A Holiday by Gaslight(33)

“I’m going to place it just here.” He put it on the edge of the shelf above her head. “Unless you object?”

She couldn’t seem to summon her voice. When she spoke, the words were the merest whisper. “I don’t object.”

Ned withdrew his hand from the shelf, but he didn’t lower it back to his side. Instead he brought it to her cheek, the back of his fingers tracing a delicate path from her temple to the edge of her jaw. “How soft you are,” he murmured. “Even softer than I imagined.”

“You’ve imagined…touching me?”

He gave a dark chuckle. “Often,” he said. “Too much for my own good.”

She inhaled a tremulous breath. His fingers were warm on her cheek, his touch almost reverent. She’d never dreamed he would handle her with so much care. Not that he’d ever been a brute, but he was so much bigger than her, so tall and strong. She marveled that such a man could be so gentle.

He tipped her chin up on the edge of his hand. Then he bent his head and kissed her very softly on the mouth.

Sophie’s eyes fluttered closed as his lips met hers. She’d been kissed beneath the mistletoe before. Childish pecks administered during the Christmases of her youth. But this was no childish peck. Ned’s lips were warm and firm, molding perfectly to hers. She listed against him, their mouths clinging together for an endless moment.

And then it was over.

She opened her eyes and blinked up at him, as if waking from a dream that had ended far too soon.

His hand still cupped her chin. He was regarding her intently. “Was that all right?”

She nodded, still incapable of speech. It was more than all right. It was a revelation. Every nerve ending in her body was humming with she knew not what. And all he’d done was caress her face and press a chaste kiss to her lips.

“Do you think you can bear to repeat the experience when next we encounter a sprig of mistletoe?”

Her cheeks burned. A more sophisticated lady might play coy. Might pretend that what had just happened hadn’t shaken her to her core. But Ned wasn’t blind. And they’d promised to be honest with each other. She saw no reason to prevaricate. “I can more than bear it.”

A flash of triumph gleamed in the depths of his blue gaze. “It’s hanging in all the doorways, isn’t that what you said?”

“And in the drawing room and the main hall. Everywhere in full public view.”

He plucked the mistletoe from the shelf above her head and tucked it back into the pocket of his waistcoat. “Then I’d better keep this on hand. Just in case.”





The next day the tree arrived. Some men from the estate drove it up to the front of the house in a long wooden cart. The tall, handsome fir had wide, full branches of deep green. It was so big that part of it dragged on the ground behind the cart, leaving a deep furrow through the snow.

The servants wrestled it into the house and installed it in the main hall where the ceiling was high enough to accommodate its great size. The newly-mended tree skirt was draped round its bottom and then—fortified by cups of tea and glasses of mulled wine—Ned and the other guests were invited to help trim it.

“I expect a woodland creature to crawl out of it,” Walter said under his breath. “It’s mad to have it in the house.”

“Haven’t you ever had a Christmas tree, Mr. Murray?” Emily asked. She was established nearby on a straight-backed wooden chair, her injured ankle propped on a tufted footstool. A small wooden crutch leaned at her side. She’d been using it to hobble about.

“Never one of such majestic proportions.”

“It has to be big.” Sophie walked by carrying a crate of tinsel ornaments. “Anything less would be dwarfed by the size of the hall.”

She was wearing an afternoon gown of claret-colored silk with embossed velvet ribbons and fine muslin undersleeves graced with delicate cuffs. The same delectable dress she’d worn to visit Ned in Fleet Street.

He lifted the crate from her arms. “Where would you like it?”

Sophie looked at him and quickly looked away. “Just there, by the tree skirt.”

Ned wasn’t offended by her response. She’d had just such a reaction at dinner last evening, and then again at breakfast when he sat beside her and their arms had brushed. She was flustered by him. As skittish as a schoolgirl. And he knew why.

It was that kiss.

That brief, all-consuming kiss.

It had been chaste. Respectful. And sweet as anything. All clinging lips and mingled breath. The memory of it had been tormenting him since the moment he’d drawn back from her mouth. He’d spent half the night thinking of it. And the other half dreaming of when he might kiss her again.

“It was Prince Albert who started the tradition,” Mrs. Lanyon said. “When he came from Germany to marry the Queen. They always have Christmas trees in Germany.”

“We didn’t get our first tree until many years after,” Ned’s father said, twining wire around a tree candle. “Seemed a foolish idea. But it did look fine when it was all decked out.”

Lady Appersett smiled as she drifted through the hall. “I think it’s a lovely tradition. Don’t you agree, Mrs. Sharpe?”

Ned’s mother paused in the act of unknotting a ribbon. Her expression was reserved to the point of coldness. “Lovely it is, my lady. And wasteful.”