Holiday Duet: Two Previously Published Regency Novellas

by Grace Burrowes

  Max enjoyed the simple sound of Antonia’s voice. She was well educated, her diction that of the upper classes. She read French easily, and she worked with the steady focus of a woman with inherent self-discipline. Max had caught her staring at his mouth, though, and caught himself stealing glances at hers.

  And at her hands, her hips, her everything.

  “I’ve locked up,” Antonia said. “I can finish the final box on my own.”

  “No, you cannot. The streets are already dark and I’d be no sort of gentleman if I left you here alone with all these books yet to catalog.”

  She settled onto her stool with a weary sigh. “You are very dear, Mr. Haddonfield, but you are also a distraction.”

  “I am?”

  “You needn’t sound so pleased. I might work more quickly if every three minutes I wasn’t recalling your kisses.”

  Max took a book from the box. “Only every three minutes?”

  “Oh, very well. Constantly. You are like a tune that won’t leave my head. I have matters to consider, work to do, but there you are in my imagination, with your sweet caresses and—I am making a cake of myself.”

  Max kissed her on the cheek. “I am distracted as well, but I refuse to give Kessler the satisfaction of winning by cheating. Sooner begun is sooner done, Antonia, and I want very much to finish this task and move onto more interesting endeavors.”

  She smiled at him, seized a book, and went back to her shelving.

  Max went back to being distracted.

  To share a task with a man was an odd sort of waltz, one Antonia was enjoying. Mr. Haddonfield occasionally read her passages at random, sometimes silly, sometimes profound. He had an ear for lovely prose, and an ability to sink into the activity put before him.

  Antonia, by contrast, resented that a lot of musty books interfered with her enjoyment of his company. She silently reveled in the faint scent of fresh baking wafting from his direction, and loved how he stopped what he was doing to greet the cat and scratch its chin.

  “He left when Mr. Kessler started ranting,” Antonia said. “I thought perhaps Lucifer had removed permanently to more peaceful surrounds.”

  “Not when the weather’s turning wintry on us. He likes it here.”

  “For the most part, I like it here,” Antonia said, diving into the final box for another armful of books, except the box was empty. “Mr. Haddonfield, we have finished.”

  He rose, the cat in his arms. “About damned time, pardon the emphasis. Shall we finish the lemon cake and warm up the leftover tea before facing the elements?”

  Antonia really, truly ought to be getting home. She typically sent a ticket porter to fetch the coach at the end of the day, but who knew if porters were to be found after dark?

  “I ought not to tarry.” Though when would she have another chance to spend a quiet quarter hour with a man she thoroughly enjoyed? Why not be a bit daring? A bit independent? She’d been alone with Mr. Haddonfield for the last hour, and a pleasant hour it had been too.

  Unlike the time she’d spent with Peter first thing in the day.

  “You were willing to toil away all day to appease Kessler’s demands, Antonia. Take ten minutes to sit with me and enjoy a snack.” The cat rubbed his head against Mr. Haddonfield’s chin. “With us, rather.”

  Lucifer’s purring was audible from two yards away, and beyond the curtained windows, the street was quiet. Sometime during the afternoon, Mr. Haddonfield had dropped the Miss before Antonia’s name, and she liked that too.

  Liked it rather well. “I suppose the cake will get stale if we don’t eat it.”

  “A terrible waste.” He set the cat down gently. “Miss Dottie and Miss Betty would disapprove.”

  He’d charmed them into taking tea with Antonia at midafternoon, and they’d regaled her with tales of court life back in “Dear Old George’s day.”

  Antonia picked up the cat, gave the shelves one last look, and headed for the stairs. “How do you suppose Miss Dottie and Miss Betty came to be haunting libraries when, in their youths, they were the toasts of polite society?”

  “Their youths were some time ago,” Mr. Haddonfield said, collecting the boxes and following Antonia down the steps. “Fortunes wane, families decline. A small competence becomes even smaller when it must last for decades.”

  Something in his tone caught Antonia’s ear. “Has your family fallen on hard times, Mr. Haddonfield?” The Earl of Bellefonte did have the family name of Haddonfield, but that signified nothing. Mainwarings, for example, were thick on the ground in some counties.

  “You and I have shared a hundred gothic adventures, Antonia. Please call me Max.”

  His smile reminded her that they’d also shared some lovely kisses—not that she was about to lose track of that memory.

  “The boxes can go in the back hallway, Max.”

  He strode off, giving Antonia a candlelit view of his retreating form. He was stunningly well made, and he moved with the inborn grace of a man comfortable in his own skin. He’d brought a bag of tools with him to the library. Antonia could not imagine any gentleman of her acquaintance knowing how to use a bag of tools, much less carrying them about himself.

  “Clearly, I do not know the right gentlemen,” she muttered to the cat.

  “When Lucifer replies, you’ll want to keep that to yourself,” Mr. Haddonfield—Max—said. “Now, about that lemon cake?”

  Antonia swung the kettle over the coals glowing in the hearth and took the lemon cake down from the mantel.

  “Have you blown anything up lately?” she asked, taking a slice and passing the rest over.

  “Not in the sense most people use that term. Shall we sit?”

  The library had one comfortable place to sit—a sofa before the hearth. The sofa occupied the warmest spot in the whole building, because it was situated under the mezzanine’s overhang. With the curtains on every window closed, the effect was surprisingly cozy.

  Antonia took a corner of the sofa and let the weariness of the day settle over her. “In what sense do you blow things up?”

  “The baking sense. We enjoy leavened bread and use yeast to give other products lightness. The yeast gives off gas when mixed with the wet elements of bread dough—or we see bubbles form in something like malt wort—and heat expands that gas as the item bakes. This all takes time, though, and yeast can impart a characteristic flavor. It also doesn’t like salt, and beyond a certain quantity, doesn’t like sugar either.”

  “This is what you’re studying? The properties of yeast?”

  “I’m researching the properties of yeast and experimenting with other possible sources of leavening. The ideal agent will be cheap, have no taste, and work quickly. I’m also experimenting with different preparations of yeast, and I find that some work more quickly than others.”

  “Why?”

  “Why do they work more quickly? I suspect because the size of the individual particle when pulverized in a dry form—”

  Antonia patted the place beside her. “Why investigate this topic?” She loved bread still warm from the oven, but she’d never once—not ever—considered how bread was made.

  “Because bread that requires two risings takes longer to prepare, and time is money.” Mr. Haddonfield sat beside her, making the old sofa creak. “Because leavening with whipped egg white or whipped heavy cream takes effort and expense. Because the French have come across a simple means of making soda ash—sodium carbonate—from brine, which when reacted with an acid becomes sodium bicarbonate and that has potential for many uses, including in the kitchen.”

  “You are passionate about this.”

  He popped the last of his lemon cake into his mouth and dusted his hands. “My siblings find my vocation amusing. Many bright minds are intent on developing faster means of transportation for goods and people. Other bright minds are making stronger steel, cheaper copper, and the like, but every bit as much work is done in the kitchen as in the factory. Why not lighten the load in the
kitchen too? We can live without enormous bridges or quick passage across the seas, as we have for generations. We cannot live without safe, affordable, nutritious food.”

  While Mr. Haddonfield poured two cups of tea and added a dash of sugar to each, Antonia finished her cake. “You seek to lighten the load of women with this work.”

  “I spent a year apprenticed to a cook that I might familiarize myself with basic food preparation,” he said, resting an arm along the back of the sofa. “The effort needed to produce a palatable, safe, nutritious meal is enormous. Miss Betty and Miss Dottie are tiny, for all they seem to be in good health. Would they be more robust in their old age if preparing a decent meal was easier for them?”

  “You have quite the imagination.” And he was both fierce in his beliefs and confident of his priorities. What a refreshing change from men who sought only to while away their mornings at the tailor’s or to be seen riding bloodstock in the park.

  “You have an imagination too,” he said. “What occupies your fancy when you have the time to indulge it?”

  His question might have come from a particularly engaging dinner partner, but darkness had fallen, and Antonia had spent much of her day with the man seated so casually at her side. She would soon have to make a decision regarding Peter—none of her options in that situation appealed to her—and yet, she had this stolen moment with a fellow she liked and increasingly respected.

  “When I have time to indulge my imagination lately,” she said, taking his mug and setting it aside, “I think about you, Max Haddonfield, and about kissing you.”

  His smile spread like a sunrise across a bountiful land in high summer. “Do you truly?”

  “In fact, I’m thinking about kissing you right now.” She bussed his cheek, which took every bit of her courage, then hesitated.

  He lifted her to straddle his lap—lifted her easily—and then he was kissing her back like she was the answer to all of his dreams, and a few of his wildest fantasies too.

  As he was surely the answer to hers.

  A long afternoon watching Antonia reach for the highest shelves, handle books, and bend to retrieve more books from boxes had sorely tried Max’s self-restraint. She was well formed, generously endowed, and she’d bumped up against Max any number of times in the cramped confines of the gothic shelves.

  He would never importune a lady uninvited, but his imagination had shed every pretense of gentlemanly decorum hours ago.

  He and Antonia needed to talk. She needed to understand that he was not without means, though he preferred to use those means for his vocation. He was well born, not a fact he set much store by, but it would matter to her.

  Apparently, getting his neckcloth untied mattered to her more.

  “Antonia, we mustn’t.” Not yet, maybe not ever.

  She kissed the thought right out of his head and replaced it with sensation as she sank her weight over his falls. Whatever else was true, Max had to kiss her back, had to finally, finally learn the shape and softness of her breasts in his hands.

  Her next project was unbuttoning his shirt and slipping her hands over his chest and around his neck.

  “Did you know,” she whispered right into his ear, “watching you handle books unsettled me?”

  “The affliction is apparently contagious, for I—Antonia, what are you doing?”

  She gathered her skirts and petticoats. “I am for once doing as I please, for once ignoring the strictures polite society trusses me in from the time I pour my second cup of tea until I lay my head onto my pillow. I will soon be a spinster or worse, and I have squandered so many opportunities. I refuse to squander this one.”

  Something in her comment wanted further investigation—what was worse than being a spinster?—but Max’s deductive powers were consumed with figuring out how to undo the buttons of her bodice.

  “Let me,” she said, brushing his hands aside.

  In moments, Max was staring at the frothy lace trim on a pair of snug chemises. “You don’t wear stays?”

  “I must for formal wear, but I often walk here in the morning, and one wants to breathe. A fitted chemise allows more freedom.” She untied the bows holding her décolletage closed and some of the urgency seemed to leave her. “You will think me very forward.”

  “I think you very delectable.” Max eased the linen and lace aside, and wished the English language offered more effusive terms. He stared at pale, abundant female perfection, alabaster smooth in the firelight, ever so much warmer than alabaster.

  He buried his face in the cleft of her breasts, reveling in the scent of lemons. “Why me, Antonia? Why allow me this honor?”

  Her head fell back as he caressed the soft undersides of her breasts, then teased her nipples. “Because you look at me and you see me. Because we deserve this. Because that feels wonderful.”

  She tasted wonderful, of tart fruit and sweet woman, of desire and abundance. Max was soon more aroused than he could recall being since his randy boyhood.

  “We should stop, Antonia. I can satisfy you without. . .”

  She had scooted back to start unbuttoning his falls.

  “This is not wise, Antonia.” How he loved the sight of her, half undone, determined on her objective, that lock of hair again curling against her shoulder.

  “Wasting this opportunity would be unwise, Max. I envy Miss Dottie and Miss Betty. They were young and happy once, they knew themselves to be desired and envied. They turned heads and broke hearts. They didn’t sit among the potted palms wondering how soon they could leave the ball without causing talk.”

  Max could not fathom every nuance of what drove Antonia, but he knew that to refuse her, to reject what she offered, wasn’t in him. Her lively, sensible mind might grasp his reasoning, but the tender heart she guarded so well would be hurt.

  “Antonia, do you understand what follows if we continue? I will exercise restraint,”—somehow, he would find that strength—“but conception is always a possibility.”

  She framed his face in her hands. “I understand, and I thank you for the question. My mother made sure I was not kept in ignorance, and at finishing school, I met a groom.”

  “Yes?” Whoever that young swain had been, he’d made Antonia smile.

  “I was not always the buttoned-up, practical, plain woman you see now. Before my parents died I had more courage.”

  Didn’t we all? “You are not plain, Antonia, and at the moment, you don’t qualify as buttoned-up either.” Practicality had left the premises a good twenty minutes ago.

  She looked down at her breasts, expression quizzical. “I could grow to like being unbuttoned in your company.” She resumed undoing Max’s falls. “I like unbuttoning you too.”

  She liked handling him, exploring textures and contours with a careful curiosity that made Max’s vow to exercise restraint a slender spar of clarity on a vast sea of temptation. Somewhere between measuring day-old bread loaves, befriending stray cats, and setting a good example for Dagger, Max had lost sight of the sheer pleasure of being an adult male in the company of a willing adult female.

  “You will indulge my curiosity all evening if I ask it of you, won’t you?” Antonia said, kissing him on the mouth. “I can’t wait all evening.”

  There were reasons—reasons beyond rampaging desire—that Max would not tarry in the library all evening, though at the moment, those reasons eluded him.

  “On your back,” he murmured. “I want you on your back.” For he would need to withdraw, and that meant maintaining as much control over the situation as possible.

  Antonia scrambled off his lap. “Up you go,” she said. “I have need of this sofa, sir.”

  Then Max was over her, half-hampered by skirts and breeches, until they got their clothing arranged, the pillows arranged, and themselves arranged. He took his time, easing into Antonia’s heat, waiting for any hitch in her breathing or tensing of her body that might signal the need for retreat.

  “I like this,” she whispered. �
�I want this.”

  I like you. Max couldn’t get the words out, because he was too busy mentally checking his own desire, and besides, he more than liked Antonia. He treasured her humor and practicality, her spirit and her determination. He gloried in her desire for him, a man who spent his days measuring bread and befriending cats.

  “Faster,” she murmured, scooting down to get a better grip on him.

  “Soon.” When she couldn’t speak, she was so overcome with passion. “Move with me.”

  “How?”

  “Like dancing, Antonia, only sweeter.”

  She was a quick study and had a marvelously short fuse. Max tried to complete a simple calculation in his head—divide 11.5 by 3.14—while Antonia thrashed and keened beneath him, but even the charms of mathematics were barely adequate to bolster his restraint.

  “Maximus Haddonfield.” Antonia made his name sound like her favorite sweet. “You astound me.”

  He gave her a few minutes to catch her breath, and then astounded her again, though that was the limit of what he could ask of his self-discipline. When Antonia’s legs had eased down to his sides, and her breathing had relaxed, he slowly withdrew.

  “Must you go?” she asked.

  They had not spoken of marriage, hadn’t even mentioned courtship. Did she seek that from him, or was this experience a fist she raised against the approaching arrival of spinsterhood? Max would summon the focus to untangle those questions, when desire no longer clamored so urgently for satisfaction.

  He extricated himself from Antonia’s embrace, rose, took out his handkerchief, braced his back against the mantel, and brought himself off in a few swift strokes. When he opened his eyes, he beheld Antonia, sprawled on the sofa, skirts rucked to her thighs, eyes slumberous and frankly watching him.

  “Never have I been more pleased to spend time in a library,” she said, “and I do love my books.”