The Duke Who Saved Christmas

CHAPTER ONE – SYLVIE

There was a pig in the middle of the road.

I was more surprised than I probably should have been, but in my defense, the pig was wearing reindeer antlers.

How they were in place, I didn’t know. I couldn’t even begin to tell you how such a momentous feat was occurring, but it was a stark reminder of where I was.

Castleton. The Yorkshire Dales. Where pink and black pigs mooching about in the middle of the road wearing a reindeer antler headband wasn’t all that weird.

All right.

The reindeer headband was weird.

The pig, however, was totally normal.

Farm animals weren’t exactly known for staying inside their fields, and it wasn’t as if there was a shortage of those here.

Everywhere.

Fields were everywhere.

So were farm animals, to be fair, although they did tend to retreat to barns in the winter.

The frosts up here were sharp—sharper than I was used to after ten years living in the south of England where it was decidedly warmer.

Unless Jack Frost wanted to terrorise most of the population, of course, then all bets were off.

Especially when he got together with a pissed off Elsa.

Never mind. I was going off on a tangent.

The point remained that there was a tiny pig in the middle of the road, and the pig possessed a remarkably lacking sense of danger. Lone animals usually hightailed it into the nearest field when a car came, but this one was just standing there, staring at me.

All right. Not all animals. Like sheep.

Sheep didn’t count.

Sheep were absolute bastards.

And so were bloody pheasants on account of the fact they flew into your car instead of away from it.

Maybe a pheasant was where this miniature pig learnt its road safety.

I turned the key to stop the engine running, grabbed my phone, and got out, taking the key with me. The last thing I needed was to get locked out of my car on what I knew was an unnamed road with no serious civilisation for at least a twenty-minute drive.

Apparently, you could take the girl out of the countryside, but you couldn’t take the countryside out of the girl.

I turned on the torch on my phone, sighed, and looked at the pig. “What are you doing out here?”

The little black and pink porker that was either a piglet or one of those mini pigs looked at me.

Naturally, it didn’t talk back.

It was a shame. If it did, then I’d know where to return him. On the other hand, allowing animals the ability to speak sounded like a headache that should only be unleashed on Halloween.

Or, you know.

Never.

In hindsight, parrots were bad enough.

Gracious, could you imagine if cats were given the gift of speaking the English language? We’d never hear the end of their complaints.

Dogs? That I could get on board with. A great deal of their chatter would be saying how much they love us and how happy they were to see us, and that was the kind of thing you could never hear too many times.

That was why I wanted a dog more than I wanted a boyfriend.

The dog would appreciate me more. And they were trainable.

At least so said my dating history.

The pig stared at me for a moment longer before he turned away and walked towards the hedgerow. It disappeared into the darkness, and the branches of the roadside hedge snagged on its reindeer antlers, popping them off its head.

I walked over and bent down, getting the answer to my unspoken question.

A headband.

Why on Earth was a pig wearing a reindeer antler headband?

You know what? I wasn’t even going to go there. Castleton was full of peculiarities I’d long stopped trying to understand, and I was going to chalk this up as one of those.

Peculiar was really about the only word for it, wasn’t it?

All right, ‘bloody weird’ also worked, but that was two words.

I took the headband back into my car and tossed it on the front seat. There was a very good chance that my grandparents would know who the pig belonged to and could tell me where to drop off the headband.

I couldn’t believe that thought had crossed my mind. Returning a headband that belonged to a pig.

Jesus Christ. The countryside was scrambling my brain already.

I brushed it away with a swift shake of my head and started the car.

It was getting bloody cold out here, and I wanted to get to my grandparents’ house before my nipples froze off.

It was already pitch black and I hated driving in the dark as it was, never mind on country lanes in this pitch-black hell.

Still, I knew these pothole-ridden roads like the back of my hand.

The potholes, while annoying, were weirdly comforting. There was something to be said about a place that didn’t change, and it was great to see that Castleton Council were just as ruddy useless as they’d always been.

After all, why fill in potholes when you could give yourself a Christmas bonus? Pumping up a fat cat salary was a far more useful way of spending the resident’s local council tax than fixing the roads, after all.

I made the final turn to the road that would lead me to Castleton. Butterflies erupted in my stomach, and the feeling that tickled at my nerve endings was something between excitement and downright terror.

I hadn’t visited home in five years, and here I was, three weeks before Christmas, rolling into the village like I was coming back from the dead.

At least it wasn’t for anything bad. Like someone dying.

With my general life luck and my sister’s notoriously bad luck in the romance department, my family had started a literal betting pool thinking that I wouldn’t return until someone popped their clogs.

I couldn’t be mad about it.

If I’d been allowed to bet on myself, I’d have chosen that very option.

Thankfully for my baby sister, Hazel, her luck had changed two-and-a-half years ago when she’d met her now-fiancé, Julian.

She’d screamed to me on that very day that he was The One.

I had, as the dutiful big sister, promised I would come home for her wedding that she swore would happen, assuming it never would.

I didn’t tell her that, of course. In my defence, it wasn’t as if that feeling was entirely warranted.

Her three prior engagements hadn’t exactly fuelled me with the greatest confidence that she’d actually make it down the aisle with a man she’d met ten minutes before our phone call.

Well, I was eating crow.

Lots of it. Several murders of them, actually.

Julian had proposed to her last Christmas Eve, and that very lovely moment I’d witnessed on the screen of my laptop was exactly why I was chugging along the pitch-black lanes of rural Yorkshire on my way home.

Hazel’s Christmas-loving heart meant she had only one vision for her wedding, and that would be a winter wonderland on Christmas Eve.

I couldn’t blame her—growing up where we did meant that loving the festive season was largely engrained into each and every resident, and she’d really taken it to heart.

Castleton was known for one thing and one thing only: Christmas. Every year was bigger, brighter, and better than the last. The tree in the village square was taller, the lights glittered more, and the overall vibe during December was very Mariah Carey.

On steroids.

With a cup of coffee in one hand and a Red Bull in the other.

My love for Christmas had somewhat dampened after living in the dreary greyness that was southern England. Wet and windy Christmas mornings in Dorset weren’t quite the same as the usual snowy dreams I’d grown up with in Castleton.

Seriously.

The town looked like a Christmas card.

I didn’t blame my sister for wanting to get married on Christmas Eve. I was also doubly glad that it meant I could see my grandparents and parents on something other than a screen since they’d visited me three years ago.

Not that my trip home was going to be relaxing.

Oh, no. Not for me.

I was pulling double wedding duty.

I wasn’t even charging my sister my full wedding planner fee, either. And yes, she could consider that her wedding gift. I’d pulled some big strings to get her the venue she’d wanted, and that hadn’t been easy given that it was condemned for destruction.

I was glad Julian came from money—and loved Hazel dearly—because the council had charged some pounds for that, and the insurance had been through the roof.

Yes. My next three weeks would not be the glory of the excited build up to Christmas, but a mix of maid of honour and wedding planner duties.

Honestly, a lot more of those crossed over than you’d think.

That wasn’t to say I wasn’t happy to be here.

I was. Sort of. As a teenager, I’d wanted to escape the small village and see the world. It also seemed like the only way to escape the bullying that chased me through secondary school, and university was my ticket out of Castleton and into a brighter, better world.

Well, that was what eighteen-year-old me had thought ten years ago. I’d only been back once since, and that was little more than a flying visit for my grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary party.

University had given me a lot, even if my dream had changed over the years. Granted, the art degree I’d obtained was largely useless these days, but I did love a good doodle.

What it came down to was that I just didn’t love Castleton the way my family did, and it’d never been somewhere that I’d necessarily seen myself living in for the rest of my life.

I was just happy to see my family again, and I smiled as I pulled along the sweeping driveway that led to my grandparents’ house.

My house, technically.

They’d wanted to move three years ago, and I’d been in a position to buy the house from them.

They’d always intended it to be an inheritance for me and Hazel anyway, but she didn’t want the house, and it seemed like a good investment for me at the time given how much cheaper houses were up north.

Buying a house in the south was more and more of a pipeline dream as time went on and house prices rose faster than my savings account.