She’d not do what society and her parents expected of her, any longer.

Dashing the tears from her cheeks, Myrtle drew in a surprisingly slow, steady breath, and a peaceful calm stole over her. Opening her mouth, she proceeded to sing.

“Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht

Alles schläft, einsam wacht

Nur das traute hochheilige Paar.

Holder Knabe im lockigen Haar.”

She was singing again.

And he should be glad.

Because as long as she was singing, then she wasn’t opening that window and calling out to him to come join her in that terror-inducing contraption.

And even more importantly, she wasn’t leaning out of that same terror-inducing contraption, leaning out while the coach swayed slightly back and forth, as those miserable conveyances did, and risking breaking her neck or her body.

With her safely secured, he’d ridden on ahead, determined to put distance between him and the chatty minx. He’d been so very determined to keep that space.

But his thoughts, they’d continued going back to her, refusing to relinquish the reminder that these were the last moments he’d have with Lady Myrtle McQuoid. That soon he’d deposit her at her derelict family’s properties and turn on his heel and head back to London and his lonely London townhouse. Lonely as it had been these past years.

But not as it had been these past few days, with her.

Because of her.

And as he was being honest with himself, it was why he’d turned his mount about and waited for the conveyance to catch up.

But he was not glad, and he was not calm.

Not when the carriage finally reached him and the song that came from within those dark walls did, too.

One that ratcheted up a tension, coiling all his muscles into knots, twisting his lungs in a vise and squeezing so that it was impossible to make a breath or a sound.

Despite the chill of the early winter morn, sweat slicked his palms and dotted his brow.

Val gritted his teeth.

Must she always sing?

Only, she didn’t always sing. She was determined to sing those Christmas carols, ones that he’d not heard since his wife’s death. It was his late wife whom he should be thinking of and recalling in that moment.

God forgive him, however. It was not.

Somehow his mind had become all confused, with memories of the past tangling and twisting with the vines of an imagined future.

One where Myrtle, who now sat inside that carriage with the same dog who’d sat inside another, was tossed through an open door while he remained hopeless to catch her. To keep her from flying out.

Val squeezed his eyes shut so hard his head ached, and he concentrated on the pain, welcomed it, preferring that physical suffering, for surely it would prove a diversion and break the hold of those imaginings that now haunted him.