Page 45 of How the Belle Stole Christmas

Her head on his shoulder, his arm wrapped around her waist, they sat in the cramped, cold, narrow passage, and it still felt right.

Although they didn’t belong here, in this terrible place during these awful events, they belonged together.

Their hearts beat in unison; their souls burned for each other.

Then why had they spent thirty years in tense silence? Why had they suffered for the last few months apart?

“Where did we go wrong?” he asked.

“Mm?” Fiona shifted in his arms.

“This passion I have for you… it never dimmed. Why have you never felt it before?”

She met his eyes. “Have ye truly always had this passion for me?”

“I have.”

She shook her head. “I thought ye did in the very beginning, when we had just married. Ye used to come to me nightly; ye used to touch me the way ye touched me today—like ye wanted me desperately.”

“I’ve always wanted you this way.”

“When I became with child, with Eddie, this changed.” She dropped her gaze. “Perhaps because my body changed.”

He reared back in horror. “You were always beautiful. Never more so than when you were with child.”

“Why did ye stop being so passionate with me then?”

He thought back to that time, thirty years earlier. He couldn’t remember exactly what happened, but he remembered her being sick and worrying over her. “I didn’t want to hurt you. You always had aches and pains—”

“They had nothing to do with ye… with that,” she said, waving a hand vaguely toward his crotch.

“Why haven’t you said anything then?”

Her cheeks flushed. “I was young and embarrassed. I didn’t even know a woman could experience pleasure in bed.

I didn’t think it was proper to talk about such things with my husband.

We had a marriage of convenience. My mother told me to do what ye asked of me in bed and not to ask for anything more or less. ”

Ire rose in his throat, but it wasn’t directed at Fiona’s mother or at Fiona herself; it was directed at him. Of course, she was inexperienced and young, thrust into an unfamiliar home. And he took whatever he wanted from her without asking what she wanted.

She was responsive to him in bed, so he enjoyed his time with her. Until she fell ill, and instead of asking what he could do for her, he just assumed.

“Then ye came back from war… and ye started coming to me in complete darkness, like you didn’t want to see me.”

“That’s not… I didn’t…” Oh, God. Did she think he’d lost the desire he had for her?

“It wasn’t about you. I didn’t want to distress you.

I had a terrible wound.” He opened his shirt to reveal a scar hidden beneath the hairs on his chest. She touched her cool fingers to it, sending gooseflesh scattering across his skin.

He stifled a groan of pleasure. A simple touch elicited such a reaction from him, and she thought he didn’t want her.

“It’s healed now, but at the time, it was hideous.

I didn’t want you to see that or touch it. ”

“Why didn’t ye just tell me?”

“Pride, I suppose. I didn’t want you to think of me as less than I was before. But you should've told me if that bothered you. Why didn’t you come to me with questions?”

“As I said, I was always told to follow a man in matters like that. My job was to satisfy yer urges; that’s all that mattered, so I obeyed.”

He grimaced. “I never wanted our marriage to be that way. I thought we were a great team. We consulted each other on everything—running the estates, hiring servants, and educating our children. Hell, I even consulted you on the bills I was drafting.”

“Aye, but that’s different. We were always friends—that part was easy. It was the intimate… nightly things that were hard. And after Leslie… after the losses of two babes in a row…”

He flinched. He still didn’t like to think of that period. She had terrible pregnancies, two in a row. After that, she barred him from her bed. He couldn’t blame her, though he wished she could’ve shared her grief with him because he’d wanted to share his grief with her as well.

But they had been young, stubborn, and not open to love.

He tightened his grip on her. He was now. “I love you,” he whispered the words out loud for the first time in thirty years of their marriage.

She tilted her head toward him, a soft smile on her face. “I love ye, too.”