Lady Sophie's Christmas Wish - By Grace Burrowes Page 0,106

her waist. Not exactly a hug, but a half embrace that let Sophie lean against him.

“Hush, my dear. Kit isn’t crying now, is he? A man with three daughters knows a few things about dealing with babies. Let me walk you to the livery, and I’ll wait with you until Westhaven is done making the pretty with vicar.”

Across the cold, sunny air, Sophie heard one repetitive piano note being struck in the lower register again and again in slow succession. Over at the church, Valentine was tuning the curmudgeon, but the single repetitive tone felt like a bell tolling somewhere in Sophie’s heart.

“I don’t want to leave him. I should not have come.”

“I can understand that sentiment.” Vim led her down the steps as he spoke. “All my relations are about to descend, and I feel… ambushed, like I was lured here under false colors. I’m tempted to ride in the direction of Bristol rather than return to Sidling.”

“Is that what you did all those years ago? Rode for Bristol?”

His step didn’t falter as they moved across the frozen green toward the livery. “Have you asked your brothers about my past, then?”

“I have not. I’m asking you.”

Abruptly, it seemed the thing to do. If this was what made it impossible for Vim to settle down at his family seat, if this was part of what made any hope of a future with him a ridiculous wish, then she wanted to hear it, and hear it from him.

For a time, they walked in silence, and Sophie thought if there was something worse than a crying baby, it was the silence of a man figuring out how to explain why he’d never be gracing the neighborhood again.

“Let’s take a seat, shall we?”

He led her to a bench carved from a single oak tree trunk. The thing was huge and beautiful in a rough way. It had probably been there when Good Queen Bess had been on the throne.

“You’re sure you want to hear this?” He waited for her to choose her seat then came down on her left. “The tale quite honestly flatters no one.”

“Scandals usually don’t, but you said it wasn’t quite a scandal.”

She wasn’t at all sure she did want to hear an old and sordid tale, but she most assuredly wanted to hear his voice, to have a chance to study his features. In the bright, wintry sunshine, his eyes looked tired.

“Not a scandal. I was finishing up at university, trying to figure out how I was to go on in life.” He paused, and Sophie saw him glance at her left hand. She was wearing riding gloves, which did not provide a great deal of warmth.

Did he want to take her hand? To make a physical connection to her? She made a pretense of gathering her cloak a little more closely and moved so their sides touched.

“You were here for the holidays?” she asked.

“For the holidays, yes, but I was down here a lot that fall, because Grandfather was old enough that at any point, he might be taken from us. He was hale at the time, and there was speculation he and his fourth wife had finally succeeded where the second and third hadn’t been as lucky.”

Sophie remained silent. Old men siring babies wasn’t a subject she was equipped to converse on, not even with Vim.

“I became infatuated, Sophie.” Vim said softly. Sophie could not tell if he was being ironic. She feared he was perfectly serious. “At the hunt ball, the first of October thirteen years ago, I fell in love with the most beautiful, witty, kind, attractive woman in the shire, an innocent girl with the promise of all manner of pleasures in her eyes, and she accepted my suit. I was over the moon, ready to move mountains, willing to conquer pagan armies to impress my lady.”

“You were smitten.” She watched his lips moving, forming words that seemed to hurt him as much as they hurt Sophie. He was in all likelihood still smitten, and that was why he absented himself from his own home for years at a time.

“The fall assembly had passed, and we were to be married early in the New Year, so we’d had no opportunity to make an announcement. She’d asked me to wait until after Yuletide to speak to her father, but there was no young man more optimistic than I. My lady allowed me the occasional taste of her charms, but I esteemed her too greatly to