Page 6 of His Wicked Little Christmas
Some would be surprised to find the Marquess of Westfield loved Derbyshire more than any place he’d ever been, and he’d been many places. The rolling hills and hamlets, limestone caverns, and broad rushing rivers. The northeast quadrant where Markham Manor resided was gently mountainous, abundant in all the wondrous things that held his supreme interest. Coal, iron ore, lead, zinc, manganese, barytes. Caves layered in marble and fluorite, littered with fossils and minerals.
He couldn’t imagine growing up anywhere else.Withanyone else.
Which brought his mind back to Georgie.
He tapped his knuckle to the chilled windowpane. Those glorious cobalt eyes, the dimples that flared to life when she smiled, had led him on a merry dance this eve. He laughed and shook his head. Still susceptible to her charms. Before, she’d been too young and he a foolish boy who wasn’t sure what he wanted, what he needed. He’d had much to prove, many people todisprove. He’d done exactly what he’d said hewould, made a living, a remarkably sound one, off the hunks of sediment his father claimed would be the ruin of a five-hundred-year-old duchy, when Dex was the most proficient mining surveyor in England, his innate knowledge of rocks coveted by those willing to pay and pay well.
But ambition had exacted a personal cost, no doubt about it. Costher, too, he was coming to suspect.
Bracing his arm on the wall alongside the velvet drape, he drew a breath smelling faintly of vinegar and decay. He’d never wanted to marry anyone. Truthfully, because he could be truthful in his dying father’s dank bedchamber when there was no one, not even the dying father, to listen—he’d never wanted to marry anyone buther.
The dilemma? He wanted a wife when Georgie quite adamantly didn’t want a husband.
“Impulsive fool,” he whispered and bumped his forehead to the glass. How had he imagined making a reckless wager would ease the burden of seeing Georgie again,touchingher again, and realizing he’d indeed made a grave mistake leaving her behind?
Now, she wanted adventure.
Dex glanced to the turbulent storm raging outside the window, a world of flawless, fluttering white. How to provide an adventure when the roads would be inches deep in mud and ice come morning? Travel of more than a mile or two a nightmare. If he could have taken her to the limestone caverns in Chinley, the ones they’d explored as children, shown her everything he hadn’t known to show her before, things he hadn’t knownhowto show her before, that would have been a start. Surely, passionate kisses surrounded by thousand-year-old quartz was an adequate quest.
A petite adventure, a beginning.
He lifted his head from the frigid pane. A beginning, not a spot mired in the middle of life, which was what his conversation with Georgie at Buxton’s gathering had felt like. An unsulliedstartwas what they needed, with no repulsive earls who’d turned out to be atrocious husbands or indecisive, inexperienced future dukes mucking it up. Dex had until Twelfth Night to give his father an answer. A ticking clock, asit were. Which he would do because denying a dying man’s wish was an act Dex couldn’t stomach.
And, frankly, he worked well under pressure.
His mind shifted to the wooden crates stacked in the Oak Room, ones he’d shipped from all over the globe the past three years. He grinned and shoved his hair from his eyes. There were adventures aplenty in those boxes if the right person was there to unpack them.
His spontaneous wager was set to put Georgie’s disdain for marriage to the test.
Because he planned to tell her what he wanted in a wife, what he wanted inlife, what he could give of his heart, mind, and soul, which was substantial. He would cheerfully review her list of suitables while he went about convincing hershewas his only suitable.
Very politely, he would consider each one, without considering any at all.
In the process, he’d get to know her again. And she him.
Then, on Twelfth Night, Dex would find out if Georgie meant to keep him.
Chapter Four
Giving away her coat the following morning was an easy decision to make.
Georgiana pressed the length of woven wool into Jane Fletcher’s trembling hand, her own hand trembling though she tried to hide it. “Please take it. I have another at home,” she said, although she didn’t. But Georgiana had been unable to ignore the comments made at the Buxton’s party about a family in the village with a new baby, little warm clothing, and meager supplies for the season. When she’d gone to find them, it had turned out to be a family she’d known for most of her life.
“But the ride back without a coat…” Jane gestured to the window and the angry swirl, a lank of dull brown hair dancing across her cheek with the movement.
Georgiana glanced at the bread, eggs, mutton, and vegetables sitting on the Fletcher’s nicked wooden table, her bounty after a thorough raid of her manor’s provisions. Knitted socks, a scarf, books, a length of chalk, a square of slate. She’d even found two apples tucked on a low pantry shelf, a surprise delighting the Fletcher children to no end. “I have a riding blanket in the carriage. A heated brick. And less than two miles to travel.” She appealed again, presenting the coat. She wasnotleavingwith it warming her shoulders. “I insist. My goodness, Jane, I’ve known you since we were children. Anthony was quite friendly with your brother, Edwin, if you recall. Oh, the trouble they used to get into!”
Jane cradled her newborn son against her chest, the babe swaddled in a faded slip of cotton, his cheeks mercifully plump and rosy with good health. Finally, with a sigh, she took the coat from Georgiana, pressed her nose into the lapel, and inhaled softly, then lovingly draped it over the chair at her side. “We miss you, my lady, we do. There’s never anyone from your estate who comes to the village. Since your father died, not a word from the house on the hill. Things have fallen off the edge of a cliff, they have. The church roof is leaking, the roads pitted and unsafe. A fire at the mercantile last month, necessities for the winter dwindling.”
Georgiana tied her satin bonnet strings beneath her chin. “I’m off to Markham Manor if my coachman can navigate the main road. The marquess has returned from the continent, and I’ve promised to visit. Perhaps I can speak to him. The duke is unwell, or surely he would have taken greater care in the village. His tenants have always spoken highly of him.”
Jane’s smile was beatific, a reminder of all Georgiana loved about Derbyshire and its people. She was home, even if returning felt a bit like stuffing yourself into a piece of clothing you’d long outgrown. But Sussex and London didn’t fit, either.
The knock on the door had them turning in bewilderment.
“Who could that be in this tempest?” Jane asked, crossing to the cottage’s modest foyer, her oldest child clutching her skirt and trailing behind.
When Jane opened the door and Georgiana saw Dex standing beneath the ramshackle portico, snow a feral flurry around him, his arms loaded with foodstuff and supplies, her breath jumped out like she’d taken a fierce thump to the back. The lapis stone he’d given her seemed to heat up from its spot in her concealed bodice pocket as if it recognized its true owner.