The New Year’s Eve ball. A tradition Martha had helped her husband maintain every year since they wed, despite his failing health.
George imagined Jane with him at the ball, throwing open all the doors with all the other guests at the stroke of midnight. Martha’s suggestion and offer to keep Jane as a guest for a fortnight burned like a fiery gem before him. He felt dragonish about it. He wanted to grab it, make it his own, horde it away.
George stepped into the thick choking fog and started down the stairs. Each footstep on the pavement felt like pulling his boot from a void of mud, sticky, deep, dark, and heavy. The simple, soft snow that had begun to fall on his departure from Whitwood had changed to a steady rain by the time he’d arrived in London, leaving the city mired more than usual in mud. Simply striding down the street safely proved a challenge, but he did not think about where he went. He left his body to take him there. That in itself was a trial. His body longed to travel along more country roads toward more country destinations. Why in hell had he left Jane behind? Foolish, that.
But when the home and family he had returned to was not what he’d contemplated bringing Jane into? Neville’s recovery was far from guaranteed. He’d needed a reminder of that. No, leaving had been for the best after all.
A laugh brought his molasses movements to a stop. It had been a deep and feminine laugh. A familiar one. But that was not possible. He searched the street. A coach ambled slowly past him on the rutted road. The sound must have emanated from there.
Jane’s laugh. For that’s what it had sounded like. Impossible. He’d been without sleep in the last twenty-four hours, his headache returning, his arm aching. He must have hallucinated the thing he wanted most. He walked faster. He needed a good bout of muscle movement and the slick of sweat over every inch of his skin to calm him. He strode in the opposite direction of the coach. He’d visit Doctor Abbott after the new year began, find out if anything else could be done for Neville, if there was another way to go about the cure.
He looked over his shoulder in the direction of the coach with the laughing woman. Toward his front door. If he followed it, returned home, would he find the coach stopped before his townhouse? Would he find Jane warming herself by the fire, Martha making her comfortable after her travels?
He turned. He hesitated. It could not be her. She had no reason to chase after him. He’d left her.
But if it was… and Neville woke up. And George was not there. And something happened?
George put one controlled boot in front of the other. He ached to run, but to run spoke of hope, and that he could not give into again. There was too much stacked against hope, Neville included. As he strode into view of his townhouse, the coach, a black affair with no crest to mark its owner, pulled away from his doorstep.
He kicked the dirt from his feet and charged into the house. Female voices, light and happy, floated down the hall. He followed them, slowly, carefully, their voices turning into a buzzing in his ears. A belated side effect of his encounter with tree roots? He stood before the door behind which the voices laughed. His palms sweated and his heart raced, recognizing almost before his ears did the owner of that one, rich laugh.
He pushed through the door. It was her. Her back was to him. A berry red velvet cloak over a cream and green-trimmed gown, trim waist, slender neck, pale peak of ears from a thick tangle of hair piled neatly and simply atop her head.
“Jane.”
Jane turned to a statue then unfroze with a shoulder roll. Her profile appeared over her shoulder as she turned to look at him. Then her body followed, and she stood facing him fully, her hands twisting in front of her.
“Happy Christmas, Sir George.” she said with a hint of shy hesitancy.
George stood across the room. “You’re here.” He kissed her. He pushed her to arm’s length. “You should not be here.”
“My,” Martha said. “Such volatile emotions. I’ll… go over there.” She pointed to an armchair where her husband snoozed, a paper open across his belly.
Jane gasped and tried to pull away, but George took advantage of that little, sweet parting of her lips. He slipped his tongue between them and explored the warmth of her mouth. When Jane appeared, his control had slipped away. He could not hold tight to his anger, either. Just like her to take off on her own.
Somewhere at the back of his brain, right about where it had hit a tree root a week ago, a warning bell rang. He ignored it. He held Jane in his arms on Christmas day. Nothing else mattered.
She’d come to him. He wanted her.
He wrapped his arms around her and flattened his palms against her lower back, pressing her body to his, then dragged his hands over the curves at her hips.
A long, low whistle broke through the grip of lust.
He lifted his gaze from Jane to the whistler across the room.
“Remember when you used to greet me like that, Martha?” Wix, Martha’s husband, asked with a grin.
Martha sat on the floor before her husband. “I would so now if I was not scared of a coughing fit.”
Wix’s skeletal hand brushed through Martha’s dark hair. “You’d put me right in my grave, love.”
Jane blushed a pretty pink but did not laugh. She leaned close to him. She had not far to go since he’d never taken his arms from around her.
“Your brother-in-law is an expert at graveyard humor, I note,” Jane said. “And we’ve not even been introduced yet.”
“Quite. You get used to it. And you learn it yourself in this family. Must find things to laugh about some days.”
Jane’s smile faltered.
