Falling Stars

Wiltshire, England,

11 December 1818

If a man could sleep through the racket of early morning London, Marcus Greyson told himself, he could certainly sleep through the noise of lively children. He pulled the pillow over his head, but he could hear it all the same: shrill voices and the thumping of little feet up and down the corridors. Even in the intervals of silence, he was waiting, braced for the next outburst of shrieks and thumps.

With an oath, he flung the pillow aside and dragged himself out of bed. He had slept only three hours. That, evidently, was all the sleep he was going to get. A glance at the window told him morning was well advanced—a winter morn so crisply bright it made his eyes ache.

Despite his grogginess, Marcus washed and dressed quickly, while his mind ran over a dozen possible excuses he could give his elder brother and sister-in-law for turning up in the dead of night.

Julius and Penelope probably still weren’t aware he was here.

They had all been asleep when he’d come. He had simply let himself in with his own key, and gone up to the room they always kept ready for him. While they’d be delighted Marcus had changed his mind about spending Christmas at Greymarch, they were sure to wonder about his bizarre traveling schedule.

He gave his thick mane of tawny hair the usual slapdash brushing, and pulled on his coat. Since he didn’t have a reasonable explanation, he might as well give an unreasonable one, so ludicrous they’d be too busy laughing to ask any more.

He opened the door and stepped into the hall just as a matched pair of fair-haired little girls came barreling round the corner. One neatly dodged and shot past. The other tripped over his foot.

Marcus caught her before she hit the floor and briskly set her back on her feet. As he met her dazed blue stare, he inhaled sharply. He knew those eyes... no, it was impossible.

“Delia! Livy!” came a feminine voice from the stairway.

His head swung toward the sound.

“Yes, Mama,” the little girl called out. “We’re just going to the schoolroom.” Flashing Marcus a grin, she darted down the hall.

“Not before we have a discussion, young ladies.”

Even while his mind denied, disbelieved, his senses recognized, and stirred.

The voice’s owner came round the corner, then stopped dead.

All else stopped, too—his heart and breath—as though they’d collided physically. The impact sent him reeling into the past.

He had met her in summer, but hers was winter’s beauty. Her hair was pale sunlight framing the snowy purity of her skin, and there was winter, too, in her eyes, clear, ice-blue. Christina.

He regained his breath and managed a bow. “Mrs. Travers.”

“Mr.... Greyson.” The fingers of her left hand curled and uncurled against the grey woolen gown. No wedding ring. When had Arthur Travers died? Some two or three years ago?

“I was not...” Her full mouth formed a tight smile. “I was unaware you were here. Penelope said—that is, no one mentioned your arrival.”

That low voice with its trace of huskiness... so like a caress... He pulled his wandering mind back.

“They couldn’t have known,” he said. “I arrived late last night. A spur-of-the-moment decision.” His heart was beating too fast—because he was taken aback, Marcus told himself. He knew she and Penny still corresponded, but from all he’d heard, Christina hadn’t left Cumbria since she was married. He hadn’t been told she’d be here, and couldn’t possibly have expected it.

He backed away a step. She did, too.

“How... pleased Julius will be,” she said. “And Penelope. And of course, the boys. They’ve boasted of their uncle to the twins.”

“The little girls,” he said tautly. “Yours, obviously.”

She nodded. “Delia and Livy.” Her ice blue gaze melted a fraction. “Seven years old last month. And dreadful hoydens, as you’ve probably noticed. I hope their noise didn’t wake you.”

Seven years old. That seemed impossible. But it had been ten years since he’d last seen her, and she’d married soon thereafter—a mere three months thereafter, he recalled, with a sting of bitterness that startled him. He retreated another pace.

“The children didn’t disturb me at all,” he lied. “I was just going down to breakfast.”

“Then I mustn’t keep you.”

She moved past him, a breath of scent teasing in her wake. Lavender.

He’d known many other women who wore lavender. The scent should have conjured up recent memories. Instead, as he stood in the hall listening to her light step fade, the scene opening up in his mind rose from a decade ago.

It had been late May, a fortnight before Julius’s wedding, and the first group of houseguests had arrived. Julius was taking them on a tour of Greymarch, and he’d nagged Marcus into going along.

Though acutely aware of Penny’s beautiful friend, Marcus had kept his distance. He detested prim and proper Society, and above all loathed its featherbrained misses, with their virginal white gowns and twittering voices and mincing, mannered ways. The males weren’t much better: a lot of complacent hypocrites among whom not a single original thought could be found.

While the guests explored the old gatehouse— the Greysons’ Picturesque Ruin, Julius called it— Marcus had gritted his teeth and kept his mouth shut, resolved for Julius’s sake to endure boredom and frustration in silence. Marcus had been leaning against a fir tree, softly whistling the melody of a bawdy song, when Penny’s friend had shyly approached.

“What is the song?” Christina had asked in that foggy, beckoning voice.

He had carefully avoided looking at her, because he’d seen what happened to other men who did. In less than twenty-four hours, this eighteen-year-old girl with her platinum hair and silver-blue eyes had effortlessly turned every unattached male at Greymarch into a dithering imbecile.

Marcus had looked at the gatehouse, the rocks, the trees, and the blue, cloudless sky—anywhere but at her—while he answered acidly that the melody was beneath the notice of good little girls because its composer wasn’t anyone genteel like Haydn or even Rossini.

“Oh,” she’d said. Only that, and she was just backing away—as he’d believed he wanted—when the spring breeze carried the lavender scent to his nostrils. It had swirled into his brain—and, dizzy, he’d looked down and watched her face slowly turning to profile, her eyes downcast so that the long lashes almost brushed her cheek. He’d watched her soft mouth turn downward ever so slightly, then saw his hand reaching to touch her muslin sleeve, while he heard his voice gentling as he said, “Shall I whistle Rossini instead?”

She had turned back, lifting doubtful blue eyes to his. Then, in th

e space from one heartbeat to the next, the moment of her silver-blue gaze sweeping up to meet his, he’d tumbled headlong into love... and two weeks later, into heartbreak.

Marcus recoiled from the memory as though it had been a physical blow. The present swung back sharply into focus.

Christina Travers was nothing to him, he told himself as he headed for the stairs. He’d scarcely thought of her in years. Young men fell in love every day, and had their hearts broken, or else they got their hearts’ desire and wed. Some lived happily ever after—as Julius had—but more often they existed with their wives in a state of stultifying boredom or endless quarrel.

Christina had wed wealth and comfort—as she’d been reared to do, Marcus was well aware. According to gossip, she’d lived in virtual seclusion in the Lake District ever since, while he’d spent seven of the last ten years abroad. Had he encountered her in the interim, today’s meeting wouldn’t have disconcerted him. His strong physical reaction and his mind’s reversion to the past were confused responses to the unexpected... and to her beauty, of course. He wouldn’t have imagined she could grow more lovely.

Naturally he wouldn’t. The last time he’d seen her, he had been a callow youth of four-and-twenty who believed Christina was the most beautiful girl in all the world. He’d believed a great many foolish things, once.

***

Having seen the children settled in the school room under Miss Finch’s competent tutelage, a shaken Christina went to the sitting room to write a letter to her great-aunt Georgiana. She took up a sheet of paper, dipped her pen into the inkwell, then had to wipe the pen and put it down because she couldn’t keep her hands—or her thoughts—steady. She studied her uncooperative hands in dismay, as though they belonged to a stranger. A short while ago, in the hall, she had felt like a stranger to herself. She had behaved like a tongue-tied schoolgirl—like the weak-minded young miss she’d been a decade before—frantically babbling small talk while she turned hot and cold by turns under Marcus Greyson’s intent, gold-glinting stare. Worst of all, she had snatched at the first excuse to run away.

Rising from the desk, Christina moved to the window. Below her, Greymarch’s formal gardens lay tranquil, their winter barrenness softened by the deep emerald of evergreen shrubs. To her right, the branches of leafless oaks etched dark webs against the vibrant blue of the sky. To her left, well beyond the winding stream, ancient fir trees blocked her view of the old gatehouse.

She didn’t need to see it to remember, though.

It had been two weeks before Penny’s wedding. Christina hadn’t seen Penny in several months, but they’d corresponded. Julius Greyson turned out to be just as Penny had described in her letters: tall, dark, handsome, gracious, witty, and obviously in love with his bride-to-be. That much Christina managed to digest before she was introduced to his brother.

She saw a bronze god: thick, tawny hair streaked with gold, a sculpted, sun-burnished countenance, and intent, amber-flecked green eyes that lit to gold when he glanced down at her and muttered some barely polite greeting. Marcus Greyson was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen. He was also, at first, the least amiable. Bored, his impatience palpable, he couldn’t be bothered to say another word to her during the subsequent tour of Greymarch.

As far as he was concerned, she didn’t exist. As far as she was concerned, no one existed but him. To approach a gentleman she didn’t know—who evidently preferred to know nobody—was unthinkable. To keep away was impossible. And so, when the group paused at the gatehouse, she’d walked— shaking in her half-boots—across the clearing and up to him, and said the first inane thing that came into her head.

He’d snapped at her quite rudely, which no one had ever done in all her eighteen years, and which should have sent her scurrying back to the safety of her well-mannered acquaintances. But he’d leaned against a fir tree, and there was the cool tang of evergreens about her, and some other scent—tansy and cloves, she’d guessed—emanating from him. There was something else as well—strange and different and dark—and this had slowed her retreat. When he’d touched her sleeve, she’d looked up into his eyes. He’d smiled, and she had too, helplessly, because she’d found the welcome she wanted.

His eyes had not been welcoming this morning. His handsome countenance had hardened to stone the moment he saw her, and the only emotion she’d discerned in those changeable eyes was annoyance.

Well, the surprise hadn’t been altogether agreeable for her, either.

Turning from the window and a view that stirred unwanted ghosts from the past, she tried to consider the situation rationally and fairly. His annoyance very likely had nothing to do with her—or, more precisely, with the Christina of the past. He’d surely forgotten most, if not all, of what had happened. After all, she had been merely one in an endless stream of infatuated females.

If he was vexed to find her here, that could easily be because he’d expected to spend a quiet Christmas with his family. Now there were twice as many children as he’d expected—which meant twenty times the racket—and a widowed friend of Penny’s he’d have to make polite conversation with.

She wasn’t exactly delighted about making polite conversation with him, either, Christina thought defensively. But that was ridiculous, she chided herself in the next instant. She was far too mature to hold a grudge for ten long years.

All the same, she couldn’t help remembering. She saw clearly in her mind’s eye his letter with its black, lashing script, each word sharp as the sting of a whip. At the time she had believed her shattered heart would never recover.

So the young generally feel when they first experience betrayal, the mature Christina told herself. The fact was, he’d done her a favor in destroying her illusions. She bore no grudge. She simply hadn’t forgotten the painful lesson he had taught her. She had nothing to fear from him. He couldn’t hurt her again. She was no longer a naive eighteen-year-old girl.

***

As soon as they were released from the school room, Kit and Robin hunted their uncle down, and formally introduced him to their new playmates. Within a very few minutes, Marcus discovered that Livy was quiet and reflective, while Delia was bolder and restless. It was Livy who ran to seek their mama’s permission to play out of doors with Mr. Greyson, while Delia was already racing for her coat and mittens. She was first at the door, shoving a ridiculously frilly bonnet onto her head, and heedlessly pulling her mittens on backward.

Marcus crouched down before her. “May I help?” he asked politely.

At her nod, he straightened the mittens, then proceeded to tie the bonnet ribbons.

“Your eyes are two colors,” she told him. ‘There is green and little gold speckles. Did fairies do that?”

‘They might have done.”

“It is very pretty. I wish I had fairy gold in my eyes.”

He stood up and pulled on his gloves. “You have fairy silver,” he said. “Like a blue sky with silver dust. It is much, much prettier.”

“A blue sky with silver dust.” She considered. “And Livy, too, then. And Mama.”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” she repeated with a satisfied nod. She took his hand, and looked up at him, and smiled.

This was merely a child’s smile of trusting innocence, and a child’s tiny, mittened hand clasping his own. There was nothing in it to disturb or surprise him. He was disturbed nevertheless, because he felt the small gesture too deeply, as though it pricked some sensitive place in his heart, some old wound.

He looked away from the girl’s innocent, upturned face and the too-familiar silver-blue eyes, and the troubling sensation passed. Marcus told himself his mind was addled, that was all, and he was oversensitive from lack of sleep.

***

Christina was in the sitting room, embroidering a handkerchief while she listened to Penelope fret over arrangements for the following night’s Yuletide ball.

“I can’t think what’s to be done.” Pushing back from her cluttered writi

ng desk, Penny folded her hands over her just-noticeably swollen belly. “I can hardly tell Miss Nichols to keep away. And it’s no use hoping she’ll break an ankle. When she learns Marcus is here, she’ll come, even if she must be carried on a litter.”

“I take it Miss Nichols has set her cap at Mr. Greyson.” Christina jammed the needle through the fabric with rather more force than necessary.

“She’d set her hounds on him if she could. Since she can’t, she’ll plague him to death.”

“She’s a near neighbor,” Christina said. “You could hardly not invite her, even if you’d known he was coming. Besides, he may not object to her interest.” She felt a tweak of something nastily like jealousy. She glared at the knot she’d just made. “I expect she’s grown quite lovely. She was a beautiful child when I first—when I last saw her, at your wedding.”

Penelope turned a bit in her chair. “We weren’t much more than children ourselves. Was that the last time you saw Marcus?”

Christina nodded stiffly.

“Then you find him much changed, I daresay.”

“I should hope so,” came a masculine voice from the doorway. “I should hate to appear a callow youth when I’m teetering on the brink of senility.”

At the sound of his voice, Christina’s heart gave a quick, foolish leap, just as it used to do whenever he came near. She set her jaw and resolutely turned her head toward the door.

Marcus leaned against the frame, his eyes dark and unreadable in the shadow of the doorway. He had changed little physically. He had been tall, lean-muscled, and strong ten years ago. Maturity had added a fraction more breadth to his shoulders, to his hard chest... but she’d noticed all that earlier, she chided herself. She didn’t have to take measurements, for heaven’s sake. She dragged her gaze away.

He had made his own way in the world—alone, she reflected, while she listened to Penny tease him for eavesdropping. People had mistrusted him once, because Marcus Greyson made his own rules, respected no authority, no boundaries set by others. But in the time since she’d known him, he’d dared and risked and won, stunning the world with the magnitude of his success. He now possessed both wealth and power, and it showed.