The Winter Wife Read online

  Published by Anna Campbell

  Copyright 2010, 2012 Anna Campbell

  Cover design and eBook design by Karrie Mathews

  Published by Anna Campbell at Smashwords

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems - except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews - without permission in writing from the author, Anna Campbell. This book is a work of fiction. The characters, events, and places portrayed in this book are products of

  the author’s imagination and are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

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  Will a chance meeting on Christmas Eve…

  Alicia Sinclair, Countess of Kinvarra, cannot believe that fate has been so cruel as to strand her on the snowy Yorkshire moors with her estranged husband as her only hope of rescue. During their rare

  encounters, the arrogant earl and his countess act like hostile strangers. Now that Alicia has fallen into Kinvarra’s power, will he seek revenge for her desertion? Or does the dark, passionate man she once adored have entirely different plans for his headstrong wife?

  ..deliver a second chance at love?

  Sebastian Sinclair, Earl of Kinvarra, has spent ten wretched years regretting the mistakes he made with his young bride, but after long separation, the barriers between them are insurmountable. Until an un- expected encounter one stormy night makes him wonder if the barriers of mistrust and thwarted desire are so insurmountable after all. When winter weather traps Sebastian and his proud, lovely wife in an isolated inn, could the earl and his headstrong countess have a Christmas miracle in store?

  To my dear Readers,

  Thank you so much for picking up The Winter Wife: A Christmas

  Novella.

  I’ve had a yen to do a Christmas story for a long time. I love the hope and joy that are part of this time of year and I think the festive season makes a wonderful background for a romance.

  The Winter Wife was originally published in shorter form in 2010 as “Upon a Midnight Clear” in The Mammoth Book of Regency Romance. It was my first reunion romance and I loved the characters. I’ve always

  wanted the chance both to expand the story and to share it with a wider audience as a stand-alone novella rather than as part of an anthology, much as I love anthologies. This Christmas, I thought, “Why not?”

  So I hope you enjoy this chance to meet or revisit my Scottish hero, Sebastian, Earl of Kinvarra, and his estranged countess, Alicia, who meet one Christmas Eve in the middle of a Yorkshire snowstorm.

  Thanks to the people at Mammoth Anthologies who gave me the op- portunity to write “Upon a Midnight Clear”, and to my writing friends Vanessa Barneveld, Annie West and Christina Brooke for their help in bringing The Winter Wife to publication.

  Best wishes!

  Anna Campbell, December 2012

  Chapter One

  North Yorkshire, Christmas Eve, 1825

  THE CRASH OF shattering wood and the terrified screams of horses

  pierced the frosty night like a knife.

  Sebastian Sinclair, Earl of Kinvarra, swore, brought his restive mount under control, then spurred the animal around the turn in the snowy road. With icy clarity, the full moon lit the white landscape, starkly revealing the disaster before him.

  A flashy black curricle lay on its side in a ditch, the hood up against the weather. One horse had broken free and wandered the roadway, harness dragging. The other plunged wildly in the traces, struggling to escape.

  Swiftly Kinvarra dismounted, knowing his mare would await his signal, and ran to free the distressed horse. As he slid down the muddy ditch, a hatless man scrambled out of the smashed curricle.

  “Are you hurt?” Kinvarra asked, casting a quick eye over him. “No, I thank you, sir.” The effete blond fellow turned back to the

  carriage. “Come, darling. Let me assist you.”

  A graceful black-gloved hand extended from inside and a cloaked woman emerged with more aplomb than Kinvarra would have believed possible in the circumstances. Indications were that neither traveler

  was injured, so he concentrated on the trapped horse. When he

  spoke soothingly to the terrified beast, it quieted to panting stillness, exhausted with thrashing. While Kinvarra checked its legs, murmuring calm assurances, the stranger helped the lady up to the roadside.

  The horse shook itself and with a few ungainly jumps, ascended the bank to trot along the road toward its partner. Neither animal seemed

  to suffer worse than fright, a miracle considering that the curricle was

  beyond repair.

  “Madam, are you injured?” Kinvarra asked as he climbed the ditch. He stuck his riding crop under his arm and brushed his gloved hands together to knock the clinging snow from them. It was a hellishly cold night. Christmas tomorrow would be a chilly affair. But then of course his Christmases had been chilly for years, no matter the weather.

  The woman kept her head down. With shock? With shyness? For the sake of propriety? Perhaps he’d stumbled on some elopement or clandestine meeting.

  “Madam?” he asked again, more sharply. Whatever her fear of scandal, he needed to know if she required medical assistance.

  “Sweeting?” The yellow-haired fop bent to peer into the shadows cast by her hood. “Are you sure you’re unharmed? Speak, my dove. Your silence troubles my soul.”

  While Kinvarra digested the man’s outlandish phrasing, the woman stiffened and drew away. “For heaven’s sake, Harold, you’re not giving a recitation at a musicale.” With an impatient gesture, she flung back her hood and glared straight at Kinvarra.

  Even though he’d identified her the moment she spoke, he found himself staring dumbstruck into her face. A piquant, vivid, pointed face under an untidy tumble of luxuriant gold hair.

  Furious and incredulous, he wheeled on the milksop. “What the devil are you doing with my wife?”

  ***

  Alicia Sinclair, Countess of Kinvarra, was bruised, angry, uncomfortable, and agonizingly embarrassed. Not to mention suffering the aftereffects of her choking terror when the toppling carriage had tossed her around like a pebble in a torrent.

  Even so, her heart lurched into the wayward dance it always performed at the merest sight of Sebastian.

  She’d been married for eleven miserable years. Their short interval living as man and wife had been wretched. She disliked her husband more than any other man in the world. But nothing prevented her

  gaze from clinging to every line of that narrow, intense face with its

  high cheekbones, long, arrogant nose and sharply angled jaw. He looked older than the last time she’d seen him, more cynical if that was possible. But still handsome, still compelling, still vital in a way nobody else she knew could match.

  Damn him to Hades, he remained the most magnificent creature

  she’d ever seen.

  Such a pity his soul was as black as his glittering eyes.

  “After all this time, I’m flattered you recognize me, my lord,” she

  said silkily.

  “Lord Kinvarra, this is a surprise,” Harold s
tammered, faltering back as if anticipating violence. “You must wonder why I accompany the lady—”

  Oh, Harold, act the man, even if the hero is beyond your reach. You’re safe. Kinvarra doesn’t care enough about me to kill you.

  Although even the most indifferent husband took it ill when his wife chose a lover. And Kinvarra had always suffered an overabundance of pride. There wasn’t the slightest hope that he’d mistake Alicia’s reasons for traveling on this isolated road in the middle of the night. She stifled

  a rogue pang of guilt.

  Curse Kinvarra, she had absolutely nothing to feel guilty about. “I’ve recalled your existence every quarter these past ten years, my

  love,” her husband said equally smoothly, ignoring Harold’s dismayed interjection. Although the faint trace of Scottish brogue in Kinvarra’s deep voice indicated that he reined in his temper. His breath formed white clouds on the frigid air. “I’m perforce reminded when I pay your allowance. A substantial investment upon which I receive woefully little return.”

  “It warms the cockles of my heart to know that I linger in your thoughts,” she sniped. She refused to cower like a wet hen before his banked anger. He sounded reasonable, calm, controlled, but she had no trouble reading the tension in his broad shoulders or in the way his

  powerful hands opened and closed at his sides as if he’d dearly like to hit something.

  “In faith, my lady, you speak false. Creatures of ice have no use for a heart.” A faint, malicious smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “Should I warn this paltry fellow that he risks frostbite in your

  company?”

  She steeled herself against Kinvarra’s taunting. He couldn’t hurt her now. He hadn’t been able to hurt her since she’d left him. Any twinge was merely the result of temporary shakiness after the accident. That was all. It couldn’t be because this man retained the power to stick needles into her feelings.

  “My lord, egad, I protest.” Fortunately, shock made Harold sound less like a frightened sheep. “The lady is your wife. Surely she merits your chivalry at the very least.”

  Harold had never seen her in her husband’s company, and some reluctant and completely misplaced loyalty to Kinvarra meant she hadn’t explained why the Sinclairs lived apart. The accepted fiction was that the earl and his countess were polite strangers who by mutual design rarely met.

  Poor Harold, he was about to discover the nasty truth that the earl and his countess loathed each other.

  “Like hell she does,” Kinvarra muttered, casting her an incendiary glance under long dark eyelashes.

  Alicia was human enough to wish the bright moonlight didn’t reveal quite so much of her husband’s seething rage. But the fate that proved capricious enough to fling them together tonight of all nights wasn’t likely to heed her pleas.

  “Do you intend to present your cicisbeo?” Kinvarra’s voice remained quiet. She’d long ago learned that was when he was most lethal.

  Dear God, did he plan to shoot Harold after all?

  Her hands clenched in her skirts as fear tightened her throat. Lacerating as Kinvarra’s tongue could be, he’d never shown her a moment’s violence. But did that extend to the man she planned to take into her bed? Kinvarra was a crack shot and a famous swordsman. If it came to a duel, Harold wouldn’t stand a chance.

  “My lord, I protest the description,” Harold bleated, sidling further away. He’d clearly also heard the unspoken threat in Kinvarra’s question.

  Oh, for pity’s sake. Was it too much to wish that her suitor would stand up to the scoundrel she’d married as a silly chit of seventeen?

  Alicia drew a deep breath of freezing air and reminded herself that she favored Lord Harold Fenton precisely because he wasn’t an overbearing brute like her husband. Harold was a scholar and a poet,

  a man of the mind. She should consider it a mark of Harold’s superior intelligence that he was wary of Kinvarra.

  But her insistence didn’t convince her traitorous heart.

  How she wished she really was the callous witch Kinvarra called her. Then she’d be immune both to his insults and to this insidious attraction that she’d never conquered, no matter how she tried.

  “My lady?” Kinvarra asked, still in that even voice that struck a chill into her soul sharper than the winter wind. “Who is this…gentleman?”

  She stiffened her backbone and leveled her shoulders. She was made of stronger stuff than this. Never would she let her husband guess that

  he still had power over her. Her response was steady. “Lord Kinvarra, allow me to present Lord Harold Fenton.”

  Harold performed an uncertain bow without stepping any nearer. “My lord.”

  As he straightened, tense silence descended. Alicia shifted to try and warm up her icy feet, fulminating against the bad luck that threw her in Kinvarra’s way tonight.

  “Well, this is awkward,” Kinvarra said flatly, although she saw in his

  taut, dark face that his anger hadn’t abated one whit. “I don’t see why,” Alicia snapped.

  It wasn’t just her husband who tried her patience. There was her lily-livered lover and the perishing cold. The temperature must have dropped ten degrees in the last five minutes. She shivered, then silently cursed that Kinvarra noticed and Harold didn’t. Harold was too busy staring at her husband the way a mouse stared at an adder.

  “Do you imagine I’m so sophisticated that I’ll ignore discovering you in the arms of another man? My dear, you do me too much credit.” She stifled the urge to consign Kinvarra to perdition. Just as she

  stifled the poignant memory that once he’d called her his dear and his love and he’d meant it. Once, briefly, long ago. “If you’ll set aside your bruised vanity for the moment, you’ll understand that we merely

  require you to ride to the nearest habitation and request help. Then you and I can return to acting like mere acquaintances, my lord.”

  He laughed and she struggled to suppress the sensual awareness that rippled down her spine at that soft, deep sound. “Some things haven’t changed, I see. You’re still dishing out orders. And I’m still damned if I’ll play your lapdog.”

  “Can you see another solution?” she asked sweetly.

  “Yes,” he said with a snap of his straight white teeth. “I can leave you to freeze. Not that you’d notice. Your blood has always been colder than Satan’s icehouse.”

  Her pride insisted that she send him on his way with a flea in his ear. The weather—and what common sense remained under the urge to wound that always flared in Kinvarra’s vicinity—prompted her to sound more conciliatory.

  It was late. She and Harold hadn’t passed anyone on this country road. Bleak, snowy moors extended for miles around them. The grim truth was that if Kinvarra didn’t help, they were stranded until morning. And while she was dressed in good thick wool, she wasn’t prepared

  to endure a night in the open. The chill of the ground seeped through her fur-lined boots and she shifted again, trying to revive feeling in her frozen feet.

  “My lord…” During the year they’d lived together, she’d called him Sebastian. During their few meetings since, she’d clung to formality to keep him at a distance. “My lord, there’s no point in quarreling. Basic charity compels your assistance. I would consider myself in your debt

  if you fetch aid as quickly as possible.”

  He arched one black eyebrow in an imperious fashion that made her want to clout him. Not a new sensation. “Now that’s something I’d like to see.”

  “What?” “Gratitude.”

  He knew he had her at a disadvantage and he wasn’t likely to rise above that fact. She ground her teeth and battled to retain her manners. “It’s all I can offer.”

  The smile that curved his lips was pure devilry. A shiver with no connection to the cold ran through her.

  “Your imagination fails you, my dear countess.”

  Her throat closed with nerves—and that reluctant physical reaction


  she couldn’t ignore. He hadn’t shifted, yet suddenly she felt threatened. Which was ludicrous. During all their years apart, he’d given no indication he wanted anything from her except her absence. One chance meeting wasn’t likely to turn him into a robber baron ready to spirit her away to his lonely tower where he could have his way with her.

  Having his way with her was the last thing Kinvarra wanted, as she was humiliatingly aware.

  Nonetheless, she had to fight the urge to retreat. She knew from dispiriting experience that her only chance of handling Kinvarra was to feign control. “What do you want?”

  This time he did lean closer, until his great height overshadowed her. Close enough for her to think that if she stretched out one hand, she’d touch that powerful chest, those wide shoulders. “I want—”

  There was a piercing whinny and a sudden pounding of hooves on the snow. Appalled, disbelieving, Alicia turned to see Harold galloping off on one of the carriage horses, legs flailing as he struggled for purchase without stirrups.

  “Harold?”

  Her voice faded to nothing in the night. Her beau didn’t slow down. In fact, he kicked his mount’s sides to encourage greater speed. She’d been so engrossed in her battle with Kinvarra, she hadn’t even noticed that Harold had caught one of the stray horses.

  Kinvarra’s low laugh mocked her. “Oh, my dear. Commiserations. Your swain proves a sad disappointment. I wonder if he’s fleeing my temper or yours. You really have no luck in love, have you?”

  She was too astonished to be upset at Harold’s departure. Instead she focused on Kinvarra. Her voice turned hard. “No luck in husbands, at any rate.”