Page 201 of Ten Lords for the Holidays

Falling to the side, he pulled her into his arms, heedless of the mess. He closed his eyes and held her tight, refusing to allow reality into this moment of pure joy. She’d come apart with him. They were suited as well in bed as he’d always known they would be. He pressed his mouth to hers in a firm kiss. An owning kiss, with no tongues. Just their mouths together.

He loved this woman. She owned every part of him. And as soon as he regathered his wits, he’d propose marriage properly.

“Tam!” A voice–-stressed and high-pitched but also sotto voce—came from the corridor. “Where are you?!!”

“That’s my mother!” Tam scrambled away from him while his mind was still lodged in his still throbbing cock.

“Tam.” He meant to make his voice commanding. She ignored it.

“I have to go.” She threw herself up and out of bed, grasping desperately for her drawers.

“Not before we’ve—”

“No.” She found one and yanked it up. “It’s not your reputation on the line. It’s not your future.”

“But it is.” Because if he didn’t have her, he didn’t haveanything.

She shook her head as she pulled up the other drawer and tied it at her waist, barely pushing her skirts down before lunging for the door. “Thank you for nearly being my salvation.”

“Tam, don’t go,” he begged in an undertone.

And then she was gone.

CHAPTER7

Christmas day,1875

Sometimes Tam liked to diagnose her emotions as though they were a disease, and she a patient. It helped to categorize them, with the idea perhaps that if she could name the ailment, she could treat it.

Sitting in the morning room after breakfast and the first round of presents, it wasn’t all that difficult to recognize her primary ailment. She was sad. And confused.

But there were layers of additional illness too, underneath that. It took some digging around in her head while there was the chatter of her family all trying to make the best of what they knew would be their last lavish Christmas, but she found it.

Loneliness. Despite her family, she felt utterly alone without Att.

Just as there was satisfaction in memorizing everything in an anatomy book, correctly identifying a feature, her emotions felt more controlled if she could name them.

Fear.

That was the other one.

Had she ruined her chance at happiness? She had panicked.

She could see that now, in the light of this cloudy, cold Christmas morning.

There was no other name for her symptoms but sheer fear. She’d been terrified by the depth of her emotions, the vast unendingly deep ocean of her love for Att when he was bound to discard her after their experiment. The sound of her mother’s voice had rattled her as thoroughly as a box of matches in an unsprung cart going over a cobbled street. It had dislodged a recollection that the Duke of Newton had once laughed at her objective, and had now taken her virginity with her having no recourse.

The combination of the most intimate physical act she’d ever experienced and revealing her feelings and hearing—or she thought she had—her enemy’s feelings too, had sent any reasonable response flying out of the window. No, more than that. She had been a pigeon trapped in a room with one small exit and a lot of glass, giving herself a concussion and making a horrible mess as she’d tried to fly, rather than thinking the problem out.

Give her a bleeding artery, and she didn’t panic. Or a nasty case of gout. Even head injuries didn’t faze her. But after being cracked open by a duke’s member, apparently she had no brain at all. None.

And as a consequence, she’d made a terrible mess.

She’d met her mother in the corridor, and she’d cast her eyes over Tam’s disheveled dress but not commented. Tam had danced with two men who she had no recollection of whatsoever, then pleaded a headache to her mother, and they’d returned home in utter silence.

She hadn’t seen Att. Almost certainly, she’d lost him forever.

He’d been generous and sweet and set her alight with pleasure. She’d run away from him. The strongest of friendships couldn’t withstand that, never mind their mutual antipathy.

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