by Fiona Harper
Or perhaps she’d never known.
What she’d said earlier had been true. Nobody did nice things for her with no strings attached. She just didn’t know how to handle it. He decided it was time to diffuse the impact this small bit of thoughtfulness on his part had made.
‘I don’t know about you,’ he said, ‘but I could do with something to drink.’
Louise’s mouth formed a circle of surprise. ‘Drink?’
He smiled to himself and reached down into the rucksack he’d dropped by the chair earlier and pulled out a bottle of red wine. Nothing extravagant. Just a bottle of supermarket Cabernet.
In one smooth second, Louise unclenched. She smiled at him, started to speak and then just shook her head. She rose, extracted a couple of teacups from Laura’s picnic set and plonked them on the coffee table. After pouring a generous amount of wine into each cup, he handed one to her.
‘A toast—to Christmas,’ he said as they cheerfully clinked teacups.
‘Something weird is happening here …’ She shook her head, as if she was trying to shake away confusing thoughts, but then she raised her teacup and smiled at him. ‘What the hell? To Christmas!’
Ben took a sip of the warm, rich wine and kept his thoughts to himself. He knew exactly why he’d phrased the toast that way. Christmas was about giving—and receiving. That weird feeling Louise didn’t recognise? That was the warmth that came from letting someone show you they cared. If there was one thing he could give her this Christmas, it would be to show her that not all gifts had hidden traps, and that receiving them could be a simple and uncomplicated pleasure.
She needed a friend. A true friend. And that was the sort of gift a friend could give safely.
As they worked their way through the bottle of wine, a tiny teacup at a time, they retreated to the sofa thing that was piled high with cushions. Even though it was on the opposite wall to the fire, the boathouse’s upper room was small enough for them to get all the benefits of its warmth. They talked about anything and everything before falling into a comfortable silence. The candles flickered, the sun set and the temperature outside began to drop.
He was just starting to think that it was about time to get going when Louise suddenly said, ‘I don’t think I know who I am any more.’
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.
‘You’re not a WAG,’ he said. ‘Don’t be daft.’
She gave him a wry look. ‘Well, not for much longer—the divorce should be final after Christmas.’
Ben shook his head, frowning. He couldn’t see how that definition could ever have applied to Louise. He was about to say so, but she pre-empted 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. Problem was that he didn’t know what she wanted, let alone how to go about getting it for her.
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.
That put Being What Louise Needed on a whole new level.
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. They ended up in the bargain bucket at a supermarket.’
She looked at Ben and waited for reaction. He shrugged, as if to say so what?
Yeah, so what? That’s 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 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 and mean it.
‘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 rough and the local services were overstretched.’ She looked away. ‘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 v
oice 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. She stared at the fire while she talked, unable to meet his eyes.
‘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 frustrations 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, tuning her head back to look at him. ‘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 a few years after I started modelling.’ She looked into Ben’s eyes, desperate in this moment for someone else to understand what she’d done. ‘I let him down,’ she whispered. ‘I should have been there.’
And then she started crying, really crying. None of that sissy 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 whispered, 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 had a direct answer, 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 her lips and her breath caught as she felt them part.
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 an experience her daydreams had never been able to provide—she wanted to taste him.
The touch of his mouth on hers was 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 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. And Ben liked it—she could tell from the low sound he made on 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 jawline, 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. 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 problems 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. He 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 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. It’s not that I don’t want to …’ the look of frustration that passed over his features confirmed that nicely for her ‘… but we should do this for the right reason, because we both want to, because we’re both ready. Not just because we’re feeling lonely on Christmas Eve. Maybe this isn’t the right time to make this kind of decision. I don’t want to wake up in the morning and feel as if I’ve taken advantage of you.’
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.
She looked at him. Even though she’d never met Dominic Blake—Laura’s Dominic—at this moment, Ben reminded her of him. So full of honesty, even to his own hurt. A man like that was worth keeping, and she didn’t want to scare him away.
But, like Laura, she found herself wanting to be selfish. She didn’t want to give this up yet. Moments like this were like Christmas
itself—fleeting, magical. 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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
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 bedroom?
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 pulled her closer. She smiled.
This is 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.