Ed laughed. “You don’t know the half. Anne has a seeking game planned if the weather proves cooperative. She’s partnered you with—”
“Spare me tonight.” Frost held up a hand, finding the thought of any organized holiday game nauseating. Or maybe it was the cloying scents of pine and fir that were making him nauseous. That or an impertinent curl. “Damn ballroom smells like a forest,” he grumbled. “Not another word about it, Ed. I’ll deal with tomorrow on the morrow. Make my excuses to your dear wife. I promise I’ll be better company after a full night’s rest.”
Hieing off to his room and to bed should have been accomplished in a trice, but Frost was restive. Or so he told himself when instead of heading toward the guest wing where his assigned chamber awaited, he turned in the opposite direction…exploring. Searching.
His cheeks felt peculiar. He reached up to touch one, and that’s when Frost realized he was smiling. Smiling at the audacity of the fresh-faced chit who had left him standing there, rejected.
By Zeus, he finally decides to do his duty and ask a wench to dance and the only one he approaches shows him her backbone in denying him, and then her backside—alluringly curved, he couldn’t help but notice—as she walks away.
Amazing. Both that she turned him down and that he found it humorous.
“Insane.” He checked Ed’s study and the library, declined refreshment when a servant passing in the hall offered such, made quick work investigating the balcony along the second floor, as well as two smaller parlors he chanced across, looked in the drawing room where they’d gathered before dinner, the card room—which was much attended at the moment—and the billiard room.
Though he must’ve encountered every damn guest not on the dance floor and avoided seven of Ed’s blasted kissing boughs, he didn’t catch sight nor sound of the woman he sought.
Where the devil had she gone off to and why the devil did he care?
It wasn’t as though untidy brown ringlets and annoyingly green-as-holly, unusually pale peepers were anything worth obsessing over. Neither was her trim figure sheathed in flowing lavender or her pinkened cheeks. An attractive, wholesome package to be sure, but nothing he hadn’t seen a hundred times over.
Yet obsess he did.
Over that obstinate mouth he craved to taste—almost as much as he craved hearing it spout unexpected retorts.
Breathing deeply after ascending yet another set of stairs—of thinking of her mouth?—Frost consciously subdued his efforts and the sense of inexplicable anticipation surging through him.
He had eleven more days to learn who she was. To convince her to dance with him. To forget why he hated Christmas and wasn’t supposed to be feeling something as unexceptional as excitement over spending it here. With her.
The unnamed nobody he’d yet to garner an introduction to.
The woman who caused him to remember his past with something other than pain.
Chapter Two
A Festive Search
Isabella stood beside the open front door, cold air blasting her exposed cheek, telling herself not to be anxious. She trusted Anne, who’d assured her several times over that Isabella could fully participate in the day’s activities.
The great hall was filled with scarf-and-mitten-bedecked females, with hatted and multi-caped coated gentlemen. Or so Harriet had described before departing to inspect Aylmer’s pantaloons “On the chance today’s have any holes in peculiar places too”.
Though she wore the requisite bonnet and scarf, Isabella had slipped her unmittened hands into the beautiful white ermine muff Anne had given her for Christmas (both Anne and Harriet had described the gift, but their words hadn’t been necessary—its exquisite texture was sufficient to conjure hazy images in her mind). Feeling the anticipation as much as any other guest yet unable to move about on her own, Isabella repeatedly instructed her restless fingers to stop twitching within the confines of the sumptuous fur.
Really…she had no cause for being at sixes and sevens, having committed to memory the number of steps needed to exit the great hall and descend the stairs where the carriages would be waiting to convey them into town—the alluded to destination.
Unfortunately the knot of nervous dread in her stomach refused to cooperate, her anxiety deepening by the second. Of a certainty, her reaction couldn’t have anything to do with hearing each doublet of names Anne called out, pairing the guests, and suspecting after name upon name was announced and mentally checking each off her list that she was about to be partnered with the brash stranger from last night.
The man whose identity she’d yet to learn or whose scent she’d not yet been successful in eradicating from her nostrils. Wretched nose. It remembered everything! The way he smelled richly of sandalwood, his breath of wine. The way—