A Regency Christmas Pact Collection (23 page)

Surely this cross must be a reliquary. But then Freddie began to wonder what ancient relics had once been housed within it.

Not that such a thing mattered in the slightest. It wasn’t hers. It belonged to Lord Upton Grey…well, now it belonged to this other man. Regardless of who it belonged to, it couldn’t help Freddie and her family. She needed to stop thinking about it.

She closed the door to her chamber behind her, leaning against it while she tried to slow her breathing and calm her racing thoughts.

No matter what she did, though, a phrase kept pushing its way to the forefront of her mind:
five thousand pounds
.

As soon as Preston entered the drawing room before supper, both Rachel and Mary rushed over to draw him into a hug, with Rachel even pushing herself up on her tiptoes to kiss him upon the cheek.

“I’ve been near desperate to see you again,” his eldest sister said when she pulled back. “Your travel was all right? How are you faring after Arrington’s funeral?”

Mary gripped his hand tightly within her own. “But you don’t really wish to speak of funerals right now, do you?”

Every word from both of his sisters was said with such motherly affection, he couldn’t begrudge them for hovering. Any thought of that had fled him so long ago he could scarcely remember it. The two of them had banded together to rear him after their parents’ deaths. Rachel and Mary didn’t quite know how to stop mollycoddling him, even though he was now a man of thirty and more than capable of taking care of them both, instead of the pair of them taking care of him.

Their overprotectiveness had annoyed him when he’d first gone away to Harrow. Arrington, Berkswell, Findley, and the rest of the boys in his house had been blessed with parents who saw fit to leave them to their own devices. None of their parents were constantly sending letters to the headmaster about every little thing. For that matter, Upton Grey was Preston’s guardian, and the earl couldn’t be bothered with such trivial matters as Rachel and Mary seemed to make almost daily concerns.

Preston’s view on the matter had changed significantly when he’d returned home after the first term in his second year to find Rachel bearing bruises which had come at the hands of her then-husband, the Marquess of Charmouth.

On that very day, Preston had decided he could withstand any amount of cossetting his sisters felt it was necessary to provide.

He had also decided he would never sit idly by while a woman suffered at the hands of her husband, the man who should be protecting her from harm. That had formed the beginnings of what would one day become Darlingshire House, a safe haven for women whose husbands believed it their right to beat them. The act may be
legal
, but that didn’t make it
right
. Once he’d come of an age where he could take his seat in the Lords, he’d even started pressing for a change to laws that would allow women more legal protections.

He was still pressing for them today, and imagined it would be quite some time before any of his goals came to fruition. As a general rule, peers thought it should be their right to do as they wished.

But when he’d seen Rachel like that…

It still vexed him, since he had been merely a boy, that he’d been unable to protect his sister. Preston had gone to Upton Grey with his discovery, asking for advice on how to handle the matter.

His guardian had told him not to worry.

Not worrying was easier said than done, however, yet they made it through his entire holiday from Harrow without another incident.

A fortnight after he’d returned for the second term, he’d received a letter from Upton Grey informing him that Lord Charmouth had met an untimely end. A year later, after Rachel completed her period of mourning, Upton Grey had asked for her hand.

There had been no more bruises.

There
would
be
no more bruises.

There was no gentleman in all of England Preston held in higher regard than Upton Grey. Ellingham had proven to be equally as upstanding. He could trust his sisters’ care to them without fear for their safety.

Just now, though, he held out an arm for each of his sisters to take, led them to a spot on the chintz sofa nearest the window, and answered every question they saw fit to ask of him. When their curiosity was finally appeased, he took his chance to appease his own.

“I thought this was to be a
family
Christmas.”

Rachel let out an inaudible sigh, the slight lines around her eyes crinkling as she gave him the look she always had which commanded his forgiveness. “It was,” she said softly. “But Lady Stalbridge is on the board of my ladies’ charity, you know, and we had our annual meeting last month. She arrived in a hired carriage, not one belonging to Stalbridge, which I thought rather odd. And she didn’t bring a lady’s maid with her, even though we were there for the better part of the week. I finally pulled her aside after tea one day, hoping to get the truth of it out of her. She wouldn’t speak a word against her son, however, though it was as clear as day to
me
that he’s the problem. I got the impression, though she wouldn’t confirm it, that funds are rather limited for Lady Stalbridge and her daughters at the moment. I just wanted the Bexley-Smythe family to have a nice holiday...”

Preston doubted the situation was as dire as all of that, but he held his tongue. Standing by while others suffered was not a trait any of the Hounslow siblings had inherited.

If there had been any true sense in his mind that Stalbridge was neglecting the ladies in his care, Preston would have done precisely what his sister had done and more. He would have removed them to Darlingshire House, where they could be safe and well looked after. Neglect could be just as damaging to a person as physical abuse.

Whether the Bexley-Smythe ladies were truly suffering or not—and Preston was leaning more towards believing they were not—his eldest sister had it in her mind that they were.

Throughout Rachel’s speech, Mary had sat on his other side, nodding vigorously and hemming at appropriate moments, as though her agreement was required for Preston’s understanding. They all knew it was unnecessary, though.

Blast Stalbridge for being a degenerate. Preston had known for quite some time the marquess held loose morals. Now the man was convincing people he was even more dissolute and debauched than he likely was.

“I see,” he said at long last, hoping to convince them he wasn’t upset that he wouldn’t have the quiet family time he’d been hoping for. Or perhaps he was attempting to convince himself of such a thing. “Dare I ask how long you invited them to stay?”

Both of his sisters let out visible sighs of relief, and Rachel took his hand into her own again. “I knew you would understand! Upton Grey warned that you might not be very forgiving, considering that you’re mourning a friend, but I couldn’t bear the thought…” His sister’s eyes flitted across the room to where the two young ladies—both of them blonde and lovely and laughing entirely too much for his comfort—sat with their mother, deep in conversation.

Preston bit his tongue to prevent himself from grimacing. “Of course you couldn’t.”

“That wasn’t your only thought in inviting them, Rachel,” Mary said cautiously, her eyes flitting up to meet Preston’s with a sizeable portion of implied meaning in her gaze.

Good God
.

“You were hoping I might form a
tendre
for one of them…”

Rachel squeezed his hand with such imploring fervor she was liable to stop the blood from flowing through his veins. “The elder sister, actually…Lady Frederica. I’m afraid that Lady Edwina is not yet out. But you
do
need to take a bride. There has to be an heir—”

“Jeffrey is my heir.”

“Jeffrey is our cousin, not your son. He’s working as a barrister and is quite happy to continue doing so.” Rachel finally eased her grip. “You know as well as we both do that he’d prefer not to have the marquessate fall to him. The responsibility…”

Responsibility and duty, and the idea of having the estates and investments and servants all fall to him…those were all things which would terrify Jeffrey Hounslow. The young man much preferred being responsible only for himself.

It had always been that way.

But Jeffrey was young and teachable and far more biddable than any female Preston had ever known in his entire life. He’d proven he could learn to do things he never thought himself capable of, and he could learn to be the Marquess of Preston.

He would have to.

Every peer must learn how to do it, and who better to teach his cousin than Preston himself? He’d started learning to fulfill the requirements of the role at the tender age of four when his parents had died. Jeffrey could damned well begin to learn at the not nearly-so-tender age of four-and-twenty.

“Jeffrey is my heir,” Preston repeated more firmly, ignoring the way Rachel’s hopeful expression faded before his eyes.

Then he changed the topic of conversation, preferring instead to discuss the latest developments and accomplishments of all his nieces and nephews.

His sisters’ offspring were a far safer conversational subject than the Bexley-Smythe women. He already knew the children held him in great esteem and affection, and would never use a fire poker around him for any purpose other than to stoke the fire.

After what Stalbridge had put his sisters through over the last several years, God only knew what the chits were capable of…

Without conscious thought on his part, Preston scanned the room until his gaze settled upon the hearth and the neat arrangement of tools situated beside it. A new thrill of fear clutched his heart, squeezing like a vise. The fire poker. Both of those young ladies were seated much closer to it than he was.

Then the eldest of the Bexley-Smythe sisters met his gaze. She smiled at him in a way that lit up her warm eyes and sent a chill racing through his extremities towards his loins.

God’s teeth
.

Before Preston’s thoughts could run any more rampant than they already had, Goddard came into the drawing room to announce that supper was served. They all ushered out into the corridor, Preston urging his two sisters forward until the three of them were at the very front of the exodus.

He wanted as much distance between himself and the fire iron as he could get.

What an utterly odd gentleman this Lord Preston was proving himself to be. While he may be Lady Upton Grey’s brother, after spending the entirety of dinner seated next to him there was simply no other conclusion Freddie could draw about the man.

He’d conversed politely enough—the gravelly nature of his voice proving him to be the unknown gentleman she’d overheard talking with Lord Upton Grey—and had seemed knowledgeable and cordial and all the various and sundry things one must strive to be at all times when in polite company. And yet, every time Freddie had commented in any way upon any of the gentlemen in her acquaintance, a panicked expression had taken over Lord Preston’s otherwise handsome features.

She’d lost count of how many times his distressed hazel eyes, now nearly gray in color, had flitted away from her to stare at some random spot near the hearth when she would speak. It was the most uncanny thing she’d ever in her life experienced.

Most gentlemen would take care to look at a lady when the lady in question spoke to him. It was only polite, after all.

Yet Lord Preston did not.

He’d done the same thing in the drawing room before supper, as well, and all she’d done there was simply look at him. She hadn’t said a single word!

Freddie didn’t appear to be the only one having such a profound and confusing effect upon the man, either. Any time Edie said something, or laughed, or did anything at all it seemed, she elicited the same reaction.

Was this strange behavior merely how the marquess reacted to all women who were not his relatives?

But that didn’t really make much sense as an explanation for his odd behavior, because Mama’s behaviors did not garner similar results, and she was just as unrelated to Lord Preston and Freddie and Edie were.

Perhaps it was
young
ladies, then. Or
unmarried
ladies.

She could only imagine what must have happened to him in order to be so petrified of young, unmarried ladies. Had he been jilted at the altar? Did someone attempt to entrap him into marriage through a compromising situation? Did he have a jealous mistress who wanted to keep him and his attentions all to herself?

Freddie’s thoughts about Lord Preston and his curious aversion to young, unmarried ladies ran rampant all throughout supper, which only caused her to stare at him far more thoroughly than was prudent.

His eyes were perhaps his most striking feature, a combination of startling hazel intensity and warm, golden flecks, the effect of which gave him an entirely caring demeanor. His auburn hair, ever-so-slightly longer than was fashionable, curled slightly at the edges in a manner which made her think of scandalous things like reaching out her hand to feel if it was as soft as it appeared. Yet his face consisted almost entirely of hard, angular lines, making her thoughts turn to places she had no business allowing them to wander. Then she realized how very much taller he was than she (and like her sister Georgie, Freddie was quite tall for a lady), and she thought more fully about all the hard, angular lines he must possess in other locales.

When she felt a flush of heat creeping up her neck, she knew she must absolutely turn her thoughts in a different direction, and quickly lest he notice her blushing. Granted, then he would more than likely simply stare across at the hearth again. It might not be all bad.

As such, when Lady Upton Grey had arisen from her seat and announced it was time for the ladies to retire to the drawing room and leave the gentlemen to their port, Freddie had found it difficult to repress her unladylike sounds of relief.

She was not accustomed to spending such an inordinate amount of time pondering the oddities of any gentleman apart from her brother Percy, no matter how dashing and debonair the gentleman in question might appear.

Appearances, after all, did not tell the whole story of a man. She knew that as well as anyone, after observing the changes in Percy since Papa had died.

She silently thanked the heavens when, after the gentlemen had joined the ladies in the drawing room, Lord Preston had decided to play cards with three of the others, well away from Freddie and her sister.

For the remainder of the evening, she had sat with Edie and discussed all manner of things which were quite inane and banal, but which blessedly allowed her mind to wander to things other than Lord Preston’s piercing hazel eyes. How very odd that he preferred to watch a roaring fire than to look upon her.

Of course it would happen that the first place her mind wandered was back to that room in the blue corridor. Or, to be more specific, to the reliquary itself which was in the room…and to the five thousand pounds Lord Upton Grey seemed certain it would fetch at auction.

She oughtn’t to allow herself to think about it at all. It wasn’t hers. It belonged to her host. Well, now that he’d given it to Lord Preston, she supposed it belonged to the marquess. Nevertheless, it wasn’t hers, or Mama’s, or any of her sisters’, or even Percy’s.

It shouldn’t matter to her in the slightest.

Yet she could think of little else, if anything at all.

Because of that, she quickly grew bored with sitting in the drawing room and whiling away the hours until she could make her escape.

Then an absurd idea struck her and, as with all the Bexley-Smythes, once an idea took root in her mind, it was practically murder to remove it. She wanted to go back to the blue corridor, back to the near-empty room housing the golden reliquary, and take a closer look at it.

She just wanted to determine if it really
was
a reliquary as she suspected. Or at least that was what she was trying desperately to convince herself of. And if it was one, she wanted to know if it was still holding the relic it had been created to hold. Surely Lord Upton Grey had already checked inside it, but one never knew for certain about these things unless one was willing to perform an investigation.

There were few individuals Freddie knew who would be better suited to investigating anything. She’d spent years trying to sort out all the various lies and half-truths her siblings had told, all in the name of making certain someone other than the person in question was blamed for some nonsense or another. In more recent years, it had fallen upon her to investigate all the pursuits Percy had undertaken so she could discover in advance what their fate might be. Determining exactly what this treasure was could be entrusted to no one else—particularly since no one should know she was aware of its existence.

For all she knew, it could be something else other than a reliquary entirely.

She’d only seen it from a distance, after all, and her glance had been fleeting at best before she’d made her hasty escape. But…well…she just needed to
know
. It was a particularly bothersome trait…another of those Bexley-Smythe characteristics which so often felt like curses.

Alas, Freddie wasn’t one to typically feign an illness, but that was precisely what she did when, after at least two hours of such ennui-inducing tedium, it seemed the other occupants of the drawing room were no closer to retiring for the evening than they had been immediately after supper.

After what could perhaps have been considered an overly dramatic sigh, she placed a hand to her temple. “Oh, dear.”

Edie was still so caught up in her current conversation with Lady Upton Grey that she didn’t hear her. Either that or she was ignoring her. One of the two.

But Lady Upton Grey turned in her seat and leaned forward. “Are you quite all right, my dear?”

The lady’s concerned query drew the attention of the entire room. It became very quiet all of a sudden, almost eerily so. Even Lord Preston turned his slightly troubled hazel eyes in her direction.

Goodness. She hadn’t intended to draw all eyes in the room to her. It was much easier to make a quiet and subversive retreat if one hasn’t garnered an entire room’s attention. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” she said in a rush. “It’s just a bit of a megrim, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, how horrid,” Lady Upton Grey said. “I always suffer megrims after spending more than a few hours in a carriage. It’s the constant bumps along the road, I’m sure. Come, you should go up to bed at once.” With that, the lady rose and reached out a hand as though to assist Freddie.

Bother and blast, she wasn’t
truly
ill. She couldn’t have anyone coming with her—not if she intended to go and get a better look at the silly reliquary. Then she’d have to go all the way to her chamber, likely change into her nightrail and climb into bed until her maid left her alone, and then somehow find a way to sneak back down to the blue corridor without any proper clothes on.

That would prove to be the absolute opposite of coming closer to meeting her end goal.

“Oh, truly,” Freddie said far more hastily than she ought to have done. She pushed herself to her feet and smoothed her skirts, all the while making a pointed effort to avoid looking at Lord Preston, lest he stare at the fire again and befuddle her more than she already was. “There’s no need for you to accompany me. I’ll just go upstairs and Meg will see to getting me settled.”

Slowly returning to her seat, Lady Upton Grey inclined her head just enough for the action to be visible. “If you’re certain…”

“Meg will see to anything she needs,” Mama put in. “We will see you in the morning, Frederica. I’m sure you’ll feel much more the thing then.”

Their hostess smiled graciously up at Freddie. “I do so hope you feel well enough to join us tomorrow.”

“As do I.” Before anyone could say anything else which might deter her, Freddie skirted around the various chairs and tables and out of the drawing room. Once she was alone, however, she didn’t continue on towards the stairs. She looked all around her, making certain no one would see where she was headed, and then turned in the direction of the blue corridor.

Curiosity might have killed the cat, which was an awful thought indeed…but it would undoubtedly kill her, too, if she didn’t appease it.