She fought to keep her smile in place, although she cringed at the poor figure she cut with her lack of sophistication and drab clothes. When she’d give anything to dazzle him with her wit and beauty.
And all was not lost. He’d called her sparkling.
“Well, I do have the king of Christmas in my thrall,” she said lightly.
To her surprise, he touched her cheek with one leather-gloved hand. The contact was over in an instant. Surely she must imagine the blast of heat sizzling through her, heat that made a mockery of the freezing air.
“You do at that,” he said softly.
Her lungs stopped working, and she found herself enmeshed in his gaze, unable to break free.
Bob shattered the stasis. He butted his square head against Mr. Hale’s arm, protesting at standing still in the falling temperature. Maggie watched Mr. Hale come back to reality, as he turned to rub the pony’s nose.
Bob was clearly his devoted slave. Joss Hale had a gift for inspiring affection, Maggie had noticed. She hated to think she was quite as susceptible as the pony was to the man’s disheveled charms, but she suspected she was. Right now after her happiest hours in years, she couldn’t summon the will to resist a fall that began to seem inevitable.
“We’re too slow for Bob.” Maggie caught a faint huskiness in Mr. Hale’s voice that hinted he, too, had felt that strange connection with her.
He started to walk back toward the house, one hand holding Bob’s bridle, not that he needed leading. The pony had been born on this estate. Maggie fell into step beside them. An unexpectedly tranquil silence descended, broken only by the crunch of feet in the snow. The rest of the world lay hushed under the curtain of white.
When she stumbled over a branch buried in the snow, Mr. Hale took her arm, and she didn’t pull away.
“There’s another Christmas superstition in the valley,” she said, after they’d covered most of the way back.
“Oh?”
“Yes. If a stranger crosses your threshold in Advent, it means good luck.”
He gave a soft huff of laughter. “I hope to God that’s true.”
“I’m sure it is.”
But was she? When he left, she’d feel lonelier than ever. She’d barely endured her humdrum life, when she’d had nothing to compare it to. But after a mere three days in the company of this vigorous, attractive man, she already knew that Thorncroft would feel like a desert when Mr. Hale was gone.
Chapter 6
“Look what I found,” Mr. Hale said, coming back into the hall from the kitchens, where he’d gone to fetch a basket for the pine cones they’d collected yesterday.
Maggie turned from tweaking the holly she was arranging above the huge stone fireplace. They’d spent the morning decorating the hall. The formerly bare and unwelcoming space was now green and fragrant, and redolent of the season. All the other downstairs rooms sported vases crammed with holly.
“We should get a Yule log,” she said.
He laughed. “For someone who needed to be coaxed into celebrating Christmas, you’re getting into the spirit of things. We’ll fix it up tonight, when we come back from skating.”
“From what?” Then she noticed what dangled from those large, adept hands. “Oh, you found the skates. I’d forgotten we had them.”
“I didn’t know Uncle Thomas indulged.”
“I think t
he previous owner must have left them behind.” Although skating seemed an innocuous occupation for that wild young buck, given what she’d heard about him.
“Well, shall we?”
She shot the skates a doubtful look. “I haven’t been on the ice since I was a child.”
He took both sets of skates in one hand and extended his other hand toward her. “I won’t let you fall.”
She wished she could be so certain. And she wasn’t talking about sliding around on the ice.