How about a first kiss post for this WIP Wednesday? I have one. It’s from To Wed a Proper Lady. Full disclosure. This seen hasn’t much changed since the novel was the novella The Bluestocking and the Barbarian.
Please share your own work-in-progress first kisses in the comments.
Sure enough, Sophia was alone in the room to which the doddery old butler directed James when he asked after the second parlour. He gave the room a quick and cursory scan before focusing his attention on the woman standing on a ladder and hanging garlands across the huge painting on the window wall. She leaned to her right to reach up to the carved pediment above the window, clutching at the draped maroon curtains to keep her balance.
James was across the room in seconds. “Careful,” he said, steadying the ladder.
Sophia looked down. “Lord Elfingham. What are you doing here?”
“I was looking for something useful to do, Lady Sophia. May I be of service?”
She examined his face and then nodded. “You are between Scylla and Charybdis, are you not?”
James laughed. “You have it exactly. On the one side, the ladies who think it worth the gamble to pull a possible future duke down into their watery vortex, and on the other, the multi-headed monster of innuendo and insult in the company of the gentlemen.”
“Neither ladies nor gentlemen by their behaviour,” his own lady said tartly. “Very well, Lord Elfingham, I will put you to work.” She put one hand on his shoulder to help herself from the ladder. “Bring the ladder, please. I have more garlands to hang.”
James lifted the ladder and followed obediently in her wake. “What are we doing, pray tell?”
“We are having a costume party tonight. You heard?”
James nodded. His wardrobe was limited to what he could carry in his saddlebags, but the duchess had ordered chests of costumes and fabric brought down from the attics, and he had found the means to replicate his festival clothes as a mountain prince, or at least close enough for the audience.
If they wanted a barbarian, he would give them a barbarian.
“We did not decorate in here on Christmas Eve, since we had so much else to do, so I am putting up Christmas decorations. See? The evergreen is a symbol of life in this most holy season. And the holly, have you heard the song about the holly?”
Sophia sang for him, in a light alto, all the verses his father had taught them when he was a tiny child. This European holly was not precisely the same as the holly he had grown up with, but it was similar. For the pleasure of hearing her voice, he kept his counsel.
She went on to explain the other Christmas customs, not just the foliage and ribbons and other materials used in the decorations, but the pudding that had been served at Christmas dinner, the Yule logs burning in various fireplaces around the house, and the boxes that the duchess had delivered the previous day to poor families around the district.
“Cedrica and I, and several of the other ladies, were her deputies,” Sophia explained. “It was wonderful to see the happy little faces of the children, James.”
James had stayed back from the hunt organised for the men in the hopes of spending time with Sophia, and had found out about the charity expedition too late to offer his services. “I am sorry that I missed it,” he said sincerely.
He noted one glaring omission in her descriptions. “Just a decoration,” she had told him, mendaciously, when he asked about the kissing boughs.
And now pretending to be ignorant of these English Christmas customs was about to pay off. One day, when she was safely his wife, he might admit to Sophia that he and the whole citadel had hung on his father’s tales of an English Christmas, that his mother and her maids had decorated high and low, and his father had led the troops out to find a fitting Yule log to carry home in triumph on Christmas Eve. A harder job in his dry mountains than in this green land.
But this was not the time for that story. Not when Sophia was relaxed and about to pass under a kissing bough that retained its full complement of mistletoe berries.
James suppressed a grin. “Look,” he said, at the opportune time, pointing up. “My kaka—my Papa—told me about these.”
She stopped, as he had intended, and with a single stride, he had reached her, wrapped her in his arms, and captured the lips that had been haunting his dreams this past three months.
And she kissed him back. For a moment… for one long glorious moment, while time stood still and the world ceased to exist, Sophia Belvoir kissed him back.