A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong: A Blackshear Family novella (B 0.5) by Cecilia Grant Page A

was a chance to upend hundreds of years of social order, if only for a night. In my house, it’s chiefly given the younger children an occasion to be pert and capricious without consequence.”
    “What about you?” There she went, looking at him again. “What form does the misrule take when you’re the one to find the bean?”
    It was his own prurient mind, not anything in her face or intonation, that wove a ribbon of innuendo through her words. His own mind, too, that lost no time in conjuring eight or nine kinds of misrule with which he might answer. If the maid weren’t here, and if Miss Sharp was willing, and if he were a man of fewer scruples, he could put into action some thoughts that had brewed in the back of his brain since their departure from Mosscroft, on the matter of how two long-limbed people could best arrange themselves for mutual enjoyment in the confines of a carriage.
    “No. That doesn’t happen.” He spoke with a little more vehemence than he’d intended, warmth stealing from under his poor wilted cravat up into his cheeks. “That is to say, I see to it that one of the younger children always finds the bean. It’s a game more suited to them, really.”
    “But the youngest is fifteen, you said. None of your siblings is truly a child anymore.”
    “Indeed.” He inclined his head, to steal a short respite from her too-keen curiosity. “I exempted myself when they were small, and I suppose it simply became habit, as these things do.” Not that he owed her any accounting. “At all events, I sincerely doubt anyone’s the poorer for it. I haven’t much taste for mischief and disarray. I’m sure my reign would be a disappointing one.” Though now he thought of it, Martha was every bit as sober and mindful of rules as he, and nobody ever seemed to find Twelfth Night lacking when the bean turned up in her piece of cake.
    “That’s mere conjecture.” She spoke like the Miss Sharp who’d vexed him at the breakfast table, quick with an argument on topics that were really none of her concern. “You cannot know what your reign would be like if you’ve never even given it a try. Perhaps you’d find misrule suits you after all.”
    “Perhaps.” The words came quickly. “But I was brought up to believe there’s more to consider, in choosing my behavior, than whether or not something suits me.” Even if he hadn’t heard the sudden frost in his voice, he would have known of it from Miss Sharp’s reaction. She blinked, and said nothing, and abruptly averted her eyes to the window.
    A fine thread of guilt went unspooling deep in his stomach. He hadn’t meant to be uncivil, or to cast aspersions aloud on her upbringing. But maybe she’d take a lesson about presuming to tell people how they ought to live their lives.
    No doubt she’d thought she was doing him a kindness, urging him to kick up his heels and loosen his too-tight cravat and learn to savor careless pleasures. As though he hadn’t heard such urgings before, from every feckless acquaintance made uncomfortable by his example of propriety, or every heedless one who sailed through life never noticing that it was the vigilant people, the people standing back from the merriment, who stomped out the fiery raisins dropped by others and kept everything from going up in flames.
    And how was he to have known his curt words would sting her, when his cool silence over the first few miles had not dampened her spirits in the least? Indeed he’d delivered a number of similarly pointed remarks over breakfast, hadn’t he, and only inspired her to more dogged and devious argument.
    Things changed, though, once a lady and gentleman got to exchanging family stories and confiding hopes of social success. She’d probably supposed they’d be friends of a sort for the duration of the drive. Admittedly, he’d given her some grounds to think so.
    Still she kept her face to the window, the muted winter daylight bathing her lips, her cheek, the slope