An Affair Before Christmas

by Eloisa James

  Charlotte insulted him, and shouted at him, and looked as if she might cry, but she never did. “Did I tell you that I’m marrying you?” he murmured.

  Her smile was so faint that he could hardly see it. “If you survive I might take you at your word, and marry you out of revenge. But I’m sure you’ll back away once you come to your senses.”

  “You can sue for breach of promise.”

  “How much do you think I’ll get?”

  It was hard to think, like swimming in treacle, but so much fun to have a conversation with a joke to it, that he made himself concentrate. “I’m rich. I wouldn’t settle for less than thirty-six thousand pounds.”

  “That much?”

  He felt a flash of pride. “See? You should rethink your foolishness and marry me anyway.”

  “Too old for me,” she snapped. “And look at you. Thin as a twig.”

  He could make a lewd joke, but he couldn’t seem to think of one. They never told you that desire fled at the shadow of death. There was a lot no one told you. “Will you read me that story again?” he said.

  “Which?”

  “It’s His birthday to night.”

  “It’s a magical night,” she said, smiling. “My grandmother used to tell me all sorts of stories about it. To night is the one time all year that the animals can talk to each other.”

  “Shakespeare said the same,” Villiers observed. And then found the words in his head, like some sort of benediction: “The bird of dawning singeth all night long, And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad.” He paused. “Something else there, I think. And then ‘No fairy takes, no witch has power to charm, so hallowed and so gracious is the time.’”

  “Would you like the Gospel of Luke again?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Just the part about the inn, and the angels. And will you hold my hand?”

  So she began, with her clear intelligent voice, and he hung on to the dear old words like a lifeline, from this world to the next. “And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto Galilee…”

  Chapter 50

  It was twilight, Christmas Eve night. The snow wasn’t howling around the house anymore, but it was still falling. Poppy drifted away from the party and to the window. If she stood just next to the glass, in the well of the deep window, she could peer out at the garden in the twilight. Where before had been the bare outlines of hedges in the enormous formal gardens that surrounded the house, now all was transformed into a soft and mysterious landscape of snow and shadow. Where the light fell, the snow glittered like midnight diamonds. Where the light faded, the snow looked soft, like lumpy velvet.

  Somehow she knew he was standing up before he did so. It was as if they were connected by a thin, tingling wire. She knew he was walking toward her.

  He stepped behind her and slipped his arms around her, dipped his head to her neck.

  “Hello,” she said, husky and low, her Frenchwoman’s voice.

  “Poppy,” was all he said. But then he bumped her from behind, and the feeling of him, hard and urgent, went through her like a lightning shock.

  “I love it when you don’t wear panniers, but now we’re in trouble,” he murmured into her hair. “I can’t turn around and shock everyone.”

  “How so?”

  He held her tight against him. “I’m wearing a cut-away coat.”

  “Nothing would shock Jemma,” Poppy pointed out.

  “I don’t want to drive her mad with lust,” he said, a thread of laughter in his voice.

  She snorted. “She’s seen your like before.”

  “Don’t count on it,” he boasted.

  She let her head fall back on his shoulder, even though he was a hopelessly vain and foolish creature: a male by definition, Jemma would say. He had a strong arm around her waist, so she curled her fingers around his wrist.

  “You have to stop that,” she said a little while later. Her voice came out with a dark edge.

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “I’m sure people can see you!”

  His hand didn’t stop. “I drew the curtains behind us, not that anyone was interested.”

  Poppy glanced back, over his shoulder, and saw that he had indeed drawn the thick velvet panels. Now they stood in a tiny room, framed by glass on one side, with the black world of snow outside, and a wall of crimson velvet on the other. She suddenly realized that the voices of the party were muffled, almost as if they came through a veil of snow as well.

  “Anyone could open that curtain at any moment!” she gasped.

  His hand was cupping her breast, a thumb roughly caressing her nipple until she twisted in his arms, unable to stop herself.

  “They’re not fools.” His voice was dark as the night. He started nipping her, tiny little bites at the bottom of her ear, at her neck, at the curve of her shoulder.

  “You’re acting like an animal.”

  “I feel like an animal.”

  “Horses nip each other while mating, you know.”

  “I never examined the process.”

  “I read it in a book,” she said, twisting again.

  His other hand settled between her thighs, rubbing soft fabric over her delicate folds so that she was panting, gasping a little.

  Suddenly she focused not on the dark outside the glass, but on their reflections. She, with her head thrown back on his shoulder, his dark hair falling over his cheek as he kissed her neck, his strong hands caressing her body as if it were a musical instrument by which he created a song from her gasps, her moans…He was rubbing a little harder and she was helpless, thrusting her hips forward, sobbing a little.

  He turned her body just enough so he could take her mouth, but he didn’t stop touching her.

  “Fletch,” she said. It was a whisper, a prayer. “You can’t—” The words choked in her mouth. Her body was singing a tune she was still only coming to recognize. “People—”

  “Hush. They’ve gone to dinner.”

  Sure enough, she realized that the muffled sound of laughter was gone, and the only sound she could hear was the pant of her own breath.

  He was pulling up her skirts now, her pale legs reflected in the glass until she turned all the way away from her pale image in the window, and slid her hands under his jacket, pulled out his shirt. Remembered that she was not a rag doll.

  “No,” he whispered. “This is my turn.”

  He did something with his hand and she sobbed a minute, had to catch her breath and then said, “No!”

  “I can’t undress in here,” he said.

  “But you’re making me undress!” He had her gown up around her waist, and then he pushed her back against the glass. It was chilly and unexpectedly sensuous against her bottom: she felt cold and hot at the same time.

  He wasn’t even listening to her, just licking her neck and then kissing her chin and her cheek and the bottom of her cheekbone, and then finally taking her mouth. He was savage and soft at the same time, taking and giving, his hand keeping a rhythm that had her twisting against the cold glass, sobbing into his mouth.

  Feeling the sparks fly higher and higher, until her heart was beating to a dance that no one could follow except his fingers as they drove her faster and higher, and then she was sobbing against him. He swallowed her shudders, her little scream, the way she trembled and shook in his arms.

  When it was over she turned into his shoulder. “How loud was I?”

  “What?” His voice sounded strained and rough.

  She started to smile. “Was that my turn or yours?”

  “My turn,” he said.

  “So when is it my turn?”

  “Now?”

  Chapter 51

  Fletch was still a little red in the face, and he seemed slightly short-tempered to Poppy. She was feeling blissfully happy and couldn’t stop smiling, whereas he was definitely irritable. “Wouldn’t you like to go upstairs now?” he asked. “Since it’s your turn?”

  “Oh no,” she s
aid, smiling at him. “What I’d like…” She stopped and licked her lips, and then thrust out her bottom lip because she wanted to see that flare in his eyes. It was a French thing to do. “I’d like to go outside,” she decided.

  His face went suddenly bleak. “Outside?”

  She nodded. “We can always go to bed later, Fletch.”

  “Do you think that you could call me by my real name?”

  “Fle—What is your real name?”

  “You don’t know your own husband’s name?”

  She thought about it for a moment and refused to feel a pang of guilt. “My mother was scandalized by the mere fact that I addressed you as Fletch rather than Fletcher. If I had started calling you by your Christian name she would have fainted.”

  “I hate your mother.” He said it flatly.

  “My mother said that I shouldn’t return until you had a mistress,” she observed. “So I wasn’t forced to ser vice you all the time.”

  He grabbed her so fast that she didn’t even see him move. “Forget that ugliness. I don’t want to hear it; it has nothing to do with us. Besides, you need me.”

  She smiled into his mouth. “Why?”

  “To ser vice you. And—” He said it into her hair, and at first she didn’t understand and then her heart bounded.

  But there was something she had to say. “I can’t be French all the time, Fletch. I’m—I’m afraid you’re going to lose interest.”

  He looked down at her, eyes burning. “Never.”

  Her lips were trembling but she still wanted to say it all. Because perhaps, at the end, they could stay friends and if she didn’t have that, her heart would break. That was the worst of it, the thing she realized only when she saw her own reflection in the glass. She looked—she was—a woman in love. The kind of love that you never got over, that was like an illness until death. “But I just want to say that if it happens, if we could stay friends, Fletch, I could—”

  “Not Fletch!”

  She blinked. “What is your name, then?”

  “John.”

  “What?” It was such a simple, solid, respectable name. It seemed to have nothing to do with her exotically fashionable husband.

  “You can’t ever say it in public.”

  She stared up at him. His hair was rumpled from the way she clutched him, behind the curtain. But his coat fell in perfect seamless folds. His cravat somehow managed to make rumpled look fashionable. He looked like the most exquisite sprig of fashion in the ton.

  “Your name is John?”

  He looked so furious that she couldn’t stop laughing.

  “Didn’t you say that you wanted to take your turn now?” He definitely sounded grumpy.

  It was perfect for him, of course. John was the man she fell in love with: a solid, thoughtful, powerful prince of a man who loved loyally and truly. Whose exotic exterior had little do with a solid English interior.

  “I love you,” she said. “John.” She touched his cheek.

  His smile was a little crooked.

  “Let’s go outside. For a walk.”

  She had trouble getting him to stop kissing her but finally he followed her.

  A man whose name is John doesn’t stop loving his wife because she isn’t the most beautiful in the room. Or the youngest. Or the least well-read.

  A man named John loves you forever.

  Chapter 52

  “I don’t want to go outside. It’s cold. It’s Christmas Eve and it’s snowing. Everyone will think we’re mad.”

  From the look on the footmen’s faces, they were already certain of that fact. But Poppy, wrapping a woolen scarf around her neck and over her head, said, “You just want your turn.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant!”

  “I’ve never been allowed outside in a snowstorm,” she said.

  “The voice of reason,” he groaned, accepting a pair of fur-lined gloves from the butler.

  “Please do not lose yourself in the snow,” the butler observed, handing Fletch a little lantern.

  “That’s right,” Fletch said. “We could be at risk! Lost in the snow and never recovered until the spring thaw.”

  “It’s scarcely snowing now,” Poppy said, taking a lantern for herself and nodding to a footman, who pulled open the great front door.

  Light spilled from the doorway, revealing a world turned into piles of soft cakes covered with spun sugar.

  Poppy danced through the door and Fletch followed.

  “If Your Graces do not return in an hour, I’ll send the footmen after you,” the butler announced.

  Fletch had the sudden idea that perhaps they could find a warm barn and test Miss Tatlock’s idea that animals could talk on Christmas Eve. And a few other things he had in mind. His turn, for example.

  “Two hours,” he clarified.

  He felt ravenous. Obsessed. Absolutely mad. What he wanted to do was drag Poppy back upstairs, throw her on the bed and plunge into her. The thought made him so hard that he hardly felt the sting of cold outside. Naturally, Poppy had pranced directly into the snow and was tracking around the side of the house.

  “Wait for me,” he bellowed, and then started after her, walking in her footsteps. Snow had to be up to her knees. Courtesy demanded that he break a trail, but if she were so eager that she wanted to plow through drifts, he’d allow her to be the man.

  She was a fast little thing, so he tramped along in her wake, not thinking about much other than her thighs. How soft they were, and white. And how she whimpered last night when he started putting little bites there. And then when he got up a little higher, she stopped whimpering and started…

  Well, what was it? How could it be the same woman he’d made love to for years? What happened to her?

  It made him feel uneasy, as if the ground had shifted under his feet. Only last year she would lie before him like a chilled piece of molded butter, and now she was melting and shrieking. And it wasn’t anything he did, either.

  If he’d tried some new technique, he could have explained it to himself. He started walking slowly, thinking about it. Poppy was already around the corner of the house. He kept thinking that someone must have taught her—but he knew that wasn’t true. There was no other man, except for that puny Dr. Loudan and she didn’t like him that way. She liked to order the poor man about and send him fussy letters about squirrel toes and the like.

  So if she wasn’t melting because of another man, what was it?

  It wasn’t his beauty, though it was embarrassing to think of it that way, because she’d seen plenty of that in the years since they married.

  Just then he heard a little shriek and sped up. He turned the corner fast to find his wife poking under a huge fir tree.

  “What are you doing?” he shouted.

  It was so quiet that his voice seemed swallowed up by snow. But oddly, it wasn’t all that cold. The huge house reared behind them, golden light spilling out of all its windows. No one else was foolish enough to tramp around in the dark.

  “Look at this,” Poppy said, waving her lantern at him. “I believe some animals are living here, under the tree.”

  “Oh for God’s sake, it’s probably a bear,” he groaned, plowing through the snow over to her. It was well over the top of his boots. She must be frozen, dragging skirts that had to be lined with ice.

  “The tracks are much smaller than that. Look!”

  He caught up with her and in a spar of light falling from his lantern, he saw the little footprints. Two tiny ones in front and two longer ones in back.

  He gave a bark of laughter. “That’s no bear!”

  “Perhaps it’s an English possum,” Poppy said, giggling. Her eyes were shining. Once he started laughing he could hardly stop.

  “For a naturalist,” he spluttered, “you’re pretty slow, Poppy.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him and then looked back at the tracks. At the way the little ones were spaced, there weren’t too many and…

  “Rabbits!” sh
e breathed. “There’s a rabbit hole under this fir tree.” And without a second’s hesitation, she dropped to her knees and pushed her way right under the huge skirt of branches that jutted above the snow.

  Fletch’s mouth dropped open. For Christ’s sake. “Poppy, get back out here!” he bellowed, leaning down.

  No answer.

  Suddenly he thought that rabbits make a good meal for a bear—who might well live under a tree. He dropped to his knees and thrashed his way under the tree so fast that he bumped right into Poppy.

  She was sitting, hugging her knees, as if she were in her own bedchamber. “Fletch!” Poppy said, sounding as delighted as if he’d decided to join her for a cup of tea.

  “What the hell,” he growled, setting his lantern to the side. The light wavered and went out, leaving only Poppy’s thin flame.

  “It’s like a little room,” she said. “Wait a minute, Fletch. Your eyes will get accustomed.”

  “Are there any bears in here?”

  But he took a breath.

  “No rabbits and no bears. But it’s a little house.”

  A minute later he saw what she meant. The snow had scoured around the fir tree, building little walls that came up to meet the bottom layer of fir. The ground was actually a soft mat of dried needles. The snow filtered light, somehow, so that it was a pearly gray under the tree, except for the shower of yellow light around her lantern. His head just brushed the bottom layer of fir branches.

  “Very nice,” he said. “Let’s go, Poppy. Your skirts must be soaked through.”

  “I’m not cold,” Poppy said. She was curled up against the fir tree, smiling at him. Her hair was escaping from a thick red wool hat the butler had given her. It was a world away from the elegant little bonnets she used to wear, tipped just so on top of elaborate nests of curls. She looked like a little girl.

  Well, perhaps not so little. Not with that deep sensual lip and the way her eyes were watching him. She wasn’t wearing all the face paint of last night but she didn’t need it. Her lips were the dark plum color of ripe fruit.

  Even as he watched her tongue stole out and wet her lips, and then she rolled out her bottom lip in that way she had and he was harder than the tree trunk.