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  So. She was observant, or maybe blessed with a good memory. Samuel hunched, trying to make it look like a bow of assent. “It is. We lack only one piece to finish the issue.”

  “Dear me. And Vir Virilem has failed to perform?”

  Samuel coughed. “Vir Virilem is finding himself too cynical, perhaps, for the season.”

  Her eyes opened wide, playful. “Can a gentleman’s magazine be too cynical? Even at Christmas?”

  “It seems so. Annoyingly.”

  She gave a little shrug. “It’s your conscience, Mr. Goddard, having a laugh at you. But I confess, I’m glad for it.”

  Did she usually look so roguish after having her work rejected? He thought not. Something was different today. He noticed it in the carelessness of her grasp on her little case of papers; the brightness of her eyes. Her cheeks were nipped pink from the wintry weather; her bonnet…

  Her bonnet was a bit shabby, actually. And her gloves had been darned, and her cloak had been turned. He revised his judgment of her as a wealthy dabbler. She looked lovely, as usual—but now that he really looked, she wore signs of making do. Of respectability, determination, and genuine need. How had he missed all this before?

  He’d been seeing what he expected to see. He’d been seeing what he’d been told to.

  That was neither gentlemanly nor Christmassy, and it certainly wasn’t how he’d want people to judge him. For how many years had he been called “that strange Goddard boy”? The one who twitched; whose tongue was sometimes stubbornly silent. The one who took refuge in the written word.

  Just as Miss Keating did—or so he presumed, with her portfolio and her persistence.

  So he extended a hand, grateful that Miss Keating ignored the way it clenched and unclenched. “Come, show me what you’ve brought along.”

  She grinned. “It’s a Christmas miracle! Finally.”

  “What’s that? What if I had turned you away again?”

  “You did. But I hadn’t quite got around to leaving yet.” She unfastened her little case and upended it over the desk. Papers spilled out, folded and fluttering like great snowflakes. “And aren’t you glad now that I didn’t?”

  He hardly heard her. All of the world had narrowed to the sight of those papers floating, falling. Papers in a hand he knew as well as his own; a hand that felt like Christmas every time he saw it: a gift of insight, of wonder, of warmth and humor.

  The neat hand of E. H. Wise.

  “What are these papers?” he said through numb lips. “Whose are they?”

  “They’re mine. Or yours, if you want to buy them.”

  Samuel looked up from the bounty atop the desk. Into the eyes of Harriet Keating, brown and familiar and not known at all. “You wrote these? You’re E. H. Wise?”

  For the first time, she looked uncertain. “Are you pleased? I was determined to tell you today, as—as a gift for myself. But perhaps I shouldn’t have.”

  “You’re E. H. Wise. You, Harriet Keating.” He hadn’t quite accepted the new shape the world had taken.

  “Ellen Harriet, though I’ve never cared for my first name.” Her chin lifted. “If you’re interested, what can you offer me? And if you’re not interested, tell me at once, and I’ll never return.”

  Never looking away from her face, Samuel extended a hand to touch the papers. Papers she’d written; sentences she’d formed in that marvelous brain.

  “I’d hoped we could be friends,” he blurted. “Someday. If we met.”

  Her brows knit. “What do you mean?”

  He shook his head. Kept on shaking it. “Sorry. Just—thinking aloud.”

  “Are you interested in buying a piece from me?”

  “God, yes.” Finally, his brain was catching up with the situation around him. “Yes. Of course. Always. Any time.”

  Her mouth fell open. “That’s quite an endorsement from someone who usually can hardly boot me out of the office quickly enough.”

  “All part of my strategy.” He attempted a joke based on her earlier words. “Why do you want to write for The Gentleman’s Periodical so badly?”

  “Ah.” Her look of skepticism turned shy. “It’s because of you, Mr. Goddard. The Periodical used to publish on-demandes, those dreadful questions that ruined people’s lives. And now that you’re an editor, you don’t do that anymore.”

  He blinked. “Oh. It’s—because of me? That is—”

  “You stood for something.” She tilted her head. “You stand for something. And—and I do too, and that’s why I wanted to work for you. I sent in my pieces by mail so you’d know what I could do, without deciding you already knew I couldn’t do it because I was a woman.”

  “I see,” he said softly. He did. Oh, he did. How many times had people decided Samuel couldn’t do something before they even knew him? How many times had he said the same to himself without even trying?

  “But I told myself,” she continued in a rush, “that if I stopped into the office, you’d get to know me a bit. So one day I could write for you as myself. But I know it’s the work that matters, isn’t it? Just the work. Even so, I wanted you to know it was mine.”

  Samuel turned to the papers on the desk, stacking them and returning them to order. And then he turned back to Miss Keating. E. H. Wise. Both of them. “It’s not only the work that matters. It’s the person who creates it. There cannot be one without the other.”

  “Oh,” she said, and her eyes were warm as chocolate and lovely as stars, and he swayed toward her as if she were a magnet. That pretty face. That wonderful mind.

  “Please select a piece,” he said, “from those you have brought. I have two-thirds of a column to fill, and it will be yours for the Christmas issue.”

  “Don’t you want to read it?”

  “I will read it, and with pleasure. But I trust your judgment.” He smiled, knowing he was twitching; not caring. “You stand for something, Miss Keating, that I admire very much.”

  “Oh,” she said again. “Please—please do call me Harriet.” He offered his Christian name in return, and then they both got to work.

  She handed him a piece, and he read it as he set it into type. It was a recollection of family Christmases from years past; of firesides and church bells and bawdy games and laughter. Above all, laughter—such as Samuel had never known on Christmas, but that he could now feel in his heart.

  He inked the final forme and pressed to it a page for proof-reading. Clipping it overhead, he skimmed the lines.

  “It’s perfect,” he told Harriet, who had handed him type with nimble fingers and watched every step of production with curiosity and interest. “The perfect piece. Exactly what was needed. Name your price, madam.”

  “The standard rate,” she said. “Though there’s one more thing. An error that needs correcting.”

  “Oh?” He squinted at the page. “What did I miss?”

  “Right there.” She pointed at a spot on the inky proof. “You see? It says mistletoe on the page, and it’s hanging over our heads.”

  Unmistakable hint. “I know what to do about that,” said Samuel Goddard, who just now had the perfect words—and then no words at all, as he was home for Christmas in the arms of Harriet Keating, pressing a kiss to her lips. Not a stolen kiss beneath mistletoe, but one freely given, by two people who stood for something, and best of all, now stood together.

  The Prodigal Duke

  Theresa Romain

  Chapter 1

  Sixty feet was a long way to fall.

  But here on her wire sixty feet above the ground—here and nowhere else on earth—Poppy feared nothing. Here, she ruled a world of her own.

  When she looked down, her eyes dazzled from the thick scatter of lamps brightening the twilight-dark sky. But Poppy didn’t need sharp sight to keep her footing. Though the rope was little more than a shadow before her, she knew it by feel. Her white and gold balance pole served as an extra set of arms, fully eight yards long,
and flexible and strong as sinew. It drooped gently, grounding her to earth, even as she walked high above. Above the owners of Vauxhall, who tinkered with her show almost on a weekly basis. Make the rope longer. Make the mast taller. Shorten your skirts. Run as quickly as you can. Pause at the middle of the rope to dance.

  Sixty feet in the air, she could forget all of that—except for the payment. A week on the wire paid the same wages a housemaid received in a year. And one season at Vauxhall? Why, it would pay almost enough for a new beginning. Because the war had ended in June, she could escape to the south of France and live in a cottage among lavender and olive trees.

  The orchestra played at a distance, the lilting beat of a comic song floating through the air. Poppy let it carry her forward, one step, another and another, in time with the faint music. Beneath her knee-length skirts, long pantalettes protected her modesty and left her legs wonderfully unencumbered. Letting her balance pole hold her steady, she stepped back, a quick dancing beat, then took a hop forward that made the people far below her gasp. A crowd loved nothing so much as thinking she was about to fall.

  But Penelope Hayworth—known here as Madame Haut and everywhere else as Poppy—never set a foot wrong anymore. Not in her daily life, and certainly not on a tightrope.

  She stepped forward again, a quick shift of her weight, then darted forward—racing, as she’d so often done along the fences and rails of the Duke of Westfair’s lands. Applause followed her, a ripple of sound that swelled until she reached the end of the long rope. Here a pair of posts tilted together to clasp the rope tight, leaving a vee at the top and a rope end that trailed to the ground below.

  She notched her balancing pole into the vee. Lord Bexley—the run-ragged viscount overseeing the coming celebrations in honor of Waterloo and the Prince Regent’s birthday—would see it hooked safely down and stored for her next performance. For tonight, she was done. She slid down the trailing rope to the small cordoned-off area at its base, gritting her teeth against the familiar collision of feet with earth.

  It didn’t come. Instead, hands caught her about the waist from behind, gentling her landing.

  Her panicked reflex was instant: Poppy flung out an elbow and stomped backward, seeking the arch of the assailant’s foot. “Do not touch me! My contract states quite clearly that I am not to be touched.”

  The hands lifted. “My apologies. I haven’t read your contract.”

  That voice. Nothing else could have stilled her attack at once. She knew that voice, though she had not heard it for six years. She would have recognized it if sixty years had passed.

  Her voice quavered as she spoke through shallow breaths. “You are not the guard who is supposed to keep the crowd away.”

  “I am not, no.” A flicker of laughter brightened the words.

  Tottering, she put a steadying hand on the rope she’d just slid down, then ventured a slow, cautious turn. “Leo.”

  It was him. It was really him.

  “Hullo, Poppy.” He lifted his hands, that sweet, saucy grin on his face. “Thank the Lord you’re on solid ground again. I was all in knots watching you.”

  “You never did like climbing anything higher than the staircase in your family’s town house.” She hardly knew what she was saying. Here was Leonidas Billingsley, tall and handsome as ever. Her old friend Leo, who’d had her heart in his pocket along with half the Westfair money when he left England six years before. Now, with the death of his older brother Richard, he had become the Duke of Westfair.

  And now he was home.

  And he was laughing. “Do you have to remember that about me? Couldn’t you remember something more heroic?”

  “Who says I don’t?”

  Wait. That wasn’t right, was it? Ought she to be pleased to see him or not? At some point in the last six years she had retrieved her heart from his keeping. She knew, because it was pounding heartily in her chest.

  She shook her head. Tried again. “What are you doing here, Leo?”

  “I came to see you, obviously. I arrived in London yesterday and am staying at the Westfair town house. My uncle told me you were performing at Vauxhall tonight. As a ropedancer! It was truly impressive, at least what I could bear to watch of it.”

  Poppy smiled. “I called on Ubie last week. I suppose he couldn’t help but share all my gossip.” Uncle Bernard, Leo’s mother’s brother, had lived in the Westfair household since the death of the old duke. When Leo and Poppy had run tame across their families’ adjoining lands, Poppy had grown fond of Ubie and had given him the nickname he grudgingly tolerated.

  Poppy’s call on Ubie at the Westfair town house had been an ordinary visit, with ordinary tea and biscuits and chat. They hadn’t spoken of Leo. What would have been the point? Though he had been summoned from abroad after his elder brother’s death months before, no one knew when—or whether—he would return.

  She eyed him closely. No, he wasn’t the same Leo who had left, after all. At twenty-one, he’d been wiry and quicksilver. Now twenty-seven, he seemed more solid. His shoulders were broader, with a confident set to them.

  “So you came to see me,” Poppy said. “That’s all you wanted? To avert your eyes and greet me?” She sank to the worn grass to unlace her slippers.

  “By no means. I’m not averting my eyes now. What are you doing?” Leo was instantly crouching before her, curious as ever.

  “I always change my shoes after a performance.” Might as well cling to this shred of normalcy. She wiggled one foot free, her bare toes chilled despite the sultriness of the evening, then held up the slipper. “See? I can’t go walking around in these.”

  Her laced performance shoes fitted to her feet, tight as second skins. Their thin leather soles were waxy with the same resin that heavily coated the high wire.

  As she removed the second shoe, Leo regarded the first with fascination. “Special shoes for walking on a rope. I’d never have thought of it. Didn’t you used to walk every rail barefoot?”

  “I did.” She turned away to retrieve the small case she kept at the end of the rope, then exchanged her slippers for a pair of half boots she stored in there. “But the owners of Vauxhall, the Barrett brothers, informed me that my bare feet were too provocative. So I had to fashion something else.”

  Leo’s eyes fastened on her feet, pale against the dark earth and worn grass. Her toes curled shyly, as if trying to hide their nakedness.

  “Very provocative,” he agreed with mock graveness. “As opposed to the skirts that show off your knees, which are sedate as a nun’s.”

  “Ah, well, those are just good business sense,” she replied. “Or so the Barretts explained to me. If I wore a long dress and tripped over the train, the performance would be over far too quickly.”

  “I imagine ropedancers toppling to earth would lead to poor ticket sales.”

  “Indeed. Which is why I shall probably have to have a net next time I perform.” She eased on one half-boot, then the next, acutely aware of the crowd around them. Not that a woman changing her shoes was the most scandalous sight at Vauxhall by far—but still, Poppy was used to the shield of her guard.

  Whom, she now saw, was holding a tankard in one hand and a plump woman’s derriere in the other. Leo must have given the guard a coin to leave his post. Nice to know he was so easily bribed.

  “Why a net?” Leo rose to his feet, then extended a hand to her.

  She placed hers in his, glad for his gloves that kept her bare hands from touching his skin. “The Prince Regent,” she explained, hopping to her feet, “has arranged for a series of celebrations in his own honor. Oh, and also in the honor of the victory at Waterloo this past June. Lord Bexley is trying to make sense of the budget and keep dramatics to a minimum. Which means if I am so foolish as to fall from the wire, it must be into a net. Once a net can be procured, that is.”

  She released his hand, brushing dry blades of grass off her skirts. “Are you planning to stay at the garde
ns for a while? Or do you want to accompany me home?”

  Leo smirked. “Why, Poppy, we've only just got reacquainted.”

  Her cheeks heated. “I didn’t mean like that,” she blurted. “I just wondered if you wanted to walk with me. Since you came here to see me. I live in a very proper room, not far from here. I rent from a widow who defines respectability, so you couldn’t try…anything. Even if you wanted to.”

  “I am gratified to hear that your landlady is watching out for men who try to exercise their base instincts. They are, no doubt, the sort of men who would be given to frothing with desire at the sight of bare toes.”

  Some of them didn’t even need that much. Poppy was acutely aware of the shortness of her skirts, the bareness of her arms. She folded her arms across her chest. “There is a reason why I have a guard and why my contract specifies that I am not to be touched.”

  Too late by far to do any good, unfortunately. A woman couldn’t live her life protected by a contract.

  “I’ll accompany you home, if you’d like to depart. I do need to talk to you.” Leo’s dark brows knit. “But you’ll be cold walking around in your costume. Here.”

  Before she could protest, he shrugged out of his coat, draping the heavy wool around her shoulders. This left him in shirt-sleeves and a waistcoat, which state of undress seemed to bother him not at all. And indeed, if one were to strip off random articles of clothing without censure, Vauxhall would be the place.

  The look suited him: tousled dark hair beneath a high-crowned hat; a perfectly tied neckcloth and no coat whatsoever. The lines of his arms and shoulders were hard and strong. He was unmistakably a gentleman, but every inch a rogue.

  “Thank you,” she said cautiously, clutching the lapels of the coat together. It was soft and fine and dark, cloth woven and dyed and tailored with the greatest care. The faint, spicy scent of bergamot tickled her nose. Once wrapped in this dark coat, she would look like a floating head with her light hair. The notion made her smile. “I ought to tell you, though, I have a cloak. It’s in the same case where I kept my spare shoes.”