A Rohan Family Christmas (The House of Rohan #6)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

“Your mother has lost her mind.”

James Bartholomew Benedick de Malheur, more commonly known as Brat, surveyed his father with a jaundiced air. “I doubt it,” he said dryly.

His father, Lucien de Malheur, more commonly known as the Scorpion, was not discouraged. “She’s gone Christmas mad! She’s decorated everything—there isn’t a spare amount of wall unadorned by holly and ivy and mistletoe hanging from every door.”

“Surely not every door. You’d never get anything done.”

“She has three Christmas trees! Twenty years ago we didn’t even have one, and now she has one in the dining room, one in the drawing room, and one in the great hall. The servants have been doing nothing but decorate for the last two weeks and the place smells like a forest.”

“I can think of worse things for it to smell like,” Brat observed.

“She’s put candles in every window of Pawlfrey Hall. Do you know how many windows there are?”

“It sounds disgustingly festive—I’m just glad I don’t have to be there to partake in it.”

“That’s what you think,” Lucien said. “Your mother wants you home.”

Brat’s expression of polite boredom didn’t change. “She always does.”

“This time she means it. We’ve got most of the uncles coming with their large and assorted families, and she wants her eldest there too.”

“No.”

“Tell that to your mother.”

“You tell it to my mother,” Brat shot back. “I should have known this wasn’t a mere social call. Tell her you couldn’t find me. Tell her I’m abroad. Tell her I’m dead.”

“That would go over well,” Lucien drawled. “You’ll come for Christmas, do your mother’s bidding, and you won’t have to deal with family again for another year.”

“I don’t have to deal with family now. Uncle Benedick disapproves of me, Uncle Brandon dislikes me, and their wives deplore me.”

“I never would have thought you such a sensitive soul, to let your relatives’ opinions matter. If you’re so delicate, then perhaps you’d better mend your ways.”

“I don’t give a damn what they think of me. I’m merely pointing out that I won’t be the most welcome addition to the house party. The skeleton at the feast, so to speak. The only person less desirable is my stalwart Uncle Charles.”

The Scorpion shuddered. “God save us from such a fate. At least he’s promised to his sour wife’s family, as always. He finds the bunch of us much too diabolical for his saintly peace of mind.”

“God help us,” Brat murmured.

“So you don’t have to worry about him.” He rose from his chair and strode around the elegant confines of his son’s London drawing room.

“I don’t have to worry about anyone. I’m not coming.

Christmas is simply a construct of organized religion, used to lure people away from Saturnalia.

Now I’d be a great deal more amenable to a rollicking harvest festival than some innocuous and unlikely baby who’s supposedly going to save us from our sins.

Mine are too great to be forgiven, and I intend to continue on in my flagrant ways without being distracted by my numerous family members. ”

“You need to worry about your mother.”

He saw the shadow cross his son’s dark eyes, and he knew he’d got him. Brat de Malheur didn’t care for anyone or anything, a true offspring of his regrettable father, but he had a soft spot where his mother was concerned.

“You can…”

“She cried,” Lucien said, shutting Brat up.

He rallied. “She doesn’t cry.”

“She gets sentimental at Christmas time, and she wants her family around her. She wants you.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“I know you don’t. But I will not tolerate your mother’s tears. You’ll leave with me this afternoon and comport yourself like a gentleman around your young cousins.”

“Does that mean I can be my real self with the aunts and uncles?”

Lucien shuddered. “God help us all.”

“That abominable boy is coming for Christmas,” Benedick Rohan, Viscount Rohan, warned his wife as they were dressing for dinner.

They’d arrived at the house in the Lake District that afternoon, exhausted after the long trip, only to be greeted by his younger brother Brandon and the unwelcome news that the Scorpion’s son and heir, an absolute doppelganger to Lucien’s diabolical ways, was to join them for their holiday festivities.

“If I’d known that, I would have found a reason to cry off. ”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Melisande “Charity” Rohan said cheerfully. “He’s no worse than you were at that age.”

“He’s a great deal worse. I wasn’t kicked out of Cambridge.”

“You were sent down twice,” his wife reminded him. “They just happened to allow you back.”

“I didn’t hold rapacious gatherings and…and orgies…”

“Your father did. And your grandfather.”

“I didn’t strip green young men of their fortunes at the card table and then watch as they blew their brains out.”

“I hardly think that was Brat’s fault. Young Merrick shouldn’t have gambled.”

“You’ve a hard heart,” said Benedick to the woman with the softest heart in England, and she merely smiled.

“Maybe he’s turned over a new leaf.”

“Not if the gossips are to be believed. And the children adore him. Charles Edward has already been a bit too curious about our reprehensible nephew.”

“Charles Edward has you for a father, not the Scorpion. He’ll be fine.”

“Perhaps,” Benedick said gloomily. “I’m just not sure about us.”

“I’m so happy,” Miranda de Malheur, Countess of Rochdale, said as she tucked a sprig of greenery into the barrel of a dueling pistol.

“I haven’t had James home for Christmas in three years, and I just couldn’t do without him any longer.

I expect Lucien will be bringing him back with him any day now. ”

“You must be happy,” Emma Rohan said as she followed suit, placing a sprig of holly beside a battle axe.

The weapons that had once adorned every wall in Pawlfrey House were now limited to the study, the library, and the great hall, and everything was far out of reach of tiny hands.

The display looked oddly inviting, and Emma reached for another branch of greenery.

“You don’t mind, do you?” Miranda said anxiously. She was a beautiful woman in her late forties, her brown hair lightly streaked with gray, her face the content visage of a long and happy life. “I know he can be a bit difficult at times.”

“He didn’t call me fat,” Emma pointed out.

“Melisande’s not fat,” Miranda protested. “She’s just comfortably padded. You know Benedick worships the ground she walks on.”

“Which was why he said he was going to take a horsewhip to your son when he made a remark about Melisande.”

“James won’t make the same mistake again.” Miranda said serenely.

Emma wisely said nothing, tucking a spring of laurel into the chain of a mace. “At least there are no young women in the household,” she said again. “The girls are too young to realize just how bewitching a rake can be.”

“Oh, I don’t think he’s a rake, do you? He hasn’t compromised anyone, more’s the pity. If he had, I could be a grandmother by now.”

“I wouldn’t wish that on any poor woman,” Emma said unthinkingly.

Miranda gasped. “You don’t know my son. Once he decides to marry, he’ll become a most excellent husband, just like his father. Look at Lucien. He was quite despicable before he met me.”

And quite despicable afterward, Emma thought. Even now a little bit of the Scorpion went a long way. “I only meant a forced marriage is unpleasant for all concerned.”

“Not always,” Miranda said with a secret smile.

Emma wisely said nothing. “Will he be staying the full two weeks?”

“If I have anything to say about it he will. If he tries to leave early, I’ll cry.”

“You never cry.”

“I can summon tears upon occasion. I managed to squeeze out a few when I sent Lucien off to find James.”

“And he believed you.”

“He loves me,” Miranda said simply. “If I feel strongly enough to fake tears then he knows it’s important. He won’t come back without him.”

“Splendid,” said Emma with a fixed smile. “It will be wonderful to see him.”

Brat decided to count his blessings, of which there were few.

He was being forced to attend the Christmas festivities at the lake house, surrounded by his revoltingly happy aunts and uncles and his equally enamored parents, he’d be besieged by importunate children, and he’d be forced to attend neighborhood gatherings and flirt with vapid young women and dance with clod-footed country girls.

He would have no outlet for his prodigious sexual drive, but then, that would be no different in in the city.

He’d dismissed his latest mistress with suitably expensive gifts, and he’d had yet to choose another, so it wasn’t as if there was blessed surcease waiting for him back in London.

His father’s carriage was beautifully sprung, the squabs rich velvet, the animal throws warm and comfortable.

Unfortunately, comfort had never been one of his main needs.

Neither had filial obedience. There was no escaping the fact that this was a command performance, and he would have to be on his best behavior, which was equivalent to that of a great white shark.

He didn’t wish to punish his mother for insisting he come back—he loved her, as much as he loved anyone in this world.

But she was going to regret dragging him into this family reunion.

They’d driven north very fast, another mixed blessing.

Travel was tedious, but it brought him to his destination more swiftly, and to say he wasn’t looking forward to it was an understatement of colossal proportions.

The very thought turned his sour mood into one of bleak, black despair.

He couldn’t be completely unpleasant to all around him, but he could come close.