I roll my eyes and stretch onto my back, taking the sugarplum with me. As a child, I always thought sugarplums were, well, sugar-coated plums. There are no plums involved, just lots and lots of sugar, this particular one having an anise seed at the middle, rather like a jawbreaker.
As I enjoy the comfit, William runs a hand over my belly. I look down to see his face glowing in the candle light.
“Bigger than when you saw me in October?” I say.
“Wonderfully bigger.” He leans down to kiss my stomach. “You look well and truly pregnant now.”
He’s moving up beside me when he stops short, his hand on my belly.
“Was that a kick?” he asks.
“Probably food digesting. I was a bit hungry.”
I feel a tell-tale twitch inside me and glance down to see something briefly protrude from my stomach.
“Nope,” I say. “That’s definitely a kick.”
William grins and spends the next few minutes watching my stomach as our baby wriggles and kicks.
“A dancer,” he says. “Like her mother.”
I snort. “About as graceful as her mother, too.”
I finish a second sugarplum and then stretch a hand over my head, fingers brushing a brown-paper parcel wrapped with scarlet ribbon.
William lifts it out of my reach. “None of that.”
As he moves it, the tag—cut from a Christmas card—dangles low enough for me to read. I blink and then sit up, catching the tag to double check the writing.
“To William, with love from Bronwyn?” I say. “Uh, this isn’t from me.”
He frowns. “Are you sure?”
“Positive. Freya is under strict orders not to release your gifts to anyone but me. I also didn’t wrap them in brown paper.”
“How strange. I wonder what it could be, then?”
“One way to find out.” I reach for the box, but he whisks it away.
“Uh-uh,” he says. “You have made the rules very clear. We do not open gifts before Christmas. Possibly Christmas eve, if I have my way, but no sooner.”
“I’m the giver of that one, not the recipient. I want to see what I got you.”
“It’s a surprise.”
I thump back onto the pillow-strewn carpet. “You are ridiculous.”
“Insults will not earn you more gifts.”
I look at the towering pile. “I don’t think I need more.”
“They aren’t all for you.”
I crawl over and plunk down beside the stack to begin reading tags. “For me, for me, for me, for . . . Will Jr? Hoping for a male heir, I take it?”
“Certainly not. I picked a name suitable for either sex.”
“We’re going to call our daughter William?”
“Willa. Will for short.”
“Which won’t be confusing at all.”
He crawls over to sit beside me. “I would love to choose a proper name, but I cannot do it until you give me one of my presents.”
I look at the box tagged to him from me.
“Not that one,” he says. “The one you’re hiding in your magic box.”
I look down the length of my naked body.
He sputters a laugh. “Your other magic box.” He rolls over and pulls my cell phone from my discarded coat. “You have something on here for me, don’t you?”
I take the phone, flip through photos and pull up my ultrasound picture. When I pass it over, he turns it this way and that, frowning at the screen.
“Now you’re just teasing me,” he grumbles. “I know the difference between a baby and a topographical map.”
I laugh. “Sorry, but that is your child. It’s a sonographic view.”
I point out the facial profile and limbs, and as I do, his blue eyes light up. Holding the phone, he rolls onto his back to stare at the photo while I munch on candied nuts.
After a moment, he says, “You say the doctor can tell the baby’s sex from this sonograph?”
“She can.”
He sits up. “And . . .”
“Well, if you were secretly hoping for that proper Victorian heir, you’ll be disappointed.”
“A girl?” He grins. “We’re having a girl?” He lifts the phone to gaze at the screen again. “Baby Willa.”
“We’ll, uh, work on that.”
He pulls me over to him. “In the interest of marital harmony, I’ll settle for Wilhelmina, but that’s as far as I’m going. Wilhelmina Hortensia Melvina Dale Thorne.”
“Melvina,” I muse. “I like that.”
He pauses. “I was joking.”
“No, it’s a good one. Melvina Thorne. I think we have a winner. We’re definitely—”
“Oh, look, is that mistletoe over our heads?”
“I believe there’s scarcely a square foot of this house where mistletoe isn’t over our heads. We’ll need to get rid of it after Christmas. It’s poison, and little Melvina—”
He cuts me off with a kiss and lowers me back onto the pillows as the phone slides to the floor, forgotten.
As a historian, I specialize in the Victorian era. It has been my period of fascination since childhood, when I first crossed the stitch into William’s time. That knowledge is extremely helpful now. I know what to expect from this world. While I can still be uncertain and cautious, I feel comfortable navigating it, with few genuine moments of culture shock.
Thus I know what I should expect on waking mid-winter in Thorne Manor. The room will be freezing cold, with no maid to slide in and light the fire before we wake. I should be nestled under layers of blankets and wearing a long, flannel nightgown—for warmth, not modesty. The windows will be open despite the sub-zero windswept moors, because a closed window invites miasma, which will lead to endless ailments. Even after the fire is going, the ambient temperature will likely not exceed sixty degrees, requiring those endless layers of undergarments.
Instead, I wake naked in a comfortable feather bed with just the right amount of blankets, the top ones peeled back so I don’t roast. The fire is roaring, and has never been fully extinguished. William rose earlier and stoked it, and while a big stone house like this is impossible to keep toasty without central heating, the rooms will be warm enough to suit my more modern sensibilities—and my preference for modern underwear, which William fully endorses. One window is just cracked open. We’ve discussed germ theory enough for my husband to banish period-appropriate notions of miasmas, and for us, a little fresh air is simply preference.
The room is deliciously cozy, that chilly breeze like the welcome ripples of wind on a hot day. The sharp and crisp breeze perfectly counterpoints the perfume of the roaring fire and . . . Is that tea?
I lift up and follow my nose to a steaming cup resting on the nightstand, with two biscuits perched on the saucer.
God, I love my husband.
I love this bed, too, which is going to be my dearest friend for the next twenty-four hours. I’ll tell William that I need a little more sleep, and that he’s more than welcome to join me later, when we can continue our marital reunion.
I grin and reach for a biscuit. The door swings open, William giving it a kick as he walks in, breakfast tray in hand.
Enigma wends her way past his feet and hops onto the bed to curl up with me. Her mother—Pandora—follows at William’s heels like a loyal hound. It is a picture I have been dreaming about for two months, rising in this bed, seeing William, the cats, the fire, the smell of the moors through the window . . .