An Affair Before Christmas (29 page)

“Do you want the candles snuffed?” he whispered into her neck.

Poppy wasn’t listening. She’d discovered that even running her fingers over the muscles in his back made currents of desire sing in her blood.

“The candles?”

“Hush,” she whispered. And then: “Kiss me again.”

Finally, some time later, with a gasp: “Harder!”

There were so many discoveries. That laughter was part of it all, the way Fletch laughed when he was kissing the sweet slope of her breast and she thought he might make better use of his time.

“You told me that I should tell you what I want,” she said, catching her breath. And then with a little moan, “Oh—”

Fear was part of it, too. Because Fletch was laughing and panting and afraid, all at once. Afraid it was some sort of a dream that had caught him waking, because the reality of it was so much better than all those dreams he’d had. She twisted under his hands and sobbed a little, and even screamed, but she was so
Poppy
at the same time. She told him one thing, and then forgot and started her own explorations. And when he tried to push her back into place so that he could minister to her, and drive her mad with desire as he planned, she got fierce and before he knew it, he found himself flat on his back with his little wife doing her best to drive every logical thought out of his body.

“I meant—I want to—” he gasped, his body arched at the feeling of her soft lips kissing him everywhere, even biting him, tasting him, exploring him.

“Quiet,” she said, and he humored her (all right, he lost his mind for a while), until finally he flipped her over and didn’t entertain any more objections. Just feasted himself on her sweet apples of breasts, memorizing the way she squealed when he used his teeth, just a little bit, the way she tasted when he kissed his way down her body.

Until neither one of them could stand it any more, when she was sobbing for his possession, and fire was raging in his legs—and yet he was afraid, afraid it wouldn’t be right, she wouldn’t like it—

Afraid—

She pulled him down onto her curvy velvet little body and said in her fiercest tone, “Fletch, if you don’t make love to me right now—” But then she arched against him and seemed to lose track of her threat.

And just like that, he forgot his idiotic worries. By some miracle, some Christmas miracle, he had their wedding night back. It was their first time.

He rubbed against her, teasing her, kissing her.

She started scolding him again, his sweet little shrewish wife, and so he finally took her face in his and kissed her while he sank into her…the first time, the best time, the only time.

Poppy looked up at him and to her horror, felt tears coming to her eyes. French seductresses didn’t cry while they were making love. She knew that. She sniffed and tried to think French thoughts, but then her own Fletch kissed the tears away and drove into her again and then she stopped worrying about tears and Gallic attitudes. It was all she could do to catch the rhythm and join the dance.

At first it felt like some sort of frustrating game in which she was behind on the count. Fletch was moving, deep and strong and steady, and she was twisting under him, trying to get that pressure, the pressure she wanted—

When suddenly she realized that she was doing it again. She was letting him lead the dance, bring everything to the table. A little arch in her back and a surge back at him and, oh God, the pressure was there, it was delicious, it was building. He made a low sound in his throat and his head fell back.

It was Fletch
and
Poppy. Not just Fletch, and not just her.

The tears came in earnest this time, because how could she not? Their bodies were moving in unison, hard and sweaty and real. Fletch was saying things about love too. They were hoarse, and breathless, but real.

She was moving faster, closer to him, tears in her mouth when he was kissing her no, they were kissing each other—and then faster, until she couldn’t think, until with a shuddering cry, she let go and flew into perfect, perfect pieces. Sweaty, messy, dirty pieces.

Perfect.

Harriet cried, but he didn’t know why and couldn’t summon up the strength to care.

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…”

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?”

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.