A Very Selwick Christmas by Lauren Willig Read Free Book Online Page A

course. And she"s a part of that world.”
    Richard had a feeling he was about to step into something soft and squishy, but he ventured forward anyway. “Yes.”
    “And I"m not.”
    Ah. That was the squishy bit. “I didn"t say that.”
    Shaking her head, Amy turned away. “Never mind. I"m just— Never mind.”
    Concerned, Richard followed after her, resting his hands on her shoulders. “Just what?” he asked.
    He could see the bared nape of her neck as she bent her head forward, the little tendrils of curl escaping from their ribbon dark against the tender skin. Ordinarily, he would have kissed her curls away, but this didn"t seem a moment for that.
    Amy gave a little shake of her head. Richard could feel her shoulders rise and fall beneath his hands as she shrugged. “Nothing,” she said, turning jerkily, so that she was addressing the top button of his waistcoat. “Just—all this. Seeing Jane. Too much mince pie.”
    “It"s not the mince pie, is it?” Richard asked grimly. “It"s the Jane bit.”
    Amy lifted her head. Her eyes looked darker than usual, too dark in the shadow cast by his body. Richard thought abstractedly that this was the second pair of big, soulful blue eyes he had encountered this evening in this very same room. But this time, there was a difference.
    He cared.
    “A little,” she admitted. “No. A lot.”
    Richard felt a lump in his chest that was more than just the three pieces of mince pie he had shared with his nephew. Out of the mass of indigestible emotion, he found himself blurting out, “If you had it all to do again, would you do it differently?”
    Amy took a step back. Someone, presumably his niece Caroline, had stuck a sprig of holly into the bandeau that held back her curls. It had come unmoored, bobbing drunkenly beside one ear, like a buoy in a deserted sea.

    “Do what?” she asked warily.
    Grimacing, Richard made an abortive gesture. “All this. You had so little time over there before we had to leave—before I had to leave,” he corrected. He, at least, had had seven years playing hero, long enough, if he were being entirely honest, for the exercise to begin to stale. Amy, on the other hand, had had three months, three months after a lifetime of training.
    “Are you sorry?”
    “Sorry?”
    Richard tried to keep his voice light. “That you yoked your lot to mine.”
    Amy plucked the sprig of holly from behind her ear, squinted at it, made a face, and tossed it onto the desk. “I don"t usually think of it as a yoke.”
    Richard didn"t like the sound of that “usually”. “Just when Jane comes to visit, then.”
    Amy sketched an impatient gesture that could equally be taken as negation, assent, or do-we-really-have-to-talk-about-this-now? “We should be getting back,” she said. “Your mother wanted to get up a game of charades.”
    “Bother the chara—”
    “And you have house guests now.”
    Richard cursed bloody Deirdre, her bloody mother, and their bloody coachman to perdition.
    He threw in the snow for good measure while he was at it. Bother the snow.
    “I had house guests before,” muttered Richard. “And they aren"t my guests, they"re my parents" guests.”
    Amy dignified that with all the response it deserved. None. Tucking her holly more firmly into her hair, she swept the train of her red velvet dress up over her arm and started for the door, back towards charades, and house guests, and assorted dotty relatives who would effectively preclude their having any sort of meaningful conversation just by being themselves. Not that he was doing too well on the conversation front as it was—digging his own grave appeared to be the operative phrase—but he couldn"t let her go off looking like that. Not when it lay within his power to fix it.
    “Wait—” Richard caught his wife by the hand. She looked back over her shoulder. A holly berry gave up its hold on her hair ornament and jounced off her shoulder before rolling harmlessly to the carpet.