Elisabeth Fairchild

Valentine’s Change of Heart

By Elisabeth Fairchild

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Table of Contents

Copyright

Also By

The Silent Suitor

The Counterfeit Coachman

Miss Dornton’s Hero

Lord Endicott’s Appetite

A Fresh Perspective

Marriage a la Mode

Breach of Promise

A Game of Patience

Love Will Find the Way (Novella)

The Ramsay Family Saga

The Loveknot

Lord Ramsay’s Return

The Rakehell’s Reform

Provocateur 
NEW!

The Valentine Duo

Captain Cupid

Valentine’s Change of Heart

Christmas Revelry

The Holly and the Ivy

Sugarplum Surprises

The Christmas Spirit  
NEW!

Felicity’s Forfeit (Novella)

A Christmas Canvas (Novella)

The Mistletoe Kiss (Novella)

To the courageous, who leap,

and especially to those who get back up again

A
cold wall of mist pressed in on Valentine Wharton, hemming in the landscape of intent into which he rode, wetting his cheeks, dripping from hat brim and limp locks on this, his birthday. His rebirth day.

A thin white flag of mist flew from his mouth when he loosed a laugh. Not surrender. Never surrender.
Dragon’s breath.

His best friend Cupid had dubbed it so on the battlefields of France, the fighting spirit of the dragon in each of them, drifting from noses and mouth in the chill rains. The notion had bolstered their courage, fired their imaginations.

Val was in need of a bit of bolstering this Valentine’s Day. He missed Cupid’s company, his quiet, good cheer. He had not seen much of him since the wedding, since the night his fellow marksman had shot him in the leg.

The old wound ached from the damp weather, reminding him of a dark night, a harder rain. With gloved hand he rubbed at the knot in his right thigh. Cupid’s arrow. His enemy not the French but a friend.
No! My enemy is the drink, mock courage. Mustn’t forget. Mustn’t let down my guard.

Would it always trouble him? Always serve to remind him? Cupid’s best shot, the one that had turned his life--and his thinking--inside out.

The bay’s neck gleamed in the pearly morning light, its mane, flung against his face by the wind, stung like the memory. Behind him, an embodiment of the past that meant to catch up with him, the carriage rumbled and splashed.

Val remembered other gray mornings, in France, in Cumbria, another Valentine’s Day, and on the road a young woman in a violet cloak.

Penny.

“Val!” Joy in her voice. A spark of light in her eyes. How in Heaven had she found it within her to be glad to see him when he had left things so badly?

Penny. Pretty Penny.
I thought to pocket you again, my misspent coin.
He closed his eyes, shut out the vision, sadness permeating him like the mist, a chill that seeped down to bone. He longed for a drink, with sudden, gut-wrenching, mouth-souring urgency. Something to put fire in his belly, warmth in the cracked stone of his heart. He did not want to see her, even in memory, did not want to recall all that he had done, and said, and ruined.

Her words haunted him still. “How much of your life is forgotten, Val? Lost? Remembered falsely?”

He tipped his head, a rivulet of water dousing his neck. Shaking wet hair out of his eyes, he raked it under the hat with a resolute sweep of his hand. Blast the past! He was intent on building a fresh future.

I make this journey in search of freshly minted coin, in search of. . . the spirit of the dragon. Penny Foster, now Penny Shelbourne, is the past. Spent. Lost. Like the trees in the mist. Like the tenderness in me.

His own fault. He had gone about it all wrong—unmindful of the implications of his own actions, his dagger sharp tongue. He and the damned spirits.

He spurred the horse through the gateway to the old Elizabethan manor. Gargoyle dragons, imbibing too freely, spewed rain rather than fire. Heads and stomachs of stone. That’s what it takes.
I am not made of stone. I only thought I was.

He stepped down from his horse, splashed through puddles, burst through the door, wet boots slipping on the flagstones, unsteady on his pins, as he had been many a time before, throat wet, feet dry. An oath slipped his lips, entirely inappropriate in this learned atmosphere.

He laughed at the thought, a dry, sardonic laughter that echoed in the empty hallway. Children sang in one direction, a young girl recited poetry in the other. The place smelled of wet wool, chalk dust, moldy book leather. He closed his eyes and drank it in.

Different dragons here, the dragons of innocence. He could remember in some distant past his own innocence. The odors brought it rushing back without fail, the same way the smell of rain, gunpowder, and wet horse made him remember France, the singing state of heightened awareness that had ruled his every waking moment there, until the burn of too much rum had allowed him to forget, to still the anguished cries--the voices of the dying.

He brushed his gloved hand across a moisture-beaded mouth, reaching automatically, out of habit, for the hip flask he no longer carried. Made of silver, it was embossed with a dragon, its tail wrapped around a castle’s turret.

No more warm burn of forgetfulness to fire his veins. No more false courage. He would need the real kind to do what he had set out to do.

It was harder than he had anticipated. Saying no, and no, and no while need raged, and anger rose, scalding, to the back of his throat. He licked his lips, and swallowed the ragged edge of thirst, once more, with renewed resolve.

Felicity.

The headmistress’s office looked the same as when last he had visited: green blotter upon the desk, striped aspidistra in a porcelain pot by the window, a painting of two small children and a pained looking spaniel behind her, a yellowing, outdated globe near the door--the realm’s horizons expanding--as did his own.

A new world, a new Valentine Wharton. Something larger than the wing-backed chair Mrs. Northgate bade him sit in, the leather gone scaly.

“You are certain you wish to take her with you, my lord, on such a long journey? A child her age may prove a burden.”

A burden too long shirked. He said with veiled sarcasm, “I’ve no doubt.”

The headmistress blinked at him, as if unclear what part of her remark he met with such certainty. With a wave of her hand, she summoned passing footsteps from the hallway into the austere tidiness of her domain.

“Elaine.”

“Yes, Mrs. Northgate?”

The voice was that of a young woman: gentle, subservient, agreeable. With the words came a cool whiff of almond-scented soap, and the vibration of a presence immediately behind his chair.

Val turned to look into dark, guarded eyes, soot dark hair pulled severely away from porcelain pale cheeks. A face dominated by huge dark eyes, and darkly arching brows, her lips pressed tight. Those eyes seemed in that quickly averted glance, fearful or shy, he could not be sure which. Here was a background sort of creature. Timid tabby.

Not at all the sort of woman he was drawn to. He might have passed her by a half dozen times without noticing anything but those eyes.

He recognized evidence of intelligence there, and a spark, as if a fire lurked in the depths of her. Recognition? Disapproval? A dragon?

He blinked, surprised. 
Do I know you, puss?

“Miss Deering will fetch Felicity,” Mrs. Northgate assured him.

He knew the name at once, stared at her a moment longer than was polite as she bowed her head, dark hair parted down the middle, raven dark wings pulled over her ears, plaited in a neatly woven braided style that confined it in a tidy knot at the nape of her neck.

“Yes, of course.” She turned to leave, her every movement carefully contained, understated, designed to go unnoticed. She avoided eye contact, and yet she knew he stared at her. The faintest bloom of raspberry stained her cheeks. She slid a wary look from beneath a dark fan of lashes. “If you will be so good as to wait,” she suggested.

I am neither good, nor patient, and I do not care to wait.

He rose from the wing-backed chair and briefly clasped the headmistress’s hand, just as Cupid would have done, well-mannered Cupid. “A pleasure. I shall just tag along if you do not mind.”

Before Mrs. Northgate could object he was out the door and discreetly following Miss Deering, two ees. Not Miss D-E-A-ring always mentioned in Felicity’s letters, but dearest Miss D-E-E ring. Her stride was almost soundless, and swift.

A deering on the run, a younger doe than imagined.
She will do, Miss Deering. I’ve a proposition for her.

“Miss Deering reminds me of Penny,” Felicity had written. And then she had crossed out the Penny, and written in above it, Mrs. Shelbourne.

The carefully scribed words had left him thirsty. He had stood a long moment considering the craving, hand claw-like, crimping the page. Just one glass of wine, just one to take the edge off.

He had rung for Yarrow. The old man had met his request with baleful eyes.

“There is no wine in the house, my lord. No spirits at all, not even for cooking. As per your request, my lord.”

A request made the night the not-so-well-mannered Cupid had shot him in the leg.
The night you almost killed your daughter.
The unspoken truth hung between them. Yarrow would never say it, but the thought had to have crossed his mind as clearly as it had crossed Val’s.

Val’s heart ached to think of Penny, his bright Penny, who had not given up hope when hope was, he had been convinced, lost forever. He had forsworn both--Penny and drink--for Felicity’s sake--sweet Felicity--the careless mistake of a child he had been ready to die for.

He had sent her away to school, this child he barely knew. While he battled spirits, and memories, his daughter better left to another’s care, another’s instruction. Her own personal dragons.

A sweetness had marked her every letter home to him--dutiful letters--written because he had asked her to, not because she longed to communicate with the stranger who was her father. In those letters Miss Deering had often found mention.

“Clever Miss Deering. She speaks five languages fluently, plays three different instruments, and knows the most interesting details about the farthest flung places.”