Page 78 of All I Want for Christmas… Is You
“Your name is Nollaig. It means Christmas, does it not?”
“I was born on the twenty-fifth of December, so it was the name my mother gave me.”
“I knew it! YouareHim!”
Noel put his head in his hands and resisted the urge to gather his hair in fists of confusion and frustration. Even more maddening was the fact that there was a part of him, hidden beneath the coverlets, that was growing more and more aware of the fact that a beautiful woman stood in the nearby darkness, a daft woman, yes, but a woman nonetheless, and the state of that particular part of his anatomy was beginning to claim more of his attention than his attempts to follow her strange conversation.
“You were born on Christmas,” she said passionately. “You are gentle and kind, you evenlooklike Him. You said ‘I Am.’ You came to me in a dream and yet you deny it all, deny that you’re Him, when it’s obvious that you are. Please don’t disappear now, please don’t ascend up through the ceiling and through the clouds above, please, stay and tell me more about yourself.”
Noel stared at her.
And suddenly, he knew exactly who she thought he was.
He, who was as much a sinner as the next man, no more holy than a footstool in a parson’s cottage. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
“Lady Katharine,” he said slowly, “I am not theHimthat you’d have me be. I’m nothing but a down-on-his-luck Irish rogue who came to England to appeal to my relations for help, but who was denied recognition or mercy and thrown out on the street. Truly, I’m nothing more than that.”
She stood looking down at him, blinking, her face stricken. “You’re not ... the Lord?”
He felt her pain and disappointment, mirrored there in huge, tragic eyes. “No. Honestly. I’m not.”
He saw her face change. Saw it fill with raw humiliation and horror. Her lips trembled and she pressed her fingertips to her mouth, unable to speak.
He lay there, looking quietly up at her.
“You have made a fool of me,” she whispered in a broken little voice. “I believed in a miracle. I believed in something I desperately wanted to be true, and now I feel like an absolute fool.”
“There’s no need to feel like a fool. And making you feel like one was never my intent. As for miracles, you gavemeone tonight. You saved my life.”
“I’m so ...mortified!”
“And I think you’re beautiful. In body, heart and soul.”
Her eyes filled with tears and with a little cry she turned and ran from the room, the door slamming behind her.
Outside, the sleet pinged against the glass like a thousand needles and wind whistled under the eaves, and Noel wondered if maybe, just maybe, he should have let her go on believing her outrageous conviction that he was the Christ.
He’d be back out in the cold again, soon enough.
He thought of a newborn baby in a manger while the breaths of stable animals frosted the air around Him.
Maybe he had more in common with the Christ child than he’d thought.
CHAPTER7
Oh, ohhh, the nerve of that horrible man, that pretender, that—that imposter!
Katharine had never been so humiliated in her entire adult life, and probably not in her childhood, either. What kind of fool had she been to let a dream—as close and real as it had been, as vibrant as it still was in her memory—to make her think that an ordinary man was someone extra-ordinary? Divine?
The only thing extraordinary and divine about Mr. Nollaig O’ Flaherty was the fact that Lucien de Montforte hadn’t yet found him, because when he did—
There was a sudden pounding at the door.
Katharine froze. One o’ clock in the morning, snow swirling against the windows, and for the second time this wretched night someone was outside and she, having given the footmen the evening off (she was a shrew, after all), was going to have to answer it yet again. Who would it be this time? Mother Mary? The three Magi? The angel Gabriel?
She yanked open the door, throwing caution to the wind. It could have been anyone or anything on the other side of that door, and the anyone or anything that it turned out to be was none other than Lucien de Montforte.
The duke stood out there on the steps, the reins of his savage stallion in one gloved hand, his eyes black and inscrutable beneath a tricorn that was crusted in wet snow. Behind him, a black-and-white mare stood tied to a nearby tree, ears flat and head drooping beneath the worsening weather.
