Page 98 of A Very Bellamy Christmas

The winner got to choose the next game and Stacia had won five games in a row. First they had played three games of chess and now two games of spillikins.

“You choose the next game,” she said, putting the sticks back into the fancy lacquer case.

“No, no, you won, so you choose. Those are the rules we agreed on. I am no shirker.”

He was definitely sulking, and Stacia knew she should not find it so adorable, but…how could she not? This big, strong, gorgeous man was pouting like a toddler because she had beaten him five times running. Stacia wasn’t a great chess player—or even a very good one—but Lord Shelton was truly abysmal. He made one headlong, ill-conceived move after the other, losing pieces left and right to no effect.

He was slightly better at spillikins, but still too impatient.

“Do you want to do something else, my lord?”

He suddenly looked alert. “Like what?”

For some reason, Stacia’s face heated. “I don’t know. Take a nap?”

“A nap?” His handsome face screwed up into an expression of horror, as if she’d suggested they plait each other’s hair. “Just how old do you think I am that I’d need a nap in the middle of the day?”

Stacia pulled her lips between her teeth, struggling not to laugh.

“Oh, that amuses you, does it?”

“Since you’ve brought it up, how old are you?”

“How old do you think I am?” he shot back.

She tilted her head to the side and pretended to study him. Stacia knew how old he was, of course—she knew almost all there was to know about the man. At least all the public information that had been bandied about. Now was her chance to get her own back for that drab little dab comment.

“Not much over forty,” she said after a long moment, during which time his frown had deepened.

His eyebrows nearly launched off his forehead. “Forty?”

Stacia was biting her tongue so hard it was almost bleeding. “Nine-and-thirty?” she asked in a choked voice.

“I am four-and-thirty,” he said frostily. “How old are you?”

“It is rude to ask a lady her age.”

“Perhaps that’s the case when the lady is older. But you cannot be much more than twenty.”

“So, what is next,” she asked, ignoring his fishing.

“I don’t care,” he said petulantly.

“Do you want to read for a while?” She knew the answer to that question even before she’d asked. After all, she’d watched him that first evening in the drawing room, when he’d held a book as if he had never held one before, not turning a page the entire time.

He glanced at the stack of books he’d removed from the trunk and scowled. “No, thank you.”

Yet again, Stacia had to smother a laugh. Lady Kathryn—if that is truly who’d done this—had included four gothic novels from the Minerva Press and two books that Stacia had already read and adored: Sense and Sensibility and Emma, both written by “a Lady.”

“Have you read any of these books?” she asked, already knowing the answer.

He scoffed. “No.”

“And yet you are already condemning them.”

“They are romantic novels—melodramas.”

Stacia smiled.