An Affair Before Christmas

“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 said, 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.”