Her Christmas Wish by Ellie St. Clair

Author:Ellie St. Clair
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2019-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

13

Emily shivered, but this time it was not with cold.

She was trembling all right, but it was from the touch of Charles’ fingers upon her face, of his nearness, of the fact that she was standing with him in front of a fire, alone in a cottage when no one knew where they were.

It was quite scandalous. It was exactly the situation she had told herself to avoid. And yet, despite her offer to leave, she didn’t want to be anywhere but here.

“Charles,” she said, swallowing, needing to put space between them. She could hardly see his face in front of her, so atrocious was her vision without her spectacles, but she could see enough to know how seriously he was looking at her, how intent his eyes were focused on her face, how firmly he gripped her arms. It seemed everything this man did was with determined precision. She searched her mind wildly for something to say. “Are your feet not cold?”

“Pardon me?” he said, his eyebrows lifting as her words were apparently not was he was expecting to hear.

She took a breath, and his musky scent of ink and leather drifted into her nostrils, overcoming the mustiness of the cottage which had obviously not been used in some time.

“I— I asked if your feet are not cold as well,” she said, feeling the fool but forging ahead anyway. “My feet were soaked from the snow. Are yours not?”

“Slightly,” he said, his hands drawing down from her face now and she missed his touch, wishing she had said nothing that would cause him to rethink where they had been. “But they don’t seem to be overly bothering me at the moment.”

“Mine are like icicles,” she said, telling the truth.

“Come,” he said, taking her hand and leading her the two steps over to the bed, careful not to sit on her spectacles. He lifted them carefully and placed them on the floor beside them. “Give me your feet.” He held out his hands to her.

“Oh, I couldn’t,” she said, the back of her neck and her face beginning to tingle as her breathing quickened.

“I will not tell anyone,” he promised, but she shook her head.

“It isn’t that,” she said, biting her lip.

“Then why not?”

“Because… it simply doesn’t seem… right.”

“Hush,” he said, obviously not wanting to discuss it any further. He kept his hands outstretched toward her, offering her no choice but to reach her leg out to him. Her toes looked small and pale in comparison to his large hands, and as cold as she was, heat rose in her cheeks as he palmed her feet.

But then he began to rub them to infuse warmth back in, and she forgot all of her shyness as blood began rushing into her extremities once more.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “That… hurts!”

“Just focus on the feeling of my fingers,” he murmured, and now he moved from rubbing her toes to massaging the rest of her foot. His thumbs kneaded into the pad at the bottom, moving down over the arch, to her heel and back.

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