The Earl of Christmas Past (Goode Girls Romance #5) - Kerrigan Byrne

Chapter One

Calvine Village, Highlands, Scotland – 1891

Winter Solstice

Fate had been Vanessa Latimer’s foe since she could remember.

She was the most unlucky, ungainly person of her acquaintance, and had resigned herself to an early death. However, she always imagined said death would be glorious, as well.

Or at least memorable.

Something like tripping and accidentally sacrificing herself to a volcano in the Pacific Islands. Or perhaps becoming the unfortunate snack of a Nile crocodile or a tiger in Calcutta.

Meeting her end as a human icicle in the Scottish Highlands had never made it on the list.

Not until the angry blizzard turned the road to Inverness treacherous, and something had spooked the horse, sending the carriage careening into a boulder the size of a small cottage.

The driver informed her that the wheel was irreparably damaged, and that she must stay in the carriage while he went for help.

That had been hours ago.

When the dark of the storm became the dark of the late afternoon on this, the shortest day of the year, the temperatures plummeted alarmingly. Even though Vanessa had been left with furs and blankets, she worried she wouldn’t survive the night, and set off along the road with a lantern and the most important of her luggage.

Now, huddled on the landing beneath the creaking shingle of Balthazar’s Inn, she clutched her increasingly heavy case to her chest, shielding the precious contents with her body.

The surly innkeeper’s impossibly thick eyebrows came together in a scowl as he wedged his bulk into the crack of the open door to effectively block any attempt at entry. Even the gale forces didn’t save her nostrils from being singed by his flammable scotch-soaked breath. “As ye can see, lass, ye’re not the only traveler stranded in this bollocks storm, and I let our last remaining room to the other rank idiot not clever enough to seek shelter before the storm fell upon us. So, nay. Ye’ll have to try elsewhere.”

“Was that rank idiot a shifty-eyed man in his fifties named McMurray?” she asked, forcing the words out of her lungs like a stubborn bellows to be heard over the din. The wind buffeted her skirts this way and that, plastering them to her trembling legs.

“Aye,” he said with a self-satisfied smirk as he also managed to leer. “But doona think to be offering to share his bed; we’re a reputable establishment.”

“Never! I wouldn’t—that isn’t—what—” Vanessa gaped and shuddered for a reason that had nothing to do with the cold. Her driver had left her out there to freeze to death while he’d purchased a room with her fare? She should have listened when her instincts had warned her off hiring him.

Her case, growing heavier by the moment, threatened to slide out of the circle of her arms and down her body, so she bucked it higher with her hips and redoubled her efforts to hold it aloft with fingers she could no longer feel. “Is there somewhere nearby that might take me in?” she called, coughing as a particularly icy gust stole her breath.

“Aye.” He jerked his chin in a vaguely northern direction. “The Cairngorm Tavern is not but a half hour’s march up the road.” He said this as if the angry wind did not threaten to snatch her up and toss her into the nearest snowdrift.

Swallowing a spurt of temper and no small amount of desperation, Vanessa squared her shoulders before offering, “What if this rank idiot can pay you double your room rate to sleep in the stables?” She pointed to the rickety livery next to the sturdy stone building. ’Twas the season and all that. If it was good enough for the baby Jesus, who was she to turn her nose up?

At this he paused, eyeing her with speculation. “Ye’ll pay in advance?”

A knot of anxiety eased in her belly as she nodded dramatically, her neck stiff with the cold. “And triple for a warm bath.”

He immediately shook his head, his jowls wobbling like a winter pudding. “Doona think I’ll be spending me night hauling water for ye and yers.”

“J-just me,” Vanessa said, doing her best to clench her teeth against their chattering. “N-no m-mine.”

“No husband? No chaperone?” For the first time, he looked past her as the storm finished swallowing the last of the early evening into a relentless chaos of white snow and dark skies.

“I’m—I’m alone.” Vanessa told herself the gather of moisture at the corner of her eyes was the sole fault of the untenable weather. Not her untenable circumstances.

A banshee-pitched