“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.
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.
There was hardly any room under there, so he crawled forward a bit. “Poppy,” he said slowly.
“It’s
your turn,
” she said.
“You’ll catch your death. We can’t—”
“In fact, it’s warm in here,” Poppy said. “This is a snow cave. I read about them in
Gentleman’s Magazine.
When Captain Sybil went to the mountains of Peru, they dug snow caves and described them as quite warm.”
“I am not warm,” Fletch said. “My knees are wet. And my feet are frozen.” He crawled forward again and stopped with his mouth just an inch from her lips. “I want my turn in a proper bed.”
But she reached out one little red-mittened hand, and before he knew it, he was on his back in a soft bed of needles. She was lying on top of him, and through layers of coat he could feel the soft curves of her body. Plus, she was kissing him. Rather clumsily, it was true. She kept clicking their teeth together.
But to Fletch’s mind, enthusiasm made up for everything. And when he managed to get his hands under her coat and started to rub her all over (for warmth, naturally), he found that he liked her kissing more and more.
She was kissing him and snuffling him, and licking his eyebrow and his eyelashes and then swooping down on his mouth whenever he said anything and kissing him into silence. He protested a bit when she started pulling his clothing apart, but by then they’d heated up the little cave. As she kissed her way down his chest, murmuring things about his turn, he felt his temperature go higher and higher.
“Poppy,” he gasped at one point, “I don’t think—”
She was playing, letting snow drift from her fingers onto his nipples and his more sensitive parts and then replacing the brief chill with her warm mouth. Being a naturalist, she accompanied her little experiments with a stream of commentary.
Fletch had never been very noisy in bed. He preferred to devote himself to his partner’s plea sure…but now he found himself helpless in Poppy’s curious hands, helpless under the ministrations of her sweet lips. Strange hoarse noises came from his lips as she played her games, laughing at him, licking him, finally driving him close to mindless pleasure—but not quite close enough.
Finally he managed to snatch her, wordlessly, wrench up her gown and hold her protesting, an inch from his body for a moment before letting her go. Her sweet wet warmth enveloped him.
She stopped protesting. Their clothes bunched up between them. He pulled his fur coat around both of them. Snow kept filtering down onto his face like a dusting of sugar…
It all faded away when he found the way home. The way to her.
He pulled her closer and closer until there was nothing, no end to her and no start to him, or that’s how it felt.
Then he arched up, and she cried out. So he did it again, and again, and there in that perfect little room, Poppy found her voice and cried again and again.
Then she pulled back, sat up so that her head brushed the branches and sent snow all over them, but it melted the moment it struck their bodies.
She was a natural. Found a rhythm that drove him mad, too slow, too fast, he didn’t know. All he knew was that pressure was building, and the plea sure was like pain, the way she kept slipping, sleek and tight and soft away from him and then coming back when the only thing he wanted was to grab her.
So finally he did that: grabbed her hips and held her where she had to be, and with a huge roar arched into her. Again and again, as fierce and as hard as he could.
She was panting and crying out, and he could feel the tension gathering in her body as if it were his own body.
And when the storm finally broke, it was the same moment for them, a shared moment, a shared tempest, a shared joy.
The ringing meant that it was Christmas.
Another Christmas.
She woke up just then, like a cat from her sleep, and blinked at him.
He smiled at her.
“Leopold?” She pushed hair out of her eyes. “Oh my God, did I sleep here last night?”
“You’re ruined,” he said, hearing the cheer in his own voice. “Of course, no one in Jemma’s house hold will have noticed. I can still sue you for breach of promise if I have to.”
“Breach of promise?” She sat up and stretched and then stopped. Stared at him. Froze.
He felt as weak as a kitten, but he managed to push up on his pillows.
“Oh my God,” she whispered. “You—”
“You said that I put too much credence in the opinions of my doctors,” he reminded her. “Treglown said that if I survived the night, I was going to live. Do you think I shouldn’t believe him?”
“But he said—”
“I live to prove the man wrong. Merry Christmas, Charlotte.”
“Merry Christmas,” she whispered.
“Future duchess,” he observed.
She leapt from her chair. “I’ll be off to my own chamber now.”
“Too late. You’re compromised.”
“In case you didn’t notice,” she said, “your heir is here as well. So who compromised me? Prepare your breach of promise suit, Your Grace.”
“I will,” he said, half under his breath. She whisked through the door and he reached out for his water glass. The water felt like a cool benediction on his tongue, sliding down his throat.
He was tired.
But he was alive.
So with his glass, he saluted the Child whose birth was about to be celebrated. “Thank you.”
It sounded odd, whispered in the room. No one was there but his sleeping cousin, no one but a decrepit duke and the trace of a woman’s perfume.
So he said it again, more loudly.
“Thank you.”
Off in the distance the bells continued their wild jangle, and the Duke of Villiers turned on his side and fell into sleep, a clean, healing sleep.