Yuletide Enchantment Read Online Free PDF Page B

and Scotland. Her future husband was handsome and rich. And she was most likely the most miserable woman in Scotland.

    Thank goodness Fiona and Stuart were sharing the sleigh with them. Isobel was not yet ready to be alone with the man. Lord, she didn’t even know his Christian name. Or his favorite color, or . . . or any of the other meaningless things couples learn about each other during a courtship.
    Worse, she didn’t think the earl was the sort of man who knew the first thing about courting. He seemed most uncomfortable sitting beside her. Whenever their shoulders or knees would touch, he stiffened as though a brisk gust of air had blown down his collar. And sharing a lap fur with him was far too intimate for Isobel.
    Across the sleigh, Stuart blew on his hands to warm them, and Fiona reached for them, drawing them inside her rabbit fur muff. Isobel arched her brows and looked out at the beautiful hills that passed them by. If the earl hoped she might bestow the same sort of kindness, he was hoping in vain.
    “Shall we sing a carol?” Fiona asked. Stuart groaned and the earl positively glowered.
    “Oh, let’s!” Isobel agreed, relishing the look of pain on the earl’s face. “I love singing, though I croak like a frog.” She laughed, watching as his expression of pain deepened. “Don’t you love singing, my lord?”
    “I . . . I . . .” He moved his head, stretching his neck as though his tie was strangling him. “I do not sing myself, but would like nothing more than to hear your voice. I’ve always thought you sing like an angel.”
    Drat. She had sung every year at the ball, and St. Clair had heard her. There went her idea for sending him packing by singing like a fishwife.
    “I only know the words to ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,’ ” Stuart replied irritably. “If you would sing, it’ll have to be that one.”
    “Well, then, shall we begin?”
    As they sang the opening bars of the carol, St. Clair maneuvered the reins to turn the sleigh in the direction of the forest. Despite her attempts to be sulky, Isobel found herself enjoying the ride and the fresh, crisp air of the afternoon. She loved Christmas. The food, the carols, the presents. But most of all she loved spending time at MacDonald Hall. For most of the year, her family was in London. Stuart and her father owned a steel factory that supplied the railroads. It was only during Christmas that Isobel came back to the country of her birth, and the home they had shared when her mother was alive.
    “Shall we stop and take a stroll?” the earl asked.
    “I’d love a walk,” Isobel agreed. “And I’d like to find some more holly for the centerpieces.”
    “Then we are agreed.” The earl pulled the dapple-grays to a stop right before the forest. “This seems as good a place as any to stop.”
    Isobel froze as she remembered being in the forest and emerging from the exact spot where the sleigh now stood. She recalled the stag. The raven. The voice she had heard whispered on the breeze. She was certain it was those memories that provoked her into dreaming of that strange man. A man who was vastly different from the Earl of St. Clair.
    “Shall we?” St. Clair offered her his hand. “I believe we will find lots of holly in the woods.”
    Isobel followed beside him while Fiona and Stuart contented themselves with picking pine cones from the trees at the edge of the wood.
    “Are you not afraid of venturing into the wood?”
    “Of course not, my brother is only footsteps away,” she replied.
    The earl chuckled. “I do not refer to myself, Miss MacDonald, but the other creatures who reside there.”
    “Rabbit and deer, do you mean, my lord? Hardly imposing creatures,” she laughed, deftly stepping over a thick tree root.
    “I meant the Otherworld folk.”
    Isobel stopped short. “Do you mean to tell me that you believe in faeries and trolls and unicorns?”
    “Not trolls and unicorns, but faeries, aye. I believe in the