Under The Mistletoe Read Online Free PDF Page A

reaction would be if she should happen to see him. She had ignored him with haughty dignity at breakfast.
    Elizabeth was not in her room. She might be anywhere, but he took a chance on finding her in the nursery. He was not mistaken. She was standing at the window of Jeremy’s room looking downward, as if she expected the outdoor party to emerge from the door below at any moment. The baby was asleep in his crib.
    â€œWe are about to leave,” he said.
    â€œAre you?” She turned toward him, straight-backed and regal and unsmiling.
    He had wasted his time coming up here to talk to her, he thought. He had probably ruined her Christmas, in fact.
    â€œDoes the baby need you?”
    â€œHe has just been fed,” she told him. “Your eagerness to see him has certainly diminished since yesterday.” She spoke softly, but the rebuke was unmistakable.
    â€œI came up here early,” he said, feeling a stirring of anger against her. Why had she married him if she despised him so? But the answer to that question was obvious, at least. It had certainly not been from personal choice. “His nurse was changing his nappy, and he was as cross as blazes, though she assured me that he could not possibly be hungry. I held him for half an hour.” He had held his tiny son against his shoulder with an intense ache of tenderness. “He almost deafened my right ear for a few minutes, but he finally found amusement in chewing on the brocade collar of his papa’s dressing robe.”
    Not for the first time he wondered how his son would grow up. Would he, too, despise his father and be embarrassed by his origins?
    â€œI did not know that,” his wife said. “Nurse did not tell me.”
    â€œI suppose,” he said, “you do not want to come outside with us?”
    â€œGathering greenery?” she said. “And engaging in a snowball fight?” She sounded shocked.
    â€œNo.” He nodded briskly and turned back to the door. “I did notthink so. We will probably be back late for luncheon. You may wish to have the meal set back an hour.” If her mother would permit such a disruption of the household routine, that was.
    He was at the door of the outer nursery—deserted this morning—when her voice stopped him. She had stepped out of Jeremy’s bedchamber and was closing the door behind her.
    â€œMr. Chambers,” she called, her formal words of address increasing his irritation, though he turned politely toward her, “do you want me to come?”
    She looked different somehow, less serene, less sure of herself. There was an expression almost of longing in her eyes. She looked suddenly youthful, and he remembered that indeed she was little more than a girl. She had been eighteen when they married, five years younger than he.
    He swallowed his first impulse, which was to tell her that she might please herself.
    â€œYes,” he said abruptly. And it was true. He was as irrationally head-over-ears in love with her as he had been when he first set eyes on her. If she still despised him for his origins and his willingness to have his father purchase her for her birth and rank, well, so be it. But he had come here to see if something could be made of his marriage before their separation had continued for so long that it would be virtually irreversible.
    â€œVery well,” she said, her cool, reserved self again. “I will go and change. You need not wait for me.”
    Had he imagined that look of longing? Was she coming merely because he had asked? Merely because she owed him obedience? Would she be miserable outside in the snow and the cold? Would she spoil the outing for everyone else?
    â€œWe will wait outside for you,” he said.
    Â 
    It was still snowing. Thick white flakes fluttered down from a heavy gray sky. The steps outside the front doors had been swept recently, but there was a thin film of snow on them again. Elizabeth stepped out