An Affair Before Christmas Read Online Free PDF Page B

than…”
    He leaned toward her. “Yes?”
    “To be desired.” Her voice was husky and suggestive. Maybe Poppy truly was unusual in that respect. She didn’t want to be desired. He shook the thought off. Poppy was his wife. Lady Nevill was…
    “How does the lady in question choose among all those who desire her? For their numbers must be legion.”
    “Like the maddened swine in the Bible?” She unfurled her fan; her eyes laughed over the edge. They were delicately marked with a sensual line of kohl. “The lady simply looks for the least pig-like, I assure you.”
    “And if they hide their curly little tails?” He laughed right back at her.
    “Ladies are never interested in anything little ,” she said softly. Fletch let the corner of his mouth rise in brief appreciation of her jest. She was perfect: interested in his body for the plea sure it would bring her.
    “I outgrew my short pants long ago.”
    “And yet you are still so young!” Her eyes raked his body from head to foot, lingering in places where Poppy never bothered to look. The Frenchwomen had exclaimed over his endowments. He wouldn’t disappoint her.
    “Not so young,” he said, almost sadly.
    “None of us can claim eternal youth.” He could see in her eyes just a shadow of regret that echoed his.
    “Yet you look as beautiful as a girl of eighteen,” he said, taking her hand to his mouth.
    “I shouldn’t want to be that,” she said. “If I were only eighteen, after all, I should be young and just married. Which is what you appear to be.”
    “Married four years,” he said. “Believe me, that doesn’t come within the purview of just married.”
    “We must stop telling each other truths this very moment,” she said, her eyes dancing. “There is nothing more disconcerting—or dreary—than a conversation laden with veracity.”
    But Fletch was enjoying a conversation in which the truth was desire, and the words were nothing. “The most dreary conversation,” he said, “is one in which all the truths are unspoken.”
    “Now I can see that you are no newlywed. A wearisome topic, marriage,” she said, tapping him again on the wrist with her fan. “Since there seems to be no one here to introduce us, sir, perhaps we should do the honors ourselves.”
    Fletch was suddenly overcome by a giddy delight, by the pure plea sure of being in the company of a woman who wanted to touch him, who used her fan as an extension of her fingers. “But surely there is no need…I can guess who you are. A goddess?”
    “Do not say Venus, if you please. I find that good lady remarkably tiresome, and so overused.”
    “I wasn’t thinking mythologically. But if I were…”
    “Helen of Troy?”
    “I hope not. Poor Helen. Young Paris simply scooped her straight away from her older husband’s bed.”
    “I didn’t know that her husband’s bed was involved,” she said.
    “I assure you that it was. Paris arrived on the shores of—the shores of—where the devil was that, anyway?”
    “Greece,” she said, giggling. Her laugh was a century away from a girl’s excited giggle; it was a sultry chuckle that heated his groin. “I am fairly sure that we are talking about Homer’s epic about the Trojan War, are we not? In which Paris left Troy and came to Greece to steal the queen.”
    “He didn’t come to steal her,” Fletch objected. “He was promised her, was he not?”
    “Ah, men. They always think they have been promised some woman or another.”
    “Are we so demanding?”
    “Without fail. In my experience, men live in a fever of expectations about promises they think they were given.”
    “For example?”
    “Oh, that their wives will desire them forever…that they will be desirable forever…that their breath will always be sweet.”
    “But women are just the same. Oh, the promises men break without ever knowing that they made them! When all along women break their promises right and left.”
    “Now you must tell me.” Her eyes were