Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

In Christmas Promises, Lord Vandover promises his beloved grandmother that he will bring her home a Christmas present, but all she wants is for him to find a bride, and not just any Lass will do. She wants him to be happy, as he has not been most of his life.

Miss Holly Paxson is making her debut in the Little Season in the fall, having been delayed by mourning for her father. She is cheerful, vivacious, intelligent, naïve, and not impressed by most of the fashionable beaux. She is worried about her twin, Noël, an unofficial spy in France who has sworn her to secrecy to protect himself, so she has no one with whom to share her concerns.

Holly and Hunt, Lord Vandover, like each other, and Hunt is willing to discuss the war with Holly, unusual in men and disapproved by her snarky sister, if not her mother, but a great relief to Holly. Hunt has seen enough, and thinks Holly will be a good wife, and eventually his Duchess.

Christmas Bride begins with Holly and Hunt's Christmas Eve wedding, and covers their first year together. Since he proposed only two weeks after they met, they still do not know each other very well. Grandmama, the Dowager Duchess, teaches Holly how to manage the estate, which will one day be her job, and comes to love her.

Hunt is away on Foreign Office business more than he is home, and Holly still has no one to talk to about her worries on Noël's account, but tries her best to help England's cause in the war. Her unsophisticated eagerness to help, and frustration at her powerlessness to help, leave her easy prey for the traitor in the Foreign Office whom her husband is striving to identify. The traitor blackmails her, threatening both Hunt and Noël if she exposes him, leading, of course, to secrets and misunderstandings, and forbids her to see or even write to her husband, whose arrest he has engineered to protect his own nefarious activities .

Both lovers are of course desperately unhappy, but cannot talk to each other even when they are in the same country. Hunt's half-brother and Grandmama try to effect a reconciliation of the obvious estrangement, but since neither party will admit to a problem or discuss it with anyone, their efforts go nowhere. As Christmas approaches and the family gathers at the ducal estate, the continued efforts to hide the obvious fool no one who watches, but there seems no way out, and the Grandmama everyone, including Holly, loves is dying, along with both Holly's and Hunt's hopes and dreams for the future. Is there any way out of this miserable dilemma?