“I’ll hold you to that,” Alex murmured.
She looked toward the open doorway, where she could just see the back of Erin’s head as she walked away down the corridor, phone already at her ear.
The ache returned then, a little deeper, a little sadder. Not just heat between her thighs, but a hollow under her ribs.
She wanted her. That part was simple. She wanted Erin’s body, her mouth, her hands. Wanted her moans in her ear, wanted the weight of her, the way she surrendered nowhere else in her life but there.
But more than that, she wanted Erin’s presence. Undiluted. Not the version of her that was always half-attuned to footsteps in the hall, to the buzz of her phone, to the possibility of catastrophe.
She wanted to feel, just for a night—or even an hour—that they were on the same side of the glass again, not separated by a constant layer of obligations.
Florence shifted against her, yawning. Matilda argued with Vic about the exact antler span of the supposed deer. Frank tried to eat another biscuit and was intercepted by a nanny. Julia made a note in her folder, lips pursed, probably already thinking about the next day’s adjustments.
Alex smoothed her hand over Florence’s hair and made herself a promise.
If the universe wanted to keep throwing power cuts and snowstorms and reindeer-shaped branches at them, fine. Let it.
She would get creative.
She would book out a room and lock the door and confiscate Erin’s phone if she had to. She would enlist Julia and Vic and every staff member in Balmoral to create a distraction.
She would not let their marriage become a series of almosts.
We will find privacy, she told herself, the words solidifying into something like resolve.
Maybe not today. Maybe not in a freezing corridor with a rebellious radiator and four overexcited children on the loose.
But before this holiday was over, she and Erin would have more than five minutes in the dark.
She owed it to herself. She owed it to Erin. She owed it to the two foolish, brave women they’d once been, flirting inpalace corridors and sneaking touches in between duty calls.
Alex tightened her arms around Florence, glanced once more at the doorway where Erin had vanished, and lifted her chin.
“Right,” she said, summoning a grin for the children. “Tell me everything about this terrifying reindeer.”
And in the back of her mind, she began to plan.
6
ERIN
By the time Erin made it upstairs, she’d rehearsed six different ways to initiate sex with her wife and rejected all of them as ridiculous.
Option one: classic. Kiss her senseless, push her onto the bed, trust all the years of pent-up attraction to do the rest.
Rejected because: children. At least one of them would materialise in under ninety seconds, clutching a stuffed animal and an existential crisis.
Option two: humour. “Your Majesty, I’m afraid I’ve identified a critical security vulnerability and it’s located in our bedroom; I’ll need you to strip so I can investigate.”
Rejected because: Alex would laugh so hard she’d snort, and laughing and stripping probably wouldn’t be a sustainable combination, and also Erin might actually die of embarrassment halfway through the sentence.
Option three: blunt. “I miss you. I want you. Can we make time?”
Rejected because: terrifying.
She rounded the corner onto the corridor that led to their suite, boots soft against the old rugs, and tried to slowher breathing so she didn’t look like she’d sprinted up the stairs in panic.
It was ridiculous. She’d been naked with this woman more times than she could count. They’d weathered protests and scandals and actual attempts on Alex’s life. They’d had their sex life interrupted by everything from fire alarms to a toddler throwing up in the doorway.
