To Wed His Christmas Lady (The Heart of a Duke Book 7) by Christi Caldwell Page B

gaze from her efforts, “should be down shortly.” She tied a wrinkled, red satin bow about two branches, connecting the evergreen. A smile played on the woman’s lips. “And her coming will have nothing to do with the lady’s leaking ceiling.” She picked up her head and spoke on a conspiratorial whisper. “Even if she tells herself it is.”
    A dull heat climbed up his neck and he resisted the urge to yank at his collar. He, who’d never struggled with words, came up empty when presented with the older woman’s knowing look. Had he been so very transparent in how each moment spent with Cara had drawn him more and more under her spell?
    Since early that morning, when they’d parted, he’d not been able to rid his thoughts of the golden-haired beauty. Of what she’d shared. Of her past. Where most young women of eighteen were filled with a carefree innocence and hope, her light had been dimmed by the darkness she’d known at her father’s hands. Through all their exchanges, however, there had been the flicker of light and spirit, and it would kill him the day their paths would eventually intersect once more at a ton event when he was the proper duke’s heir and she was the frigid, unapproachable lady he’d first met in this inn.
    The fire snapped and hissed noisily. William balled his fists. He’d not think of a world where that was again the woman she became. He’d remember her as she’d been, lying on her back in the snow, joy dancing in her eyes and etched on the delicate, angled planes of her face as she stared up at him. From where she sat working on her Christmas bough, Martha cursed drawing him to the moment. A small smile pulled one corner of his lips. And he’d forever recall Cara as the lady who cursed with an inventiveness possessed only by a poet’s turn of phrase. He made his way over to the table. “Did I mention I had a good share of experience making Christmas boughs?”
    She looked up with a glimmer of surprise and, in an assessing manner, took him in. A twinkle lit her rheumy eyes. “I would wager a charmer such as yourself has a good deal of experience with the kissing boughs, hmm?” She waggled her stark white eyebrows.
    He winked, eliciting a laugh from the old woman. She motioned to the colorful bows and fabrics scattered about her table. “I’ve but the three branches for the boughs.” He followed her sad gaze over to where her husband shuffled with pained movements about the taproom. He pushed the broom over the dusty floor. “Every year we would go out and collect the green together.” Her eyes lit with a blend of happiness and sadness converging as one with that old memory. “How very fast time goes. You are making those boughs one Christmas to kiss your love and the next,” she held up her gnarled hands, “and the next you cannot even make your fingers move.”
    The passage of these eight years was testament to the rapidity of time. What would he have become thirty-eight years from now like this aged couple? Where they knew love and joy in their marriage, his would be a cold, calculated affair that, if he was fortunate, would bring him children and very little misery. “Here,” he said quietly.

    Later that evening, her wet garments cast aside for another borrowed dress from the innkeeper’s wife, and the chill gone from her jaunt into the storm, Cara hovered at the base of the stairs outside the taproom.
    Since her return, every last thought had belonged not to the misery of being the unwanted, unloved, and often forgotten daughter of the Duke of Ravenscourt, or the misery staring down at her if… She gave her head a shake, when she wed that pompous, also unfeeling, future duke. Instead, Will had laid claim to her every thought, so that her skin still tingled with remembrance of his touch, and her heart yearned to speak with him once more.
    Heart racing, Cara peeked around the wall with the same surreptitiousness she’d shown as a girl listening on silently while