Straightening her shoulders, she determinedly turned and strode purposefully across the room. She had paused at the door to the master bedroom and half-raised her hand to knock before she caught herself. She was supposed to see his bottom as soon as she could so if she entered without knocking and caught him changing or something of the like, it would actually be a good thing, Christiana told herself as she opened the door without knocking and walked in.

He wasn’t half naked mid-change or anything of the like. Instead, he and Daniel were talking quietly as they crossed the room in her direction. Both men paused abruptly at her appearance, however, eyes widening with alarm as if they’d been caught doing something they shouldn’t. Christiana felt her eyebrows crawl up her forehead at the strange reaction and glanced curiously from one man to the other.

“Ah.” Daniel was the first to speak. His eyes moving to Richard he asked, “Should I . . . ?” He shifted his gaze over his shoulder in a silent question she didn’t understand.

“No. That’s all right. Go ahead,” Richard said quietly. Apparently he understood the question.

Frowning, Christiana peered in the direction Daniel had glanced, but didn’t see anything but the bed. It looked quite lumpy, but then Grace had said it had been ruined by the soaking from the melting ice. The other servants were apparently speculating on how the bed had come to be soaked as it was, but she doubted they’d ever come up with the truth. Christiana, her sisters and Grace themselves had gone out to fetch back the ice to avoid involving the other servants.

“Christiana?”

She blinked her thoughts away to realize that while she’d been woolgathering, Daniel had exited through the door she’d left open and Dicky—Richard

—was now standing directly in front of her. His expression was questioning, but she couldn’t help noticing that his eyes were locked on her mouth and darkening with a heat she recalled from the night before. It brought an answering heat to life inside her.

“You must be terribly uncomfortable with your hair pulled so tight,” he murmured suddenly and reached up to begin removing hairpins.

“It’s the way you insisted I wear it,” Christiana reminded him, irritation slipping in to nudge aside a bit of the awakening heat.

“Then I was an idiot,” he said simply as he finished freeing her hair and allowed the now loose strands to fall around her face. He smiled with approval.

“Much better.”

It felt much better too, she acknowledged with a sigh as the pressure was released from her scalp, but her eyes widened as he now caught her face between his hands and lifted it so their gazes met. They widened even further when he asked, “No kiss of greeting for your husband?”

Before she could respond, his mouth was on hers, coaxing that greeting from her. Christiana remained completely and utterly still at first, confusion rampant inside her head as memories from this last year of life with this man collided with the new reality. She wanted to push him away and demand some explanation for everything, for how he could have treated her as he had this last year, for how he could now treat her so differently. Unfortunately, her body had memories of its own from last night and didn’t appear to care much about the worries her mind had. It urged her to just kiss the man. After all a good wife would, surely?