Vic was already rattling off something about cranberries and backup turkeys as she retreated inside, Alex falling into step beside her. For a second, Erin watched her go, the swing of that dark green cloak, the tilt of her golden head as she listened, the way she briefly reached out to steady an elderly footman on the slick flagstones.
All these years of our love, Erin thought, bending to scoop up a wriggling, damp Matilda. And apparently zero uninterrupted minutes of privacy.
Matilda latched onto her, cold and clingy and complaining into her neck. “My feet are soggy,” she announced. “I don’t like soggy.”
“Me neither,” Erin said, hoisting her up with a grunt andreaching for Florence’s hand with her free one. “Come on, troops. Let’s get you inside before you merge with the snow and I have to explain to the press why the royal family now includes three small snowmen.”
“What about me?” Frank demanded, arms spread, as if daring gravity to take him.
“You,” Erin said, shifting her weight and eyeing the distance to the door, “are walking. You ate the snow after I told you not to. Actions have consequences.”
Frank scowled, then promptly tried to catch snowflakes in his mouth again as he trudged toward the house. Florence’s small fingers tightened around hers, trusting.
Erin took one last look over her shoulder as she herded them inside.
Alex disappeared into the warm glow of the entrance hall with Vic talking at top speed beside her. Before she vanished entirely, she glanced back, just once, and their eyes met. Her brilliant blue eyes were unmistakable.
Later, Alex’s expression said again.
Later.
Erin nodded, even though Alex couldn’t see it, adjusting her grip on Matilda and bracing herself for the chaos waiting inside.
She hadn’t had sex with her wife for longer than she cared to calculate. She was exhausted down to her bones. She was about to spend several days trapped in a snow-bound castle with an over-caffeinated event planner, four children, and an entire staff prone to melodrama where traditions were concerned.
And yet.
Underneath the fatigue and the irritation and the constant low-level scan of exits and threats, hope flared, stubborn and bright.
Before Boxing Day, she told herself again, as she steered the triplets over the threshold and into the heat and noise. Somehow, some way.
I will have sex with my wife before Boxing Day.
She wasn’t sure what exactly she’d have to face down to make that happen—rogue reindeer, mutinous turkeys, Mrs. MacLeod’s rolling pin, Vic’s spreadsheets, four overexcited five-year-olds, centuries of royal tradition—but she’d faced worse odds.
Probably.
Behind her, the door swung shut on the drifting snow, muting the outside world to a soft, distant hush.
Inside, the volume immediately doubled.
“Take your boots off!”
“Not in the hallway!”
“Frank, do not lick that banister!”
Erin sighed, shifted Matilda higher on her hip, and went to war.
Her first attempt at intimacy lay in tatters somewhere between the front steps and Vic’s clipboard.
Round one, Balmoral, she thought, as she separated Frank from the dangerously lickable banister and eyed the staircase Alex had vanished up.
But the game was far from over.
3
VIC
