Have Yourself a Merry Little Scandal: a Christmas collection of Historical Romance (Have Yourself a Merry Little... Book 1)
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“You paid your dues as a wife. As a widow you have latitude. Have a bit of fun.” His gaze scanned the room, “Ahh, the Dolton Twins, I love how they fight over me. If you will excuse me.”
Seraphina watched as Marsden strode over and unfolded his charm. He was devastating when he set his mind to it.
“So, what is the relationship between you two? Lovers past, or childhood sweethearts?” Ilya spoke from close over her shoulder.
She groaned and it sounded less pained than it should have. His cologne, faint and fresh was most likely the reason. Ballrooms were stuffy and although not spoken about, could smell. He was a delicious hint of byzantine. She would be happy to bury her face into his neck and fill her lungs. If she was not still annoyed with him and his free ways.
“Go away,” she growled.
“We got off on the wrong foot,” Ilya replied as he pressed through the people close around them to stand in front of her.
“We didn’t get off on any foot. You are a parasite nibbling at any scrap of feminine flesh that comes across your path,” she hushed at him so those circling them backs turned wouldn’t hear.
“As I recall,” he leaned forward and whispered, “when I nibbled on you, you nibbled back.”
Her heart lurched. His lips were deliciously addictive, his tongue…devastating. “I hope that wasn’t what you call a kiss. I remember something wet and soggy lipped.” She remembered something electric and alluring. Something that rewrote her body’s expectations of pleasure. Violins strummed the start of the next set.
Ilya barked a laugh and others turned. He tugged her dance card from her hand and printed his name for a waltz.
“Don’t bother to show up for it. I will not dance with you.” She wanted to though. What did that say about her? Not doing the very things she wanted to because—why? He wasn’t serious? He flirted…outrageously. The truth was that every inch of her wanted to feel his hold again. Smell the warm scent of him as he powered her across the dance floor.
“Coward.”
“Oh please!” She swallowed. She was.
“Feeling brave?”
She scoffed. Turning her back to him pretending to search for someone.
“It was a parlor game,” he said, his voice at her shoulder serious.
Seph watched the throng, the dancers take their places as the music started. “It’s not my concern.”
He leaned in. “I want it to be your concern…” he whispered, his breath tickling over her skin making the hairs along her arms rise.
She didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know what to think.
Yes... Yes... Yes... pounded in her thoughts, but she hadn’t the nerve to jump. Wasn’t sure if she was making a fool of herself with a man who bounced from one woman to the next like some kind of bumble bee.
“Come play with me Seraphina.” He murmured in his thick-as-honey accent. “Have a taste of what you saw at Hells’ Hall. Let it be me who shows you, no strings attached.”
No strings attached. How did someone do that? That was the game she didn’t know how to play, but one he excelled at.
The throng around them pressed tighter, a surge as the dances twirled wider, pressing Ilya to her in the squeeze. The hard lines of him pressed against her as the crowd momentarily locked them together. The backs of her fingers pressed against his member. Her eyes widened. His went dark. No one could see what happened below shoulder height, with them all pressed together.
His hand wrapped around her wrist, turned her hand so her palm pressed against him, and held it there. “Play with me Seraphina.”
Excitement, desire, the need to be more than the prim miss her life had made her.
“You are deranged.” She tried to pull her hand away and failed as his grip held her wrist fast.
“I am well equipped for the game.”
And just like that, so close to his body, the heat of him, the raw excitement of what he dared, she was back in the corridor at Hells Hall her thoughts full of Ilya and the pleasures he promised.
Seph swallowed hard. Didn’t even try to hide the way the words hit her. “Ilya…” the smallest sound. Her toes at the edge of a cliff, the earth beneath them crumbling, she needed to either step right back and away, or take her chances and leap.
He dipped his head down to her ear, the wooded scent of him intoxicating. “It’s not only very fat,” he rumbled in his accent, “it’s also very…long.”
Blood pounded in her ears. Her body suddenly too hot, her skin too sensitive. People pressed around them on all sides. Talking over the music. Looking at the dance floor, the cause of the squeeze.
Her fingers, heaven help her, reached out and traced him, traced the exceptionally fat and exceedingly long member and her core clenched.
His face, so dark and stormy, right in front of her. Yet with not a chance of feeling those lips here in the crush.
“I am not sure I know how to play,” she whispered.
Heart hammering, she squeezed his length and watched his eyes roll back. She ran her nails over his dress pants and along the length of him. Felt his flesh firm, thicken, and lengthen. Imagined what he would feel like inside her. This man pressing her down with his weight, his lips delivering those bone melting kisses and this, this…cock moving inside her.
“I think you know more about playing the game than you think.” He tried to move back but couldn’t.
Emboldened, Seph started a slow rub with her palm. Her heart pounded with excitement and her breath quickened. The press of bodies, his pushed against hers, his scent filling her lungs. She felt invincible in their clandestine tryst, so daring in public. Somehow, as if the crowd held him constrained, she could sample him without consequence.
His hand tightened on her wrist, “Seraphina.” His voice a warning.
“I would have thought you had more stamina.” She said under her breath, her mouth curled into a smile.
His mouth quirked. “Why don’t you try me and find out,” he whispered back.
“I think I can find out right now.” The power of the moment making her brave.
His hand came over hers and he pressed her palm harder against him, subtly grinding his hips into her palm making her core clench and her sex weep with need.
She squeezed him again and leaned closer, her breasts pressed against his chest and whispered in his ear. “I can almost feel you inside me. Pressing into me. Claiming me heart and soul with each thick, penetrating inch. Breaking me open to lay spread wide, vanquished on your sword.” He groaned against her neck.
Her heart thundered in her chest at her boldness. Elation. Excitement. She hadn’t fully jumped but she hadn’t stepped back. His face all hard, tight lines not hiding his desire or his need…so brave. So raw and honest. Did she have the same courage?
She drew her nails across the tip of him, felt the slight dampness of the fabric announcing his readiness. She felt powerful. Alive. Her skin vibrated with tension, the combustible heat scorching them. If they were alone she would be his, he could take her and she would lambast him if he didn’t.
“I surrender.” He growled and muttered things in Russian. She pressed closer, squeezed that damp head in her fingers. An oath under his breath.
“No more little bird.” His burning gaze locked on her lips.
Just then the throng breathed, and they had space. Cool air rushed around them. The loss of his heat as he stepped away a physical pain in her chest.
He growled something in Russian before turning around, taking a few quick strides that had him clipping the side of the Christmas tree as he ducked into the corridor behind it.
“What are you doing to that poor man?” Marsden asked pressing through the crowd and standing behind her.
Seph turned, lightheaded, body pulsing with need. “Showing him that two can play his parlor games.”
“Good for you.” Marsden looked in the direction Ilya and gone. “It was obviously a double-edged sword.”
“What do you mean?”
“Pff. It’s just the heat in here.” She took out her fan and fanned herself.
“Bravo,” Marsden said beside her.
“I think I am getting an idea about how this is all played.”
Marsden chuckled. “Well you’ll have your hands full if you don’t watch out.”
He didn’t know how true that was, literally.
Ilya did come for his waltz, but she was already on the floor. He stalked around the edges of the floor, scowling for a few moments before whisking a wallflower onto the floor, proceeding to twirl the poor girl around Seraphina and her partner as if Ilya and the wallflower were doing circumambulations.
It was when she was leaving, as she walked into the large entry hall, that she saw him lean down under the mistletoe and give a chaste kiss to the flushed and starry eyed wallflower before she was led out by her family.
“You are cruel,” she said as she walked up beside him and watched the girl look back over her shoulder, hope painted all over her young face.
“Girls need dreams. Besides, I like women who keep their appointments.”
She laughed. “Dreams…I see.”
Seph stepped closer, the carnal ghost of him under her fingers. “So, you blessed her with future night terrors,” she whispered, pressing her breast against his arm for a moment, awakening all those sensations of earlier.
The man was wicked.
And right now, he looked at her like a wolf, his face full of dark intense eyes promising to consume her. But it was his mouth that made her shiver, a mouth curved in a dangerous smile.
Triumphant at having won that bout, she stepped away.
But his arms slipped around her. An arm as hard as steel that brooked no argument.
He drew her in for a mistletoe kiss that would become infamous in tomorrow’s gossip columns for its inappropriateness.
Chapter 8
The Bond Street Bookshop was one of her favorite places when she needed to get away. The shop front with its gold lettered signage and a terrible bell that, in all the years she’d frequented it, hadn’t been replaced by one with a more pleasant-sounding ring. Inside it smelt like paper and printers’ ink, the warm tones of leather from the bindings a more subtle note. Right now, she needed to be in the familiar place where every book held a world waiting to be found and explored. She needed, even for a few hours, to be removed from this very real and confusing world.
It had been three days since the Fairmont’s Ball. She’d avoided the salons. Didn’t want to face him while her skin still burned and her body pulsed with need that hadn’t yet left her. The truth was, she still teetered on that cliff’s edge.
Seraphina scanned the books lining the shelves of The Romantics: Shelly, Blake, Byron, Keats. Then there was Edger Allen Poe. She pulled the small book out and flipped to The Raven, about a man wanting to remember and wanting to forget. How well she knew the conflicted feeling.
The book slipped from her hand and she bent down to retrieve it. Her body noticed his arrival first when it slipped into a warm hum of awakening. Her peripheral vision saw movement and she needed nothing else to know that it was Ilya. So, she rose, ignored him as he came alongside her, and she opened the book.
“It’s rude to ignore a person you know,” he said then leaned in. “especially if you touched him where you have me.”
She turned her gaze to the bookshelf as if searching for something.
“You don’t strike me as the type who reads,” she said in her most disinterested voice.
“I read all manner of things, Seraphina.” He turned and stood far too close to be polite and there it was again, his byzantine scent wafting about the air in seductive tendrils. “For example. I can read the beat of your heart at your clavicle. A little fast I’d say. You are excited to see me.”
“Nonsense.” But the truth was her heart thundered in her chest and her mouth had gone dry.
“Then there is the fact that you have the book upside down.” He plucked it from her hands and turned it right side up, taking a closer look. His all too handsome face with its devastating lips, screwed up in mock distaste. “I should be offended. I seem to have driven you to the macabre.”
“I am surprised you even know who he is.” She snatched the book back determined to purchase it simply because he didn’t like it. She let herself look at him then. So very Russian in a large brown fur coat, opened now he was inside, with a well-tailored charcoal-grey suit underneath. There was no top hat today, instead a fur hat was pressed into the coat pocket. He was all Baltic beast today, and it made her want to snuggle under that coat and play again with his awfully long and terribly fat member.
Bothersome.
“What are you doing here anyway?” This was her sanctuary, she was here to get him out of her mind. He belonged in salons and gambling halls.
“You like my coat?” he preened.
“Please…I was thinking you looked rather bestial.”
He barked a laugh. “I could wear it to bed if you’d join me.”
She pulled a face of distaste even as her breasts felt heavier, imagining the feel of the soft fur pressed against her naked flesh.
“As you are looking for something to read, I’d suggest the latest edition of The Women’s Herald. A riveting article called Russian Princes in London.”
She rolled her eyes. “As if there would be anything to write about a man who does nothing.”
He stilled.
She expected one of his witty comebacks, but it didn’t come.
His jaw was tight, and he looked…annoyed. She should feel happy to have finally stopped him in his tracks and yet she didn’t. She felt somehow that she had offended him.
“We have your tray, Your Grace.” The store manager stood at the end of the bookcase.
“Well, if you’ll excuse me.” She gave Ilya a small nod and moved past him, then followed the manager to a small table laid with her tea service, two plush little reading chairs one on either side. It was nestled between the window and a bookcase on travel memoirs, her favorite place to sit while she determined which of the books she’d selected she would purchase and to peruse some of the periodicals.
Seraphina glanced up expecting Ilya to have made his selection and pay for it at the counter, of which she had a clear view from where she sat. Eventually curiosity got the better of her. She took her tea cup and walked along the end of each bookcases looking down the rows to see what had captivated him.
Ilya was nowhere to be found.
She paced back along the shelves but there was no sign of him. The shop’s discordant bell had not rung to signal his departure. Her gaze caught that of the shop manager who looked quickly away.
Most odd.
Since there was no chance of Ilya seeing that she actually was interested in reading about him, she went to the periodical section. The latest edition of The Women’s Herald sat proudly displayed alongside multiple copies ready to be sold. Seph brought a copy back to her chair, along with her usual copies of The Bookman, The Idler and The Dome which had published one of her poems in this December edition.
She then set about devouring the article about him and his brother. She took out a small notebook she kept in her purse and wrote down his interests, small facts.
Horses. Managing his Estates. Chess.
“I like a woman who knows what I like.” Ilya stood with a package wrapped neatly in brown paper under his arm. From the expression on his face he had forgotten the earlier moment when she had offended him.
“Oh. You’re still here.” She looked up. It was too late to pretend she hadn’t been taking notes. She pushed her embarrassment aside, covering it with her usual foil of cool disinterest. “I hadn’t noticed.”
The man didn’t even try and hide the satisfied smile as she snapped the periodical closed and placed it to one side.
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�May I?” He motioned to the empty seat.
“I would have thought you’d have more stamina.”
“I don’t understand.” His Russian accent arched through her.
“You led me to believe you could stand erect for long periods of time.”
He barked a laugh and sat, placed his package on the floor beside him and helped himself to a shortbread biscuit.
“You should ask before you eat what belongs to another.”
“I recall making numerous suggestions.” The intimate kiss, the tableau of Marsden and his woman. And just like it did at their every meeting, her body again warmed, her skin sensitized and she wondered what it would be like to be his lover.
Mesmerized, she watched his mouth as he chewed. The rake made a point of licking his lips.
Seph quickly glanced away.
What did a tongue feel like between your legs? She had no doubt that his lovers knew what his tongue felt like between their legs.
Ilya rumbled something in Russian and she looked up. The casual smile was gone. His face was focused, intense, his gaze moving over her as if she were his next piece of shortbread.
“I want more of you Seraphina.”
The words raced through her leaving a hot trail.
“I think we’d both enjoy some extended time together. Am I correct?” This was what they referred to as courage in love, or more correctly in this case, desire. That leap that exposed you. That moment when you whipped off the covers and revealed what you wanted and how you felt.
Her hand had made its way to her chest and clutched there as her heart raced under it. Thoughts flew so fast through her mind she couldn’t catch a single one, didn’t know what she thought or what to say.
This was it then, how people began a liaison.
Ilya lowered his voice and leaned closer over the tea service. “I want to kiss you as Marsden kissed his paramour. I want you to murmur more of your sweet words in my ear as I show you what if feels like to drown a slow delicious death in pleasure.”