Page 2 of The Duke Who Saved Christmas
Dogs? That I could get on board with. A great deal of their chatter would be saying how much they love us and how happy they were to see us, and that was the kind of thing you could never hear too many times.
That was why I wanted a dog more than I wanted a boyfriend.
The dog would appreciate me more.Andthey were trainable.
At least so said my dating history.
The pig stared at me for a moment longer before he turned away and walked towards the hedgerow. It disappeared into the darkness, and the branches of the roadside hedge snagged on its reindeer antlers, popping them off its head.
I walked over and bent down, getting the answer to my unspoken question.
A headband.
Why on Earth was a pig wearing a reindeer antler headband?
You know what? I wasn’t even going to go there. Castleton was full of peculiarities I’d long stopped trying to understand, and I was going to chalk this up as one of those.
Peculiar was really about the only word for it, wasn’t it?
All right, ‘bloody weird’ also worked, but that was two words.
I took the headband back into my car and tossed it on the front seat. There was a very good chance that my grandparents would know who the pig belonged to and could tell me where to drop off the headband.
I couldn’t believe that thought had crossed my mind. Returning a headband that belonged to apig.
Jesus Christ. The countryside was scrambling my brain already.
I brushed it away with a swift shake of my head and started the car. It was getting bloody cold out here, and I wanted to get to my grandparents’ house before my nipples froze off. It was already pitch black and I hated driving in the dark as it was, never mind on country lanes in this pitch-black hell.
Still, I knew these pothole-ridden roads like the back of my hand.
The potholes, while annoying, were weirdly comforting. There was something to be said about a place that didn’t change, and it was great to see that Castleton Council were just as ruddy useless as they’d always been.
After all, why fill in potholes when you could give yourself a Christmas bonus? Pumping up a fat cat salary was a far more useful way of spending the resident’s local council tax than fixing the roads, after all.
I made the final turn to the road that would lead me to Castleton. Butterflies erupted in my stomach, and the feeling that tickled at my nerve endings was something between excitement and downright terror.
I hadn’t visited home in five years, and here I was, three weeks before Christmas, rolling into the village like I was coming back from the dead.
At least it wasn’t for anything bad. Like someone dying.
With my general life luck and my sister’s notoriously bad luck in the romance department, my family had started a literal betting pool thinking that I wouldn’t return until someone popped their clogs.
I couldn’t be mad about it.
If I’d been allowed to bet on myself, I’d have chosen that very option.
Thankfully for my baby sister, Hazel, her luck had changed two-and-a-half years ago when she’d met her now-fiancé, Julian. She’d screamed to me on that very day that he was The One. I had, as the dutiful big sister, promised I would come home for her wedding that she swore would happen, assuming it never would.
I didn’t tell her that, of course. In my defence, it wasn’t as if that feeling was entirely warranted.
Herthreeprior engagements hadn’t exactly fuelled me with the greatest confidence that she’d actually make it down the aisle with a man she’d met ten minutes before our phone call.
Well, I was eating crow.
Lots of it. Several murders of them, actually.
Julian had proposed to her last Christmas Eve, and that very lovely moment I’d witnessed on the screen of my laptop was exactly why I was chugging along the pitch-black lanes of rural Yorkshire on my way home.
