Page 24 of A Holiday By Gaslight

“Does the snow get very dirty there? I imagine it must with all of the activity in the streets.”

“Excessively so. Have you never seen it?”

She shook her head. “We’ve spent every winter here since I was born.”

“Would you like to spend Christmas in London?” he asked. “To live there all the year round?”

Her stomach gave a nervous quiver. “I suppose it would be all right.” They walked in silence for several steps. “Did you enjoy holidays in London when you were a boy?”

“I worked through most of them.” Ned’s mouth hitched into a fleeting smile at her expression. “You look appalled.”

“Oh no,” she stammered. “I just…I didn’t realize…”

“All of my family worked. The shop was closed on Christmas Day, but there was always someone who needed something. My parents rarely turned people away. They were forever obliging their customers. It’s a central tenet of their business.”

“What sort of work did you do for them?”

“During the holidays? Deliveries, mostly. On Christmas Eve I used to take people their parcels. Last-minute Christmas gifts, most of them. Up one city street and down another, through the sleet and snow. It would get so I couldn’t feel my hands.”

“That’s dreadful.”

“It wasn’t, actually. People were grateful for their parcels. They tipped rather generously. And then later, when my deliveries were finished and I returned to our apartments above the shop, my mother would give me a hot cup of tea and a biscuit. It was my reward for a job well done.”

Sophie refrained from saying that a biscuit seemed a poor reward for a child forced to traipse through the sleet and snow on Christmas Eve. A child who was frozen through. Who couldn’t even feel his hands. “Are you very close to your parents?”

“As much as they’ll permit.”

Her brow furrowed. “I don’t understand. Don’t they wish to be close with you?”

“My parents taught me the habits of hard work and economy. They also taught me self-denial, which I felt most keenly when they made me put by half my earnings each week. It was a hard lesson, but a good one. Because of them, I was able to save enough to make my first investment. It was a merchant ship sailing to the West Indies. Murray and I each put all our savings into its cargo. Had the ship been lost at sea, we’d have been ruined. Instead, it arrived safely back in port, making us very rich indeed.” He looked at her briefly. “You might say that everything I have I owe to my parents. But they’re not warm people, for all that. They’re not given to an excess of emotion.”

She cast him a sidelong glance. His expression was as solemn as ever, but his black hair was rumpled, a section near the front standing half on end. It was oddly endearing. On every other occasion she’d been with him, his hair had been combed into meticulous order. There had never been a strand out of place. She decided she preferred it this way. He looked far less intimidating. As if he’d just risen from his bed in the morning.

The thought brought another flush of heat to her face. She swiftly looked away from him, pretending to be absorbed in admiring the snow-covered landscape. “Do you consider yourself to be a warm person?”

“Compared to my parents?”

“Compared to anyone.”

Ned didn’t answer right away. When he did, he spoke with a greater than usual degree of care. “I’m not a man given to great expressions of emotion. It’s not how I was raised. It’s not how I’ve lived my life. But I do feel things deeply. I may not always show it, but I do.”

She stopped beneath one of the trees that stood at the edge of the path. Its wide branches provided meager shelter against a sudden flurry of snow. “I was afraid you were made of stone. Until the day I came to your office, I thought you might be.”

“I wasn’t very warm to you then.”

“No, but it was then I realized…” She backed up against the tree trunk as he came to stand in front of her. He was so tall and darkly handsome; his blue eyes fixed on her with a single-mindedness that made her pulse tremble.

How many ladies before her had been the beneficiaries of that intent blue stare? How many had held Edward Sharpe riveted?

A wave of shyness assailed her. She was no experienced London flirt. She couldn’t act the coquette to save her life.

“What did you realize?” he asked.

“That I’d hurt you somehow. Until that day, I hadn’t thought you capable of being hurt. I didn’t think you cared about me one way or another.”

“A foolish assumption.”

“Based on the evidence of my eyes and ears.”