A Kiss for Midwinter (The Brothers Sinister) Read online

  God, he loved her. He couldn’t quite believe she was here, that she was touching him, wanting him. She slid a finger in the waistband of his trousers and then pulled the tails of his shirt out. When she ran her hands up his bare abdomen, he let out a gasp. She gave him a scandalous smile, one that brought his blood to a slow simmer. He took off his shirt, carefully, and set it atop his vest. And then, before she could get those wicked fingers on the waistband of his trousers, he undid the laces of her front-facing corset. It peeled away, leaving her in chemise and drawers.

  From here, lit by the flickering light of oil lamp, he could see the devastating silhouette of her body. The curves of her hips, the weight of her breasts, no longer supported by her corset. He could see the shading of a dark triangle of hair through the thin fabric of her drawers, the darker points of her nipples. His whole body pulsed with need, the desire to press against hers.

  “You’re distinctly good at that,” she said, a note of amusement in her voice. “But I suppose you’d have to be. If you needed to treat someone in a rush…”

  He shook his head.

  “No? You didn’t learn to remove women’s clothing through your profession?”

  He crossed the room to his desk, and took a letter opener off his desk.

  “Jonas?”

  He turned back to her, a smile on his face. What he wanted to say was that when he was in a rush—if minutes had made the difference between life and death—he wouldn’t have bothered with laces. But since she hadn’t given him leave to speak yet, he’d have to show her. He stalked up to her, hooked his finger in the neckline of her chemise. She just had a moment to look up at him in confusion, before he set the letter opener against the fabric and sliced it clean through.

  That. That was what he would do in a rush, if he needed to get at something. Her skin pebbled in the night air, but not for long.

  She gasped. And then he pushed her on the bed, the two halves of her chemise falling to either side of her. He dragged her drawers down, baring her body for him. Her eyes were wide, so wide, and dark. She hadn’t said a word of protest, and so he spread her legs.

  She’d said she wanted him carnally.

  Before she could think, he set his lips on her sex in a full-mouthed kiss.

  Her hips jerked under his tongue. Her hands found his hair. “Oh my God, Jonas,” she gasped. He kissed lightly at first, licking at the edges until her breath stuttered, until he tasted the liquid of her arousal. Then he deepened the kiss, licking up the length of her, finding the hard nub of her clitoris with his tongue.

  “Jonas,” she said, “Jonas. That feels so—so—”

  He couldn’t speak, and right now, he didn’t want to. He lost himself in the feel of her, the taste of her, her legs clasping around his shoulders, her hands on his scalp. Her sex underneath him, open for him, open for his taste, his tongue. She was open for him to bring her pleasure, and he brought it on her bit by bit, until she trembled beneath him, until she begged incoherently. Until he could taste the edge of her desire, until there was only want in her and no fear.

  God, it felt so good. So damned good, just to feel her on his lips, to feel that trembling wave pass through her as she screamed, her back arching, her whole body flushing pink and warm with the orgasm.

  He sat back on his heels, grinning.

  Slowly, she propped herself up on elbow and looked at him. “You,” she said, “are a man of hidden talents.” She crooked her finger at him. He stood and walked to her. Her fingers at his waistband—brushing the head of his erect penis—had him gasping. She undid the buttons and slid his trousers down, waiting for him to step over them before setting them neatly with the rest of his clothing. He wished he could make this moment last forever—this moment where she reached out and slid her fingers down him, sending a shiver of sensation through him. Instead, he handed her the French letter.

  And when she bit her lip, he showed her what to do with it.

  When it was on, she looked up at him. “Make love to me, Jonas,” she said.

  He joined her on the bed, wrapped his arms around her, and kissed her. He kissed her until her breath came in stuttering gasps, until her limbs trembled under his. Then he spread her legs, set the head of his penis against her vulva, and slid inside her. She was wet around him, wet and tight and so good. So, so good. So good to be seated inside her. To have her breasts to hand, her lips close enough to kiss. So good to thrust, unbearably sweet, into her. To have her arch up into him, gasping, as he took her.

  After all this time, he had to bite his lip to keep himself from spilling his seed too soon. But she was already deeply aroused. Every thrust brought a moan from her; every circle of his hips had her moaning. And when he found her nipple with his finger and rolled it around, her vagina clamped around him and another orgasm swept through her.

  God, she felt so good around him. So good. So damned good. He came in a great rush.

  Afterward—after he’d pulled out, after he’d gathered her up and given her a thousand little kisses, after they’d held each other in laughing wonder…

  “There are twelve days of Christmas, yes?” he asked. “Keep the turtle doves and the partridges. This was lovely. Let’s do it again.”

  She sat up and very, very slowly, she smiled. “You cheat. I didn’t say you could talk yet.”

  “I’m no expert,” he said, “but I think that when you screamed my name for the second time, it counted as tacit permission.”

  “You and your technicalities.” But she only leaned against him, running her hand along his hip. “I suppose you want French letters instead of French hens? That’s not very romantic of you.” But she kissed him as she spoke.

  “There is really nothing less romantic than chickens,” he told her. “They leave droppings all over the place, die at the slightest provocation, and are stupid enough to spend three weeks trying to hatch rocks. You keep your chickens. Let me have my true love, and hang the gifts.”

  She let out a little breath, ducked her head and put it against his shoulder.

  “Lydia.” He pulled her close, breathed in the scent of her.

  “I need your advice.” She spoke without looking up, her breath whispering against his skin.

  “Mm.”

  “There’s this man. He’s had his eye on me for months, but I haven’t always treated him kindly.” Her words faltered. “He gave me the truth for Christmas. The first time—and the second time—and the third time he offered it, I couldn’t take it. How do I let him know…” Her voice faltered. “How do I let him know that I want nobody but him?”

  “Show up in the middle of the night with a French letter,” he advised, setting a finger under her chin, “and he’ll likely get the message.”

  He tilted her face up. She looked in his eyes, and he smiled.

  “No point in being subtle.”

  “No,” she breathed. “I suppose not.”

  “But just to be sure,” he said, leaning down and setting his forehead against hers, “you’d better try it again tomorrow. And the day after. And every day you can, until we’re married. When do you think that will be, Lydia? Because I’m hoping for soon. Very soon.”

  Epilogue

  Some weeks later

  THERE WAS AN UNEARTHLY LIGHT IN THE ROOM when Lydia woke up that morning—that curious reflected brightness filtering through a gap in the curtains, one that suggested that there was now a foot of snow on the ground.

  She sat up, leaned over, and touched her fingers to her husband’s shoulder.

  Her husband. Now, that was a word that was still new, so new that she bit her lip even thinking it. That word was almost as new as the year.

  “Jonas,” she whispered.

  He didn’t respond. She could tell he was awake, though, because his eyes screwed shut, and his mouth contorted in a half-grimace.

  “Jonas,” she repeated, “it snowed last night.”

  “Mmm.”

  “That means that Minnie and Robert will be
trapped here until the trains are running,” Lydia said, “and that we can meet them for breakfast after all.” Her best friend had come into town for the wedding, and had stayed for almost a week. It had been wonderful, even if Minnie had made a few sly comments along the lines of I told you he fancied you. Lydia had been too happy to protest. And, well, Minnie had told her so.

  “Your hands are cold,” Jonas muttered. And before she could say anything in response, he reached out and took her fingers off his shoulder, and then pressed them between his palms. “Let me warm them for you.” He held them for a few moments, rubbing them lightly, before opening his eyes. “That’s scarcely helping. You know what you need?” he asked.

  “What do I need?”

  “Increased blood flow,” he responded smoothly.

  Lydia leaned over and kissed him. “Increased blood flow is my favorite,” she informed him, and then proceeded to show him precisely how much she favored proper circulation. Somewhere, in the middle of a long, lingering kiss, he took off her night rail, and she divested him of the remainder of his clothing.

  The rest was a foregone conclusion—the warmth of his skin, the slick desire of her own female liquid, and the hard thrust of his body into hers, slow and steady, his hips claiming hers as he looked into her eyes. He was her husband of just a few days, but he already knew how to drive her to the edge of wildness and beyond.

  When he’d finished, he kissed her again. “Did I ever tell you why I wanted to marry?” he asked.

  “Because you couldn’t resist me.”

  “Because I wanted a source of regular sexual intercourse, one that wouldn’t risk disease,” he responded.

  Lydia leaned into his shoulder, smiling against his skin. “Oh, too bad,” she said in mock sympathy. “And instead, you got a wife who loves you.”

  A smile spread across his face—a big, golden smile, one that had Lydia smiling in return. “There is no instead,” he said. “Only in addition. I got the woman I loved.”

  Author’s Note

  I’VE ALWAYS BEEN FASCINATED by the history of medicine, but I don’t think I could have written a doctor before the mid-Victorian era. That’s because, for the most part, doctors before then knew so little about the causes of health—and had so few tools available to them for the testing of pharmaceuticals—that it’s quite possible that they killed as many patients as they cured. That may be a charitable assessment.

  The Semmelweis study Jonas cites in this novella about the correlation between hand-washing after an autopsy and childbed fever was in fact conducted. Sadly, many doctors of the time reacted to this study with outrage. They were furious that someone suggested that they needed to wash their hands, and even angrier that it was implied that they themselves could be the cause of the disease. Semmelweis was so ostracized by the response that he ended up in a madhouse.

  As for the prussic acid/cyanide prescribed by Doctor Parwine in the beginning, I am, alas, not making this up, either. (In fact, if you ever think that there’s some screwy element of medical stuff that happens in here, trust me—I’m not making it up.) I went looking for a morning-sickness brew that would be a little sketchy, that an older doctor might prescribe in the late 1850s, and got this absolute gem:

  Dr. Scellier extols the following mixture, as a remedy for nausea and vomiting, during the period of pregnancy.

  Take of lettuce-water, 4 oz—gum arabic, 1 scruple—syrup of white poppies, syrup of marshmallow root, each, 2 oz. —Prussic acid, 4 drops.

  — From Colin Mackenzie’s Five Thousand Receipts in the Useful and Domestic Arts, reprinted in other volumes as late as 1841.

  Dr. Scellier luckily only suggested a tablespoon of this every half hour. But this solution is already 100,000 times more toxic than the toxicity for Atlantic salmon listed in the Materials Safety Data Sheet for hydrogen cyanide.

  If you’re wondering if I made up the lard-and-rice recipe, the answer is—once again—no. I did make one alteration, though. The version I heard sprinkled MSG on top. Mmm, yummy. Thanks to my former roommate Karen for providing that delectable story of cost-saving.

  Sometimes I am very grateful to live in the modern world. Right now I am very, very grateful.

  Thank you!

  Thanks for reading A Kiss for Midwinter. I hope you enjoyed it!

  • Would you like to know when my next book is available? You can sign up for my new release e-mail list at www.courtneymilan.com, follow me on twitter at @courtneymilan, or like my Facebook page at http://facebook.com/courtneymilanauthor.

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  • A Kiss for Midwinter is a novella that comes after the first full-length book in The Brothers Sinister Series. The other books are The Governess Affair, a prequel novella, The Duchess War, A Kiss for Midwinter, The Heiress Effect, and The Countess Conspiracy.

  If you’d like to read an excerpt from The Duchess War, please turn the page.

  The Duchess War: Excerpt

  The Duchess War

  available now

  Miss Minerva Lane is a quiet, bespectacled wallflower, and she wants to keep it that way. After all, the last time she was the center of attention, it ended badly—so badly that she changed her name to escape her scandalous past. Wallflowers may not be the prettiest of blooms, but at least they don’t get trampled. So when a handsome duke comes to town, the last thing she wants is his attention.

  But that is precisely what she gets…

  Excerpt from Chapter One:

  ROBERT BLAISDELL, THE NINTH DUKE OF CLERMONT, was not hiding.

  True, he’d retreated to the upstairs library of the old Guildhall, far enough from the crowd below that the noise of the ensemble had faded to a distant rumble. True, nobody else was about. Also true: He stood behind thick curtains of blue-gray velvet, which shielded him from view. And he’d had to move the heavy davenport of brown-buttoned leather to get there.

  But he’d done all that not to hide himself, but because—and this was a key point in his rather specious train of logic—in this centuries-old structure of plaster and timberwork, only one of the panes in the windows opened, and that happened to be the one secreted behind the sofa.

  So here he stood, cigarillo in hand, the smoke trailing out into the chilly autumn air. He wasn’t hiding; it was simply a matter of preserving the aging books from fumes.

  He might even have believed himself, if only he smoked.

  Still, through the wavy panes of aging glass, he could make out the darkened stone of the church directly across the way. Lamplight cast unmoving shadows on the pavement below. A pile of handbills had once been stacked against the doors, but an autumn breeze had picked them up and scattered them down the street, driving them into puddles.

  He was making a mess. A goddamned glorious mess. He smiled and tapped the end of his untouched cigarillo against the window opening, sending ashes twirling to the paving stones below.

  The quiet creak of a door opening startled him. He turned from the window at the corresponding scritch of floorboards. Someone had come up the stairs and entered the adjoining room. The footsteps were light—a woman’s, perhaps, or a child’s. They were also curiously hesitant. Most people who made their way to the library in the midst of a musicale had a reason to do so. A clandestine meeting, perhaps, or a search for a missing family member.

  From his vantage point behind the curtains, Robert could only see a small slice of the library. Whoever it was drew closer, walking hesitantly. She was out of sight—somehow he was sure that she was a woman—but he could hear the soft, prowling fall of her feet, pausing every so often as if to examine the surroundings.

  She didn’t call out a name or make a determined search. It didn’t sound as if she were looking for a hidden lover. Instead, her footsteps circled the perimeter of the room.

  It took Robert half a minute
to realize that he’d waited too long to announce himself. “Aha!” he could imagine himself proclaiming, springing out from behind the curtains. “I was admiring the plaster. Very evenly laid back there, did you know?”

  She would think he was mad. And so far, nobody yet had come to that conclusion. So instead of speaking, he dropped his cigarillo out the window. It tumbled end over end, orange tip glowing, until it landed in a puddle and extinguished itself.

  All he could see of the room was a half-shelf of books, the back of the sofa, and a table next to it on which a chess set had been laid out. The game was in progress; from what little he remembered of the rules, black was winning. Whoever it was drew nearer, and Robert shrank back against the window.

  She crossed into his field of vision.

  She wasn’t one of the young ladies he’d met in the crowded hall earlier. Those had all been beauties, hoping to catch his eye. And she—whoever she was—was not a beauty. Her dark hair was swept into a no-nonsense knot at the back of her neck. Her lips were thin and her nose was sharp and a bit on the long side. She was dressed in a dark blue gown trimmed in ivory—no lace, no ribbons, just simple fabric. Even the cut of her gown bordered on the severe side: waist pulled in so tightly he wondered how she could breathe, sleeves marching from her shoulders to her wrists without an inch of excess fabric to soften the picture.

  She didn’t see Robert standing behind the curtain. She had set her head to one side and was eyeing the chess set the way a member of the Temperance League might look at a cask of brandy: as if it were an evil to be stamped out with prayer and song—and failing that, with martial law.

  She took one halting step forward, then another. Then, she reached into the silk bag that hung around her wrist and retrieved a pair of spectacles.

  Glasses should have made her look more severe. But as soon as she put them on, her gaze softened.

  He’d read her wrongly. Her eyes hadn’t been narrowed in scorn; she’d been squinting. It hadn’t been severity he saw in her gaze but something else entirely—something he couldn’t quite make out. She reached out and picked up a black knight, turning it around, over and over. He could see nothing about the pieces that would merit such careful attention. They were solid wood, carved with indifferent skill. Still, she studied it, her eyes wide and luminous.