Page 21 of Mistletoe and Christmas Kisses

Camille wanted to ask more. How many positions were there? Did it sometimes last longer? When could he do it again? Because she could do it again, her body was ready. But the pang of jealousy constricting her chest meant her heart was not.That damned actress, she groused and blew a sigh across his collarbone. Fathoming that he’d experienced anything close to this with another woman sliced like a blade.

Pride and possession she had no right to feel battled inside her.

Thiswas the danger, the risk, the trap.

Owning Tristan, even for one night, and losing him to fate, to life, was going to rip her apart. Her childhood obsession becoming her one, true love now seemed marginally hard to manage when she’d thought it would be easy to experience this and leave him to his life while continuing on with hers.

“What’s the fit of pique?” he asked in a sleepy rumble. “Even in my near delirium, I can feel your mind churning.”

She drew a circle around his nipple and watched it pebble, felt his body tense. “You promised two. Times. The after, remember?”

He mumbled a vague response.

She waited, the silence drawing out as she trailed her hand down his body. His sex was hardening when she wrapped her fingers around it. She’d not touched him there yet. Rigid, silky smooth, moist.Wonderful.

“You’re insatiable, is that it?” His tone was light but filled with a breathless urgency that told her she was doing something right.

“Maybe,” she returned and stroked, learning her way. Then his hand was there, guiding her, showing her what he liked.

She could, she reasoned, get used to this.

He groaned softly, deep in his throat. “I suppose I must stand by my promise.” Sinking his fingers into her hair, he rolled, pressing her into the mattress and claiming her.

And she was lost.

CHAPTER6

WHERE A DISCARDED LETTER CAUSES TROUBLE

Camille watched Tristan sleep as the moon crawled high in the sky, milky light flooding the bedchamber and bathing the world white. Midnight or just after, she’d guess. Sitting up, she stretched and shifted, feeling unfamiliar twinges in a well-loved body.

Love.

Gazing at him, she cataloged his every feature from head to toe, able to do so without his probing green eyes throwing her off-balance. He looked younger, long eyelashes dusting his cheek, slender lips slightly parted, innocent in a way he wasn’t. Not anymore. She frowned and reached to trace the scar on his shoulder, then drew her hand back. He didn’t sleep well. Nightmares, which he’d told her about in brief. So she wouldn’t wake him. Not when they’d made love three times already, and he’d tumbled into sleep after the last with little more than a kiss and sigh. She giggled and pressed the back of her hand to her lips.Three. Who would have imagined it? Twice in Tristan’s bed and once while standing, her legs wrapped around his hips, back pressed to the wall. So he’d been the only one on his feet.

Such a different feeling, that position, like he touched her in places he couldn’t while lying down. He’d barely made it inside her before her release began to overtake her.

She dreamily shook her head, still dazed from their night together.

Drawing the wrinkled sheet to his chest, Camille crawled from the bed, snatched Tristan’s shirt from the floor, and snaked her arms through the sleeves. Her stomach growled, and she remembered she hadn’t had a bite to eat since breakfast. And it was freezing in the bedchamber. She’d round up whatever foodstuff was in the lodge, the plums she’d brought if nothing else, start a fire in the hearth…and tell him she loved him. Ask him, not beg, mind you, to consider giving them a chance. Despite his fears about the future, despite hers about losing her independence,this…she glanced back at her slumbering duke, this could very well besomething.

Something magical, something extraordinary.

Something like love.

The wadded foolscap lying on the faded carpet caught her eye as she passed the desk. Glancing back, she noted Tristan’s chest rising and falling in a fixed rhythm. Crouching, she smoothed the sheet flat with her hand. A nagging prick of guilt hit her, but she lifted the letter into the moonlight and read it anyway.

A before-unknown inheritance should arrive by Christmas. A deceased cousin of Lady Bellington’s would be appropriate, someone distant enough to be difficult to locate in Debrett’s. Direct funds to run Longleat Manor indefinitely.

Camille swallowed hard and sat back on her heels. Scrambled to her feet to pilfer through the correspondence scattered across the desk. A completed letter was there, addressed to the Tierney family’s solicitor in London. Apparently, Tristan’s solution to the problem,herproblem, had been to create an inheritance. So she needn’t marry Ridley.

Or him.

The air quite literally vanished from her lungs.

Hand trembling, she grabbed a quill pen, dipped the tip in the inkwell, and scribbled her opinion across the top of the letter.

Then she dressed and stalked from Tierney Hall’s hunting lodge.