An Affair Before Christmas

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!” she 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.