A Yuletide Invitation: The Mistletoe Wager / The Harlot's Daughter. Christine Merrill
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them again he was his usual carefree self. He started down the stairs, showing to all the world that there was not a thing out of the ordinary in entertaining one’s wife and her lover as Christmas guests.
‘Tremaine, you have decided to take up my offer after all.’ He reached out to clasp the gentleman’s hand, and gave him a hearty pat on the back that belied his look of a moment earlier. ‘We shall get you out of the blue funk you inhabit in this jolly time.’
Tremaine looked, by turns, alarmed and suspicious. ‘I seriously doubt it.’
‘But I consider it my duty,’ Harry argued. ‘For how could I entrust my wife to the keeping of a man who cannot keep this holiday in his heart? She adores it, sir. Simply adores it.’ There was the faintest emphasis on the word ‘wife’, as though he meant to remind Tremaine of the facts in their relationship.
‘Really, Harry. You have not “entrusted” me to anyone. You speak as though I were part of the entail.’ Pique only served to make Elise more beautiful, and Rosalind wondered if it was a trick that could be learned, or if it must be bred in.
‘And Elise.’ Harry turned to her, putting a hand on each shoulder and leaning forward to kiss her.
She turned a cold cheek to him, and he stopped his lips just short of it, kissing the air by her face before releasing her to take her wrap. ‘This is most unexpected. I assumed, when you said that you never wished to set foot over my threshold again …’ he leaned back to stare into her eyes ‘… that you would leave me alone.’
Elise’s smile was as brilliant as the frost glittering from the trees, and as brittle. ‘When I heard that you wished to extend your hospitality to Nicholas, I assumed that you were inviting me as well. We are together now, you know.’ There was a barb in the last sentence, but Harry gave no indication that he had been wounded by it.
‘Of course. And if it will truly make you happy, then I wish you well in it. Come in, come in. You will take your death, standing in the cold hall like this.’ He looked out into the yard. ‘The weather is beastly, I must say. All the better to be inside, before a warm fire.’
Tremaine cast a longing glance over his shoulder, at the road away from the house, before Harry shut the door behind him. ‘Come, the servants will show you to your rooms.’
‘Where have you put us?’ Elise asked. ‘I was thinking the blue rooms in the east wing would be perfect.’
Rosalind swallowed, unsure of how she was expected to answer such a bold request. Although Harry might say aloud that he wished for his wife to have whatever made her happy, she doubted that it would extend to offering her the best guest rooms in the house, so that she could go to her lover through the connecting door between them.
Before she could answer, Harry cut in. ‘I am so sorry, darling. Had I but known you were coming I’d have set them aside for you. But since I thought Tremaine was arriving alone, if at all, I had Rosalind put him in the room at the end of that hall.’
‘The smallest one?’ Elise said bluntly.
‘Of course. He does not need much space—do you, old man?’ Harry stared at him, daring him to respond in the negative.
‘Of—of course not,’ Tremaine stuttered.
Harry turned back to Elise. ‘And I am afraid you will have to take the room you have always occupied. The place beside me. Although we are full to the rafters, I told Rosalind to leave it empty. I will never fill the space that is rightly yours.’
The last words had a flicker of meaning that Elise chose to ignore. ‘That is utterly impossible, Harry. I have no wish to return to it.’
His voice was soft, but firm. ‘I am afraid, darling, that you must make do with what is available. And if that is the best room in the house then so be it.’ He turned and walked away from her, up the stairs.
Elise hurried after him, and Rosalind could hear the faint hiss of whispered conversation. Nicholas Tremaine followed after, his retreating back stiff.
CHAPTER FOUR
BY THE time they reached the door to her bedroom, Nicholas had made a discreet exit. And for the first time in two months, Elise was alone with her infuriatingly reasonable husband.
‘But, my dear, I cannot give you another room, even if I might wish to. On my honour, they are all full.’
Harry was smiling at her again, and she searched his face for any sign that he had missed her, and had orchestrated the situation just to have her near. But in his eyes she saw not love, nor frustrated passion, nor even smug satisfaction at having duped her to return. He was showing her the same warmth he might show to a stranger. He held a hand out to her again, but made no attempt to touch her.
‘I am offering you the best I have, just as I have always done. And you will be more comfortable, you know, sleeping in your own bed and not in a guest room.’
He was being sensible again, damn him. And it was likely to drive her mad. ‘It is not my own bed any longer, Harry. For, in case you have forgotten, I have left you.’ She said it with emphasis, and smiled in a self-satisfied way that would push any man to anger if he cared at all for his wife or his pride.
Harry responded with another understanding smile. ‘I realise that. Although it is good to see you home again, even if it is only for a visit.’
‘If you were so eager to see me you could have come to London,’ she said in exasperation. ‘You were there only last week.’
Harry looked confused. ‘I was supposed to visit you? If you desired my company, then you would not have left.’ He said it as though it were the most logical thing in the world, instead of an attempt to provoke her to anger.
‘You tricked Nicholas into coming here for Christmas with that silly letter.’
‘And he brought you as well.’ Harry beamed at her. ‘I would hardly call my invitation to Tremaine a trick. I promise, I meant no harm by it. Nor by the arrangement of the rooms. Can you not take it in the way it is offered? I wish Tremaine to have a merry Christmas. And I wish you to feel at home. I would want no less for any of my guests.’ If he had a motive beyond that she could find no trace of it—in his expression or his tone.
‘But you do not expect the other female guests to share a connecting door with your bedroom, do you?’ She had hoped to sound annoyed by the inconvenience. But her response sounded more like jealous curiosity than irritation.
He laughed as though he had just remembered the threshold he had been crossing regularly for five years. ‘Oh, that.’
‘Yes. That, Harry.’
‘But it will not matter in the least, for I have no intention of using it. I know where I am not welcome.’ As he spoke, his cordial expression never wavered. It was as though being shut from his wife’s bedroom made not the slightest difference in his mood or his future.
And with that knowledge frustration got the better of her, and she turned from him and slammed the door in his face.
Nick made it as far as the top of the stairs before his anger got the better of him. In front of him Harry and Elise were still carrying on a sotto voce argument about the sleeping arrangements. In truth, Elise was arguing while her husband remained even-tempered but implacable. In any case, Nick wanted no part of it. And he suspected it would be the first of many such discussions he would be a party to if he did not find a way back to London in short order.
But not until he gave the girl at the foot of the stairs a piece of his mind. Rosalind Morley was standing alone in the entryway, fussing with the swag of pine bows that decorated the banister of the main stairs. She was much as he remembered her—diminutive in stature, barely five feet tall. Her short dark curls bobbed against her face as she rearranged the branches. Her small, sweet mouth puckered in a look of profound irritation.
It irritated him as well that even after five years he fancied