Page 6 of Miss Barton’s Mysterious Husband (Mayfair Christmas Romance)

Roland stared at this beautiful, spirited woman he’d married in such haste and wondered how she could even ask the question.

“Yes, perfect,” he said, standing.

He wondered if he set himself up as a target. Pride alone had kept him going since she’d left. Although pride, he’d discovered, couldn’t compare as a companion to the woman he’d wed. If she shot him down, he’d crash so hard that he feared he’d never rise again. But if making himself vulnerable meant that Charmian came back, he’d take the risk any day.

“I’ve made you so miserable.” She went back to wringing her hands. “You should hate me.”

A wry smile twisted his lips. He felt like he’d smiled more in this last hour than he had in the previous three years. “I could never hate you.”

She looked unconvinced. “You must have cursed me.”

One hand cut through the air. “I did that, all right. You hurt me.”

He waited for her to defend herself, but instead her lips turned down. “I did. And I’m so sorry. I’ll sound like a witch, but I wanted you to suffer without me. Now I’ve seen you, I can’t forgive myself for what I did.”

He didn’t even need to consider his reply. “I forgive you.”

“That’s very magnanimous.”

“It’s the only way forward. That is…” He swallowed to shift the great lump of trepidation that jammed his throat. “That is if you want to go forward with me.”

She regarded him with an uncertainty that reminded him of the untried girl he’d married. Painful emotion cramped his heart. He’d missed that girl like the devil. He could already tell that the woman Charmian had become could do even more damage, if she decided she wanted nothing to do with him.

“I’m your wife.” She spoke in a hesitant voice, as if unsure of the facts.

He smiled again. “Yes, you are, but we could arrange a formal separation if that’s what you want.”

She looked unimpressed. “As a follow-up to our informal separation?”

He shrugged, although he didn’t feel casual about any of this. “If you like.”

That troubled green gaze remained fixed on his face. “Is that what you want, Roland?”

He reached out to grab the plain mantelpiece and summoned all his courage to answer. If she turned him away now, she’d annihilate him. “I want you to be happy, Charmian.”

It was true, as far as it went. But of course, he wanted so much more than that.

Her intense expression didn’t ease. She didn’t answer the question but continued with one of her own. “Do you want us to separate?”

“We’ve been separated for three bloody years,” he said with a hint of bitterness.

“Yes. But do you want to make that official?”

“No.”

“Then what do you want, Roland?”

He swallowed again. Speaking was so damned difficult. More difficult at this moment, when he had to lay his cards on the table and sacrifice all the protection of his pride.

“I want you back. I’ve always wanted you back. Never, not even one day during all these endless months and years, have I woken without wishing you were in my arms again.” He waved toward the satchel. “If you doubt me, there’s proof. I don’t know what you wrote in those letters, but mine are nothing but a plea for you to see me, to speak to me, to live with me again.”

She was so white that her rich red hair formed a shocking contrast to her translucent skin. “Some of mine are pleas. Some of mine are angry. I was hurt, too. You were always a better person than I was.”

“If you thought I’d made no effort to get you back, you were entitled to hate me.”

She bit her lip and sent him a questioning look. “I never hated you either. But I feared that you’d stopped loving me.”

“Never,” he vowed, before he could remind himself that it might be more tactical to play those cards a little closer to his chest.

A light sparked in her eyes, a light that he’d last seen the morning she left him. The morning before they had that horrible, destructive argument. Roland’s aching heart surged, as he waited for Charmian to say that she loved him. Then dipped again when she subjected him to a lingering scrutiny. “There was a reason why I got so upset when I thought you didn’t love me anymore.”

“Because we were tied together for life?”

She shook her head and stepped closer. “No, because I never stopped loving you. The idea that you’d forgotten me broke my heart.”

There had been too much misery for him to greet her declaration with unconditional happiness, but something black and sour and festering in the depths of his soul faded away. He felt lighter, as if someone had lifted a heavy stone that had been crushing him into oblivion.

Roland couldn’t resist touching her, although he was aware that this reconciliation was too new to support the weight of desire. He felt like he coaxed a wild bird to accept food from his hand. One false move and she’d flutter away up to the sky and he’d never find her again.

He held his hands out, not surprised to notice that they shook. The second it took her to reach out for him seemed to last an eon. Then for the first time since she’d turned his life to endless frost, Charmian touched him of her own free will.

As her fingers curled around his, her breath caught. Her touch felt frantic, as if she, too, feared that this reconciliation might shatter if mishandled.

He stared into her eyes, seeking the truth of her avowal. She’d once regarded him like a hero who could do no wrong. He couldn’t expect that again. He didn’t even want that. If they’d been a little older and wiser when they’d married, they’d have known enough to recognize that they were meant for each other, whatever temporary friction might trouble their match.

Although he’d always known that she was the only woman for him, hadn’t he? He just hadn’t known enough to plead with her to stay before she left him.

“Roland,” she said in a thick voice. “If you don’t kiss me in the next minute, I might just explode.”

His grip on her hands tightened, as he stared at her in shock. The heart that he’d feared dead expanded with a piercing emotion that could only be hope. When hope had been a stranger for so long. “Kiss you?”

Her smile was shaky, and her eyes shone with longing. “Don’t you want to?”

“Hell, Charmian, I’ve waited to kiss you ever since you went away.”

Tears choked her laugh. “Then I don’t think you should wait another second.”

“My darling…” He released her hands and caught her face, tilting her up toward him.

He read a similar fragile hope in her eyes. Her lips parted as she snatched a breath. He’d thought that if ever he had the chance to touch her again, he’d fall on her like a ravenous lion. But so much depended on this tremulous moment that he needed to be careful. He’d frightened her away once. He couldn’t bear the thought of frightening her away again.

Because that was the problem with hope. It could lift a man up so high that if he fell, the drop was likely to prove fatal.

So he didn’t grab her up against him in a fury of possession. His head started a slow descent toward hers. He paused a breath away from touching her lips with his.

She closed her eyes and strained upward. “Please,” she whispered. “Don’t make me wait. I’ve waited so long already.”

He couldn’t say who closed the final distance. When their lips met, Roland felt the contact like the blow of an ax. Heat shuddered through him, and a roaring cascade of sensory impressions. He thought that he’d remembered every detail of their time together. Reliving each second over and over had been both pleasure and torture. But this was like kissing his wife for the first time.

Her scent was rich in his nostrils. Her skin was warm and smooth beneath his palms. For a breathless moment, he sipped delight from her lips. She made an incoherent sound. Protest? Encouragement? Surrender? Perhaps all three at once.

She stretched up to deepen the contact and sucked his lower lip into her mouth. Desire shuddered through him as he opened his mouth over hers. She let him in and for the first time in years, he tasted the sweetness that he remembered. Except that Charmian seemed in many ways a stranger. A beguiling stranger. A gift from a capricious fate.

His hands firmed on her cheeks, as he pulled back to tease her with a rain of quick kisses. Tender kisses that verged on innocent. With a wordless complaint, she nipped at his lips in a silent plea for more.

He kissed her nose and her forehead and her closed eyes and the sweet space between her eyebrows. Another of those incendiary little murmurs brought him back to her lips. This time, he plundered their wonders. Using teeth and tongue, until her tongue ventured out to meet his. She shifted closer and threaded her arms around his waist. He angled her head and kissed her fully, glorying in the hot honey taste of her mouth.

When he’d first kissed her, she seemed uncertain, as if she hadn’t kissed a man in a long time. She’d already admitted that she’d taken no other lover, but even if she hadn’t told him, her kiss revealed that she’d waited for him.

The knowledge was glorious. He’d tormented himself so often, imagining other men touching her, kissing her, possessing that lissom body. But no longer. When they met, he’d trusted her immediately This was an honest woman. Now, when he didn’t deserve such good fortune, he realized that she’d stayed true.

He already loved her so much, he was near sick with it. Discovering that she’d kept faith wiped away an ocean of rancid misery seething inside him.

That first hesitancy melted under the blazing kiss. She met him with rising passion, digging her fingers into his waist. He drowned in the joy of having her in his arms once again. For the first time since she left, Roland felt whole.

His hands slid back to tangle in her mass of russet hair. That vivid shade had haunted his dreams. It was unusual, but not unique, so every time he caught a glimpse of a woman with deep red hair, his heart leaped with the hope that it was Charmian.

But it never was, and he was left more disconsolate than ever. Worse because of the fleeting surge of hope. Since he’d lost her, he’d learned to despise hope and its lying promises. But it was impossible not to hope when the wife he loved was kissing him as if the world would end if she stopped.

He wanted to kiss her all night. Hell, he wanted to kiss her to the crack of doomsday. But sensual heat burgeoned between them and tenderness had long ago flared into desire.

While he wanted her like blazes, he didn’t mean to rush her. So he pulled back and returned to little kisses. The way that he’d started what seemed like a century ago.

They were both panting when they finally drew apart. She stared up at him out of dark, yearning eyes. Her hands kneaded his waist. Her lips were red and swollen, and his hands had made a tangle of her severe hairstyle.

“That was…” she began, lifting a hand to those tempting lips.

“A beginning?” With the greatest difficulty, he made himself release her and he stepped back. The powerful urge gripped him to carry her across to that chaste single bed and bury himself inside her, to take the kiss to its ordained end. After losing her for so long, his natural impulse was to snatch and seize and capture. Make sure that she never went away again.

But all this time without her had taught him caution. He sought a lifetime with this woman, not just a quick tumble to satisfy years of frustration. Still, it nearly killed him to take another step away.

“It’s late.” His voice was gruff with reaction to that wild kiss and the effort it took to behave like a civilized man. “I’ll go down to the kitchens and fetch you some more hot water. The water I brought up earlier will be cold now.”

He shouldn’t be pleased to see disappointment in her eyes. She’d gone up like a column of flame in his arms. The passion between them hadn’t faded, he was grateful to note. Grateful and relieved.

But passion had never been their problem. From the moment that they met, they’d been voracious for each other. Throughout their hectic courtship, she’d brimmed with innocent ardor. His memories of their brief weeks together were tinged scarlet with the heat that they’d generated when they finally shared a bed.

“You don’t have to. I can go. Or wash in cold water.”

He smiled at her. “Let me look after you, Charmian. You’ll sleep better after a decent wash.”

Although she still looked puzzled, she nodded. “Then thank you.”

He went to the door and opened it, desperate to get out before he did something drastic to scare her away again. A Christmas miracle on a stormy night had brought them together. He couldn’t allow himself to shatter the frail bond of trust forming between them.

Losing Charmian once had nearly killed him. The prospect of losing her twice was too agonizing to contemplate.