A Midwinter Prince (A Midwinter Prince #1)

Chapter One

The

first really cruel night of winter: a skin-stinging bitterness of

snow.

Laurence

Fitzroy, nineteen years old, heir to a baronetcy and who knew how

many acres of Suffolk countryside, stopped on the steps of the

Lyceum, oblivious to the exiting crowd he was forcing to part

around him. He fastened his pale silk scarf over the open neck of

his shirt, wondering vaguely what had happened to the bow tie he’d

impatiently ripped off during the performance. Laurie liked opera

well enough, but first-night shows where his father’s only

motivation for being there was the need to be seen in the best box

in the house… He drew a deep breath of the lung-catching air,

feeling himself wake up, become alive once more to the lights, the

blistering cold, the living river of human souls parting to

accommodate him. He was bored, restless, lonely.

Taxis

were pulling up by the pavement, two abreast, almost blocking the

thoroughfare. No sign of the limo. Charlie must have had one

cigarette too many with Mrs. Gibson down in the kitchen before

setting off. Laurie sighed. That wouldn’t please the old man one

bit. He glanced up the Strand as if he might turn and walk in that

direction instead, into the night.

Sir William Fitzroy stood on the pavement in the crowd,

Laurie’s mother clasped to his side like a decorative, blank-faced

doll. As Laurie watched, his great red face swung around and

darkened still further with angry blood upon spotting his son

hanging about on the opera house steps, looking as usual completely

disoriented. He raised one meaty hand and made an unmistakable

gesture. Here, boy. Now.

Laurie

was not in the habit of rebellion, and now would be a stupid time

to start. As for walking off into the night, wealthy or not, in

real terms he had on him the price of a bus fare and one night in a

B and B. Then, without further cash injections from the huge,

grim-faced man waiting on the far side of the road, he was…well, he

was that shape in the blankets over there, that fragile-looking

piece of human flotsam huddled in the doorway to Lindley’s. Except,

knowing him, he’d have let someone else steal his blankets. Laurie

sighed and began to make his way across the road. His mother, frail

little sparkling figure in the circle of Sir William’s arm, was

looking for him anxiously too. What the hell was the hurry? There

was still no sign of the sleek Daimler in which Sir William liked

to be seen going home from events like this. Lesser mortals, Laurie

couldn’t help but notice, had piled into their taxis and even their

buses and underground train stations and made their escape by

now.

The boy

huddled in the blankets outside Lindley’s was asleep, his head

tipped back against the concrete pillar of the doorway. He had

close-cropped black hair and skin Laurie thought would be olive in

daylight, though now he was painted by the lights of passing cars,

the shifting spectrum of the window display. His face, passive and

grave, had a sculpted foreign beauty Laurie had never seen

before.

He was

terribly still. Laurie noted how his own body heat had leached away

in just the time it had taken him to cross the road, how he was

pulling at his thin tuxedo jacket and starting to shiver. How long

would he survive without shelter on the streets of London

tonight?

He

didn’t know if it was curiosity or fear that drew him closer. This

boy was his own age, not dissimilar to him in looks and build. What

were the real differences? What force dictated that Laurie would go

home in a limo tonight and sleep between warm sheets, while this

image in the transforming mirror remained here, abandoned in the

bitter night to live or…

God, was

he breathing? Slowly, barely aware of what he was doing, Laurie

struggled through the last currents of the crowd, entered the

doorway, and crouched beside him.

He was

not more philanthropic or caring than the ordinary run of teenage

boys. Up till now, his horizon had been so crowded with his own

joys and pains that he’d spent little time looking past them. And

this was far from the first down-and-out he had seen on the

pavements outside theatres and opera halls while all around him

denizens of another world—his world—glittered and burst and

disappeared like bubbles from a glass of champagne. Those others

had not touched him. Laurie had not yet been sufficiently human

himself to accept properly that they were too. Something in the

line of this boy’s smooth, exposed throat, the abandonment of one

hand, which had fallen palm up out of the blankets and lay within

inches of passing women’s spiked heels… “Hello,” Laurie said,

uncertainly. “Are you all right?”

Brown

eyes flicked wide. The open hand snapped shut like a clam, plunged

inside the parka for a knife it either did not find or chose not to

deploy, and emerged a second later, thrust out toward Laurie in a

gesture of desperate warding off. “Please. I don’t have

anything.”

“I…I know. I’m not going to hurt you.” Laurie sat back on his

heels. He was trying to place the accent—not Hungarian, though not

far off. Something Eastern European, rich and softly modulated. “I

was just afraid you were dead.”

The boy

gazed up at him. Then to Laurie’s surprise, the fear drained from

his fine features, and they lit up with a wide, compelling grin.

“Perhaps I am. I have never seen a city sky so full of stars.

Perhaps you’re the angel of death.”

“That should bother you more than it seems to,” Laurie said,

helplessly smiling back. But the boy’s attention was no longer on

him. He was looking up over Laurie’s shoulder, up beyond the

rooftops of the Strand. Instinctively Laurie glanced that way

too.

The

sounds of the midnight street faded around him. No, he had never

seen a sky like this, either. Even on his family’s estate down in

Suffolk, light pollution from nearby houses and farms had spun a

web across the night. And in London—well, it never happened. You

were lucky to catch a moonrise. Yet suddenly the tops of the

buildings were bearing between them a river of light, a

thousand-hued pinprick blaze that stole the breath from his lungs.

“Beautiful,” he said, then recalled himself to reality. “That means

it’s going to be bloody cold, doesn’t it?”

The boy

returned his gaze to him. It was serene now, looking for some

reason at Laurie as if he was the one in need of help, the one lost

in the night. Laurie felt it like a kindly brush to his skin. The

boy said quietly, “‘Oh, God, make small the old star-eaten blanket

of the sky…’”

Laurie

ran the words through his mind. He did know them, though he

couldn’t be sure where from. “‘That I may fold it round me and in

comfort lie.’ Where did you learn that?”

Reaching into the pack wedged behind him in the doorway, the

boy produced a dog-eared paperback book. Twentieth Century Poetry, Laurie read

in the passing headlights, remembering now with embarrassment that

he’d learned the lines for himself while stuck for an hour in a

broken-down Tube train. Part of London Underground’s campaign to

bring literature to the masses, a few well-loved verses on the

trains’ walls between the ads for flights and cosmetic surgery,

seemingly the only way to get it through his thick head.

“Look,” he said awkwardly after a moment. “I can’t make the sky

into a blanket for you, but…” He reached into his pocket, pulled

out the twenty-pound note his mother had given him for drinks and

ice creams tonight, as if he had been ten years old. “Will that get

you into a shelter tonight? I think you’ll freeze to death if you

stay out here.”

The boy

studied him, shadowed eyes fathomless. “What’s your

name?”

“Laurie.”

“Some advice for you. Don’t start seeing us, Laurie. Once you

do, you won’t be able to stop, and it will take you years to teach

yourself to pretend again that you don’t.”

Laurie

opened his mouth to reply. Before he could, a large hand descended

from out of the night and grabbed him by the collar of his

expensive tux. He scrambled upright, trying to make the effort look

like his own, not wholly the result of his father’s grip on his

scruff. On his way, he managed to drop the twenty into his new

acquaintance’s lap. He did not see if the boy took it, was too

involved in the effort of tearing away from Sir William’s iron

clutch, turning his shove into a voluntary walk toward the limo now

waiting by the pavement. It was the only way of dealing with the

old man: to do what he told you and make it look like your own

work. Laurie shot a glance back toward the boy, smiling in

unquenched mischief. “Yours?”

“Sasha,” the boy returned quickly, like a secret thrown between

them, so soft the word was almost lost in the whisper of

traffic.

Laurie

shook off his father’s grip just in time to avoid being tossed into

the backseat like a sack of flour. His father slammed in after him,

so forcefully the pressure change made Laurie’s ears

pop.

The argument began straightaway and was very predictable.

Slouched in the limo’s backseat—noticing in some way for the first

time how delicious and unlikely its warmth was, how embracing its

leather upholstery, how complete its protection against the

night—Laurie folded his arms and let it happen. No argument at all,

really—just a trick of endurance, while his father thundered out

all the rage inside him, against a world that contained idle

chauffeurs, scrounging tinker tramps, and children of his who felt

the need to rub shoulders with them, handing them cash earned by

decent British citizens to go and buy drugs with. Laurie seldom

tried to reply. If he did, all he gained was the terror of watching

his mother’s beautiful, poised, aristocratic little mask begin to

crumble into tears. Besides, there was almost an interest to be had

in listening to Sir William, to learn, apart from anything else,

how many epithets he could find to apply to the subspecies of