spend Christmas in their father’s house for the first time since purchasing his commission four and half years ago.

Piers had seen his brother since his return to England, of course, but Sebastian had not yet been home. He’d been wounded in the final battle and spent two months in an Army hospital recovering from the shrapnel that mangled his right leg. Piers had collected Seb from the dock in Dover and hosted him for the spring in London. They passed the summer together in Brighton, and when Piers left for his Michaelmas visit to Bassingstoke, Seb had taken off for a hunting lease in Derbyshire.

His brother had promised to join the family for Christmas, though, and Piers knew Sebastian would keep his word. So Piers was looking with slightly less trepidation on this visit, since Sebastian would be there for Lady Bassingstoke to harass about marriage.

Really, Piers thought, Sebastian would have the worse end of that discussion. Their mother wanted Piers wed to some suitable young lady; Sebastian was to marry Miss Trotham. The girl was plenty old enough now at eighteen—no, nineteen—and now that Seb had come home, the time for waiting and private promises was through. Sebastian and Catherine would be formally engaged, and then they would be wed, and by next Christmas she might well be breeding. Piers had no doubts about the speed with which those events would happen, once Sebastian returned home, and Seb didn’t, either. That knowledge was probably why his brother had delayed going back until he must.

Perhaps this visit would not be quite the usual trial. If Piers and Sebastian were both lucky, their mother would be so ecstatic to have Seb home that she would forego all discussion of nuptials. If Piers alone were lucky, Sebastian would get all the attention and all the pressure on him.

Yes, Piers thought, that piece of luck would be welcome. God bless the emperor for surrendering at last…and God bless Seb for realizing he was out of excuses for staying away.

***

Catherine saw the coach rattling up the drive in plenty of time to set aside with care the petticoat she was retrimming and walk sedately down the stairs like a lady should. She learned this after throwing last year’s Christmas dress down in a heap, leaving scissors and thread spilled along the edge of the bay window overlooking the front lawn, and sprinting down the stairs at a reckless speed in her silk slippers. She slid partway across the marble foyer and flung the front door open triumphantly, certain Sebastian would be just stepping out of his carriage.

The coach had rolled up barely half the driveway.

Now there really wasn’t time, though, to go back upstairs and pick up after herself. Besides, she had opened the door. He must have seen her; he would think her unbearably odd, or rude, if she closed the door again before he walked through it.

A chill slithered up Catherine’s back at the blast of icy air that whipped into her, rushing right through her wool petticoat and velvet spencer. Maybe she should close the door. Lord Bassingstoke was ever complaining about the coal bill; she didn’t want to waste heat by leaving the door open for a full three minutes in December.

There was still the matter of what Sebastian would think if she shut the door on him the first time he came home in years. She could not be so deliberately rude to someone—especially not her husband-to-be.

Catherine stepped outside onto the landing and pulled the front door closed behind her. Immersed now in the winter air, she shivered. She crossed her arms over her stomach and tucked her hands under them, fisted against her ribs. Her toes curled in the thin fabric encasing them, already burning with cold against the stone.

She was an idiot. She could have taken the time to grab her cloak from the closet under the stairs.

The minutes the coach took to reach the top of the U-shaped drive seemed like half an hour. When the vehicle finally stopped, the door flew open from the inside, and the occupant did not wait for the outrider to lower the steps.

He hadn’t finished straightening from his hop down to the gravel drive before Catherine realized her mistake. Sebastian was not the man striding toward her with his greatcoat swirling in the wind, flaring out behind him and making him look, for a moment, larger than life.

His brother was.

Piers was almost painfully handsome, with his sculpted jaw and bold, straight nose and thick-lashed blue-gray eyes…but he was not the brother Catherine wanted to see. She would not have waited on the steps in the cold for Piers, whom she saw every season of the year for weeks at a time.

She tried to hide that mean truth behind an over-bright smile as he ran up the steps.

Welcome home, Piers.

He grinned at her. Catherine, dear girl, what are you doing out here dressed like that? He slung his arm around her shoulders in brotherly familiarity, and she was glad of both his body heat and the fabric of his coat now enveloping half of her. He smelled faintly of cologne, like he always did. She still liked the scent, as she always had.

Where’s your horse? she asked as he opened the front door. You always ride.

He had started to take a step forward, but her word arrested him. You thought it was Sebastian’s coach, didn’t you?

Catherine had never been good at lying to Piers, even the small social lies meant out of politeness. Something about him made her tongue less adroit than it was around the rest of her family and acquaintance. She looked up at him and felt her eyes widen in distress. I—yes, she confessed, feeling the insult of her words acutely.

He squeezed her tighter for a moment. He’ll be here soon enough, old girl. Come on.

They entered the hall together, and Piers drew his arm from her to shut the door. Catherine could still feel the weight and the heat of his embrace as he offered his arm to walk with her. Shall we ring for tea and warm the both of us up?

She slipped her hand around the crook of his elbow. His coat was cold on the outside. That sounds lovely.

The pair of them had not taken more than ten steps down the hall when Lady Bassingstoke came out of the formal dining room and stopped with a gasp. The shock and joy faded from her face after a moment, and she shook herself as if to clear a daze.

Piers, my son, she greeted, coming forward with her hands out and a warm smile on her lips now. I almost took you for your brother. You look so like him with your hair like that, and with Catherine at your side, I thought—

Everyone wants Sebastian home, Piers cut in with quiet earnest.

Catherine felt her heart sink. Piers’ own mother clearly wanted to see Sebastian more than him, and so had she. She had admitted as much to herself—she would not have frozen half to death waiting for Piers on the steps—and he knew it.

Now, we were on our way to ring for tea. Would you care to join us, Mother?

Lady Bassingstoke beamed and led the way into the family’s parlor.

Catherine squeezed Piers’ arm as they followed. "I am glad you’re home," she whispered.

He looked down at her and smiled, and she smiled back, but she wasn’t fooled. She knew that smile. It was the smile she used when she was humoring someone, when she was smiling for their sake and not her own. She swallowed heavily and wished she could re-live the last five minutes.

***

Everyone was on edge at dinner.

Piers saw it in his mother’s fluttering worry over everyone’s food and drink. He felt it in his father’s silence. He guessed it in Catherine’s attentiveness to him.

Ever since that moment in the hall when Lady Bassingstoke had looked at Piers and seen his brother and revealed the difference in their welcome, Catherine had been demonstrably aware of him. She was not pushy or vulgar about it; she was not offering him obsequious questions about the past three months of his life or laughing too loudly at every quip he made. Nothing so blatant. But she was giving him more attention than she normally did.

All the other times Piers had been home, they had dealt comfortably together, he slipping into the empty seat across from her as if he sat there every night, and she and his parents continuing their normal conversational patterns as though they always had a fourth at the table. If he addressed her, she would look at him, and if she spoke directly to him she would. The rest of the time she either looked at him, or didn’t, depending on where her attention was needed, the conversation or her food…and Piers had done the same. For years, now, Catherine had been part of the fabric of his homecomings, and she had treated him as a commonplace part of her life. Sebastian was the one she had hero-worshipped, the one she had latched onto like a lamprey and given her attention and smiles to.

Tonight, though, she was making an effort to focus on Piers. She knew he had been hurt that everyone wanted to see his brother more than him, and that none of them had even bothered to pretend otherwise. Now she was trying to show him that someone in the house noticed and valued his presence. When he spoke, her eyes went to him every time. When she made a joke she looked at him to be sure he was included.

He should probably be offended that she felt the need to make up for what had been an honest, if stinging admission on the steps. He should probably resent being the recipient of Catherine’s pity, that she felt so sorry for him she would pay him attentions he had never warranted on his own.

The only problem was, Piers didn’t think that was what drove her behavior tonight. Catherine seemed genuinely engaged by him, interested in his words, aware of him in a new way. He found himself extending her the benefit of the doubt; that she might be seeing him in a new light after the events of the afternoon was not impossible, after all. His view of her had changed today. When he looked at her he no longer saw the helpless little orphan girl but a young woman of exquisite sensitivity and undeniable appeal. Her soft blonde curls and fine features epitomized current standards of beauty, and her slender frame had enough curves to mark her unambiguously as a woman. No, Catherine was not a girl anymore. She was an eminently marriageable young lady waiting for her de facto fiancé to come home and claim her.

Hell, Piers thought, he would be on edge, too, in her position. He was almost on edge for her, thanks to this damnable awareness that, yes, he could not deny it, cut both ways. Every time he caught her looking at him, after all, was because his eyes strayed to her.

Good God.

Sebastian could not get here soon enough.

But supper passed, and the glasses of sherry and port after, and still no sound of carriage wheels or an opening door or muffled voices came from the front of the house. The servants cleared the dishes, and Piers’ mother chirped loudly over settling Catherine on the sofa with a sewing project, and his father went to his study for a glass of brandy, and Sebastian did not come.

Catherine, perhaps oddly, was the first to give up on his brother’s arrival. None of them had spoken a word on the subject, or admitted that was what they were about; all of them simply understood it, and understood that speaking of the matter would only make the waiting worse. Around a quarter to eleven, Miss Trotham made a deliberate scene of putting away her work and going down the hall to bed. Piers’ mother harrumphed and sighed for another half hour before abandoning her wreath-trimming, collecting his father from the bottle, and dragging them both to the self-righteous slumber of affronted parenthood.

Piers sat in the parlor alone, watching the candles burn lower and wondering what in the hell was keeping his brother. He had been on the roads today himself; the Sparrows Herne Turnpike had stayed hard for all but his last hour or two on it, right in the middle of the afternoon, and the smaller roads into Buckinghamshire had been fast. Sebastian had further to travel from, wherever he had stopped last night, but the going would have improved as evening shadows crept in and refroze the roads. He should have arrived by now, unless something had happened.

Probably all that had happened was a buxom barmaid