Free All I Want for Christmas...is you by Gayle Eden

Chapter One
    “Good evening, milord.”
    “Happy holidays, milord.”
    “Lord Bennington.”
    “Lucas…”
    “Moncrief...”
    The Earl of Moncrief, Lord Lucas Bennington
nodded and touched the brim of his beaver hat, hearing those
greetings a dozen more times before he made it from the coach to
the club. Once there, he did it all again and again, absent the
caped great coat and hat he’d removed, before finally sinking down
in a chair, taking a brandy from a passing server and muttering,
“It has begun, hasn’t it, Radcliff?” then downing the drink.
    His friend Jerome Radcliff grunted and
drawled, “You garner such respect year round, Lucas, 'tis just at
Christmas time, what with the guest lists to balls and assemblies
making or breaking some hostesses rep for the rest of the year,
they are all vying for you at the same time.”
    “I’ll be damned if I know why.” Lucas
signaled another brandy and lit a cheroot, his longish raven hair
sliding forward as he tossed the Lucifer into a dish and nodded to
the server, taking up the second sniffer.
    “Don’t you?” Jerome smiled lazily, his sable
brow lifting. “You may have considered yourself off the lists years
ago, but you still have a title and fortune, a reputation as an
astute man of business, and blue blood runs through your veins.
Unlike me, whose ancestors diluted the lines a bit—you are a man of
esteem and reputation.”
    Lucas grunted and blew a stream of smoke, his
violet eyed gaze going over the lanky and relaxed Jerome, who was
six years his junior at only thirty. Though the thirty six years
wore well on Lucas, who had only a few sprinklings of distinguished
silver in his raven mane, and whose high cheek bones and
aristocratic handsomeness had drawn comments in his younger days,
he knew that feeling of being in another category, the category of
older and out of the game gentleman, who had their nose to the
grindstone during their prime years, trying to save the family
fortune from the recklessness of the generation before him.
    Jerome was not even titled, though wealthy,
and only Lucas knew that the whispers and rumors that Jerome was a
bastard were true, he still could reach out and grasp whatever he
wanted in life, whereas Lucas saw that it was too late for him.
    “Are you attending the Fairchild’s ball?” He
asked eyeing Jerome’s undone neck cloth and rumpled shirt, which
likely scandalized the elder lords at the club. But then, Jerome
tried his best to do just that.
    “Of course.” Jerome glanced at him and raised
his half-full glass, his mouth holding a laconic smile. “I have a
wager on the Carlyn beauty being the belle of the ton this year. No
sure bet, that. However, this season appears to have presented a
crop of lovely fillies, a hundred beautiful, single females. It
always amuses me to watch the lordlings run after them like a pack
of wolves.”
    “At least they have marriage in mind.”
    “Um. Sniffing fortunes instead of skirts…
‘Tis unnatural.” Jerome chuckled low. “I let them wed them at
least, before I bed them.”
    Lucas shook his head, grinning, though he
knew well enough that women sought out rakes like Jerome as lovers.
He looked away and around the tables at the mix of peers, many old
widowers and bachelors, puffing clouds of cigar smoke to hang in
the air, and drinking port. God, do not let that be me next
year.
    “I suppose I must attend.”
    “You must,” his friend said. “If nothing else
but to join me in the card room. You know I cannot abide those
sorts of things beyond an hour.”
    Lucas laughed. “Ah. I see. Well, I shall of
course oblige, if only to relieve you of bit of that useless
fortune you throw around.”
    There followed the usual back and forth, the
kind of ribbing friends will do. Though they were in many ways
opposite, in one thing they were very similar, their feelings about
the ton and the fickle oft shallow ways of the society they moved
in.
    After an hour of conversation,