Gifts of the Season: A Gift Most Rare / Christmas Charade / The Virtuous Widow. Lyn Stone

      Chapter One

      Ladysmith Manor, Sussex

      December, 1801

      Six years had passed since she’d seen him last, yet with a lurch to her heart, she realized she’d know him anywhere.

      With her hands primly clasped to help mask their trembling, Sara Blake leaned closer to the tall window, her breath lightly frosting the glass as she gazed down at the gentleman in black climbing down from his carriage to the snow-dusted drive. She remembered when he’d not been so sober and somber, another Christmas when he’d worn a peacock-blue coat that had made his eyes even brighter as they’d laughed together, he the handsomest man in the governor general’s ballroom.

      Six years. How she’d loved and trusted him then, with all the fervency that her seventeen-year-old heart could offer! He wore his dark hair cropped shorter now, another change to follow the fashion. But as the wind ruffled it across his brow, she remembered how soft those curls had been to touch, how she’d relished the silky feel of them beneath her fingers when he’d bent to kiss her.

      “You do know who that is, don’t you, Miss Blake?” asked Clarissa Fordyce with all the relish of her much-indulged eight-year-old self. “That’s the gentleman that Mama didn’t wish us to invite here for the holiday, until Albert insisted.”

      “Young gentlemen like your brother often have friends of which their mothers do not quite approve,” said Sara, striving to keep her voice properly objective, the way a good governess’s should always be, even as the old fears and questions were making her palms damp and her heart race. “Learning to make wise choices in companions is not always an easy skill to acquire.”

      “This one wasn’t wise at all,” declared Clarissa soundly. With fingers sticky from marzipan, she pressed her plump hands to the glass, eagerly studying the man who was certain to be the most interesting among her mother’s guests this week. “Albert says everyone calls him the Sapphire Lord, and that he was the wickedest devil in all of India!”

      “Mind your words, Clarissa,” chided Sara as her cheeks warmed with a guilty rush of old memories. How could he still affect her like this after so much time apart? “No lady concerns herself with what ‘everyone’ says. I’m sure the gentleman has another name by which you shall be expected to address him.”

      “Yes, Miss Blake,” answered Clarissa promptly, but without the slightest pretense of contrition or remorse as she pressed closer to the glass. Far below the gentleman was climbing the clean-swept steps, his traveling cloak fluttering back from his broad shoulders as Albert Fordyce hurried forward to greet him. “His true name, Miss Blake, is Lord Revell Claremont, and I shall be perfectly respectful to him on account of him being Mama’s guest, and his brother being a duke, and because Albert would thrash me if I didn’t. But Lord Revell does look like a wicked devil, doesn’t he?”

      Yet when Sara looked down at Revell Claremont, she saw infinitely more. She saw the man she’d once loved not just with her heart but her soul, as well—but she also saw her own long-gone innocence, and the end of a fairy-tale existence in a faraway land. She saw betrayal and heartbreak and the sudden loss of everything she’d held most dear, and a scandal she’d hoped she’d forever left behind with her old name and life, half a world and two oceans away. She saw her past disclosed and her father’s shameful crime curtly revealed, her dismissal from this house swift and inevitable and her future once again made perilously uncertain. Revell Claremont had abandoned her to fate before, when he’d claimed to love her, and she’d absolutely no reason to believe he’d do otherwise now.

      Ah, Merry Christmas, indeed.

      Revell stood before the fireplace with his legs slightly spread and his hands outstretched toward the flames, pretending to concentrate entirely on the fire until he heard the footman’s steps leave the room, and the latch to the bedchamber door click gently closed behind him. With a sigh of relief, Revell finally let his shoulders sag, and his sigh trailed off into a groan of exhaustion. He hoped his manservant Yates would return soon with the bath he’d ordered, and a parade of maidservants with steaming pitchers of hot water from the kitchen.

      Blast, but he was tired, clear through his blood to his bones and his soul. Traveling did that to a man, and Revell hadn’t lingered in one place for more than three nights at a time in over a year. Restless as last summer’s leaf in the wind: that was how his older brother Brant had described his wandering, and Revell couldn’t disagree. He couldn’t, not really, not when it was the cold, honest truth.

      But then what did Brant know of restlessness, anyway, snug in his grand house in London with his brandy in his hand? Revell had been the one their father had cast the farthest from home, less like a twisting leaf than a worthless penny minted from tin instead of copper. Yet since then Revell had made himself into a wealthy man with the fortune to match his title, a man with power and influence and the awestruck respect of others, exactly the sort of man that, as a boy, he and his two brothers had sworn they would become. Certainly Brant had succeeded, and George, too, and he’d never heard either of them complain of their lot. If restlessness and loneliness were the price to be paid for their success, then so it had been.

      Revell shook his head, resisting the lure of the old bitterness, and spread his fingers to take in more of the fire’s warmth. He’d been away so long that he’d forgotten how cold Sussex could be in December, or maybe this chill, like the weariness, was only another sign of getting old. He frowned at his reflection in the looking glass over the mantel, half expecting to see his thick black hair streaked with white or his sharp blue eyes turned rheumy with age. He would, after all, be twenty-eight next month, and he shook his head again at how quickly time had slipped by.

      From habit he reached into the inside pocket of his waistcoat to find the small curved box, the gold-stamped calfskin worn from touching, and with his thumb he flipped open the lid. At once the cluster of sapphires inside caught the dancing light from the flames, flashing sparks and stars of brilliant blue as he turned the gold ring this way and that. For six years he’d carried this betrothal ring with him, close to his heart, a constant reminder of the one woman he’d thought had been destined to wear it, the only woman he’d ever love, the one who’d spoiled all others for him.

      Love. With a muttered oath, he snapped the little box shut and shoved it back into his pocket, wishing he could thrust aside her memory as easily. God knows she’d been able to forget him fast enough, vanishing from Calcutta without explanation or regret or even one last bittersweet word of farewell.

      Six years, yet in an instant he could still recall the rippling merriment of her laughter, the way her eyes would grow soft and her cheeks flush when she looked at him, the cherry-sweet taste of her mouth welcoming his.

      His dearest, darling Sara….

      Six years, hell. He was growing old, and foolishly sentimental, as well, dreading his own company and memories so blasted much that he’d accepted Albert Fordyce’s invitation to come here to Ladysmith. They’d been at school together, true, but Revell hadn’t seen Albert for years until they’d met by sheerest coincidence last week outside Drury Lane. The promise of a Christmas goose and rum punch and mistletoe in the doorways, a roaring great yule log in the fireplace and a masquerade ball for Twelfth Night: that was all it had taken to lure Revell here for a fortnight of weighty cookery, squealing fiddle music, and tedious entertainments with red-faced country squires and their bouncing, plump-cheeked ladies.

      And none of it would be enough to make Revell