An Affair Before Christmas by Eloisa James Read Free Book Online Page B

after she left.
    “You were both laughing so hard,” Poppy said. “Could you share the joke?”
    “You wouldn’t understand,” he said. Anger was starting to burn in the back of his throat. Rage at her, rage at life…
    She dimpled. “I take it you were telling each other naughty jokes? I’m certain that I could understand anything Louise enjoyed.”
    “I doubt it,” Fletch said. The other men were absolutely silent. He knew his voice was laden with scorn and near disgust. He couldn’t help it.
    She blinked and then her sprightly smile popped out again. “Then I shall give you all the plea sure of explaining it to me!”
    “You must be joking,” he said. “There are some things that ladies of your type never understand.”
    She pulled herself taller. “Ladies of my type?”
    “You know the type, St. Albans,” he said. But St. Albans wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Good to the bone. Practically achieving sainthood right here in London.”
    “Fletch,” Poppy said. “Do not speak to me like this, I beg you.”
    “Why not?” For the first time he looked at her directly in the face. “We never say anything significant to each other any longer. In fact, I don’t believe we’ve exchanged an interesting word in a year.”
    She was rather white. “That is not true.”
    “Name one interesting sentence,” he said, jeering at her.
    She raised her chin. “I told you last week that I loved you. Under the circumstances, that was remarkably interesting.” She spun on her heel and left.
    “Dammit,” Gill said. He forgot he was wearing a wig and tried to run a hand through his hair. His wig fell off and plopped on the floor. It looked like a dead hare, lying on the carpet.
    Fletch’s jaw tightened. “I’m sick of her childish views. I can’t stand any more of her cheerful little comments about every damn thing. If I dropped dead in the street, she’d probably kneel down next to me and coo some platitude about how much I will enjoy heaven.”
    “She loves you, not that you deserve it,” Gill said.
    “Who cares if I deserve it? I don’t want it,” Fletch said. “Our marriage is a sham and a fraud. That being the case, I’d rather that we both understood precisely where we are, rather than my wife pretending that we’re a normal couple. That we have”—he spat it—“any sort of life in the bed.”
    “Almost no one does have an intimate life with his wife,” St. Albans said, apparently recovering his tongue after the shock. “Doesn’t mean he has to shoot her down in cold blood like that.”
    “She sees the world in rose and gold,” Fletch said flatly. “I believe she actually thinks we’re happy.”
    “She doesn’t now,” Gill said.
    Fletch hunched his shoulders. “Good.”



Chapter 7
    THE MORNING POST (CONTINUED)
    There can be nothing more dangerous to moral fiber than a circle of women bent on achieving their desires, living a life of pleasure, and paying heed to no admonishments. This paper fears for the souls of every duchess in London!
    P oppy never used to cry before she became a duchess.
    Unfortunately, having a spouse had turned Poppy into a waterspout. She cried herself to sleep. She cried in the oddest moments, for example, in between meetings of the Charitable Society for the Reception of Repenting Prostitutes and the meetings of the board of Lady Charlotte’s Lying-In Hospital. Now she ran down a long corridor of Beaumont House, wiping away the tears as they rolled off her chin.
    How could he? How could he have said that, and in front of his friends? She knew they didn’t talk very much. She knew—she knew there was something terribly wrong.
    But try as she might, she couldn’t make it work. She woke every morning determined to make Fletch love her again, the way he used to before they married. She never betrayed the faintest irritation at the way he stalked around the house. Never, ever, did she irritate him by pointing out that they would have no children, given that