The Christmas Marriage Mission

by Helen Brooks

  ‘A few.’ And it had hurt, terribly, even though she’d told herself they had no idea what had gone on behind closed doors.

  Anger thickened his voice. ‘Fools are always the first to give an opinion. I was brought up in a home that resembled a war zone for a great deal of the time. Believe me, the twins are very fortunate. You have two normal, well-adjusted and happy little girls; they’re a testimony to the fact that you were right in the course of action you followed. Don’t ever doubt that, not for a minute.’

  Funny, but she hadn’t expected such understanding and comfort from him, not from Mitchell. She hadn’t spoken of how she felt to a living soul before this, not even her mother, but he had seemed instinctively to guess the doubts and fears she managed to keep under lock and key most of the time. With her father having died when he did, the girls had never really had a male figure in their lives, apart from her brother, and Peter was too busy with his own family to spend much time with them.

  ‘Better no father at all than one who would have put them through hell, Kay.’

  He took her hand, feeling it flutter in his before it became still.

  The sky was dark outside the warmth of the house, but with the snow steadily falling a winter wonderland was forming in the garden, its glow luminescent in the light from the windows. Her mother and Henry were still talking quietly together, their voices too low to be overheard, and the twins were busy with their dolls, and it just seemed the moment to say, ‘It’s affected you deeply, the way your father was, hasn’t it.’

  She saw his jaw clench and for a moment she thought he was going to draw away. Instead his hand tightened on hers. ‘It was my mother who was a serial adulteress.’ It was bald and flat. ‘It got in the end so it was any man, any time, but long before that I knew she didn’t love my father or my sister and I. I don’t think she was capable of love in any form.’

  ‘You…you knew she was having affairs, even though you were just a boy?’ Kay whispered.

  ‘I can’t remember a time I didn’t know,’ he said bitterly. ‘They would row—no, that’s too mild a word for what went on. They would fight, quite literally, at times. She’d fly at him and he’d try and hold her off for a while, but she always pushed him too far. She broke his arm once; I was about nine at the time and I can remember his scream when she brought a poker down on him. He said he was leaving then, but of course he didn’t. Don’t ask me why because I don’t think he loved her any more.’

  ‘Oh, Mitchell.’ Pain streaked through her. Pain for him now, and for the small, bewildered little boy he had once been. For the sister who had also been embroiled in the madness. ‘Your sister? Was she younger than you?’

  He nodded. ‘I used to look after her as much as I could; she was a sweet kid, timid. Scared to death of our mother.

  Most times when we’d get home from school the house would be empty. Dad would get home from work, sometimes before she got back and other times after. She never tried to deny where she had been or with whom. She was very honest.’ His mouth twisted bitterly.

  ‘I got a couple of paper rounds, one before school and one after. I think I’d got some crazy idea of saving enough to take Kathleen, my sister, and I away somewhere. Normally I was back long before Dad got in but this particular night my bike got a puncture. From what the neighbours said, Dad was waiting for my mother when she got home and when he found out she was seeing a man he worked with, he dragged her to the car to go and confront him at his home in front of his wife and family. Why he took Kathleen with him I don’t know—perhaps it was to make this guy feel bad, or because he didn’t want to leave her alone in the house. There was a head-on collision with a lorry anyway. End of story.’

  Kay put her other hand on top of his, pressing it as she said, ‘It wasn’t your fault, Mitchell. You weren’t to know he would do that, that he’d take Kathleen with him.’

  He shrugged powerful shoulders. ‘I was all Kathleen had; she trusted me. I should have been there. I wouldn’t have let her go with them.’ His voice was so raw she blinked against it.

  ‘Perhaps your father would have made you go too and you’d all have been killed. Four lives lost instead of three.’

  ‘For a long time I wished it had been that way.’ He looked her full in the face, his mouth twisting. ‘I was an angry young man, Kay. Very angry, very bitter, very foolhardy. I did some things I’m not proud of and it was more by luck than judgement I didn’t end up in prison. Then one day a group of us were racing each other on motorbikes. One of my friends was killed in front of my eyes. It brought me up short. I realised I wanted to live after all.’

  ‘I’m glad you did,’ she said softly. She hadn’t meant to say it the way it had sounded. Her voice hadn’t been nearly as matter-of-fact or prosaic enough. But what really scared her half to death was the consuming urge to comfort him, to take the look of bleakness out of his eyes and to kiss the hard set of his mouth until it relaxed beneath her lips. Friends. The word mocked her. The feelings she had for Mitchell were not ones of friendship, they never had been, and they didn’t remotely resemble the starry-eyed infatuation and girlish love that had led her to marry Perry either.

  A CD of Christmas carols had been playing in the background and now, as it finished, Mitchell rose to his feet. ‘There’s a cartoon called Santa’s Special Christmas starting about now. Fancy watching it, girls?’ he asked Georgia and Emily.

  Kay stared at him as he walked across to the huge television set and switched it on. Was it her imagination— part of the shock of acknowledging how she felt about him—or had his action been a deliberate withdrawal? Did he feel he’d said too much, revealed too much? How did she handle this?

  As the twins positioned themselves at a suitable distance in front of the TV clutching their dolls, Kay lay back against the sofa and shut her eyes. She was aware of Mitchell walking across the room again but when she opened her eyes she saw he had picked up the blanket that had been wrapped round Emily, and was now tucking it round the small child as she sat with Georgia on the floor. The action was so poignant for some reason that Kay wanted to cry.

  ‘Do you think you ladies could manage a sherry now you’re in the land of the living again?’ Mitchell included Leonora in the smile he gave, and when Kay and her mother both accepted and Henry made a move to rise he waved the older man down, saying, ‘Stay where you are, Henry, I’ll get them. A drop of your usual?’

  Kay had to admit she thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the evening, even though she dozed off twice before dinner.

  Georgia and Emily were so excited it was no use insisting on their normal bedtime, and so the little girls ate dinner at the elaborately festive dining table with the grown-ups, beside themselves with delight. They were almost asleep over their dessert, and when Mitchell picked them up, one on each arm, Kay went with him to tuck her daughters into bed. She was aware it was all too cosy, too intimate, but she couldn’t do a thing about it for the time being, she told herself helplessly. It wasn’t as though she had chosen to inflict them all on him, it had just…happened.

  Both children were asleep as their heads touched the pillows, so worn out by all the excitement of the day and the anticipation of the morrow that they didn’t need a reminder to go straight to sleep if they wanted Father Christmas to come.

  Mitchell didn’t hurry her to leave, standing with her as she watched the sleeping children for a couple of minutes. ‘You love them very much, don’t you?’ he said softly.

  It was on the tip of her tongue to say, Of course I do, they are my children, but, remembering all he had said downstairs, she answered simply, ‘They’re my world.’

  Mitchell expelled a quiet breath. ‘I know.’ He turned his head, lifting her face up to his with one finger in the slumbering stillness as he murmured, his tone rueful, ‘I thought it was going to be all so simple, dating you.’

  ‘And it isn’t?’

  ‘No, it damn well isn’t and you know it. You do know it, don’t you, Kay? I want you, nee
d you.’ He drew her out of the room as he spoke, shutting the door quietly behind them and then taking her into his arms on the shadowed landing. He didn’t have to tell her what he wanted, the desire was there to read in his eyes, his mouth hungry as it took hers.

  Kay clung to him, her head whirling less with the after effects of the flu and more with the feel of his hard body against hers. She kissed him back; she couldn’t help it. She always kissed him back—that was the effect Mitchell Grey had on her, she thought with a thread of bitterness for just a second before it was burnt up in the liquid heat coursing through her body.

  His hand was in the small of her back to steady her and she gasped as the other cupped one of her breasts, his fingers beginning a languorous rhythm on its sensitive peak that had her stifling a moan of pleasure.

  Something had happened, she told herself bewilderedly. There was a release of the restraint he had shown thus far. This gentle eroticism was as deliberate as it was powerful; he was forcing her to acknowledge her own need of him in the age-old way. Little did he know she’d got there before him…

  His mouth and hands had complete mastery over her quivering senses, her body melting against his as he kept up the barrage of sweet sensation, fuelling her own passion with his. She thought briefly of the times Perry had made love to her, taking her with barely a kiss beforehand and thinking only of his own pleasure. What would it be like to really be loved by Mitchell? she asked herself dazedly. To lie with him all night, to explore and stroke and kiss every inch of that hard-muscled male body and to let him do the same to her. Because he would want to; she knew he would want to. Not for Mitchell a quick, brief coupling.

  He had moved, pressing her back against the wall of the landing, and she could feel his thighs hard against hers, her softness stamped with the rock-hard power of his arousal. It was heady, intoxicating, to know how much he wanted her; it made her alive to the potency of her femininity in a way she had never experienced before.

  There were sounds in the hall below them, then Henry’s voice saying something to her mother as he opened the dining-room door and a faint whiff of coffee in the air. She felt Mitchell slowly draw away with a low groan of regret, his chest rising and falling with the force of his need as he straightened. ‘We have to go,’ he said huskily. ‘Unfortunately.’

  ‘Yes.’ She was breathing hard, her cheeks flushed and her hands trembling at the tumult of desire he had released. She hadn’t known she was capable of feeling like that, not in a hundred years, and now he wasn’t holding her any more she felt dizzily adrift.

  She raised a shaking hand to her hair, stumbling slightly, and immediately his hands came out to steady her, his voice rueful as he said, ‘Damn it, I forgot you’re still far from well. You’ve only been up five minutes and I’ve practically eaten you alive. Why can’t I keep my hands off you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I do. It’s because you’re enticing, mouth-watering—’

  ‘Me?’ In spite of herself Kay smiled. ‘I’m not one of your gorgeous model-type females, Mitchell, as I’m only too aware. I do have mirrors in the house, you know.’

  He let go of her, stepping back a pace and surveying her through eyes that were brilliantly clear in the darkness of his face. ‘One, I don’t have a harem of gorgeous model types, Kay,’ he said quietly, his voice holding the edge of irony. ‘Two, whatever you see when you look in the mirror, I see a warm and beautiful woman who is yet to be fully awakened to the power of her charm. And three, I never say anything I don’t mean.’

  She stared at him, her eyes locked with his, and then he moved closer again, his thumb stroking her cheek in a caressing gesture that brought a lump to her throat. ‘Red hair that glows like fire when the light catches it, brown eyes as deep and soft as velvet, skin so delicate and fine it’s like porcelain. How can you not see all that, Kay?’

  She didn’t dare believe this meant anything beyond what was for him a tried and tested seduction technique. He had told her he didn’t want commitment or anything lasting; he had been totally up front about it. Maybe if she didn’t have the twins, if she were answerable only to herself without any responsibilities, it would be different. Maybe then she would take a chance and give herself to him, hoping he would come to love her eventually, that when the time came to say goodbye he wouldn’t be able to let her go.

  But she did have the twins. She couldn’t mess with their security or stability, neither did she have the luxury of being able to flirt with emotional suicide. And whatever he said, she still couldn’t quite bring herself to believe that a man like Mitchell Grey—a man who could have any woman he wanted—would be interested in someone like her for long. She was five feet five of ordinary womanhood. She had freckles, her breasts were too small and her bottom was too big, and at that certain time of the month her skin could erupt like Mount Vesuvius. Whereas he… He was perfect.

  Perry had hurt her but she had picked herself up, dusted herself down and got on with life. But if Mitchell betrayed her, if she gave herself to him and then he tired of her…

  She turned her head from his intent gaze, shrugging her shoulders and making her voice as light as she could. ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t that what they say? And hadn’t we better go down now?’

  ‘Sure.’ He made no attempt to touch her. ‘But it’s only fair to let you know I never give up, Kay. I always get what I want.’

  She felt more vulnerable than she’d ever felt in her life. Even after Perry had gone and she’d realised she had a pregnancy and then single parenthood to face, she hadn’t felt such a sense of desperation, but she couldn’t let him see how he had affected her. She forced herself to start walking towards the top of the stairs, tossing over her shoulder, ‘Ah, but do you always get what you deserve, Mr Grey?’

  She heard him chuckle. ‘Touché, Mrs Sherwood.’

  This was still just a game to him. As they began to descend the stairs she felt exhaustion sweep over her in a great wave. Thank goodness she hadn’t done what she’d wanted to do a few minutes ago and thrown herself into his arms, telling him she was his for as long as he wanted her. Madness. That was what he created in her: madness.

  As they entered the dining room Kay saw her mother glance at her, and then Leonora said, consternation in her voice, ‘Darling, you’re as white as a sheet. You’ve done far too much on your first day up.’

  ‘I am tired.’ Kay seized the opportunity, but it was the truth anyway. She suddenly didn’t know how she was going to put one foot in front of the other to climb the stairs again. ‘I’m going to go to bed, if you don’t mind?’ She included the three of them in her swift glance. ‘Goodnight, and happy Christmas.’

  ‘I’ll see you up the stairs—we don’t want you falling headlong, do we?’ Mitchell said silkily, ignoring her protests as he took her arm, saying to the other two, ‘I’ll be back in a second, and I’ll have my coffee black, Henry, with a brandy.’

  ‘I can manage perfectly well, thank you,’ Kay muttered once they were at the foot of the stairs. ‘Go back and have your coffee.’

  ‘Bossy little wench, aren’t you?’ He grinned down at her but his eyes were thoughtful as they took in her pale face and the shadows under her eyes. ‘Your mother’s right, damn it, you have done too much. I shall have to watch that in the future.’

  She couldn’t take much more of this. For some reason she felt as though every single nerve end was exposed tonight.

  ‘Right, let’s get you into bed.’ It was deliberately wicked and she opened her mouth to make a tart retort that never got voiced, Mitchell cutting it off by the simple expedient of whisking her up into his arms.

  ‘Put me down, Mitchell. I can walk.’

  ‘Perhaps, but this is nicer.’ He looked down at her as he mounted the stairs, taking her mouth in a hard, swift kiss that took Kay’s breath away.

  He was too strong to fight, too powerful. She sagged against the hard wall of his chest, willing the moment to go on for ev
er. She wished she were a tall, stunning blonde with the sort of vital statistics to drive a man wild; she wished he hadn’t been hurt so badly by the one woman in his life he should have been able to trust, and who had shaped the young boy Mitchell into the man he now was; she wished—oh, she wished for all sorts of things and all of them pipe dreams.

  He was holding her closely, securely, as they reached the bedroom. He set her down outside the door, looking down at her quizzically as he said, ‘I presume you want me to leave you here?’

  No. No, she didn’t. ‘Yes, please. Mitchell, the girls’ presents? We usually leave them in a pillowcase under the tree at home.’

  ‘All taken care of. Henry and I have got them ready and we’ll leave them there before we retire. Leonora said there’s also a small matter of a glass of sherry and mince pie? We’ll make sure the glass is suitably sooty and most of the mince pie’s eaten, of course. Santa has to keep his strength up.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ he said softly. ‘It’s been fun.’

  ‘Your home being turned upside down with a houseful of invalids?’ Kay said disbelievingly.

  He smiled as he lowered his head, his kiss tender and painfully sweet this time. His body was bent over her but no part was touching except his mouth fused to hers. ‘You’re here,’ he said huskily as he straightened. ‘That makes it fun.’

  ‘Goodnight, Mitchell. Happy Christmas.’ It was a whisper and she opened the door as she spoke, stepping inside the room quickly and closing the door without looking at him again. She stood leaning against the wood for several moments, however, her heart beating fast and her legs trembling.

  Christmas Eve, a magical time.

  Tired as she was, she levered herself off the door and walked across to the window, looking down into the snow-covered garden for a minute or two before she drew the curtains.