A/N: It's not an A Girl in Black update, but hopefully a little Christmas smut will make up for it. It's set in the same universe as my other "Bold and Modern" fics, but all you really need to know is that Mary and Richard married in the summer of 1919 as originally planned, and the S2 Christmas special never happened. Happy Holidays to all my dear readers!
Bold and Modern Christmas
Christmas, 1919
The Haxby renovations are completed well before December-well before the July wedding, in fact, thanks to the incentives Richard wrote into his workers' contracts not to let their labour drag on-but Mary insists on spending their first Christmas as man in wife in London.
"Whatever you like, my dear," Richard says.
He smiles tightly around teeth gritted against the disappointment of not being able to play host to the Downton crew and prove that he is as capable of making people merry as any proper gentleman, born to a title and an estate. He does not, however, hold back a biting appraisal of his bride's motivations for this disruption of his plans.
"If you've no intention of actually staying at Haxby, you might have said so before I spent a small fortune making it comfortable for us. Though I had thought," he adds, "that the place was growing on you. I thought you liked the master bathroom, at least."
As his eyes meet hers in the dressing table mirror, he notes, too, that his hand has gone up to rub the back of his neck, which prickles hotly above his wing-tipped collar. He lowers it to his side though the colour burns higher-for an altogether different reason-tingeing his cheekbones. Mary glances away, and Richard at once admires and is annoyed by the poise she retains even as the glimmer in her eyes, the knowing quirk of her lips, acknowledges the bathroom incident to which he refers. When he showed her just how invigoratingan experience taking a shower could be. Before they were even married.
Bold and modern, indeed.
Except that they haven't been back to their newly remodelled estate for a repeat performance. In fairness, they haven't been back to Yorkshire at all since they returned from their wedding trip on the Continent in September, earlier than expected because the ravages of the War put rather a damper the honeymoon spirit.
"Why must you always assume the worst of me?" Mary asks, putting on a pair of glittering sapphire earrings.
Richard gave them to her a few weeks back, for no particular occasion other than he saw them in a jeweller's window remembered a blouse she owned in a shade of blue he liked on her and wished she would wear more often. She rewarded his sentimentality with a declaration that they were too formal to wear with the blouse and then had a dress made to match-the French designer gown she wears now, in fact, a shimmering beaded number whose hemline reveals so much of her long, slender legs as to make him forget any thought he might have had of lecturing her for exceeding her monthly clothing allowance.
"Hasn't it occurred to you that it's not that I don't want to spend Christmas at Haxby," Mary goes on, "but that I don't want to spend Christmas with my family?"
"That might have occurred to me, yes-if you'd ever given me any indication during our engagement that you'd rather spend time with me than with them."
He watches the white line of her spine go rigid above the dip in the back of her dress, then relax again, shoulder blades rippling beneath porcelain skin in the lamplight as she picks up her necklace to resume her toilet. Richard adjusts his white cuffs so that they peek out evenly beneath the sleeves of his dinner jacket, then in one stride closes the space between himself and Mary's dressing table bench, covering her hands with his own to take over the job of fastening the delicate golden clasp of her necklace. He feels her gaze on his face as his eyes travel down to where the deep pink tourmaline pendant settles in the white hollow of her throat, and cannot resist leaning in to kiss her neck as his hands linger on her shoulders.
"Well we're married now," Mary says, "and you're growing on me, too."
"Do I at least rank even with Haxby's master bathroom?"
"Higher, in fact. Though I should have thought that evident."
"By what?" Richard wishes his tone did not register such genuine surprise.
"The fact that I'm choosing to spend Christmas in town rather than at Haxby, where our bathroom would be our only refuge from the houseguests we should be obliged to invite."
"In that case I'm deeply flattered." He resumes kissing along the beaded neckline toward her breasts; while he appreciates that the modern fashions reveal more leg than ever, he does rather miss the swell of cleavage from the corsets of the last decade that has given way to the boyish silhouette. "I like that you want to be alone with me."
Mary's fingers rake over his scalp, mussing his painstakingly groomed hair. "That, and there's nothing so tedious as watching my family open presents."
"Have you considered that I may feel the same about watching you open presents?"
"You've bought me lots, then?"
"They can always go back," he mutters against her skin.
So it is that Richard finds himself having a lie-in on Christmas morning in his own bed-not sleeping, but reading the papers and sipping coffee while Mary's soft snore emits from beneath the bedclothes, which she will deny vehemently when she wakes. It isn't so very different to how they spend Sunday mornings. Seldom do they drag themselves out of bed for services, and while he always imagined Mary would at least want to be Christmas and Easter Anglicans-for the look of the thing-he doesn't complain at her decision to stay home today.
That is, until she wakes.
Smiling at the inelegant sight of her blinking sleepily and rubbing the crust from her bleary eyes with the tapered tips of her fingers, Richard lays aside his newspaper and slides down beneath the covers, drawing her alongside him for a slow kiss. She returns it languidly, her hands slipping beneath the lapels of his dressing gown to run over his bare chest as their tongues meet. Abruptly, though, she draws back with a crinkled nose and a complaint on her lips.
"You've drunk coffee."
"Mmm," Richard murmurs, leaning in to kiss the tip of her nose. "No doubt your tea's gone stone cold while you had your beauty rest. Shall I ring for a new tray?"
He reaches for the button over the bedside table, but Mary's voice arrests him.
"I'll have to go down and get it myself." She snuggles up to him, and nuzzles his unshaven cheek. "Or you could be a dear and do it for me."
"Why in God's name would I do that?"
"Because the servants have the day off."
Richard regards her for a moment, one eyebrow arching beneath his tousled hair, the other eye narrowing slightly in scepticism, then he rolls onto his back and takes a cigarette from the silver plated case and lighter from the drawer of the bedside table. Clenching the cigarette between his teeth as he poises to light it, he says, "For a moment I thought you said the servants have the day off."
"More like a half-day. From church until dinner."
Lifting his head again, Richard removes the unlit cigarette from his mouth. "But what about dressing?" He gestures airily with the hand clutching the lighter. "And luncheon?"
"Mrs McIntyre laid out a tray of cold cuts for us in the drawing room. You can serve yourself in your dressing gown if you really can't put on a pair of trousers without a valet."
The cigarette lighter strikes in unison with Richard's snort. "I didn't become a millionaire so that I could serve myself bloody cold cuts on Christmas Day. I never should have listened to you about staying in town."
"But you did marry an earl's daughter so you could do things properly," Mary replies coolly in the face of his petulant smoking. "I'm mistress of Haxby as well as Number 59 Cadogan Street. Servants in big houses get the day off the same as servants in small houses. That's how it's done."
"Not very modern."
"This from the man who believes in nothing so strongly as class mobility."
"Class mobility has nothing to do with it. When you're a member of the working class, you can expect to work whenever your employer is paying you to do so."
Mary mutters something that sounds distinctly like it's a poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every twenty-fifth of December.
"When you've earned your way up from that rung of the ladder," Richard goes on, "then you can please yourself with leisure time. Believe me, Mary, I worked my share of Christmases to earn my millions."
Yawning, she stretches her arms over her head. "You're boring me, darling."
She pushes herself upright, then swings her legs over the edge of the bed, charming him in spite of himself with the smirk she throws over her shoulder at him as she slides her arms into the sleeves of her sheer black négligé.
"I want tea, and I want to open the presents you've bought me on the backs of the working class."
They seem to be the usual first married Christmas fare, though the scene for the gift exchange is most unconventional. The couple sit at opposite ends of the oversized turquoise sofa in the drawing room, Richard in pyjamas and dressing gown-not through any lack of being able to do for himself-Mary in lingerie which most certainly has never been worn in the drawing room, a small mountain of presents on the cushions between them and a growing heap of wrapping paper discarded on the floor. "Which the servants would be very useful in tidying up," Richard reminds her, earning a roll of her eyes and the retort, "You certainly have the stomach for cold cuts, after all your bellyaching about them."
First Mary unwraps a diamond necklace, followed by matching barrettes for her recently bobbed hair. Richard receives a set of smart onyx cuff links to wear with the increasingly more fashionable dinner jackets. There is French perfume for her and aftershave lotion for him, a jade cigarette holder to accommodate her new smoking habit, a handsome burgundy velvet jacket for his longstanding one; he immediately sheds his dressing gown to try it on, finding tucked into the breast pocket a matchbook and his favourite brand of cigar, in which he does not hesitate to indulge.
At this point the hitherto appreciated but slightly impersonal presents take on a surprising thoughtfulness: an advance copy of a new novel he heard from a publishing friend will fly off bookshop shelves-once it is published later next year, and a fountain pen engraved with the words Strong and Sharp. This encourages him, for he has gone out on a limb with his remaining two gifts, and is conscious that in doing so he may tilt the balance of their precarious relationship in her favour, as does Mary's equally unexpected reception of her gifts; there are no squeals of delight, of course, or arms flung around his neck to kiss him in gratitude, but neither does she sit amid the crumpled wrapping paper in the blasé attitude as when he presented her with Haxby. Instead, she reveals her own style of enthusiasm by taking the ornate stopper off the perfume bottle, sniffing at it with an appreciative mmm, and dabbing a bit onto her wrists and the hollow of her throat, which glistens with it as much as with the necklace she clasps about her white neck between the black boa trim of her négligé.
Richard swallows against the swell in his throat even as he feels a tightness of his arousal against the front of his pyjama trousers. The subtle curve of Mary's lips and the narrowing of her darkened eyes indicates this is precisely the effect she intended to have on him. Far headier, he thinks, than effusive grateful kisses.
The power does not lie entirely in her hands. Richard watches the expectant part of his wife's lips as he discards his cigar in an ashtray and leans in toward her, and hears the huff emitted from them when he draws back, offering her the last gift, wrapped in gold paper, instead.
"Of course if you don't want it, a kiss is certainly a cheaper alternative..."
Mary seizes on the present. "Darkness was cheap, and Scrooge liked it."
Though she tries to prise the parcel from his hands, Richard's fingers tighten around it, his grasp firmly withholding. "Now that Dickensian comparison is dubious at best. Would Scrooge have a Christmas tree lit dazzlingly with electric lights?"
"True."
As Mary tilts her head up toward the tree that fills the corner of the room, the tiny coloured lights reflected as rainbows in the dark of her eyes and in the diamonds nestled in the black waves of her hair and resting around her graceful neck, Richard cannot be sorry that this is not the pine he'd envisioned towering in the front hall of Haxby before a garland-draped staircase for the express purpose of outshining and overshadowing Downton's. Because at this moment he knows she is here, with him, and Downton is fully two hundred miles away.
When her gaze snaps down to meet his again, the gleam in her eyes seems to flare and spark a current through him. "Though I'm not sure Tiny Tim will take great comfort in the knowledge that you've been visited by the Spirit of Christmas Modern."
"Don't forget bold," Richard says as he releases the gift to her, chuckling in spite of her teasing at his expense.
No words, teasing or otherwise, follow as Mary tears away the gold gift wrap to reveal a painting by an artist she admired at a gallery in Paris, of a moonlit night.
"I thought you might like it in your new study," he tells her, and goes on to explain that he's hired an architect to turn an unused parlour into an office for her personal use. She has one at Haxby, but since they've spent so much time here, it seems she should have a space of her own to manage their household affairs without feeling adrift in his own home office.
"Although," he adds, his eyebrows lifting in playful admonishment, "if your household management consists of giving the staff their wages and then sending them off on merry holidays, perhaps I shall rethink that gift."
Mary had slid down the sofa closer toward him as he spoke, one bare foot dangling off the sofa and crinkling in the discarded wrapping paper when she reached to lay the painting on the coffee table, but now she stops.
"What a shame." Her left hand, glittering with her engagement ring, hovers at the front of her négligé, poised to untie the ribbon that cinches the flimsy garment closed beneath her breasts. "In that case perhaps I'll have to rethink this one, as well."
Richard drags his eyes up to her face, resisting the urge to push it away and divest her of her lingerie himself, and manages a shrug. "Is it really a present when it's something you give me nearly every other day of the year?"
"I thought you didn't believe in days off for Christmas. But if you've had a change of heart-"
Mary lowers her hands to the cushions as if to push herself back from him, but Richard reaches for her, grasping her hips to hold her in place as he leans in to kiss her. She opens her mouth to the sweep of his tongue without requiring any coaxing, grasping the silk lapels of the smoking jacket to pull him down over her as she lies back on the sofa. He groans into her mouth as he acquiesces to her eagerness, but breaks the kiss briefly to sit back on his knees, one on either side of her thighs, and shrug his arms out of the velvet sleeves. He shucks the jacket off onto the floor, and Mary takes advantage of the opportunity to unbutton his shirt, her fingers tracing the lines of his chest and the line of hair that runs down his abdomen and disappears into the waistband of his pyjamas.
Richard stretches over her again, evading her attempt to capture his lips by nuzzling her cheek, the scruff of the previous day's growth of beard rasping against her delicate skin. He trails warm kisses over her chin to the hollow beneath her ear, then down along her backward tilted neck until he may at last taste the gleaming hollow of her throat. His tongue traces the outline of her collarbones, her perfume bitter for all the intoxicating sweetness of the scent, and there is a faintly metallic tinge when it brushes the edge of her white gold necklace. He nips at her neck, and Mary's fingers scrape over his scalp as his teeth graze further down-though he draws back, spluttering slightly, after inhaling the feathery neckline of her négligé.
"This is bothersome," he says, plucking at the boa.
"I was having similar thoughts about your pyjama bottoms," she says, and his hardness twitches against her fingers as her hand slips between their bodies to tug at his drawstring, loosening the trousers around his hips.
But as his own hand drifts up to untie the ribbon that keeps her body barely concealed beneath the sheer chiffon, Richard hesitates, glancing toward the partially open drawing room doors. "Are you certain we're really alone?"
"Why? Afraid the servants might see you making merry?"
"More like making Mary-" The grasp of her hand, hot through the silk pyjamas, would have reduced him to incoherence even if she did not also capture his mouth again in a hard kiss.
A moment later he breaks away again, though this time to manoeuvre out of his pyjamas and untie her gown. Mary gasps as he takes one of her small breasts in his mouth, his tongue curling around her nipple, teasing it to hardness, and she wraps her legs around him, her heels pressing insistently into the backs of his taut thighs, drawing him down against the v of her thighs and into her warmth. She digs her fingernails into his shoulders as he fills her; she murmurs his name, low and from deep within her, almost a request. Richard raises his head to find her eyes not closed in ecstasy, but gazing steadily at him, his own face, aglow in the Christmas lights, mirrored back at him.
The swell of loving her more than ever nearly carries him over the edge but he holds back, just as he holds back speaking the words and risking having the moment spoilt by her not returning the utterance in her own breathless tones. It is enough, for now, to know that she wants him-and only him; that for as long as this lasts, at least, he is the sole person who occupies her world.
He kisses her deeply, desiring to fill her in every way he can, and her slender figure sinks beneath his weight deep into the sofa cushions as the exquisite pressure between them builds. We can build something worth having, you and I. If you'll let us.
Mary arches up against him, whimpering into his mouth. "Richard, please..."
Yes, they are building something-slowly, with care for the cracked and uncertain foundation-and she is not merely allowing, but asking.
He slips his arms beneath her and without breaking their bond her scoops her up with him as he sits up. Her long legs tighten around his waist, ankles crossing at the small of his back, and his fingers dig into the notches of her hipbones as the movement makes her inner muscles cinch harder around him, too. A profanity escapes his lips as she rocks down against him, but it is the light touch of her fingers on his chin, drawing him up to meet her gaze again, that makes his hands on her hips guide her into tempo with his quickening upward thrusts. Cradling his face, she presses herself so close against his chest that his heart hammers in the valley between her breasts as they build to a peak, and crumble together.
For some moments afterward they linger, entwined, catching their breath. It is Mary who recovers first, and Richard brushes aside the thought that it is because this meant less to her than to him when she resumes their banter as if they only just left off-though the tender way she smoothes his disheveled hair back from his forehead, her gaze almost fond, helps.
"How do you feel about the servants having Christmas holidays now?"
He trails his hand up the slightly perspiring ridges of her rib cage up to fondle her breast. "I admit, my dear, you've enlightened me as to the benefits of having one's house to oneself. Perhaps you should give them more days off."
"You're in luck. It's customary to give them New Year's Eve night."
Richard's fingers go still on her pert nipple, and he looks up at her from beneath raised brows. "Surely you don't mean to tell me I'm meant to ring in 1920 by handing round champagne to our guests."
His disapproving stance-such as it is, post coitus on the drawing room sofa-is undermined by his reaction to his wife's slight wriggle in his lap.
"Don't worry, darling. I'm sure no one expects you to raise your glass in toast and say God bless us, every one."
He snorts. "More like Bah. Humbug."