Epilogue #2
He froze for a stunned half-second, and the way joy broke over his face was indecent. “Mrs. Stouts,” he repeated, reverent, and then he kissed her.
It began with care. He always began with care; it was his nature to test the rope and check the knots.
His mouth brushed hers, coaxing, asking, receiving.
Her lips parted on a breath that was meant to be a word and failed at that; his tongue traced the taste of wine on her, mulled and honeyed and ruinous.
She answered like a woman who had waited not just weeks but every winter of her life for this precise hour.
When she rose onto her toes, he gathered her in, one hand splaying across the small of her back, the other threading into her hair until it remembered softness instead of pins.
“Rumpled,” she murmured against his mouth. “I told you.”
“You prefer me so,” he said, and when she laughed—helpless—the sound broke the last of his patience. His kiss deepened, shifted, became a language of its own.
He undid the ribbon at her shoulder first—the little scarlet bow Bea had threaded there in the morning.
It slid down her arm like an unwrapped promise and landed on the rug with a sigh.
Next, the tiny buttons of her gown, the ones she had insisted were fashionable and he now discovered were heresy.
He managed them with surprising skill for a man whose fingers were made to hold quills and keep ledgers straight.
She slipped the bodice from her shoulders, the stays beneath; his breath left him in a rough, unguarded sound.
“Beautiful,” he said simply, as if there were no other word left to do work.
“Am I?” she teased, because her bones were going to melt if she didn’t keep talking.
“You are,” he said, and brought his mouth to the top of one breast in a kiss so reverent she thought she’d weep.
Heat spilled through her, swift and low.
When his hand followed his mouth, cupping, testing, learning how to draw breath from her with nothing but his thumb’s slow circle, she arched into him like a woman praying.
“Hubert.”
“Tell me,” he murmured, and she realized with a jolt that this—this asking—was part of his wanting. “Tell me what pleases you.”
“Everything,” she said, and then, bolder, braver, greedy: “More.”
He obliged. He learned her with the patience of a craftsman and the hunger of a man newly permitted joy.
He kissed her throat and laughed when it made her half-sob, kissed the hollow between her collarbones and hummed when she shivered, kissed lower and lower until she tugged his hair and swore she would expire if he didn’t come back to her mouth.
He did. When she reached for his shirt, he let her pull it over his head, the linen catching and then releasing so that he stood before her bare from the waist up, all heat and strength and a scattering of dark hair that made her fingers absurdly happy.
“I have considered,” she said gravely, palms sliding over shoulders, chest, the solid ladder of his ribs, “that under all that order you might, in fact, be indecent.”
He bent to kiss the corner of her smile. “Terribly.”
She tugged at his fall; he caught her hands, his own unsteady, and breathed, “Are you sure?”
It mattered. She loved him for stopping to ask, even now when her thoughts were molten and the storm outside had risen to hush against the window. She took his wrists and set his hands on her waist. “Yes,” she said. “With you. Tonight.”
The last of what could be called talking drained away.
He lifted her—effortless, scandalous—and set her on the settee, its brocade catching the candlelight like a private sunrise.
The fire had sunk to coals; he fed it with one hand, never taking his eyes from her as the flames licked up, gold returning to the room, to her skin.
When he came back to her, he held for a moment, kneeling between her knees, his forehead to her belly, his breath warm and ragged.
She slid her fingers into his hair and drew him up.
Their bodies found the place where promise becomes fever.
The first, sweet stretch tore a gasp from both of them; he stilled instantly, jaw clenched with restraint, eyes searching hers.
She cupped his face—good, stubborn face—and nodded once, a queen granting permission and a woman begging for more.
He moved then, careful and devastating. The rhythm found them: slow, then faster when she whispered please into his mouth, then slower again when he swore and buried his face in her neck as if to survive.
He murmured things between the kisses—thank you, and God, and Vicky, over and over as if the syllables steadied him.
She answered with hands and teeth and the single-mindedness of a woman who has found the exact truth of her body.
When the peak came, it rose through her like a bell, clear and relentless, ringing through every part of her until she cried out and clung and forgot her own name.
He followed hard after, shuddering, groaning her name like prayer and promise both. For a long, bright moment there was only the rush of blood in their ears and the wilder beat of the wind outside, as if Christmas night itself had leaned in to listen.
They lay tangled and laughing—the ridiculous, breathless laughter that arrives only after catastrophe and salvation. He pressed his face to her shoulder; she pressed a kiss to his temple, the salt of his skin tasting like every home she’d ever needed.
After a time he stirred, propped himself on one elbow, and looked down at her with the softest expression she had ever coaxed from a human. “I will spend the rest of my life learning that,” he said, a little wonderstruck.
“Good,” she said, touching a fingertip to his mouth. “I do not intend to be simple.”
He smiled into her hand, kissed it, then kissed the inside of her wrist as if returning the first time he’d dared. “Mrs. Stouts,” he said again, like a boy with a new word and a man with a vow.
She blushed, grinned like a criminal, and drew him down to taste the word from his lips.
Sometime later, when the fire had gentled and the candles guttered, when the storm had laid a fresh, thick hush upon the world, they dressed—or half-dressed, enough to satisfy propriety if propriety happened to kick in the door.
He settled her against his chest on the settee and pulled a blanket over them, his hand smoothing it as if making a promise to the very cloth.
“I suppose,” she said drowsily, “you’ll feel the need to straighten something in the shop tomorrow to reassure yourself you still can.”
“On the contrary,” he murmured into her hair. “I intend to leave every bow rakish and every sign a trifle crooked. For balance.”
She tilted her head to gawk at him. “Who are you and what have you done with my stationer?”
He considered, eyes gone comically thoughtful. “Perhaps I am precisely myself, freed at last from excessive starch.”
She bumped his shoulder with her nose. “I like you rumpled.”
“I know,” he said smugly, and she bit him, gently, for the sin of triumph.
Across the frozen fields, as if summoned, the church bells began—soft at first, then swelling, that particular peal that sounds like joy in a language the whole world understands. The hour? Midnight again? Dawn at last? It did not matter. Time had folded into itself and decided to be kind.
Vicky tucked her cold toes under his leg and closed her eyes. “Merry Christmas, Hubert.”
“Merry Christmas, Vicky.” He hesitated, then, almost shyly: “Merry Christmas, my love.”
She slept, shockingly, there on the settee in her future husband’s arms, the fire painting gold across her bare shoulder like benediction.
He did not sleep. He watched the flames fall to ember and the breath in her throat rise and fall and felt, for the first time since boyhood, that the burden he had carried all his life had found its counterweight.
Duty, yes; always. But also delight. Also her.
In the morning, the house would wake, and Bea would pretend not to note which door Vicky emerged from.
Gracie would lift a brow as high as the eaves.
Nathan would clap Hubert on the back so hard it would alarm the footmen.
And the mistletoe—dear God—the mistletoe would remain, triumphant and everywhere.
But for now there was only the quiet, and the snow, and the woman who had flung her heart at him and expected him to catch it. He would. He already had.
Outside, the estate lay tucked beneath its white quilt, every hedge and statue softened, every sharp edge gentled. Inside, on a shabby settee before a stubborn fire, two people rested in the warm wreckage of their own good fortune.
And when the bells tolled again—clear and bright, as if the world itself were exhaling—Hubert closed his eyes and said a private amen.