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

But the sound of one person applauding—only one—broke the spell. Still smiling, Sara turned, then quickly stood, just as Revell also rose to his feet.

The gentleman clapping was newly arrived, his traveling cloak still over his shoulders and his elegant dark clothes creased from his carriage, and from his world-weary, almost arrogant disdain, Sara would have known he was high-born and wealthy even if Lady Fordyce weren’t fluttering so anxiously around him, as if he were the greatest prize she’d ever captured.

And in a way he was. Sara had never seen the gentleman before, let alone met him. Yet she recognized him at once: he was older than Revell, an inch or two shorter, and his hair was lighter, but the shape of his face and smile, the ease with which he moved, were so much the same that there could be little doubt.

“Why, Revell, look at you,” said Brant, His Grace the Duke of Strachen, his voice deceptively languid as he looked not at his brother, but at Sara. “Such a…a diversion! It would seem that I’ve accepted Lady Fordyce’s invitation in the nick of time for a happy Christmas, doesn’t it? The very nick, I would venture, for us all.”

“I am disappointed, Revell,” said Brant with a sigh as he dropped into the chair before the new fire in his bedchamber. “I’d rather expected more from you. Oh, go ahead and sit. It’s not as if you’re standing in the docket.”

“From your manner, why should I feel otherwise?” Revell continued standing where he was behind the other armchair, his hands in fists on the chair’s back, which did in fact make him feel as if he were standing in some miserable courtroom, awaiting his sentence. Which, considering his older brother was willing enough to serve as prosecutor, judge, and jury combined, wasn’t far from the mark. “Under the circumstances, Brant, I believe I’d rather stand.”

Brant sighed, drumming his fingertips lightly on the padded leather arm of his chair. He had changed his traveling clothes for a long silk dressing gown, brilliantly printed with blue and red dragons, that was doubtless in the height of style. Brant was by far the most fashionable of the three brothers, not only in his dress, but in his friends and pastimes, as well, living fast, hard, and expensively. If Brant maintained that Revell was like last summer’s leaf, tossed wherever the wind took him, then Revell thought that Brant and his set were more like the sharks that swam in the China Sea, sleekly deadly and ready to tear apart their fellows without a thought.

“Circumstances, circumstances,” he now mused. “What precisely are the circumstances here, dear brother? You choose to come here in this obscure provincial household instead of spending the holidays with me at Claremont House, after which I receive the most distraught appeal from your hostess, accusing you of being a veritable fox in her henhouse.”

“There was no need for Lady Fordyce to have contacted you,” said Revell testily. “I am hardly anyone’s notion of a fox.”

“She didn’t contact me,” answered Brant, maddeningly mild. “She invited me to join her party. And since you seem to have found the—oh, what shall we say it is? The Christmas plum pudding? Sir Henry’s rum punch, famous throughout the county? The salubrious invigoration of the local air?—so thoroughly irresistible, I accepted, and now join you.”

“Badger me, you mean.” Angrily Revell thumped his fists on the back of the chair. He hated it when his brother lectured him in this bemused paternal fashion, as if there were twenty years between them instead of two. “Damnation, Brant, what kind of idiot do you take me for? I know exactly why you’ve come, and it’s not for some blasted plum pudding!”

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