A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong: A Blackshear Family novella (B 0.5) Read Free

some long-lost relation had come to call. “Our gentleman from Cambridgeshire is come and we must find out all about his sister.”
    She looked up. Then she put her book aside and rose out of the chair to her glorious, unmistakable, Amazonian height.
    “Mr. Blackshear is our caller,” the baron went on, and Andrew bowed, which gave him nearly enough time to banish all traces of discomposure from his face. “Mr. Blackshear, may I present my daughter, Miss Sharp.”
    She curtseyed. She smiled, as she might surely smile at any caller. And with the gait of a victorious racehorse , she crossed to the bell-pull to ring for tea.
    * * *
    Lord above, this one was charming. Handsome, to begin with: if she was to be perfectly honest—and she usually was—she would probably not have found the blushes of a stout, spotty-faced, patchy-haired man nearly so agreeable. Not disagreeable by any means. Stout and spotty-faced and patchy-haired men aplenty had come to buy birds, and many of them had seemed able conversationalists with possibly excellent philosophical foundations, from what she could discern in a half-hour visit. She hoped she did not begrudge them the right to blush. Mere outward beauty, after all, made no signifier of real virtue.
    But looking across the tea table now, it struck her that beauty itself was a virtue to which she had perhaps not accorded sufficient weight in her reckonings on these matters.
    “Would you care for sugar, Mr. Blackshear?” Lucy said, for no good reason other than to see if he might blush again.
    “Thank you, no,” he said to his tea, which was halfway already to his mouth. He had a strong, expressive mouth, fit for barking out commands or whispering improprieties to a lady as he brushed by her in a dance. He had eyes dark as the mahogany inlay on the tea-chest, and hair like polished cherry-wood, and arms and legs and shoulders made to take up space. Men who looked like Mr. Blackshear generally strode through life helping themselves to what they wanted, or so she’d always assumed. They didn’t take pains with courtesy, and they certainly didn’t look aghast at having innocently offered a seat in a dry carriage to a young woman walking in the rain.
    If he were handsome and unblushing, or modest and plain, he would not intrigue half so much. That was the trick of it. Not the handsomeness all on its own. She would be sorry, now, if there were no men of this stripe at Aunt Symond’s party.
    “Has your sister owned a hawking bird of any sort before?” She stirred a lump of sugar into her own tea. Time enough to think of the party, and the men she’d meet there, after this transaction was done.
    “No, never. I expect I’ll want your most tractable specimen.” His mouth kicked up into a guarded smile, revealing a dimple on the left side. It changed all the lights of his countenance, hinting at a mischief utterly out of keeping with his blushes and the polite distance in his speech.
    “Never owned a bird?” Papa, unconcerned with dimples, jumped in with the right response. “But she’s flown them, I trust. Perhaps at a house party?”
    Mr. Blackshear brought his teacup to his lips at that moment, preventing a reply and probably giving him time to deliberate on what answer would best serve his purpose. “No,” he said after swallowing. “She’ll be new to the sport.” Whether on principle, or because he doubted his powers of dissembling, he’d opted for the truth. She couldn’t disapprove of that.
    But she could—and Papa could—disapprove the ill-thought-out acquisition of a bird. Too many times they’d been visited by fashionable men and ladies who viewed falconry as but another diverting fad, the bird an accessory to be shown off like a new beaded reticule or gold-topped walking stick. They always sent those customers away.
    And so they must do with Mr. Blackshear. Almost certainly they must. Never mind how drab the parlor would look without him.
    “Is it something in