A Match Made in Mistletoe
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Epilogue
Prologue
Torver House, Dorset, December 1820
Serena Talbot carefully laid her lace handkerchief on the dressing table and pulled back the corners to reveal the fragile green and white sprig sitting in its soft nest. How absurd it was, that her hands were shaking.
When she raised her eyes to the mirror, she read apprehension in the gray depths. “It’s only a silly superstition,” she whispered to the blond girl staring back at her.
The blond girl in the reflection looked ready to run for her life.
Around her, the huge, old house was quiet, as it wouldn’t be quiet tomorrow when the halls echoed with laughter and happy chatter. The guests for the Talbots’ annual Christmas house party arrived in the afternoon.
But tonight held only silence and shadows and flickering candlelight. Caught up in the moment, Serena shivered. She felt like the ghosts of a hundred bygone maidens crowded around her. A hundred maidens who over the centuries had done just what she was about to do.
Had all those other girls felt this same aching longing, this same foreboding that they summoned powers beyond their control?
She straightened and cast the figure in the mirror a derisive glance. “Show some backbone, Serena Frances Talbot.”
With swift purpose, she lifted the mistletoe she’d plucked from the kissing bough in St. Lawrence’s church in the village and slipped it under her pillow. She’d planned this for weeks. Rattle-pated megrims would not stop her from proceeding.
All her life she’d loved Paul Garside, and now she was twenty-one, it was time to do something about it. This Christmas, she’d do everything she could to make sure he proposed and invited her to take up the glorious life she’d always wanted.
Tonight’s ritual placed the seal on her plans. With the mistletoe under her pillow, she’d dream of the man she was to marry. And tomorrow, she’d set out to claim her destiny as Lady Garside.
Once before she’d tried this, when she was eighteen and mad for Paul. The embarrassing truth was she dreamed of him all the time—but that night she hadn’t. And he’d spent all Christmas making sheep’s eyes at Letitia Duggan.
Since then, Serena had recognized that the mistletoe was telling her she wasn’t yet ready. But, oh, how ready she was now, three years later. And Paul gave every indication that he agreed. Whenever they’d met in the last few months, he’d paid her flattering attention.