Page 24 of The Virtues of Christmas
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Hot wax dripped onto Josiah Whitlow’s hand and woke him. He’d fallen asleep at his desk for the third time in a week, or possibly the fourth. His housekeeper had given up scolding him for leaving the candles burning.
“Candles cost money,” he muttered, sitting up slowly, lest the ache in his back turn to the tearing pain that prevented sleep. The fire in the hearth had burned down—coal cost money too—and the house held the heavy, frigid silence of nighttime after a winter storm.
“You left me on such a night,” he muttered, gaze on the portrait over the mantel. Katie had died in March, after a late-season storm that had rattled the windows and made the chimneys moan. Josiah had known he was losing her since she’d failed to rally after a lung fever more than a year earlier. She’d never quite regained her strength after the birth of their younger boy.
“He has a daughter now,” Josiah said, draining a serving of brandy he’d poured hours before. “Poor little mite is cursed with your red hair, madam.”
He saluted with his glass. “Apologies for that remark. Ungentlemanly of me. Christmas approaches and I… am not at my best.”
Every year, Christmas came around, and Henrietta did too. Every year, Josiah found some excuse to lurk in the mercantile across from the inn at Amblebank, until he caught a glimpse of his tall, beautiful daughter.
Henrietta resembled her mother, but every feature that had been pretty on Katie was striking on Henrietta. Katie had had good posture, Henrietta was regal. Katie had been warm-hearted, Henrietta was unforgettably lovely. Katie had known her Book of Common Prayer, and Henrietta—according to her brothers—quoted Shakespeare.
Accurately.
“I kept her from the books,” he said, experimentally shifting forward in his chair. “Didn’t want her to end up a bluestocking old maid.”
Josiah pushed to his feet, though the movement sent discomfort echoing from his back to his hips, knees, and feet. Not gout, except possibly in one toe. Gout was for the elderly.
“Which I shall soon be, God willing.”
Katie remained over the dying fire, smiling with the benevolence of perpetual youth. Josiah was glad for the shadows, because his wife’s eyes reproached him for the whole business with Henrietta.
Girls fell from grace, Katie had once said, when a man came by intent on tripping them. Lately, Josiah had begun to suspect that Katie’s point was not without validity, from a mother’s perspective. Henrietta had been sixteen when she’d fled to London, and Josiah had been sure she’d come home within the week, chastened, repentant, and forever cured of her rebellious streak.
Instead, she’d shamed her family, set a bad example for her brothers, and broken her father’s heart.
“She made her bed,” Josiah said, blowing out the candles on the desk. “She can jolly well lie in it. And—with a damned aching hip—I shall lie in mine. Good night, madam.”
The portrait, as always, remained silent, smiling, and trapped in pretty youth, while Josiah steeled himself for the growing challenge of negotiating the main staircase at the end of the day.
* * *
In Michael’s wildest imaginings, he could not have anticipated the sheer joy of making love with Henrietta Whitlow. She was like a cat in a roomful of loose canaries, chasing this pleasure, then that one, then sitting fixed while fascinated with a third, until leaping after a fourth.
She wanted to spoon with Michael’s arms snug around her, then she demanded to lie face to face and touch every inch of his chest, arms, face, and shoulders. Just as he was having trouble drawing a steady breath—he’d not realized his ribs were ticklish—she’d rolled to her back.
“Now you touch me,” she said, and Michael had obliged with hands, mouth, and body.
She gave him the sense that she’d never before permitted herself an agenda in the bedroom other than: Pleasehim.Accommodatehim.Makehimhappy. Her own wishes and dreams hadn’t mattered enough to any of the men in her bed—or she’d been that skillful at hiding them—and thus those wishes hadn’t been allowed to matter to her.
They mattered to Michael.Henriettamattered.
She liked the sensation of his breath on her nipples, he liked the ferocious grip she took of his hair. Then she wrapped her hand around another part of him, and Michael sat back, the better to watch her face by the firelight as she explored him.
“If women were as proud of their breasts as men are of their cocks…” she muttered, tracing a single fingernail up the length of his shaft.
“There would be more happy women, and happy men,” Michael said. “Perhaps more babies too. Would you please do that again?”
She obliged, more slowly. “You ask, you never demand.”
“I’ll be begging in a moment.”
Her mouth closed around him, and for long moments, Michael couldn’tevenbeg. He could only give silent thanks for these moments shared with Henrietta, while he tried to ignore the itch of guilt from his conscience.
Her valise sat at the foot of the bed, a reproach every time he opened his eyes. When Henrietta smiled up at him, he shifted over her, so she filled his vision.
