House of Trent 01.5 - His for Christmas by Jennifer Haymore Page B

smaller ones in an intricate gold setting.
    She looked up at him, breathless. “It’s beautiful. But how…?”
    He took it from the package and set the paper down on her dressing table. Then he took her hand and slipped the ring onto her finger. “It’s the promise ring my father gave to my mother thirty years ago. She always wears it. When my father died, she told me she’d keep it safe on her finger until I found the woman I would marry.”
    Amelia blinked hard against the moisture forming in her eyes. “You mean…you told your mother about us?”
    He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. “I did. She gives us her blessing and has agreed that the ring needs to be yours now.”
    “Oh, Evan.” Amelia flung her arms around him and buried her face into his chest. After a moment, she felt the movement of his torso as he rumbled out a laugh.
    “I hope this means you like it.”
    “I love it.” She pulled back and looked up at him, flexing the finger that held the ring, feeling the weight of it, the symbolic meaning. “Garnets symbolize constancy,” she mused.
    “A perfect symbol, then. I have held you in my heart constantly, despite all that has come between us.” He took her hand in his own.
    Feeling completely whole and completely happy for the first time in so long, she squeezed his hand, gazing up at him and letting all of her adoration and devotion for him show in her face.
    “The way you look at me, Amelia,” he murmured, “makes me feel like I can conquer the world.”
    She went onto her tiptoes and pressed a kiss to his cheek. “You can start by conquering Christmas with my family.”
    “Christmas with our family,” he corrected, nuzzling the top of her ear.
    “Exactly,” she said, grinning.
    Hand in hand, Amelia and Evan went downstairs and faced their family. With constancy, trust, and love, they conquered not only that Christmas, but a long, fulfilling life of happy Christmases together.

About the Author
    Jennifer Haymore is the national bestselling author of the James series, the Donovan series, and the House of Trent series. As a child, Jennifer traveled the South Pacific with her family on their homebuilt sailboat. The months spent on the sometimes quiet, sometimes raging seas sparked her love of adventure and grand romance. Since then, she’s earned degrees in computer science and education and held various jobs ranging from bookselling to teaching inner-city children to acting, but she’s never stopped writing.
    You can find Jennifer in Southern California trying to talk her husband into yet another trip to England, helping her three children with homework while brainstorming a new five-minute dinner menu, or crouched in a corner of the local bookstore writing her next novel.
    You can learn more at:
JenniferHaymore.com
Twitter @JenniferHaymore
Facebook.com/JenniferHaymore.Author

Prologue
    S arah Osborne had only lived at Ironwood Park for a few days, but she already loved it. Birds serenaded her every morning, their trilling songs greeting her through the little window in the cottage she shared with her father. Each afternoon, the sun shone brightly over the Park, spreading gentle warmth to her shoulders through the muslin of her dress as she ran across the grounds. And in the evenings, lanterns spilled golden light over the façade of the great house, which sat on a low, gentle-sloped hill and reigned like a king over the vast lands of the Duke of Trent.
    If Sarah looked out the diamond-paned window of the cottage she shared with her father, she could see the house in the distance, framed by the graceful, curving white branches of two birch trees outside the cottage. She gazed at the house often throughout the day, always giving it an extra glance at night before Papa tucked her in. It stared back at her, a somber, massive sentry, and she felt safe with it watching over her. Someday, she dreamed, she might be able to draw close to it. To weave through those tall, elegant columns