A VERY TUDOR CHRISTMAS Read Online Free PDF Page A

but it was an
emotion so dark and primitive it seemed she could not banish it.
    His hand cupped her breast through the stiffened satin,
stroking it until she moaned again.
    “Meg—it’s been so long....”
    “I know,” she gasped. She threaded her fingers through his
black-satin hair and drew his mouth back against her skin. He hungrily kissed
the soft skin of her neck, his breath warm. She could only hear the mingling of
their harsh, uneven breath, the pounding of her heart in her ears.
    One of his hands slid lower, grabbing the slippery fabric of
her skirts and drawing them up. The cold air swept over her bare skin like a
whisper. A chilling touch of reality.
    Meg suddenly heard a burst of laughter beyond the closed doors
of the great hall, and the noise reminded her where they were. At Cecil House,
with half the court just a room away. She tore her lips away from his,
struggling to breathe. Her emotions tumbled over each other inside of her, lust,
confusion, joy, anger. It was surely madness.
    “Please,” she gasped. “Please do not do this to me again.”
    “Do what, Meg?” he said hoarsely, his breath warm on her skin.
“All I ever wanted was...”
    “Meg?”
    Meg spun around at the sudden sound of Bea’s voice. Her cousin
stood at the edge of the room, staring at Meg with startled eyes.
    Meg felt Robert ease away from her, into the shadows under the
staircase, and she hurried toward Beatrice. She swiped her hands over her damp
eyes and tried to smile. “Am I needed for the masque now?”
    “Y—yes,” Beatrice murmured, still peering past Meg into the
shadows. “You are to be an Hour of Night, I think. Who was that with you?”
    “No one at all,” Meg said, firmly steering Beatrice back into
the crowded great hall. “An old friend of my parents’, who has been abroad for
some time. He was offering his greetings.”
    “Truly? He seemed rather young to be friends with my uncle.”
Beatrice tried to glance over Meg’s shoulder, but Meg pushed her into the great
hall and slammed the door behind them.
    “Perhaps so,” Meg said. “But never mind that. Tell me about our
roles in the masque....”

    Margaret. Meg. It was really her, at last, after all these
years. But she was not entirely the Meg he remembered.
    Robert raked his fingers through his hair, pacing up the
Cecils’ corridor and back again, the sound of his bootheels on the polished wood
floor the only noise to break the silence.
    From beyond the closed doors of the great hall, he heard the
sunburst of youthful laughter, cut off by a stern word from Lady Burghley. He
knew he should be in there, keeping an eye on his kinsman Peter Ellingham, but
he had to regain his calm senses first. All he could see, all he could think
about, was Meg’s cool, fathomless dark eyes, looking at him as if she had never
seen him before.
    She had never replied to his letter, left at Clifford Manor
before he went on his travels to make his fortune, and he’d always known there
was a chance she wouldn’t wait for him. In truth, they barely knew each other. A
dance, a walk, a kiss. But in those few meetings had been a—a knowing. A
realization, such as he’d never had with anyone else. She was the main reason he
was driven to make his fortune thus.
    Everywhere he went, Paris, Rome, Venice, the frozen wasteland
of Muscovy, he remembered her. She was why he did what he did, so he could be
worthy of her pure spirit. But the Meg in his memory, with her quick laugh, her
bright enthusiasm for everything around her, seemed vanished.
    In her place was a cool, still statue, a court lady with
coiffed hair and the armor of her embroidered gown. It gave him such a chill to
think of his dream of Meg Clifford, so long cherished, was vanished.
    And yet—yet for just a moment, after that fiery kiss, he looked
into her dark eyes and saw the glimmer of his Meg. Like the gleam of a diamond
under ice, precious and beautiful. Far away, but not completely beyond
reach.
    If he could