Christmas Wishes, Mistletoe Kisses

by Fiona Harper

  Uh-oh. Good deeds, practical gestures, he was good at. Touchy-feely, girl-type conversations were not his forte. Thankfully, Louise seemed happy for him just to listen.

  ‘The curse of being an ex-WAG,’ she said, turning to smile at him weakly.

  What was a WAG, anyway? He’d never been exactly sure what the term meant.

  ‘Short for “Wives And Girlfriends”,’ she added, obviously able to read the look of confusion on his face. ‘Probably more accurately used to describe the other halves of famous sportsmen, but it seems to fit me too. WAGS hunt in packs, love shopping and having their photographs taken and—above all—they love bling.’

  ‘You’re not a WAG!’ he said, rather too quickly, forgetting he didn’t know what to say in situations like this.

  ‘Well, not any more—having divorced Toby.’

  Ben shook his head, frowning. He couldn’t see how that definition could ever have applied to Louise. She hated having her photograph taken! He was about to say so, but she preempted him again.

  ‘Oh, I was at the start,’ she said. ‘I embraced it wholeheartedly—the parties, the magazine covers, the bling.’ She chuckled to herself.

  Didn’t she realise what a rare quality that was—to be able to laugh at oneself?

  ‘But, eventually, it grew old. I was famous because of him, because I was Tobias Thornton’s wife, not because of anything I had done.’

  He shifted to face her a little more. ‘I thought you were a model when you met him.’

  She nodded and looked into her teacup of red wine. ‘I was. And we made it work at first. But it was hard to keep a marriage going when we spent weeks at a time on different continents. And then Jack came along and it seemed only right to give him a home and some structure…’

  Why was she punishing herself for that? That was Louise all over—she’d thought of her family first instead of selfishly pursuing what she wanted.

  She was lost in a daydream, staring at the rain lashing against the windows. There was a wistful expression on her face, as if she was remembering something or wishing for something she couldn’t have.

  Maybe it was time Louise did something for herself, got something for herself. Not out of selfishness, but because she deserved it. He rubbed his chin with his thumb. Now all he had to do was to discover what she wanted.

  Pulled out of her daydream by some unknown thought, she turned her head, and the look she gave him sent a shiver up his spine.

  Surely not.

  Her pupils were large and dark, and there was such a heat in her eyes. He’d received that kind of look before from women, but he’d never expected to receive it from her. Surely, she didn’t want…him?

  His heart rate tripled.

  Uh-oh. That put Being What Louise Needed on a whole new level.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  WHAT she really needed, Louise thought, was to stop looking at Ben as if he were a Christmas present she wanted to unwrap. It was easier said than done.

  The different-sized baubles on the Christmas tree twinkled, reflecting the light from the candles placed all around the room. This wasn’t her festive daydream, starring Ben, but it was close. There was the tree, the fire, the sense that someone had thought about her for a change…

  Actually, reality was better. The meal, the wine, the companionship had been a much sweeter present than the anonymous gift in the silver box in her fantasies. But, whatever was missing, whatever had changed from her daydreams, one thing remained the same. Ben. It all revolved around him.

  The other thing she needed to do was to stop babbling on about losing herself. But the babbling was helping keep a whole other set of urges at bay, so it would do nicely for now. She folded her hands in her lap and smiled at him. ‘So…that’s what I am. A WAG. A woman who defined herself by her husband and is now adrift with no direction in her life, no purpose.’

  Ben began to disagree, but she was on a roll, so she just kept going. ‘I’ve got plenty of money, so I don’t need to work, but I do need to do more than just look after Jack and—’ she waved a hand to indicate the freshly refurbished room ‘—decorate. But, apart from knowing how to pout for the camera, I have no qualifications. I didn’t even finish school.’

  There. That would scare him off. He’d have to believe she was a bimbo now. Only, when she dared to look at him, he didn’t seem convinced. She would just have to try harder.

  ‘Oh, I tried all sorts of jobs while I was married to Toby. He was always encouraging me to do some of the things his friends’ wives were up to. I did the whole charity circuit, then I tried a bit of television presenting on a fashion show—and was supremely bad at it.’ She let out an empty little laugh and Ben fidgeted on the other end of the day bed. ‘They never asked me back. I even designed my own range of sunglasses.’

  She looked at Ben and waited for a reaction. He shrugged, as if to say, So what?

  Yeah, so what? That was what the buying public had thought too. It had been an utter flop.

  She took a breath, searching for another stupid exploit to fill the silence with. Nothing came. What a waste. She was thirty-one years old and this was the sum total of what she’d achieved in her life. It was pathetic.

  ‘Why didn’t you finish school?’

  She looked at Ben, expecting to see that same superior look that many people gave her when they found out that little bit of information. Everyone knew that models were thick, and wasn’t she a glowing representative of the stereotype?

  ‘Louise? What happened?’

  He genuinely wanted to know. She frowned and looked away. He might just be the first person to ask why.

  ‘Dad’s illness got worse when I was about fifteen. Some days he needed me at home. Of course, there were home helps and health visitors, but the area where we lived was poor and the local services were overstretched. On his bad days, it wouldn’t have done any good to go to school, because I wouldn’t have been able to concentrate anyway.’

  Ben reached over and simply took her hand. That one gesture was enough to roughen her voice and moisten her eyes again. She ought to stop, but she couldn’t. She’d needed to say all of this for such a long time.

  ‘In my last year of school, when I should have been taking my GCSEs, he deteriorated even further. I’d missed so much by then that I didn’t even want to go in. And some of the girls were horrible…you know how girls can be. But Dad was in so much pain, he became angry and difficult sometimes and took his frustration out on me—not physically—just verbally. But I understood, really I did.’

  Ben’s thumb gently stroked the back of her hand and she felt something hard inside herself crumple. More tears flowed and she pulled her hand away to mop them up with a tissue. Things were getting far too maudlin. It was time to brighten the story up.

  ‘Anyway, Cinderella got her happy ending,’ she said brightly. ‘Just before my seventeenth birthday I was spotted by a scout from a modelling agency and the rest, as they say, is history.’

  He held a box of tissues out to her and she took another one. ‘What happened to the rest of your family?’

  The noise she made using the tissue was truly disgusting. ‘Well, my wages helped buy a new house, pay for university fees and things like that. Sarah, the next eldest after me, is a lawyer now and she emigrated to Australia five years ago. The rest have all gone out to visit her this year, but I didn’t want to be away from Jack for that long. Billy and Charlotte still live in London—he manages a restaurant, she’s a hairdresser. And Charlie, the youngest, is just finishing university. He wants to be an actor.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘There’s no telling some people.’

  Somehow, her hand was back in Ben’s and he was stroking it again.

  ‘What about your dad?’

  Drat! Why did this man have to be so good at reading between the lines?

  ‘He died less than a year after I started modelling.’ She looked into Ben’s eyes, desperate in this moment for someone else to understand what she’d done. ‘I le
t him down,’ she whispered. ‘I should have been there.’

  And then she started crying, really crying. None of that sniffing nonsense she’d been doing up until now. Big, fat tears rolled down her cheeks. She tried to talk, but her vocal cords had gone on strike.

  Gently, slowly, so she wasn’t even sure how they’d got there, a pair of strong arms wrapped around her. Time seemed to slow as she sobbed against his chest, but it could only have been a few minutes.

  ‘I’ve kind of blown your plan for a Merry Christmas right out of the water, haven’t I?’ she said, thinking she should pull away but doing nothing about it. ‘But thank you for trying. I’m not sure there was ever much hope for a woman who doesn’t know who to be any more.’

  Ben shifted beneath her. His hands came up to cradle her face and he made her look at him.

  No one had ever looked at her that way before, as if she were delicate, precious. Her heart, which had been shrivelled like one of the dates her Auntie June used to serve up on Boxing Day, swelled.

  His voice was low and scratchy. ‘Louise, you are…I…’

  For a man who always knew what to say, he was a little short on words at the moment. That couldn’t be a good thing. Ben’s features clouded and she could tell he was struggling.

  Say something, she shouted in her head. Tell me! Tell me who you think I am! I need to know!

  He was no longer looking at her, but was staring at a piece of blank wall behind her, his mind whirring and, when he looked back at her, her heart stood still for a beat. In his eyes was a renewed sense of purpose and she knew he had something to say. She waited. And Ben just looked at her as if there weren’t adequate words to communicate what he was thinking. Oh, how she wished he would try.

  His gaze dropped to her lips and she felt them part slightly and her breath catch.

  He was going to kiss her. The world started to somersault.

  Slowly, he bent his head to meet hers, giving her ample time to move away if she wanted to. But, despite all her ground rules about keeping things ‘safe’, about keeping things locked away in her daydreams, Louise found she didn’t want to move. She wanted him to come towards her. She wanted to taste him, an experience her daydreams had never been able to provide.

  The touch of his mouth on hers was exquisitely tender, soft as a whisper. She closed her eyes and gave up all hope of keeping fantasy and reality separate.

  Oh, this was better than she’d ever imagined. As Ben kissed her again, still with the same soul-wrenching gentleness, the nerve-endings in her lips burst into life. He moved his hands from her face, ran them through her hair and pulled her closer to him as he fell back against the pile of cushions.

  Louise followed him gladly, relishing the fact that she was in total control. Now, instead of being kissed, she kissed. Ben liked it—she could tell from the low sound he made in the back of his throat.

  They kissed each other sweetly, slowly, as if time had stopped for them and all that existed was this moment. After a while, the intensity of their kisses deepened. His lips sought her neck, her jaw line, her earlobe, and Louise began to tingle all over.

  She wanted to lose herself in this feeling. Of being desired. Of being feminine. And of being powerful. It was as if she’d entered a realm where she was who she’d always wanted to be, and she wasn’t prepared to relinquish that feeling easily.

  Rolling over, she pulled him on top of her, giving her hands access to the strong, broad muscles of his back. Ben responded by running a hand down the side of her torso, skimming the curve of her waist. The air between them crackled and popped like the logs on the fire.

  Hadn’t she said something tonight along the lines of not knowing what she wanted? Well, she had no problem pinpointing that now—it was all blazingly clear. She wanted Ben. All of him. Right here. Right now.

  Taking a deep breath, she wiggled her hands between their bodies and fiddled with the top button of his shirt. A shiver of nerves ran through her.

  There had been nobody else but Toby—and he’d grazed in other pastures. What if she wasn’t any good? What if she disappointed him? What if this all didn’t live up to the fairy tale in her head? For years, Toby had looked at her with a familiar apathy, and she couldn’t bear the thought of seeing the same deadness in Ben’s eyes in the morning. She was just going to have to pull out all the stops.

  Ben, who had been trailing kisses from her collarbone to just below her ear, went still. Her heart began to pound. Ben looked as if he wanted to stop and say something but just couldn’t control himself. He kissed her again—hot and sweet and deep enough to make her toes burn.

  She trembled as she tried to find a second button on his shirt, her fingers clumsy in the haze of her desire. Ben dragged his lips from hers and his hand closed over her fingers, which were still fiddling fruitlessly with the button.

  ‘We don’t need to rush into this,’ he whispered.

  She knew what he was trying to do. He was trying to be the perfect gentleman, to give her an out. Her gaze locked with his. ‘Perhaps we do.’

  Once again, he held her face in his hands and, this time, he delivered the sweetest kiss yet. She wiggled her fingers under his and succeeded in popping the button out of its hole. He gripped her hands more tightly.

  ‘Really, Louise. You don’t need someone taking advantage of you when you’re feeling vulnerable. Maybe this isn’t the right time to make this kind of decision.’

  He traced the line of her jaw with his thumb and, although his eyes dropped to look at her mouth once again, he didn’t kiss her.

  ‘Why can’t I decide what I need?’ Even in her own ears her voice didn’t sound one hundred per cent convincing. But she didn’t want to give up yet. Moments like this were like Christmas itself—fleeting, magical. The day after tomorrow the glitter and the wonder would be gone and life would return to being grey and cold and ever so slightly emptier than before.

  A slow, gentle smile crept across Ben’s face and she couldn’t help but smile back as his eyes glittered with fierce intensity.

  ‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘We don’t need to rush. I’m not going anywhere.’

  Louise let out a shaky breath. It was very hard to believe that any of this could survive the night and live beyond the dawn. Her eyes must have betrayed her, because he lowered his head and kissed her again.

  Carefully, he shifted until he was lying behind her and she was spooned up against him, her head resting on his arm. He pulled the quilt over the pair of them and they lay in the silence, staring into the fire and drawing strength and warmth from where their bodies made contact.

  Louise’s eyelids flickered. Her head was filled with crackling fires, spiced wine and silver boxes wrapped with ribbons. She yawned and stretched one arm. That was the best night’s sleep she’d had since…

  She wasn’t alone.

  Foggily, she tried to decipher what her senses were telling her. There was a warm body wrapped around her, breathing rhythmically…a strange bed…and a Christmas tree in her room?

  The Christmas tree!

  Her eyelids pinged the rest of the way open and, suddenly, she was very much awake. That warm body tangled with hers belonged to Ben Oliver. She didn’t dare move, just in case it was all just another delicious dream.

  Slowly, she made herself relax back against him. He mumbled something in his sleep—nonsense—and hugged her tighter. She smiled.

  This was what contentment felt like. She’d forgotten its taste, its flavour.

  Her eyes scanned the room once again, this time taking in the details. The fire was out, as were quite a few of the candles, but even with the flickering yellow glow from the few that were left, there was an odd silvery-blue light bathing the room.

  Mind you, she’d never been in the boathouse this early in the morning before and she had no idea what time it was. Perhaps this was the colour of dawn down here so close to the river.

  No, that wasn’t it. Gut instinct told her to go and look out of the window. S
he dropped one leg over the edge of the day bed and started to move, but Ben grumbled again and pulled her back, nuzzling into the side of her neck.

  Half-asleep, he was adorable, but whether he’d feel the same way when he was fully conscious was another matter. She’d humiliated herself last night and the atmosphere between them was bound to be awkward. Things often looked different in the cold light of day. And, thinking about cold light, her curiosity got the better of her and she wriggled out of his arms, wrapping the patchwork quilt around her and leaving him covered with the goose down duvet.

  As she stood, and could see out of the window, she gasped. Even a tug at the trailing quilt couldn’t stop her running to the door, flinging it wide and walking out on to the balcony.

  Snow.

  Fresh and white and everywhere. It weighed down the bare branches of the young trees and topped the large stones on the beach so they looked like giant cupcakes. It seemed as if the whole world was buried under a blanket of purity, the past forgotten, everything new.

  She twirled around in amazement, taking it all in, then reached for the layer of snow, only an inch deep, that topped the balcony railing. The icy crystals crunched under the weight of her fingertips.

  A floorboard creaked behind her and once again she was wrapped up in Ben Oliver. He’d brought the duvet with him and he folded it over them both. She held her breath. She’d thought that maybe he’d been giving her the brush-off last night, but the way he was holding her now, as if he wanted to seal their bodies together, laid those fears to rest. He rested his chin on her shoulder so his head was right next to hers and kissed her cheek near her ear.

  ‘Merry Christmas, Louise.’

  She twisted her head to look at him, her eyebrows raised. She’d been so caught up in the magic of last night, the beauty of this morning, that she’d completely forgotten that it was Christmas Day.

  ‘Merry Christmas,’ she whispered back, suddenly feeling very shy. But, as she went to shake her fringe in front of her eyes, he stopped her with a gentle hand.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ he said, moving so they were now facing each other.