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“I was thinking.”

“So I gathered.”

“About the practicalities of our arrangement,” she added hastily.

His gaze lingered upon her face, and one corner of his mouth lifted.

“Of course.”

The wretched man did not believe her.

Marina straightened her shoulders. Whatever else this marriage might bring, she had no intention of allowing him to discover quite how thoroughly one kiss had unsettled her.

Not when she was only beginning to understand it herself.

Ten

The following morning, Ambrose sat at the breakfast table, the fire roaring. A freezing draft came in as the front door opened and Ernest appeared in the doorway.

“The lady has sent for the carriage. She and the feline will arrive by mid-day. Her relations will arrive by this evening,” he said. He held up the note and Ambrose stiffened at the mere mention of the woman who’d be his wife come Sunday.

Ambrose had lost his composure for the first time in his thirty-five years and kissed a woman. And not merely any woman. A woman with enough mystery that her name always had people talking. The Christmas Witch. And he was beginning to believe it, though not in the way the townspeople did.

Lady Whitmore possessed some hidden sort of spell. There could be no other explanation for the way she had managed to tempt him with her boldness, bewilder him with her surreal beauty, and somehow bring a man who had never kissed a woman in his life to the edge of forgetting every sensible principle he possessed.

Worse still, God help him, he had not wanted to stop at a kiss, and that knowledge still left his blood hot. Thankfully, his niece had cried precisely at the right moment, loudly, before he could make an even greater fool of himself.

Still, she’d kissed him without flinching, without fear. It was something he never thought he’d experience.

Ambrose dragged a hand over his face at the thought. He wished he could clear the memory away, but it would be hard pretending it never happened.

“Your Grace?”

He looked up and realized Ernest had been talking but he’d heard nary a word of it.

“I asked if you require anything else before the wedding tomorrow.”

He shook his head.

“I do not, thank you.” He waited for Ernest to depart but he did not.

“Is there something else?”

Ernest nodded. “Indeed, there is one matter. Are you certain?”

“Of course,” he answered. “I need a wife who can be there for Emma. And you suggested her, do not forget.”

“I know it. It is just that you have been different. Less… Well. You. And more…” He waved a hand. “I wonder if this arrangement might not suit you as well.”

Ambrose didn’t quite know what to say. He hadn’t been aware that he’d acted differently. The servants remained terrified of him. He had dismissed one rather impertinent young man who’d made a jest about Ambrose and his future wife just that morning.

“Emma is the only reason any of this is happening.”

Ernest did not immediately respond. Ambrose could feel the butler’s presence behind him without looking back. That was the trouble with knowing a man for so many years. Ernest had a particular talent for saying a great deal with silence.

Ambrose adjusted his cuff. And when the butler finally spoke again, his words deepened the turmoil already stirring within the duke.

“Are you certain, Your Grace, that you shall not grow fond of the lady?”