Christmas With an Angel by Eugenia Riley

Author:Eugenia Riley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: paranormal romance, historical romance, regency romance, christmas romance, victorian romance, anthology romance
Publisher: Eugenia Riley

Chapter Six

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“Emily, where are we going?” Nathan demanded.

He struggled to keep up with his wife, who was all but running by the time they emerged from the hall into the lightly falling snow.

She stopped and pointed ahead. “Look!” she cried, her breath forming white puffs on the air. “It’s the little boy—Kipp Kirkland.”

Nathan stared ahead, spotting a small, raggedy urchin running through a field between two barren, misshapen trees. “You’re referring to the orphan with two younger sisters? But we must go back and inform the vicar and the constable.”

She shook her head vehemently. “No. We must help these children.” And she rushed off again.

Nathan leaped into step beside her. “Why, Emily? And shouldn’t we fetch the carriage?”

“No, then he would hear us pursuing him.”

“But why spend our one day together on something like this?” he cried.

Gasping for breath as they marched along, Emily glanced at Nathan in keen disappointment. “Nathan, I must tell you something. I was sent back here to save you. When I came to you, you were suicidal because your life had become meaningless, totally self-absorbed. When your moment of despair came, you had nothing to fall back on to redeem yourself. Now, if you don’t find more purpose and meaning within your own heart, your own life, you will not benefit at all from the miracle we’ve been granted, and my mission here will have failed.”

He grabbed her arm and pulled her close. “Emily, I’ve already found that meaning and purpose. It’s you, love.”

But she shook her head and shuddered. “Nathan, you aren’t going to have me.”

She hurried on, and, numb with pain, Nathan followed her. They plodded across the glistening field, still trailing the child, and finally swept through the gates of a farm. Ahead of them, Nathan spotted a modest stone cottage with a thatched roof piled with snow, and beyond it, the outbuildings—barn, chicken coop, dairy, corn crib, and pigsty—which were also crested with white. Around the property, corrals, plows, wagons, and carts were piled with drifts.

Watching the boy, Nathan felt bemused. Instead of proceeding directly to the farmhouse as he would have expected, the lad hurried past it. “Where the deuce do you suppose he’s going?”

“Perhaps to the barn?” she suggested.

But her hunch proved incorrect as the boy continued well past the barn, the well, and a haystack, to a square dovecote on the hillside beyond.

“Why would he be bound there?” Nathan muttered.

Emily shrugged, appearing equally mystified.

As the boy slipped inside the dovecote, Emily and Nathan approached the tall, narrow flagstone building. She glanced at the battered door, which hung by a single rusty hinge. “Why, it looks no better than a pigsty.”

Nathan nodded grimly. “Let me go in first, dear.”

“Very well.”

Nathan slipped through the low, narrow doorway, and Emily followed him. They entered to a cacophony of flapping wings and crying birds. In the dark interior, Nathan sneezed at the odors of dust and feathers. The wretched hut reeked of bird droppings. He glanced overhead. Amid myriad holes

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