Secluded with the Rogue

1. One

One

Grosmont Grange, England

December 20, 1651

L ADY CHRYSTABEL Trevor adored Christmas.

Or at least she had until this year.

She frowned as her sap-sticky hands wove yet another wreath from the greenery she and her younger sister had collected. “Just five more days,” she said, thinking of all the decorating they still had to do.

Arabel meticulously measured two loops of red ribbon. “But just four days until Christmas Eve.”

“Yes, and we have to be ready by Christmas Eve.” Chrystabel sighed as she eyed the enormous pile of boughs they’d cut and trimmed. “I cannot believe how long it took to make the garlands. This isn’t easy alone.”

“You’re not alone, Chrystabel.” Arabel sounded sweetly sympathetic. “I’m still here. Matthew’s still here.”

“Martha and Cecily aren’t here.” Martha and Cecily were their older sisters. “And neither is Mother.” Not that Mother had helped her girls prepare for Christmas, anyway. She’d always been a rather uninvolved parent, leaving her children to be raised by nursemaids. But this was their first Christmas without her, and having her home and not participating had been better than not having her with them at all. “It makes me sad that we never see her.”

“Just pretend she’s dead,” Arabel suggested airily.

Arabel said everything airily. Pretty, seventeen-year-old Arabel was dark-haired and dark-eyed and statuesque—like Chrystabel and the rest of the Trevors—and she was the happiest person Chrystabel knew. Nothing ruffled her. She could find the good side of anything.

Unabated cheerfulness like that set Chrystabel’s teeth on edge.

“Mother is not dead,” she pointed out unnecessarily. “I could forgive her if she were dead.” Their father had died, after all—fighting for the king in the Civil War—and Chrystabel had never blamed him for leaving them. Death was sad but normal.

But there was nothing normal about being alive and not even an hour’s ride away—and ignoring your own children.

Especially at Christmas.

Chrystabel set her jaw. “I will never forgive her for marrying that… that man.”

That man was the Marquess of Bath, and he had no interest in the grown children of his second wife. The sorry and shocking thing was that Mother seemed similarly disinclined to spend time with her first family. She was too busy with her new husband and his children that she was raising. Raising. Even though she’d barely deigned to notice Chrystabel and her brother and three sisters—the five children she’d given birth to—all the years they were growing up.

“You cannot let Mother’s selfishness ruin our Christmas,” Arabel chided. “We’re not children anymore. Let it go. I have. Martha and Cecily have.”

“Martha and Cecily are married with children of their own. They don’t need a mother anymore.”

“For heaven’s sake, Chrys, you’re nineteen years old—you don’t need a mother anymore, either.” Arabel handed her a perfect red bow. “Here. Attach it, and that’s one more wreath finished.”

“Still twelve more to make,” Chrystabel said with a sigh.

Arabel’s laugh sounded suspiciously like a snort. “You’re the one who insists upon decorating this entire, huge house.”

Arabel was right about that—and more. Chrystabel knew she needed to dispense with the anger she felt toward their mother. It served no purpose. She would take a lesson from her less-than-ideal childhood: When she had her own family, she would do better.

Right then and there, she determined to do better.

“Look.” For once, Arabel wore a frown. She motioned out the window. “Soldiers. Parliamentarian soldiers.”

Hearing hoofbeats approach down Grosmont Grange’s long, icy, hard-packed drive, Chrystabel dragged her thoughts from her mother to follow her sister’s gaze. Sure enough, the horsemen wore breastplates over buff leather coats, with lobster-tailed pot helmets on their heads. Oliver Cromwell’s Dragoons.

They couldn’t be bringing good news to a Royalist family.

Since the war had ended in September, the formerly fighting Dragoons were now roaming the countryside, enforcing Cromwell’s strict Puritanical laws: no music, no dancing, no theater, no sports, no swearing, no drinking, no gaming…no Christmas.

No Christmas!

“They mean to catch us preparing for Christmas!” Chrystabel ran from the chamber and down the corridor to her brother’s study. “Matthew, open up!” Without waiting, she pushed open the door and burst inside. “Dragoons! Here to catch us celebrating Christmas!”

Arabel had already scooped up as much greenery as she could carry and was racing past the open door. “Where should we put it?” she called.

“Under your bed, then go back for more—we’ll put it under mine!” Chrystabel turned back to Matthew. “We’ll hide everything. You answer the door when they arrive.”

It took three trips to and from the drawing room to hide all the Christmas evidence beneath their two beds. Once the sisters were finished, they shut the door to Chrystabel’s room and plopped onto the mattress side by side, pretending to be reading books.

“Surely they won’t look under our beds,” Arabel whispered in her usual cheerful manner.

“We can hope not,” Chrystabel muttered back.

Long minutes passed while she listened to her own heartbeat and reread the same paragraph thirteen times.

“I don’t hear anyone searching the house,” Arabel said. “And they were wearing heavy boots.”

Chrystabel shrugged. “As you recently pointed out, it’s a big house. They’ll get here.”

They both jumped when a sharp knock came at the door.

Chrystabel steeled herself. “Enter if you must.”

“I must,” their brother said as the door swung open.

“Matthew! Are they gone?”

“They are.” He suddenly looked older than his twenty-five years. His handsome face appeared ashen. For the first time, he looked like the Earl of Grosmont to her, not just her big brother who unfortunately had inherited early.

“Why did they not search my chamber?”

“They didn’t search anything.” He held up a letter with a big, broken red seal hanging from it. A very official-looking letter. “They brought this.”

“What does it say?” Arabel breathed.

Leaning against the doorpost as though he couldn’t quite hold himself up, Matthew cleared his throat and read. “‘I thought fit to send this trumpet to you, to let you know that, if you please to walk away with your family and staff, and deliver your estate to such as I shall send to receive it, you shall have liberty to take one day to gather and carry off your goods, and such other necessaries as you have. You have failed to pay the fine assessed by the Committee for Compounding; if you necessitate me to bend my cannon against you, you may expect what I doubt you will not be pleased with. I await your present answer, and rest your servant, O. Cromwell.’”

“Oh, my God.” Arabel’s big brown eyes had never looked wider. “Did you give the soldiers your answer?”

“I had to. They wouldn’t leave without it.”

“And what was your answer?” Chrystabel asked impatiently. “What did you say?”

“That we’ll leave, of course. Tomorrow, as he ordered. What else could I say?” Matthew straightened up. Some color had returned to his face. “The fine is a third of the value of this estate. I don’t have that much money—Father spent all our savings on the war.”

“The heartless bastards!” Chrystabel would be fined herself if the Dragoons heard her using that kind of language, but right now she didn’t care. “How dare they!”

Matthew shrugged. “Our family dared to fight against them. Now they’ll confiscate our estate for their own gain. They need funds to run the new government—if the king had won, he’d have robbed the other side just the same. We are but the spoils of war.”

Matthew was a very levelheaded fellow, always good in a crisis. Unlike Chrystabel, who couldn’t seem to think straight. “But what will we do? Where will we go?”

“Grosmont Castle.” On his walk from the front door to her room, he’d obviously thought this through. “My seat. It’s supported us ever since Father died. And it’s the only place we can go, isn’t it?” he added reasonably.

“We’re to live in Wales?” Chrystabel shrieked, her volume not reasonable at all.

“My, that is far away,” Arabel murmured.

“Yes, and what about all our friends?” Being a sociable sort, Chrystabel had many friends. “We won’t make new ones—Wales is nothing but wilderness! And we don’t even know their language! Their words have all those L’s!”

“I’d wager there are no Dragoons there,” Arabel pointed out, looking on the bright side as always. “We won’t need to worry about Cromwell coming after that drafty old castle.”

“We can be thankful for that,” Matthew agreed. “I imagine we should instruct the servants to begin packing our things.”

Chrystabel shook her head, amazed that her brother could be so calm and practical. She remained silent a moment, struggling to resign herself to this dire fate.

Wales.

Wales!

She slipped a hand into her pocket and played with the silver pendant she kept there, which always made her feel better. Father had given it to her right before he left to go fight in the war, when she’d been inconsolable. It was a family heirloom, a rendering of the Grosmont crest with its lion, passed down the generations from father to son…and now to Chrystabel. Tradition said the lion pendant ought to be Matthew’s, but Chrystabel only paid heed to traditions that suited her. And losing her dearest keepsake of the man she’d loved most in all the world would not suit her one bit.

Her heart constricted at the thought of everything else she was about to lose. Her ancient tester bed, where she’d spent most every night of her nineteen years. The harpsichord her mother used to play when they had company to supper. The little rose garden her father had planted for her…

“I’m taking my roses,” she said suddenly, surprising even herself.

Matthew’s dark brows knitted together. “What?”

“I’m taking my roses. I need them for essential oils to make perfume, and I haven’t any idea whether there will be roses in Wales at all, let alone my roses.”

Arabel shook her head. “They’re planted , Chrystabel. You cannot take roses.”

“What did Cromwell say?” Chrystabel marched over to snatch the letter from Matthew’s hand and quote from it. “‘You shall have liberty to take one day to gather and carry off your goods, and such other necessaries as you have.’” She looked up. “I’m a perfumer. I consider my roses necessary.”

“You cannot take them,” Arabel repeated. “There’s no point. They’ll die.”

“It’s winter. They’re dormant.” Chrystabel hoped that meant they wouldn’t die.

“You cannot take them,” Arabel insisted.

“You think not?” The look Chrystabel sent her sister was a challenge. “Watch me.”