Christmas Nights

by Penny Jordan

  After she had had a shower she intended to try them all on again, if she had time before Henry arrived. However, when she replayed her answering-machine tape there was a message on it from Henry, cancelling their date because he had an important business dinner that he had to attend and reminding her that they still had to shop for suitable Christmas presents to take for his family.

  She had already made several suggestions based on what Henry had told her about his family, and specifically his parents—a very pretty petit point antique footstool for his grandmother, some elegant tulip vases for his mother, who, he had told her, was a keen gardener. But Henry had pursed his lips and dismissed her ideas.

  She had been tempted to suggest that it might be better if he chose their Christmas presents on his own, but she had warned herself that she was being unfair and even slightly petty. He, after all, knew their tastes far better than she did.

  She had just put on her favourite of all the outfits she had bought—the cream wool crêpe trouser suit—when her doorbell rang.

  Assuming that it must be Henry after all, she went automatically to open the door, and then stood staring in total shock as she realised that her visitor wasn’t Henry but the man she had last seen striding past her and storming into the dress agency as she’d left it.

  ‘Lisa Phillips?’ he demanded curtly as he stepped past her and into her hall.

  Dumbly Lisa nodded her head, too taken aback by the unexpectedness of his arrival to think to question his right to walk uninvited into her home.

  ‘My name’s Oliver Davenport,’ he told her curtly, handing her a card, barely giving her time to glance at it before he continued, ‘I believe you purchased several items of clothing from Second Time Around earlier today.’

  ‘Er… yes,’ Lisa agreed. ‘But—’

  ‘Good. This shouldn’t take long then. Unfortunately the clothes that you bought should not have been put on sale. Technically, in fact, the shop sold them without the permission of their true owner, and in such circumstances, as with the innocent purchase of a stolen car or indeed any stolen goods, you have no legal right to—’

  ‘Just a minute,’ she interrupted him in disbelief. Completely taken aback by his unexpected arrival and his infuriatingly arrogant manner, Lisa could feel herself becoming thoroughly angry. ‘Are you accusing the shop of selling stolen clothes? Because if so it should be the police you are informing and not me.’

  ‘Not exactly. Look, I’m prepared to refund you the full amount of what you spent plus an extra hundred pounds for any inconvenience. So if you’ll just—’

  ‘That’s very generous of you,’ Lisa told him sarcastically. ‘But I bought these clothes for a specific purpose and I have no intention of selling them back to you. I bought them in good faith and—’

  ‘Look, I’ve just explained to you, those clothes should never have been sold in the first place,’ he cut across her harshly, giving her an impatiently angry look.

  Lisa didn’t like the way he was filling her small hall, looming almost menacingly over her, but there was no way she was going to give in to him. Why should she?

  ‘If that’s true, then why hasn’t the shop been in touch with me?’ Lisa challenged him.

  She could see that he didn’t like her question from the way his mouth tightened and hardened before he replied bitingly, ‘Probably because the idiotic woman who runs the place refuses to listen to reason.’

  ‘Really?’ Lisa asked him scathingly. ‘You seem to have a way with women. Has it ever occurred to you that a little less aggression and a good deal more persuasion might produce better results? Not that any amount of persuasion will change my mind,’ she added firmly. ‘I bought those clothes in good faith, and since the shop hasn’t seen fit to get in touch with me concerning their supposedly wrongful sale I don’t see why—’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ She was interrupted furiously. ‘Look, if you must know, the clothes belong to my cousin’s girlfriend. They had a quarrel—it’s a very volatile relationship. She walked out on him, vowing never to come back—they’d had an argument about her decision to go on holiday with a girlfriend, without him apparently—and in a fit of retaliatory anger he gave her clothes to the dress agency. It was an impulse… something he regretted virtually as soon as he’d done it, and when Emma rang him from Italy to make things up he asked me to help him get her things back before she comes home and discovers what he’s done.’

  ‘He asked you for help?’

  There was very little doubt in Lisa’s mind about whose girlfriend the absent Emma actually was, and it wasn’t Oliver Davenport’s fictitious cousin.

  The look he gave her in response to her question wasn’t very friendly, Lisa recognised; in fact it wasn’t very friendly at all, but even though, concealed beneath the sensual elegance of her newly acquired trousers, her knees were knocking slightly, she refused to give in to her natural apprehension.

  It wasn’t like her to be so stubborn or so unsympathetic, but something about him just seemed to rub her up the wrong way and make her uncharacteristically antagonistic towards him.

  It wasn’t just the fact that he was demanding that she part with her newly acquired wardrobe that was making her combative, she admitted; it was something about the man himself, something about his arrogance, his… his maleness that was setting her nerves slightly on edge, challenging her into a mode of behaviour that was really quite foreign to her.

  She knew that Henry would have been shocked to see her displaying so much stubbornness and anger—she was a little bit shocked herself.

  ‘He was about to go away on business. Emma’s due back at the end of the week. He didn’t want her walking into the flat and discovering that half her clothes are missing…’

  ‘No, I’m sure you… he…’ Lisa corrected herself tauntingly ‘… doesn’t…’

  She saw from the dark burn of angry colour etching his cheekbones that he wasn’t pleased by her deliberate ‘mistake’, nor the tone of voice she had delivered it in.

  ‘You have no legal claim over those clothes,’ he told her grimly. ‘The shop sold them without the owner’s permission.’

  ‘If that’s true, then it’s up to the shop to get in touch with me,’ Lisa pointed out. ‘After all, for all I know, you could want them for yourself…’ She paused. His temper was set on a hair-trigger already and although she doubted that he would actually physically harm her…

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she heard him breathe softly, as though he had read her mind.

  Inexplicably she realised that she was blushing slightly as, for no logical reason at all, she remembered exactly what she had been thinking about him—and his body—earlier in the day. Just as well he hadn’t second guessed her private thoughts then!

  ‘So you’re not prepared to be reasonable about this?’

  She be reasonable? Lisa could feel her own temper starting to rise.

  ‘Doesn’t it mean anything to you that you could be putting someone’s whole relationship at risk by your refusal?’

  ‘Me putting a relationship at risk?’ Lisa gasped at the unfairness of it. ‘If you ask me, I’m not the one who’s doing that. If your relationship is so important to you, you should have thought of that before you lost your temper and decided to punish your girlfriend by selling her clothes—’

  ‘Emma is not my girlfriend,’ he told her with ominous calm. ‘As I’ve already explained to you, I am simply acting as an intermediary in all of this for my cousin. But then I suppose it’s par for the course that you should think otherwise. It goes with all the rest of your illogical behaviour,’ he told her scathingly.

  ‘If you ask me,’ she told him, thoroughly incensed now, ‘I think that Emma… whoever’s girlfriend she is—yours or your cousin’s… is better off without you. What kind of man does something like that…? Those clothes were virtually new and—’

  ‘Exactly. New and expensive and paid for by my cousin, who is a rather jealous young man who objects to
his girlfriend wearing the clothes he bought her to attract the attentions of other men…’

  ‘And because of that he stole them from her wardrobe and sold them? It sounds to me as though she’s better off without you… without him,’ Lisa corrected herself fiercely, her eyes showing her contempt of a man—any man—jealous or otherwise, who could behave in such a petty and revengeful way.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry,’ she continued, patently anything but. ‘But explaining to Emma just exactly what’s happened to her clothes is your problem and not mine. I bought them in good faith—’

  ‘And you’ll be able to buy some more with the money I’m willing to refund you for them, especially since… Oh, I get it,’ he said softly, his eyes suddenly narrowing.

  ‘You get what?’ Lisa demanded suspiciously, not liking the cynicism she could see in his eyes. ‘Those clothes were virtually brand-new, this season’s stock, and I’d be very lucky indeed to pick up anything else like them at such a bargain price, especially at this time of year, and—’

  ‘Oh, yes, I can see what you’re after. All right then, I don’t like blackmailers and I wouldn’t normally give in to someone who plainly thinks she’s onto a good thing, but I haven’t got time to waste negotiating with you. What would you guess was the full, brand-new value of the clothes you bought today?’

  ‘The full value?’ A small frown puckered Lisa’s forehead. She had no idea at all of what he was getting at. ‘I have no idea. I don’t normally buy exclusive designer-label clothes, especially not Armani… but I imagine it would have to be several thousand pounds…’

  ‘Several thousand pounds.’ A thin, dangerous smile curled his mouth, his eyes so coldly contemptuous that Lisa actually felt a small, icy shiver race down her spine.

  ‘Why don’t we settle for a round figure and make it five thousand pounds? I’ll write you a cheque for five thousand here and now and you’ll give me back Emma’s clothes.’

  Lisa stared at him in disbelief.

  ‘But that’s crazy,’ she protested. ‘Why on earth should you pay me five thousand pounds when you could go out and buy a whole new wardrobe for her for that amount…?’ She shook her head in disbelief. ‘I don’t—’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ he interrupted her cuttingly. ‘Don’t give me that. You understand perfectly well. Even I understand how impossible and time-wasting an exercise it would be for me to go out and replace every single item with its exact replica… even if I knew what it was I was supposed to be buying. Don’t overplay your hand,’ he warned her. ‘All that mock innocence doesn’t suit you.’

  Mock innocence!

  As she suddenly recognised just what he was accusing her of, Lisa’s face flushed a brilliant, furious scarlet.

  ‘Get out… Get out of my flat right now,’ she demanded shakily. ‘Otherwise I’m going to call the police. How dare you accuse me of… of…?’ She couldn’t even say the word, she felt such a sense of outrage and disgust.

  ‘I wouldn’t give you those clothes now if you offered to pay me ten thousand… twenty thousand,’ she told him passionately. ‘You deserve to lose Emma… In fact, I think I’m probably doing her a favour by letting her see just what kind of a man you are. I suppose you thought that just because you bought her clothes for her you had a right to… to take them back… If I were her… If I were her…’

  ‘Yes? If you were her, what?’ he goaded her, just as furious as she was herself, Lisa recognised as she saw the small pulse beating fiercely in his jaw and the banked-down fury in his eyes.

  ‘I wouldn’t have let you buy them for me in the first place,’ she threw emotionally at him, adding, ‘I’d rather—’

  ‘Rather what?’ he challenged her, his voice dropping suddenly and becoming dangerously, sensually soft as he raked her from head to foot in such a sexually predatory and searching way that it left her virtually shaking, trembling, her body overreacting wildly to the male sexuality in the way he was looking at her, the sensual challenge in the way his eyes deliberately stripped her of her clothes, leaving her body vulnerable… exposed… naked.

  ‘You’d rather what?’ he repeated triumphantly. ‘Go naked?’

  Lisa couldn’t speak; she was too shocked, too outraged, too aware of her feminine vulnerability to the blazing heat of his sexuality to risk saying anything.

  ‘But then in actual fact, according to you—since you refuse to believe the truth and accept that I am acting for my cousin and not for myself—you are wearing clothes that I have chosen… bought…’ he added softly, his glance slipping suggestively over her body for a second time, but this time more slowly, more lingeringly… more… more seductively, Lisa recognised as she felt herself responding helplessly to the sheer force of the magnetic spell he seemed to have cast over her.

  From somewhere she managed to find the strength to break free. Stepping back from him, putting a safer distance between them, averting her eyes and her over-flushed face from his powerful gaze, she demanded huskily, ‘I want you to leave. Now. Otherwise…’

  ‘You’ll call the police. I know,’ he agreed drily. ‘Very well, since it’s obvious I can’t make you see reason… I won’t forget how co-operative you’ve been,’ he added, sending a small shiver down her spine as she saw the look in his eyes. ‘Although I can understand why you’re so loath to part with your borrowed finery.

  ‘The suit looks good on you,’ he added unexpectedly as he turned towards the door, pausing to look at her before lifting his hand and outrageously tracing a line with the tip of his index finger all the way along the deep V of the neckline of the waistcoat just where the upper curves of her breasts, naked underneath it, pressed against the creamy fabric.

  ‘It’s a bit tighter here on you than it was on Emma, though,’ he told her. ‘She’s probably only a 34B whereas you must be a 34C. Nice—especially worn the way you’re wearing it now, without anything underneath it…’

  Lisa swallowed back all of the agitated, defensive remarks that sprang to her lips, knowing that none of them could do anything to wipe out what he had just said to her, or the effect his words had had on her.

  Why, she wondered wretchedly as he opened her front door and left her flat far more calmly than he had entered it, did her body have to react so… so… idiotically and erotically to his touch? Even without looking down she knew how betrayingly her nipples were still pressing against the fine fabric of her waistcoat—as they certainly hadn’t been doing when he’d first arrived. As they had, in fact, only humiliatingly done when he had reached out and touched her with that lazily mocking fingertip which had had such a devastating effect on her senses.

  It was because she was so overwrought, that was all, she tried to comfort herself half an hour later, the front door securely bolted as she hugged a comforting mug of freshly made coffee.

  She would have to ring the shop, of course, and find out exactly what was going on, and if they asked her to return the clothes then morally she would have no option other than to do so.

  How dared he accuse her of trying to blackmail him…? Her. The coffee slopped out of the mug as her hands started to shake. As if she would ever… ever do any such thing. She felt desperately sorry for the unknown Emma. It was bad enough that he should have sold her clothes, but how would she feel, knowing that he had touched her, another woman, so… so…? No, in her view Emma was better off without him. Much better off.

  How dared he touch her like that… as though… as though…? And he had known exactly what he was doing as well. She had seen it in those shockingly knowing steel-grey eyes as she’d read the message of male triumph and awareness that they’d been giving her. He had known that he was arousing her—had known it and had enjoyed knowing it.

  Unlike her. She had hated it and she hated him. Emma was quite definitely better off without him and she certainly wasn’t going to be the one to help him make up their quarrel by returning her clothes.

  At least he was not likely to be able to carry out that subtle threat of future r
etribution against her—thank goodness.

  CHAPTER TWO

  LISA STOOD IN FRONT of the guest-bedroom window of Henry’s parents’ large Victorian house looking out across the wintry countryside.

  They had arrived considerably later than expected the previous evening, due, in the main, to the fact that Henry’s car had been so badly damaged whilst parked in a client’s car park that their departure had been delayed and they had had to use her small—much smaller—model, much to Henry’s disgust.

  They had arrived shortly after eleven o’clock, and whilst Henry had been greeted with a good deal of maternal anxiety and concern Lisa had received a considerably more frosty reception, Henry’s mother giving her a chilly smile and presenting a cool cheek for her to kiss before commenting, ‘I’m afraid we couldn’t put back supper any longer. You know what your father’s like about meal times, Henry.’

  ‘It was Lisa’s fault,’ Henry had grumbled untruthfully, adding to Lisa, ‘You really should get a decent car, you know. Oh, and by the way, you need petrol.’

  Lisa had gritted her teeth and smiled, reminding herself that she had already guessed from Henry’s comments about his family that, as an only child and a son, he was the apple of his mother’s eye.

  Whilst Henry had been despatched to his father’s study, Lisa had been quizzed by Henry’s mother about her family and background. It had subtly been made plain to Lisa that so far as Henry’s mother was concerned the jury was still out on the subject of her suitability as Henry’s intended wife.

  Normally she would have enjoyed the chance to visit the Yorkshire Dales, Lisa acknowledged—especially at this time of the year. Last night she had been enchanted to discover that snow was expected on the high ground.

  Henry had been less impressed. In fact, he had been in an edgy, difficult mood throughout the entire journey—and not just, Lisa suspected, because of the damage to his precious car.

  It had struck her, over the previous weekend, when they’d been doing the last of their Christmas shopping together, that he was obviously having doubts about her ability to make the right impression on his parents. There had been several small lectures and clumsy hints on what his family would expect, and one particularly embarrassing moment when Alison had called round to the flat just as Henry had been explaining that he wasn’t sure that the Armani trouser suit was going to be quite the thing for his parents’ annual pre-Christmas supper party.