by Penny Jordan
‘So you went to all that trouble for nothing,’ Lisa sympathised, knowing how she would have felt in his shoes.
The look he gave her in response made her heart start to beat rather too fast, and for some reason she found it impossible to hold his gaze and had to look quickly away from him.
His slightly hoarse, ‘You’d have been wasted on a man like Henry,’ made her want to curl her toes in much the same way as his kiss had done last night, and the small shiver that touched her skin had nothing to do with any drop in temperature.
‘I’ll meet you downstairs in half an hour,’ Oliver was saying to her as he moved away from the bed.
Silently, Lisa nodded her agreement. What had she done, committing herself to spend Christmas with him? She gave a small, fatalistic shrug. It was too late to worry about the wisdom of her impulsive decision now.
Thirty-five minutes later, having nervously studied her reflection in the bedroom mirror for a good two minutes, Lisa walked hesitantly onto the landing.
The cream wool dress looked every bit as good on as she had remembered; the cashmere coat would keep her warm in church.
Her hair, freshly washed and dried, shone silkily, and as yet the only physical sign of her cold was a slight pinky tinge to her nose, easily disguised with foundation.
At the head of the stairs she paused, and then determinedly started to descend, coming to an abrupt halt as she reached the turn in the stairs that looked down on the hallway below.
In the middle of the large room, dominating it, stood the largest and most wondrous Christmas tree that Lisa had ever seen.
She gazed at it in rapt awe, unaware that the shine of pleasure in her eyes rivalled that of the myriad decorations fastened to the tree.
As excited as any child, she positively ran down the remaining stairs and into the hall.
‘How on earth…?’ she began as she stood and marvelled at the tree, shaking her head as she was unable to find the words to convey her feelings.
‘I take it you approve,’ she heard Oliver saying wryly beside her.
‘Yes. Yes. It’s wonderful,’ she breathed, without taking her eyes off it to turn and look at him. ‘But when… How…?’
‘Well, I’m afraid I can’t claim to have gone out last night and cut it down. It had actually been delivered yesterday. Piers and I were supposed to be putting it up… It’s a bit of a family tradition. He and I both used to spend Christmas here as children with our grandparents, and it was our job to “do the tree”. It’s a tradition we’ve kept up ever since, although this year…
‘I brought it in last night after you’d gone to bed. Mrs Green had already brought the decorations down from the attic, so it was just a matter of hanging them up.’
‘Just a matter…’ Lisa’s eyebrows rose slightly as she studied the rows and rows of tiny lights, the beautiful and, she was nearly sure, very valuable antique baubles combined with much newer but equally attractive modern ones.
‘It must have taken you hours,’ she objected.
Oliver shrugged.
‘Not really.’
‘It’s beautiful,’ she told him, her throat suddenly closing with emotion. He hadn’t done it for her, of course. He had already told her that it was a family tradition, something he and his cousin did together. But, even so, to come down and find it there after confiding in him last night how much she longed for a traditional family Christmas… suddenly seemed a good omen for her decision to stay on with him.
‘It hasn’t got a fairy,’ she told him, hoping he wouldn’t notice the idiotic emotional thickening in her voice.
As he glanced towards the top of the tree Oliver shook his head and told her, ‘Our fairy is a star, and it’s normally the responsibility of the woman of the house to put it on the tree, so I left it—’
‘You want me to do it?’ Fresh emotion swept her. ‘But I’m not… I don’t belong here,’ she reminded him.
‘But you are a woman,’ he told her softly, and there was something in the way he said the words, something in the way he looked at her that warned Lisa that the kiss they had shared last night wasn’t something he had forgotten.
‘We’ll have to leave it for now, though,’ he told her. ‘Otherwise we’ll be late for church.’
It had been a cold night, and a heavy frost still lay over the countryside, lending it a magical quality of silvered stillness that made Lisa catch her breath in pleasure.
The village, as Oliver had said, was ten minutes’ drive away—a collection of small stone houses huddled together on one side of the river and reached by a narrow stone bridge.
The church was at the furthest end of the village and set slightly apart from it, small and weathered and so old that it looked almost as though it had grown out of the craggy landscape around it.
The bells were ringing as Oliver parked the car and then led her towards the narrow lych-gate and along the stone-flagged path through a graveyard so peaceful that there was no sense of pain or sorrow about it.
Just inside the church, the vicar was waiting.
The church was already almost full, but when Lisa would have slipped into one of the rear pews Oliver touched her arm and directed her to one at the front. A family pew, Lisa recognised, half in awe and half in envy.
The service was short and simple, the carols traditional, the crib quite obviously decorated by very young hands, and yet to Lisa the whole experience was more movingly intense than if they had been in one of the world’s grandest cathedrals.
Afterwards the vicar was waiting to shake hands and exchange a few words with all his congregation, including them, and as they ambled back to where Oliver had parked the car the final magical seal of wonderment was put on the day when the first flakes of the forecast snow started to fall.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Lisa whispered breathlessly as Oliver unlocked the car doors. ‘I just don’t believe it.’
As she whirled round, her whole face alight, Oliver laughed. The sound, so spontaneous and warmly masculine, had the oddest effect on Lisa’s body. Her heart seemed to flip helplessly, her breathing quickening, her gaze drawn unerringly to Oliver’s mouth.
She shouldn’t be feeling like this. It wasn’t fair and it certainly wasn’t sensible. They barely knew one another. Yesterday they had been enemies, and but for an odd quirk of fate they still would be today.
Shakily she walked towards the car, the still falling snowflakes forgotten as she tried to come to terms with what was happening to her.
What exactly was happening to her? Something she didn’t want to give a name to… Not yet… Perhaps not ever. She shivered as she pulled on her seat belt.
‘Cold?’ Oliver questioned her, frowning slightly.
Lisa shook her head, refusing to give in to the temptation to look at him, to check and see whether, if she did, she would feel that heart-jolting surge of feminine awareness and arousal that she had just experienced in the car park for a second time.
‘Stop thinking about him,’ she heard Oliver say harshly to her as she turned away from him and stared out of the window. It took her several seconds to realise that he thought that Henry was the reason for her sudden silence. Perhaps it was just as well he did think that, she decided—for both their sakes.
Through the now drifting heavy snowflakes Lisa could see how quickly they had obscured the previously greeny-brown landscape, transforming it into a winter wonderland of breathtaking Christmas-card white.
Coming on top of the poignant simplicity of a church service which to Lisa, as an outsider, had somehow symbolised all she had always felt was missing from her own Christmases—a sense of community, of sharing… of involvement and belonging, of permanence going from one generation to the next—the sight of the falling snow brought an ache to her throat and the quick silvery shimmer of unexpected tears to her eyes.
Ashamed of her own emotionalism, she ducked her head, searching in her bag for a tissue, hoping to disguise her tears as a symptom of her cold. B
ut Oliver was obviously too astute to be deceived by such a strategy and demanded brusquely, ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ adding curtly, ‘You’re wasting your tears on Henry; he isn’t—’
‘I’m not crying because of Henry,’ Lisa denied. Did he really think that she was so lacking in self-esteem and self-preservation that she couldn’t see for herself what a lucky escape she had had, if not from Henry then very definitely from Henry’s mother?
‘No? Then what are these?’ Oliver demanded tauntingly, reaching out before she could stop him to rub the hard pad of his thumb beneath one eye and show her the dampness clinging to his skin. ‘Scotch mist?’
‘I didn’t say I wasn’t crying,’ Lisa defended herself. ‘Just that it wasn’t because of… It’s not because of Henry…’
‘Then why?’ Oliver challenged, obviously not believing her.
‘Because of this,’ Lisa told him simply, gesturing towards the scene outside the car window. ‘And the church…’
She could see from the look he was giving her that he didn’t really believe her, and because for some reason it had suddenly become very important that he did she took a deep breath and told him quickly, ‘It’s just so beautiful… The whole thing… the weather, the church service…’
As she felt him looking at her she turned her head to meet his eyes. She shook her head, not wanting to go on, feeling that she had perhaps said too much already, been too openly emotional. Men, in her experience, found it rather discomforting when women expressed their emotions. Henry certainly had.
If Oliver was discomforted by what she had said, though, he certainly wasn’t showing it; in fact he wasn’t showing any kind of reaction that she could identify at all. He had dropped his eyelids slightly over his eyes and turned his face away from her, ostensibly to concentrate on his driving, making it impossible for her to read his expression at all, his only comment, as he brought the car to a halt outside the house, a cautionary, ‘Be careful you don’t slip when you get out.’
‘Be careful you don’t slip…!’ Just how old did he think she was? Lisa wondered wryly as she got out of the car, tilting up her face towards the still falling snowflakes and breathing in the clean, sharp air, a blissful expression on her face as she studied her surroundings, happiness bubbling up inside her.
‘I still can’t believe this… that it’s actually snowing… on Christmas Day… Do you realise that this is my very first white Christmas?’ As she whispered the words in awed delight she closed her eyes, took a deep breath of snow-scented air and promptly did what Oliver had warned her not to do and lost her footing.
Her startled cry was arrested almost before it had begun as Oliver reached out and caught hold of her, his strong hands gripping her waist, holding her tightly, safely…
Holding her closely, she recognised as her heart started to pound with unfamiliar excitement and her breath caught in her throat. Not out of shock, Lisa acknowledged, her face flushing as she realised just what it was that was causing her heart and pulse-rate to go into overdrive, and she prayed that Oliver wouldn’t be equally quick to recognise that her shallow breathing and sudden tension had nothing to do with the shock of her near fall and everything to do with his proximity.
Why was this happening to her? she wondered dizzily. She didn’t even like the man and he certainly didn’t like her—even if he had offered her a roof over her head for Christmas.
He was standing close enough for her to smell the clean man scent of his skin—or was it just that for some extraordinary reason she was acutely sensitive to the scent and heat of him?
Her legs started to tremble—in fact, her whole body was trembling.
‘It’s all right,’ she heard Oliver saying calmly to her. ‘I’ve got you…’
‘Yes,’ Lisa heard herself responding, her own voice unfamiliarly soft and husky, making the simple affirmation sound something much more sensual and inviting. Without having had the remotest intention of doing any such thing—it simply wasn’t the kind of thing she did, ever—Lisa found that she was looking at Oliver’s mouth, and that her gaze, having focused on it for far, far too long, was somehow drawn even more betrayingly to his eyes.
Her breath caught in her throat as she saw the way he was looking back at her, his head already lowering towards hers—as well it might do after the sensually open invitation that she had just given him.
But instead of avoiding what she knew was going to happen, instead of moving away from him, which she could quite easily have done, she simply stood there waiting, with her lips softly parted, her gaze fixed on the downward descent of his head and his mouth, her heart thudding frantically against her chest wall—not in case he kissed her, she acknowledged in semi-shock, but rather in case he didn’t.
But of course he did. Slowly and deliberately at first, exploring the shape and feel of her mouth, shifting his weight slightly so that instead of that small but oh, so safe distance between them and the firm grip of his hands on her waist supporting her, it was the equally firm but oh, so much more sensual strength of his body that held her up as his arms closed round her, holding her in an embrace not as intimate as that of a lover but still intimate enough to make her powerfully aware of the fact that he was a man.
Lisa had forgotten that a man’s kiss could be like this—slow, thorough and so sensually inventive and promising as he hinted at all the pleasures that there could be to come. And yet it wasn’t a kiss of passion or demand—not yet—and Lisa was hazily aware that the slow stroke of his tongue against her lips was more sensually threatening to her self-control than to his, and that she was the one who was having to struggle to pull herself back from the verge of a far more dangerous kind of arousal when he finally lifted his mouth from hers.
‘What was that for?’ she asked stupidly as she tried to drag her gaze away from his eyes.
‘No reason,’ he told her in response. But as she started to turn her head away, expecting him to release her, he lifted one hand to her face, cupping the side of her jaw with warm, strong fingers, holding her captive as he told her softly, ‘But this is.’
And he was kissing her again, but this time the passion that she had sensed was missing in his first kiss was clearly betrayed in the way his mouth hardened over hers, the way his body hardened against hers, his tongue probing the softness of her mouth as she totally abandoned her normal, cautious behaviour and responded to him with every single one of her aroused senses—every single one.
Her arms, without her knowing quite how it had happened, were wrapped tightly around him, holding him close, her fingertips absorbing the feel of his body, its warmth, its hardness, its sheer maleness; her eyes opened in dazed arousal as she looked up into his, her ears intensely attuned to the sound of his breathing and his heartbeat and their tell-tale quickened rate, the scent of him reaching her with every breath she took, and the taste of him. She closed her eyes and then opened them again as she heard him whispering against her mouth, ‘Happy Christmas.’
‘Happy Christmas’! Lisa came back to earth with a jolt. Of course. Hot colour flooded her face as she realised just how close she had been to making a complete fool of herself.
He hadn’t kissed her because he had wanted her, because he had been overwhelmed by desire for her. He had kissed her because it was Christmas, and if that second kiss had been a good deal more intense than their extremely short-lived acquaintanceship really merited then that was probably her fault for… For what? For responding too intensely to him the first time?
‘Happy Christmas!’ she managed to respond as she hurriedly stepped back from him and turned towards the house.
As Oliver opened the door for her Lisa could smell the rich scent of the roasting turkey mingling with the fresh crispness of the tree.
‘The turkey smells good,’ she told him, shakily struggling to appear calm and unaffected by his kiss, sniffing the richly scented air. The kiss that they had so recently exchanged might never have been, judging from the way he was behaving to
wards her now, and she told herself firmly that it was probably best if she pretended that it hadn’t too.
Oliver could never play a permanent role in her life, and this unfamiliar and dangerous intensity of physical desire that she had experienced was something she would be far better off without.
‘Yes, I’d better go and check on it,’ Oliver agreed.
‘I’ll come and give you a hand,’ Lisa offered, adding as she glanced down at her clothes, ‘I’d better go and get changed first, though.’
It didn’t take her long to remove her coat and the dress she was wearing underneath it, but instead of re-dressing immediately she found that she was standing staring at her underwear-clad body in the mirror, trying to see it as a man might do… A man? Or Oliver?
Angry with herself, she reached into the wardrobe and pulled out the first thing that came to hand, only realising when she had started to put it on that it was the cream trouser suit which had caused so many problems already.
She paused, wondering whether or not to wear something else, and then heard Oliver rapping on the bedroom door and calling out, ‘Lisa, are you all right…?’
‘Yes, yes. I’m fine… I’m coming now,’ she told him quickly, pulling on the jacket and fastening it. Hardly sensible apparel in which to help cook Christmas lunch, but with the sleeves of the jacket pushed back, she thought… And she could always remove the jacket if necessary. So what if the pretty little waistcoat that went underneath it was rather brief? Oliver was hardly likely to notice, was he?
He was waiting for her outside the bedroom door, and caught her off guard by catching hold of her arm and placing his hand on her forehead.
‘Mmm… no temperature. Well, that’s something, I suppose. Your pulse is very fast, though,’ he observed as his hand circled her wrist and he measured her pulse-rate.
Quickly Lisa snatched her wrist away. ‘I’ve just got a cold, that’s all,’ she told him huskily.
‘Just a cold,’ he reiterated. ‘No broken heart…’
Lisa flashed him a doubtful look, half suspecting him of deliberately mocking her, but unable to make any response, knowing that she would be lying to him if she tried to pretend that she felt anything other than half-ashamed relief at breaking up with Henry.