A Kiss for Midwinter (The Brothers Sinister) (17 page)

“Show up in the middle of the night with a French letter,” he advised, setting a finger under her chin, “and he’ll likely get the message.”

He tilted her face up. She looked in his eyes, and he smiled.

“No point in being subtle.”

“No,” she breathed. “I suppose not.”

“But just to be sure,” he said, leaning down and setting his forehead against hers, “you’d better try it again tomorrow. And the day after. And every day you can, until we’re married. When do you think that will be, Lydia? Because I’m hoping for soon. Very soon.”

Epilogue

Some weeks later

T
HERE WAS AN UNEARTHLY LIGHT IN THE ROOM
when Lydia woke up that morning—that curious reflected brightness filtering through a gap in the curtains, one that suggested that there was now a foot of snow on the ground.

She sat up, leaned over, and touched her fingers to her husband’s shoulder.

Her
husband.
Now, that was a word that was still new, so new that she bit her lip even thinking it. That word was almost as new as the year.

“Jonas,” she whispered.

He didn’t respond. She could tell he was awake, though, because his eyes screwed shut, and his mouth contorted in a half-grimace.

“Jonas,” she repeated, “it
snowed
last night.”

“Mmm.”

“That means that Minnie and Robert will be trapped here until the trains are running,” Lydia said, “and that we can meet them for breakfast after all.” Her best friend had come into town for the wedding, and had stayed for almost a week. It had been wonderful, even if Minnie had made a few sly comments along the lines of
I told you he fancied you.
Lydia had been too happy to protest. And, well, Minnie
had
told her so.

“Your hands are cold,” Jonas muttered. And before she could say anything in response, he reached out and took her fingers off his shoulder, and then pressed them between his palms. “Let me warm them for you.” He held them for a few moments, rubbing them lightly, before opening his eyes. “That’s scarcely helping. You know what you need?” he asked.

“What do I need?”

“Increased blood flow,” he responded smoothly.

Lydia leaned over and kissed him. “Increased blood flow is my favorite,” she informed him, and then proceeded to show him precisely how much she favored proper circulation. Somewhere, in the middle of a long, lingering kiss, he took off her night rail, and she divested him of the remainder of his clothing.

The rest was a foregone conclusion—the warmth of his skin, the slick desire of her own female liquid, and the hard thrust of his body into hers, slow and steady, his hips claiming hers as he looked into her eyes. He was her husband of just a few days, but he already knew how to drive her to the edge of wildness and beyond.

When he’d finished, he kissed her again. “Did I ever tell you why I wanted to marry?” he asked.

“Because you couldn’t resist me.”

“Because I wanted a source of regular sexual intercourse, one that wouldn’t risk disease,” he responded.

Lydia leaned into his shoulder, smiling against his skin. “Oh, too bad,” she said in mock sympathy. “And instead, you got a wife who loves you.”

A smile spread across his face—a big, golden smile, one that had Lydia smiling in return. “There is no instead,” he said. “Only
in addition.
I got the woman I loved.”

Author’s Note

I
’VE ALWAYS BEEN FASCINATED
by the history of medicine, but I don’t think I could have written a doctor before the mid-Victorian era. That’s because, for the most part, doctors before then knew so little about the causes of health—and had so few tools available to them for the testing of pharmaceuticals—that it’s quite possible that they killed as many patients as they cured. That may be a charitable assessment.

The Semmelweis study Jonas cites in this novella about the correlation between hand-washing after an autopsy and childbed fever was in fact conducted. Sadly, many doctors of the time reacted to this study with outrage. They were furious that someone suggested that they needed to wash their hands, and even angrier that it was implied that they themselves could be the cause of the disease. Semmelweis was so ostracized by the response that he ended up in a madhouse.

As for the prussic acid/cyanide prescribed by Doctor Parwine in the beginning, I am, alas, not making this up, either. (In fact, if you ever think that there’s some screwy element of medical stuff that happens in here, trust me—I’m not making it up.) I went looking for a morning-sickness brew that would be a little sketchy, that an older doctor might prescribe in the late 1850s, and got this absolute gem:

Dr. Scellier extols the following mixture, as a remedy for nausea and vomiting, during the period of pregnancy.

Take of lettuce-water, 4 oz—gum arabic, 1 scruple—syrup of white poppies, syrup of marshmallow root, each, 2 oz. —Prussic acid, 4 drops.

— From Colin Mackenzie’s
Five Thousand Receipts in the Useful and Domestic Arts,
reprinted in other volumes as late as 1841.

Dr. Scellier luckily only suggested a tablespoon of this every half hour. But this solution is already 100,000 times more toxic than the toxicity for Atlantic salmon listed in the Materials Safety Data Sheet for hydrogen cyanide.

If you’re wondering if I made up the lard-and-rice recipe, the answer is—once again—no. I did make one alteration, though. The version I heard sprinkled MSG on top. Mmm, yummy. Thanks to my former roommate Karen for providing that delectable story of cost-saving.

Sometimes I am very grateful to live in the modern world. Right now I am very, very grateful.

Thank you!

Thanks for reading
A Kiss for Midwinter
. I hope you enjoyed it!

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•
A Kiss for Midwinter
is a novella that comes after the first full-length book in The Brothers Sinister Series. The other books are
The Governess Affair
, a prequel novella,
The Duchess War
,
A Kiss for Midwinter
,
The Heiress Effect
, and
The Countess Conspiracy
.

If you’d like to read an excerpt from
The Duchess War
, please turn the page.

The Duchess War: Excerpt

The Duchess War

available now

Miss Minerva Lane is a quiet, bespectacled wallflower, and she wants to keep it that way. After all, the last time she was the center of attention, it ended badly—so badly that she changed her name to escape her scandalous past. Wallflowers may not be the prettiest of blooms, but at least they don’t get trampled. So when a handsome duke comes to town, the last thing she wants is his attention.

But that is precisely what she gets…

Excerpt from Chapter One:

R
OBERT
B
LAISDELL, THE NINTH
D
UKE OF
C
LERMONT,
was not hiding.

True, he’d retreated to the upstairs library of the old Guildhall, far enough from the crowd below that the noise of the ensemble had faded to a distant rumble. True, nobody else was about. Also true: He stood behind thick curtains of blue-gray velvet, which shielded him from view. And he’d had to move the heavy davenport of brown-buttoned leather to get there.

But he’d done all that not to hide himself, but because—and this was a key point in his rather specious train of logic—in this centuries-old structure of plaster and timberwork, only one of the panes in the windows opened, and that happened to be the one secreted behind the sofa.

So here he stood, cigarillo in hand, the smoke trailing out into the chilly autumn air. He wasn’t hiding; it was simply a matter of preserving the aging books from fumes.

He might even have believed himself, if only he smoked.

Still, through the wavy panes of aging glass, he could make out the darkened stone of the church directly across the way. Lamplight cast unmoving shadows on the pavement below. A pile of handbills had once been stacked against the doors, but an autumn breeze had picked them up and scattered them down the street, driving them into puddles.

He was making a mess. A goddamned glorious mess. He smiled and tapped the end of his untouched cigarillo against the window opening, sending ashes twirling to the paving stones below.

The quiet creak of a door opening startled him. He turned from the window at the corresponding scritch of floorboards. Someone had come up the stairs and entered the adjoining room. The footsteps were light—a woman’s, perhaps, or a child’s. They were also curiously hesitant. Most people who made their way to the library in the midst of a musicale had a reason to do so. A clandestine meeting, perhaps, or a search for a missing family member.

From his vantage point behind the curtains, Robert could only see a small slice of the library. Whoever it was drew closer, walking hesitantly. She was out of sight—somehow he was sure that she was a woman—but he could hear the soft, prowling fall of her feet, pausing every so often as if to examine the surroundings.

She didn’t call out a name or make a determined search. It didn’t sound as if she were looking for a hidden lover. Instead, her footsteps circled the perimeter of the room.

It took Robert half a minute to realize that he’d waited too long to announce himself. “Aha!” he could imagine himself proclaiming, springing out from behind the curtains. “I was admiring the plaster. Very evenly laid back there, did you know?”

She would think he was mad. And so far, nobody yet had come to that conclusion. So instead of speaking, he dropped his cigarillo out the window. It tumbled end over end, orange tip glowing, until it landed in a puddle and extinguished itself.

All he could see of the room was a half-shelf of books, the back of the sofa, and a table next to it on which a chess set had been laid out. The game was in progress; from what little he remembered of the rules, black was winning. Whoever it was drew nearer, and Robert shrank back against the window.

She crossed into his field of vision.

She wasn’t one of the young ladies he’d met in the crowded hall earlier. Those had all been beauties, hoping to catch his eye. And she—whoever she was—was not a beauty. Her dark hair was swept into a no-nonsense knot at the back of her neck. Her lips were thin and her nose was sharp and a bit on the long side. She was dressed in a dark blue gown trimmed in ivory—no lace, no ribbons, just simple fabric. Even the cut of her gown bordered on the severe side: waist pulled in so tightly he wondered how she could breathe, sleeves marching from her shoulders to her wrists without an inch of excess fabric to soften the picture.