Page 11 of All I Want for Christmas… Is You
“And what royal family, I’d like to know?”
“A democratic republic, if you’d believe it. A society whose aristocracy is chosen from the best capitalists.”
“Not landowners, then?”
She shrugged, gathering back a few of the portraits from the bed into a tidy pile. “Some. But mostly industry giants and war heroes. Machines, factories and the like have changed everything. England’s like that too, now. The new century will belong to innovators rather than aristocrats, I’d wager.”
“Good God, what I wouldn’t give to see that.” He couldn’t decide what would be worse, dying before his time and missing what might have been. Or existing past his death and learning what he was still missing. What if the Empire rose and fell, and he was still sitting here in the bunghole of Blighty, watching generations of Balthazars raise, eat, and sometimes bugger sheep?
Her eyes brimmed with sympathy, as if she could read his thoughts. “I wish you could see it all. I plan to. I haven’t been to America yet, though I’m dying to visit New York. I think I’ll go there next if my journey to Constantinople is delayed.”
“You’re traveling to Constantinople? With whom?” He looked pointedly at her ring finger, which he noted was bare.
Why that ignited a little glow of pleasure in his chest, he couldn’t say. It wasn’t as though he could speak for her. It wasn’t as though he knew he would. They’d been acquainted for all of five minutes.
“Oh…haven’t decided yet,” she hedged, glancing away and plucking at a loose thread in the coverlet.
“You mentioned your family wanted an advantageous marriage for you, but you didn’t introduce yourself as nobility.”
His observation seemed to displease her. “No. But my father owns a shipping company, and the thing to do is marry off rich heiresses to impoverished lords.”
He made a sound in the back of his throat that he wished didn’t convey the depth of his derision on that score. It wasn’t that he thought women shouldn’t marry above their rank.
It was that he instantly and intensely hated the idea ofherbeing married.
She was young, but old enough to have been made a mother many times over. Maybe twenty and five or so…So why wasn’t she spoken for?
John allowed his notice to drift to another photograph, this one of a woman in a dark dress seated in a velvet chair. She posed like one would for any master of portraiture, looking off into the distance. Her features carefully still.
From her place at his elbow, Vanessa said, “This is my eldest sister, Veronica. The Dowager Countess of Weatherstoke.”
“A Countess. How fortunate for her.”
“I wouldn’t have traded places with her for the entire world.” The melancholy note in her voice made him glance up at her, but her faraway expression didn’t brook further discussion.
He saw the resemblance between her and the woman in the portrait. Hair the color of midnight. Bright eyes, a heart-shaped face, and elegant, butter-soft skin.
“My family is visiting her in Paris, where she lives among the beau monde,” she said, her voice injected with a false, syrupy insouciance. She picked up the photograph as if to hide it from him, examining it with a pinched sort of melancholy. “Veronica is the beauty of the family.”
“No,” he insisted more harshly than he meant to. “No, she is not.”
She peered up at him oddly, her gaze had become wary and full of doubts he dared not define. “Yes, well…the photo doesn’t do her justice.”
“It doesn’t have to. She doesn’t hold a candle to you.”
CHAPTER4
Vanessa’s focus had been arrested. Nay, seized and held captive.
The air thickened between them and the storm seemed closer now. The wild chaos of it slipping into the night. Invading the space between them. Prompting her instincts to prickle and her hair to stand on end.
She was a kitten who’d stumbled into the den of a lion. Nothing more than a light snack. Something he could pick his teeth with.
So why did she have the very feline urge to arch and glide toward and against the lithe strength of his form?
To search for warmth. For protection.
His body, as iridescent as it still was, radiated as much heat as the firelight. His shoulders were wide and his arms long and thick beneath the fitted lines of his crimson jacket.
