The Earl of Christmas Past (Goode Girls Romance #5) - Kerrigan Byrne Page 0,4
of Highland hospitality—if there still was such a thing—would not have allowed them to deny anyone sanctuary.
“You have my gratitude all the same, Mrs. Pitagowan,” the woman said.
God, how he had missed the dulcet pronunciations of the gently bred ladies of his homeland. It’d been so long. He wanted to bid her to speak, to never stop.
“I told ye, call us Bess and Balthazar, everyone else does.” The innkeeper trundled over to the door and accepted a tray of tea, which she set on the small stand next to the bed. After, she squeezed around her husband, who’d returned with yet another cauldron of water, to the small brick fireplace on the far wall. Rolling up her sleeves, she squatted to arrange a fire.
“You must call me Vanessa, then.”
Vanessa. John tested the name on his tongue, and he thought he saw the woman tense beneath her layers.
Could she hear him already? The sun hadn’t gone down yet.
“Where are ye from, lass?” Bess asked, carrying on the conversation.
John found himself equally curious.
“My family resides in London, mostly,” Vanessa answered. “Though I am compelled to spend most of the time at our country estate in Derbyshire.”
John thought her reply rather curious, not only the phrase but the bleak note lurking beneath the false cheer she’d injected into her voice. Compelled. An interesting word.
If Bess thought it odd, she didn’t mention. “Where were ye headed in such a storm, if ye doona mind me asking?”
“Not at all.” Bending to drag the case with her, Vanessa rested it by the tea-laden table, out of the way of Balthazar’s and Dougal’s stomping feet. “I was on the road to Fort Augustus on Loch Ness when the blizzard overtook us.” She poured herself a cup of the steaming brew as she answered.
“Is yer family there?” Bess turned to cast a queer look at her. “Will they be fretting after ye?”
The lady didn’t bother to sweeten the tea; she simply lifted it to her soft mouth and puckered her lips to blow across the surface before taking a sip.
A strange, hollow longing overtook John as he watched her shiver with delight as she swallowed the warm liquid and let out an almost imperceptible sigh.
Christ he’d give his soul to taste tea again.
“My family is in Paris for Christmas this year,” she answered vaguely after the silence had stretched for too long.
“And ye’re not with them?” Bess prodded, catching flame to a bit of peat she’d laid beneath the kindling.
“No. No, I am not invited to—that is, I don’t travel with them, generally. I am more often occupied by my own adventures.”
An awkward silence fell over the room like the batting of a moist blanket. The lady sipped at her tea, retreating deeper into her cloak and her thoughts as the tub was filled.
Once Bess had built the fire to a crackling height, she added one more extra-large, dry log from the grate next to the fireplace, and stood with a grunt. She reached in to test the water and flicked it off, wiping her hand with her apron.
“A strange trunk, that.” She nodded to the ungainly square case. “Not quite a trunk, I suppose, and not a satchel either.”
“It’s a camera.” Vanessa abandoned her empty teacup to the tray to stand over it. “I was to be on a winter photography expedition at Loch Ness before the storm hit. I left my trunk with my belongings on the abandoned coach.”
A camera? John squinted at the case. He’d never heard of such a thing.
Bess clapped her hands together in delight. “Och, aye? Now’s the time to find Nessie, if there ever is one! No doubt ye caught wind of the Northern Lights this year. We could see them snapping across the sky afore the clouds covered them. ’Tis, no doubt, the reason this storm is so powerful. All things are intensified during the Na Fir Chlis. And during the solstice, and Christmas after that…” She let the words linger, winking conspiratorially. “All things are possible, are they not?”
“That was my hope.” Vanessa smiled broadly, and John felt a catch in his throat, as if the very sight of that smile had stolen something from him.
“Well, here’s ye a toweling and some soap. Though perhaps not as fragrant and fancy as ye’re used to.”
“It’ll do perfectly,” Vanessa assured her with a kind smile.
John had always appreciated a woman who was kind to those beneath her in rank, stature, or wealth. It had been one of his greatest irritations when