Louise Allen - Once Upon A Regency Christmas - On a Winter's Eve / Marriage Made at Christmas / Cinderella's Perfect Christmas

‘Remember I told you I could have fled screaming when you kissed me?’

‘Yes.’ She looked at him warily, but she did not move. Yes, she wants me at this moment just as much as I want her.

‘If you look behind you will see the path out of the clearing. A perfect escape route if this provokes the urge to scream.’ He took off his hat, then, hands at his sides, he leant in, brushed his lips over hers, closed his eyes.

Julia gasped. The pressure of warm lips on hers increased, but his hands stayed still. Her decision then. Flee screaming as the provoking man suggested, or…not. She jerked at her bonnet ribbons, tipped the thing off her head and into the snow, flung her arms around his neck and returned the pressure. Giles took one staggering step backwards, then his arms were around her.

‘Steady,’ he murmured. ‘There’s all the time in the world.’

Oh, yes. Julia made herself relax, eased the stranglehold, as all her senses flooded back to her. She knew how to assess the quality of silks and cottons by touch, the variety of wood by its weight and strength. Under her hands his hair was silk, a rough, wild variety turning into velvet where it was cropped closer at the nape. His neck was teak, so were his shoulders, his chest. She did not dare think about his thighs, pressed against hers.

She had learned to grade perfumes, spices and essential oils by their scent, by the subtleties of taste. Her tongue stroked over his and discovered tea and that spicy, tantalising man-taste again. He smelt of man, too. Clean linen, slightly musky skin warming under her hands, an overtone of leather, a hint of pepper.

Giles held her, his hands unmoving, only his mouth caressing her, creating an infinite variety of subtle touches and provocations. She had thought a kiss would be an exchange of heat and desire, straightforward, blatant even. But this… She sighed into his mouth and he caught her lower lip between his teeth, gently worrying it as he sucked at the fullness.

She sighed again and he groaned, deep in his chest and finally, wonderfully, his hands moved, slid down. Cupped her behind through the layers of clothes and lifted her against him. Warmth and steady strength and something very like trust. And excitement. She needed to tear his clothes off. She wanted him to tear hers off.

‘The weather is an excellent chaperon.’ Giles released her. ‘There is no danger of things getting out of control when every flat surface is under snow.’

He was making light of this, treating that kiss as though it had been a fleeting moment of flirtation. Nothing to be embarrassed about, simply something that two adults might exchange when they found a mutual attraction. Julia found she could smile. ‘We would sink without trace.’

‘Or start a thaw.’ There was more heat in his regard than she had expected. Perhaps she was being naïve to imagine that this was mere flirtation. Did he want the dalliance he had spoken of last night? Did she?

‘Julia! Do come and help!’

‘Miri is calling. I expect she needs instructions on snowmen.’

Giles picked up her bonnet, shook the snow off and handed it to her. ‘Soggy ribbons, I’m afraid.’

She left them dangling as she took his arm and they retraced their steps through the shrubbery and on to the lawn. Miri had the parts for her family of five snow people and Giles helped her lift the heads into place.

What had happened just then was what she had wanted, surely? The experience of an attractive man’s kiss. She should treat it as a test, to establish whether her secret yearning for a lover was a foolish daydream or something that she truly desired. Because a lover would be so much better than a husband. You could dismiss a lover when you tired of him or he proved not to be the man you had hoped. A lover would not control her money, have no claim on her beyond what she granted him in her bed. A lover would give her pleasure, but would not take her power.

‘We are just going to get some things,’ Miri called. ‘We won’t be long.’

But have I power? How does a woman wield it in this cold country? In India she bought and sold, bargained, traded. Humphrey had believed that all she was doing was carrying out his orders, and, as far as his business was concerned, that was just what she did. No more, no less.

But she had learned how to run a business, had created her own and it had flourished. She had absorbed everything a seventeen-year-old youth might be sent to India to learn in order to return home to England a nabob, rich enough to buy a county. Once she had saved enough money from her housekeeping allowance it had been easy to trade on her own account, to invest in gemstones and gold for herself until she had believed that having such wealth was all she needed to be free, to control her own life. But in London it seemed that she must be a man to play by their rules, to wield the power that money gave.

Perhaps, she mused, as she gathered twigs to make the snow family’s arms, a woman could make her own rules. But I never learned to be a woman. Julia looked down at what she was holding and found her cold lips were curving into a smile. But I can play again, just for a while.

Giles and Miri returned, his arms full of straw and battered old hats, her hands heaped with small lumps of coal and a bunch of wizened carrots. They laughed and joked as they began to dress the snow figures, Miri measuring carrots against Giles’s nose to get the length right for the male figure, him teasing her by sticking handfuls of straw for hair under the female’s hat just when she had adjusted it to her satisfaction.

How long had it been since she had been able to play with as little inhibition, with almost childlike joy? Julia began to break off lengths of fir needles, just long enough to make bristly eyebrows for the snowman, then used more pieces to create ludicrous eyelashes for the snowwoman, stepped back to admire the effect and found she was laughing, too.

Giles came to her side. ‘We have done a fine job with our snow family. Just one more adjustment.’ He took hold of the twiggy arms, tipped some up, some down and there they stood, Mama and Papa Snow holding hands and, on either side, their arms sloped down to take the little twigs the snow children held up. ‘There. A happy family.’

A robin flew down, perched for a moment on the snowman’s old beaver hat, then flew off, its breast a flash of fire in the air. Julia scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her gloved hand. That had been the last time she had played and laughed uninhibitedly, as a child. That Christmas when she had been eleven. The December before Mama died. Papa had never been the same after that.

I want children. I want to share this with them. Simple pleasures, joy that money cannot buy, pleasure without calculation.

But society was hateful to children who were different and she could not deliberately set out to give a child an extra burden to carry. Life could be hard enough. Which meant she needed a husband. It was almost a relief to have her mind made up for her, to have a fixed purpose for returning to England and not just the desire to get away, to be in control of her own destiny at last—even when she’d had no idea what she wanted that destiny to be. But this husband, the father of her children, must be a man with money, who would not care whether she had ten pounds or ten thousand, because otherwise how would she know why he wanted her? For her wealth or herself? But now, if this, whatever this was, happened with Giles—who was clearly not a wealthy man—then she would embrace it for the happiness it might bring them, just for a day or two.

That had been a pleasant evening. Giles stretched out his legs in front of the cold hearth in his bedchamber, waiting for Julia and Miri to settle in their own rooms before he moved down to the warmth of the drawing room again.