Read Online All I Want for Christmas Is a Duke by Delilah Marvelle, Máire Claremont - Free Book Online

I trusted you more than I trusted myself. You were like a brother to me.”
    Martin swiped his face and grabbed the ends of the desk, leaning into it. “I didn’t want to be a brother to you.” He stared her down. “I wanted you in the way I knew you would never want me due to our age difference. Which is why I sought to change that by writing those letters. I didn’t know what else to do.”
    She glared at him, her cheeks feeling ablaze. “So you let me make an utter fool of myself? By making love to me through words? By pretending to be someone you weren’t?”
    He leaned toward her, shifting his weight against the edge of the desk, and fiercely met her gaze. “I wasn’t pretending. Mister X was real. Everything he wrote was real. That was me. All of it. I only withheld my name because I wanted to know if you and I could ever step beyond the friendship we had. And we did. You wanted me. As much as I wanted you.”
    Oh, God. To think of all the letters she had written in response to his. Letters that had been as equally romantic as they had been erotic. She had even written one letter confiding how much she longed to be touched by him. In that way. It was…humiliating. She had been writing to a seventeen-year-old boy all along.
    Scrambling toward the desk, she gathered the piled letters in a blur, bunching them into her arms, and hurried toward the lit hearth. “I’m burning these. They have no right being in existence.”
    “Jane!” he boomed, his booted feet darting toward her.
    Tears blinded her as she frantically tried to get to the fire before he reached her. Large hands grabbed her waist from behind and yanked her back hard before she could fling them onto the coals.
    Her letters scattered everywhere as Archer jumped up and barked, equally startled.
    A sob escaped her as she turned and shoved him away.
    He jerked her back harder toward himself, molding her tighter against the solid warmth of his body. “Jane.” His fingers buried themselves in her shoulders as he set his shaven chin against her head. “Don’t destroy them. I have suffered well enough and won’t have you burn the last of what we shared. I won’t.”
    She tried shoving herself out of his grasp again, but he tightened his hold, the scent of his hair tonic and the crisp mint from his clothing drowning her ability to breathe and think.
    She shoved again, but to no avail. “You must think me quite the whore after everything I wrote. No wonder you invited me here for brandy. You probably thought I was going to—”
    He shook her. “Cease! For God’s sake, I never thought that. Not once. I didn’t invite you here for that. I’m not that sort of man. Never have been and never will be.”
    “Then what did you invite me here for? What did you—”
    “To get to know you again. In the way we used to know each other. You and I used to be—”
    “Used to be! You abandoned me, Martin. Even as a friend! You took off on tour for…for years. Without so much as even saying good-bye to me! Why? Why did you—”
    “Because I couldn’t pretend anymore. I just couldn’t.”
    “So you created an illusion and then abandoned me to it?” She glared. “You ought to be ashamed of the letters you wrote, given how intimate they were. You were a boy! How could you—” She reached up to smack him, to smack out the anger and the shame and agony of knowing it had been him all along, but he caught her wrist, jarring it.
    He searched her face for a long moment, his dark eyes heatedly holding hers. His fingers around her wrist tightened. “Yes, I was seventeen,” he rasped. “What of it? Even a seventeen-year-old knows passion and love when he feels it. It doesn’t make it wrong or any less real. And given your reaction, it’s fairly obvious I did the right thing by not making myself known.”
    Yanking away her wrist from his hold, she released a sob in a desperate effort to let the anguish go. The anguish of knowing that Mister X had been real