Lady Sophie's Christmas Wish - By Grace Burrowes Page 0,31

worry,” he pointed out.

“Yes, we would.”

They’d buried two grown sons. Yes, they would worry. They would always worry.

“Shall I go back up to Town, my love? People always exaggerate descriptions of inconvenient weather. I’m sure the roads can’t be as impassable as all that when there are only a few inches of snow on the ground hereabouts.”

“No, you shall not.” Her Grace put a little scold in her words. “We have three strapping sons who are on their way to collect Lady Sophia as we speak. If Sophie is up to something unsound, better her brothers sort her out at this stage than her parents.”

“You’re sure?” Something had shifted in Her Grace’s relationship with their sons in recent months, possibly as a function of all three acquiring wives. If she was delegating management of Sophie to the boys, then it was only because Her Grace was well and truly not concerned about the girl.

“Percival Windham, you are proposing to go haring off in the dead of winter with a storm of biblical proportions raging just to the north and west, while I sit here and do what? Worry about you in addition to the four of our offspring who are not now under our roof ? I think not.”

“Just making sure, my love. More tea?”

She smiled at him, his reward for helping her make up her mind. If Sophie were up to mischief, His Grace was privately of the opinion it was about damned time, provided the mischief involved a suitable swain. Sophie was wasting her youth tending to the halt and the lame when she ought to be about snabbling a handsome specimen to help provide her dear parents with some chubby little… to help her fill her nursery.

His Grace opened the paper to the financial section. An attempt to read the contents thereof was about as soporific as a tot of the poppy, but it was a fine excuse to let his mind drift off to which young men of his acquaintance he might consider worthy of his most sensible daughter.

If any.

***

Some vital male brain function had been impaired during the few minutes Vim had held Sophie Windham in his arms. Badly impaired—impaired as if some part of him had been aching sorely for a long time, though it had taken the feel of that one woman in his embrace to make him aware of his own hurt.

And now he could not focus on much else.

He liked her, was the problem. Or part of it. The other part was he desired her, which made no sense. Of course he desired her the way any healthy male would desire any attractive woman, but this was… different.

Vim had been a sexual friend to any number of women, and they’d been happy to return the favor. Romping was merely… romping. A wink and a smile, and both parties could be on their way, an itch having been adequately scratched for the nonce.

Sophie was not a woman to romp with. She was a woman a man could spend years learning to cherish.

“You can put those in the batter now.” She gestured with her wooden spoon as if to remind Vim they were trying to put the baby’s nap to some use besides encouraging Vim’s rampant sexual fantasies. He picked up the cutting board and shifted to scrape a pile of finely chopped dates into the bowl of pale batter.

Baking was an activity designed to part a sane—and mildly aroused—man from his wits. Sophie had him pouring things into her bowls, standing right beside her, brushing arms and bodies and hands. She asked him to taste the batter, putting a spoonful of sweetness right into his mouth before he could protest or move away.

While they worked, she gently interrogated him, and he let her, because it gave him something to think of besides the sensation of her soft, full breast pressing against his arm when she leaned across him to retrieve the cinnamon.

“Didn’t you miss your family on all those long journeys?”

He accepted the tin of cinnamon back from her, their fingers brushing again as he did. “They are my half siblings, though we were all raised together. I missed them, but there was a sense too of not wanting to impose. The estate in Cumbria is theirs, not mine.”

She stopped stirring for moment and frowned at him. “My oldest brother and sister suffer from this same affliction. It’s as if Devlin in particular must always remind himself that he’s half our brother,