Lady Sophie's Christmas Wish - By Grace Burrowes Page 0,60
the world.
“Do you recall the year His Grace thought Sophie should have a pet rabbit for Christmas?” he asked his brothers.
“And Bart told her it was headed for the stew pot. I thought she’d brain him senseless,” Westhaven supplied. “I do believe it’s the only time I’ve heard Her Grace laugh out loud.”
“But we didn’t tease our sisters quite as mercilessly after that,” Val pointed out.
“Sophie has her ways,” St. Just said. “To this day, a man does not cross her with impunity.”
The talk drifted to various neighbors and other sisters before Westhaven was again complaining that his ass had frozen to the saddle, and this was hardly how the heir to a dukedom expected to spend his holidays.
When next they paused to rest the horses, his brothers washed his handsome face with snow for that nonsense.
***
All day long, as Vim’s toes turned to distant, frozen memories, the wind chapped his cheeks and nose, and the food Sophie had packed for him disappeared into a bottomless well of cold and hunger, he mentally kicked himself.
He should not have left Sophie to contend with that baby by herself. She was brave and sensible but a novice when it came to babies.
He should have escorted her to the cozy, well-staffed home of some titled acquaintance and set about courting her—a display of his connections in polite society accompanied by discreet indications of his wealth would have been a nice place to start.
He should have waited for better weather to leave Town, weather fine enough that he could take Kit with him to Sidling, where the boy could be raised up secure and safe in any number of useful professions.
He should have told her that whatever her station in life—cook, housekeeper, companion, governess, whatever, it mattered naught to him so long as she exchanged it for the position of his baroness.
And for variety, he’d occasionally curse himself for tarrying in London, at all. If he hadn’t put off going to Kent to the very last minute, he’d be cozy and snug at Sidling right now, listening to his aunt explain the subtleties of chess to a man who’d been letting his wife beat him at the game for half a century.
And finally, when he lost sensation in his fingers, the food was gone, and darkness starting to fall, he admitted he should have made love to Sophie when they’d had the chance. He should have put aside all the rotten memories he carried courtesy of the last female he’d pursued in the Yule season, gotten together his courage, and made such passionate love to Sophie that she couldn’t bear to let him go.
This thought coalesced in his brain just as his foot went sideways beneath him in the snow and he pitched headfirst into a fluffy drift at least four feet deep.
Ten
“Westhaven writes that Valentine is on the trail of some sort of violin, but it will cost them a day’s traveling time.” His Grace passed his wife the letter, a terse, efficient little epistle, via messengers, from a man who’d taken the disarrayed finances of the duchy and set them to rights in about a year flat.
“A violin?” Her brow furrowed as she perused the single page where she sat in serene domestic splendor near the study’s fire. “A Guarneri. No small find. Do you suppose Valentine is happy?”
Women. They were forever pondering the imponderables and expecting their menfolk to do likewise.
“Valentine delights in his music, the Philharmonic is ever after him to give up his ruralizing and come to Town to rehearse them. One must conclude his rustic existence appeals to him.”
Her Grace set the letter aside. “Or being up in Oxfordshire appeals to him, or his wife appeals to him. I think Ellen is yet shy of polite society.”
If their youngest son ran true to Windham form, he was spending the winter keeping his new wife warm and cozy, and perhaps seeing to the next generation of the musical branch of the family.
His Grace reached over and patted his wife’s hand. “We’ll squire her around next Season, put the ducal stamp of approval on Val’s choice. Care for more tea, my love?”
“No, thank you.”
She fell silent, leaving His Grace to go back to a daunting pile of correspondence from his cronies in the Lords. Damned fools were still yammering on about this or that bill, when they ought by rights to be with their own families, catching all the pretty parlor maids under the kissing boughs.