A Christmas Night to Remember

by Helen Brooks

  Melody winced. She would have preferred him shouting at her than his dangerously controlled soft tone. It never boded well.

  ‘And it didn’t occur to you to ring me and let me know you were all right?’ he continued. ‘Or even turn your mobile on so I could contact you? But, no, why should it? You’re totally in Melody world, aren’t you? I’m merely your husband, that’s all.’

  Melody bit her lip to stop herself firing back. He had every right to be mad. ‘I was fine.’

  ‘And I knew that by what? Telepathy? I had no idea where you were when I found you’d gone a couple of hours ago. I’ve been scouring the streets looking for you and trying to ignore the fact that the river is very deep and very cold.’

  ‘You didn’t think—’ She stopped, appalled he could imagine she would take her own life. ‘You couldn’t have imagined…’

  ‘I didn’t know what to think, Melody.’

  The very fact he had used her full name told her he was beside himself—that and the rigidity of his features.

  ‘I can’t reach you, can I? That’s the nub of the issue,’ he ground out flatly. ‘You’ve shut me out more effectively than I could have imagined. There’s no room for me any more. We’re not a couple. Perhaps we never were. Maybe all I imagined we had was just wishful thinking on my part.’

  She didn’t know what to say. That she had hurt him to the core was very clear, but if Zeke held power over her when he was his normal confident, intense and demanding self, it was multiplied a hundred times to devastating effect in his hurt vulnerability. ‘I—I thought I could get back before you woke up,’ she said weakly, the excuse sounding lame even to her own ears. ‘And I didn’t mean to be out for so long, but I met someone—an old lady with her dog. We—we talked for a bit.’

  ‘Really? And this old lady and her dog were such riveting company that it completely slipped your mind you had a husband who might—just might—be a tad worried that you had up and disappeared in the middle of the night to goodness knows where?’

  ‘I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.’

  ‘You can’t talk to me?’ He gave a harsh bark of a laugh but didn’t slow his footsteps or look at her. ‘You’re priceless, do you know that? Absolutely priceless. Only you could say that.’

  She felt sudden tears burn her eyes, but blinked them away furiously. How ironic that just when she had begun to think they might have a chance he’d decided they were through. He had had enough and she couldn’t blame him. She’d acted like a crazy woman over the past months and she couldn’t—hand on heart—promise him she was any less scared of the future. He didn’t have to put up with this, and why would he?

  By the time they reached the hotel her legs were aching badly from the unaccustomed exercise, but she would have walked on hot coals before showing it. They had just entered the lobby when Melody saw the Japanese family, coming from the direction of the dining room, the two little girls clutching beautifully dressed dolls and chattering away to each other. The mother smiled at Melody as they approached, clearly remembering their conversation the day before. ‘Santa found his way, as you can see,’ she said serenely, secure and content in her role as wife and mother. ‘And the reindeers must have enjoyed the carrots because they were all gone this morning.’

  ‘That’s good.’ Melody stopped and admired the children’s toys before saying, ‘Have you seen the snow family that came in the night? I think Santa must have brought them too.’

  ‘Oh, yes, they were delighted.’ As the father walked on with the children, the mother turned, her voice soft as she said, ‘Someone has been very busy.’

  The two women exchanged a smile before Melody and Zeke walked towards the lift, and as the doors opened Zeke said flatly, ‘How come a stranger gets your smiles?’

  Taken aback, she stared at him. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He pressed the control panel, and as the lift swept them upwards he thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his trousers, his gaze on his shoes.

  ‘Zeke, please let me explain. Can’t we talk at least?’

  ‘Wait.’ He raised his head, pinning her to the spot with his ebony eyes. ‘Wait till we’re in the suite.’

  The few seconds until they were standing inside the sitting room seemed like hours, but then Zeke shut the door behind them and Melody forced herself to turn and look at him. His first words took her completely by surprise. ‘Is there someone else?’

  ‘What?’ She stared at him in utter bewilderment.

  ‘Have you met someone else?’ he repeated stiffly.

  ‘Me?’ Her voice was a squeak, and she cleared her throat before she managed, ‘Of course not. How on earth could I have met someone else when I’ve been in hospital for the last three months? I’ve only seen doctors and other patients.’

  ‘Stranger things have happened.’

  ‘Well, not to me.’ She struggled to keep her voice steady while anger streaked through her. How could he think that? How could he? ‘And I resent the question.’

  He stared at her intently, and what he read in her face must have reassured him on that point at least because she saw the granite features relax. ‘I’m sorry but I had to ask. It would have explained a good few things—not least why you felt it necessary to creep away on Christmas morning and disappear for umpteen hours whilst making sure you were incommunicado.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ she protested weakly.

  ‘Actually, that was exactly what it was like.’

  She watched him take a deep breath and realised he was having difficulty holding on to his self-control. He wanted to yell at her, to shout. He calmed himself with a few more deep breaths and she marvelled at his willpower. ‘What I meant was I didn’t deliberately not call you,’ she said tentatively. ‘I simply didn’t think.’

  ‘Great. That makes it much better,’ he said with grim sarcasm. ‘I’m so unimportant I didn’t even register on your radar.’

  ‘Stop being like this.’ Her voice came out sharper than she had intended—probably because she was desperately trying to keep cool so she could think about what to say, how to reach him. ‘I hate it when you’re this way.’

  His eyes went flint-hard. ‘Like what?’ he said slowly and deliberately. ‘Like I’m angry or hurting or scared rigid? Like I lie awake every night trying to make an impossible situation possible again, knowing I’m up against an adversary who holds all the cards because I love her? My life is falling apart and everything’s disintegrating. I am going quietly crazy and I can’t concentrate on anything but us. But I mustn’t show it. Is that right? Well, tough. I’m human, believe it or not.’

  Melody’s heart stopped. Zeke was always professional, the consummate business tycoon. No matter what happened he didn’t let it interfere with his work. She hadn’t really thought about how her accident was affecting him because she had been too caught up in her own pain and grief, but if she had given it thought she would have expected he was carrying on as normal, engrossed in the daily exhilarating and hectic whirl that made up his show business empire. But that hadn’t been the case at all. And he had already admitted he was blaming himself for not meeting her for lunch that day, as they had originally planned. The guilt of that must have been playing on his mind too. He’d been tormenting himself every bit as much as she had.

  She swallowed against the painful lump in her throat as her heart kick-started and then pounded against her ribcage so hard it hurt. How had she missed the fact he was suffering too?

  Because she had been so wrapped up in herself, a separate and merciless part of her mind said honestly. So immersed in her battle first to survive and then to claw her way out of the deep fog of despair and depression. And Mabel was right. It was fear which governed her life now. Somewhere in the midst of those first weeks she had let it master her and it had remained in control ever since. It had coloured every thought, every decision.

  She had hurt him. Badly. She had pushed him away when he had needed
her as much as she had needed him. She had even stopped him visiting her in the hospital. What had he said? That he had resorted to driving to the hospital car park at night just to be near her. Why hadn’t she realised he’d been asking for help too? How could she have got it so terribly wrong?

  Melody stared at him. He hadn’t taken the time to shave when he had found her gone, and his hair looked as though he had run his hand through it a few times—probably in anger. And he had lost some weight over the past months. Altogether he looked harder, sexier and more devastatingly attractive than ever. She loved him, she thought wretchedly. She loved him more than life itself and she had torn them to shreds with her blind stupidity.

  She drew in a steadying breath. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said simply. ‘I’ve done everything wrong and I don’t blame you if you’re sick and tired of me, if you hate me.’

  ‘Hate you? I love you!’ He was shouting now, and it was a relief. ‘I love you so much I’m going crazy, woman. What the hell do you want from me, anyway? Tell me, because I’d really like to know. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it, damn it.’

  Just hours ago she wouldn’t have been able to answer him truthfully—especially when he was glaring at her with such deep intensity the black of his eyes glowed like hot coals. ‘I want you to keep loving me because I love you and I can’t do without you.’ There—she had said it, and now the fear was rising up, strangling her, as the enormity of what she’d done washed over her. She stared at him, waiting for his reaction.

  Zeke didn’t move or even blink for an endless moment, then his whole body relaxed with a deep exhalation. ‘Come here,’ he said softly, opening his arms. ‘We need to talk. I have to understand and you have to open up. But first I need to hold you and convince myself you’re really here and not at the bottom of the Thames or in some other guy’s arms.’

  He held her for a long time without speaking, and although she had wrapped her arms round his waist Melody was aware her heart was pounding like a drum. This was the moment of truth—or at least the next little while would be the moment of truth. Because their talk could only end in one way, and when it did, when they made love, he would look at her scars. They both knew that. The thought made her feel physically sick.

  ‘Okay.’ He drew back a little, but only to lead her over to the sofa. ‘I’m going to call Room Service before anything else. What do you want to eat and drink?’

  ‘Nothing.’ The thought of food was enough to choke her.

  Zeke picked up the phone and ordered coffee and croissants for two before coming to sit beside her. ‘Tell me where you went this morning first,’ he said softly. ‘We’ll get onto the whys in a minute. I want to know exactly where you’ve been.’

  ‘I walked for a while, and then sat on a bench and an old lady came and talked to me. She invited me to her house for a cup of tea,’ Melody said numbly. ‘She—she was kind.’

  ‘Then I’m grateful to her,’ he said expressionlessly.

  ‘She told me about her life, how she lost several babies and then went onto have her son. The time…it just went. I didn’t realise. I—I think she’s lonely in her own way.’

  He nodded. ‘And do I take it this conversation was a two-way thing? That you told her about our problems?’

  She was touched he said ‘our’, when he could, in all honesty, have said ‘yours’. It was her turn to nod.

  ‘This is not a criticism, more of an observation,’ Zeke said carefully. ‘You could spend four hours talking to this old lady about how you were feeling, but you can’t share it with me?’

  Melody couldn’t let that go unchallenged. ‘I didn’t spend four hours with her. It was two at the most—probably only one and a half. And I have talked to you about everything.’

  ‘No, Dee, you’ve talked at me, when you have talked at all. You’ve given me a list of reasons why the thought of staying with me is impossible—none of which I buy, incidentally. In fact you couldn’t come up with a reason for us to split because there isn’t one. From day one I knew we were going to be together. I told you that often enough. But you never believed me, did you? It never sank in. Even after two years of marriage.’

  She stared at him, her eyes huge in her white face. ‘I wanted it to be true.’ She swallowed painfully. ‘I really did.’

  ‘But you never believed it,’ he said softly. ‘No matter what I said or what I did you didn’t believe it.’

  She couldn’t deny it. Some inbuilt survival instinct had prevented it. If she had let herself accept she was the only one for Zeke—his ‘dream woman’, as he’d often described it—the risk would have been too great. Once she had relied on him to that extent she’d never have recovered if it all went wrong. Her voice was a tiny whisper when she said, ‘I suppose I couldn’t believe someone like you would want someone like me for ever.’

  Zeke’s fingers took hold of her face and his dark eyes stared straight into hers. ‘What do you mean, someone like you? You’re beautiful, exquisite, unique—the best there is. And the amazing thing, the thing I couldn’t get my head round at first, is that you’re as lovely on the inside as the outside. The first time I met you—when you were late for the audition, you remember?—I wanted you physically. You danced as though every bone in your body was fluid, flowing with the music, and it was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. And then you stood in the middle of the stage and refused to be intimidated by my questions or by me. A little firebrand, gusty and defiant. And then I heard you talking with the other girls and I found out the reason you were late was because you’d taken pity on an old woman who was devastated by the loss of her cat. Those other girls couldn’t understand it. There wasn’t one of them who would have done the same. I couldn’t understand it. You were an enigma. I had a job to believe you were real.’

  ‘Me?’ Fascinated as she was by his description of her, she found it hard to believe he was talking about ordinary, run-of-the-mill Melody James.

  ‘Your soft centre is something I have no defence against, my love,’ Zeke murmured huskily. ‘It melts me, it ties me up in knots, it makes me want to be a better man than I am and to believe that good can triumph over bad—that Father Christmas really does exist, and that roses round the door and happy-ever-after is there for the taking.’ And then he smiled. ‘Don’t look like that. Don’t you know how much I adore you?’

  No. No, I had no idea. ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Liar.’ It was without heat. ‘Sweetheart, you penetrated my heart as easily as a knife through warm butter. I won’t pretend there were times when I was frustrated I couldn’t do the same with you. But I’m a patient man.’

  Zeke? Patient? He had many attributes, but patience wasn’t one of them. And he did have her heart. He always had.

  Something of what she was thinking must have shown in her face, because he smiled again, his voice soft when he qualified, ‘Semi-patient at least—for you, that is.’ He bent and pressed a kiss on her mouth, pressed another to the tip of her nose and onto her forehead, before settling back and surveying her with ebony eyes. ‘So, tell me why you banned me from visiting you in hospital, and why your solicitor told my solicitor you want a divorce,’ he said levelly, no inflection in his voice. ‘And why, after we made love—twice—you still felt the need to escape and put some distance between us.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE arrival of the coffee and croissants a moment or two after Zeke had demanded she talk to him delayed the inevitable by a few minutes. Melody didn’t want to eat or drink, but she did both to gain a few precious get-your-facts-straight moments. The coffee was too strong, and the croissant she forced down didn’t sit well with Mabel’s bacon sandwich, and when she had finished Zeke’s eyes were still waiting for her to begin.

  Her heart was thumping in her chest, staccato-beating in her ears, because she knew she had to get this right. She had to make him understand why everything she had done since the accident was wrong. All her past had come together when she’d woken up in that hospi
tal bed, and from that moment she had been in a vacuum of fear and confusion, sucked into a dark and terrifying merry-go-round of hopelessness.

  She cleared her throat. ‘I haven’t been thinking clearly over the last weeks.’ To give him his due, he didn’t raise his eyebrows in the quirky, sarky way he did sometimes. Neither did he make any of the hundred and one responses he could have made in the circumstances. He simply sat looking at her. She didn’t know if that made it easier or harder.

  ‘I’ve realised this—my freaking out in the hospital and asking you for a divorce and everything—is because…’ She paused and swallowed hard. ‘I was frightened you wouldn’t want me any more now I’m— I’m disfigured.’ She rushed on quickly before he could speak. ‘Not that you have ever done or said anything to make me think that way. I know it’s me. Mabel—the lady I met today—said I was letting fear rule me, and she’s right. It’s just that I know you appreciate grace and beauty more than most. Partly due to your—your beginnings and everything, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But—but I’ll never dance again. I’m…different now.’

  ‘Sweetheart, your legs were messed up. I know that’s one hell of a big deal for you, because dancing is your life, but I can help you through it. This doesn’t have to be the end of using the fantastic gift you’ve been given, just rechannelling it. I’ve got a couple of ideas about that, but they can wait. The main thing I have to convince you of right now is that your grace and beauty has never depended on your dancing. You are grace and beauty. Those qualities are in every word you speak, the way you are, every look and movement you make. The lorry couldn’t take them away from you, don’t you see? You’re my sweet, generous, incomparable baby—my darling, my love.’

  She was falling apart, her eyes blinded by her tears, and when he took her in his arms again she fell against him, needing his strength and security as never before as she sobbed against his broad chest.