Christmas Eve Marriage (HQR Classic)

by Jessica Hart

  ‘Let’s go over there, where there’s more space,’ said Clara suddenly, and before Thea could protest had towed her out into the centre.

  ‘Clara, I don’t think this is a good id—’ Thea broke off as she saw the two figures heading straight towards them.

  Rhys and Sophie.

  Unprepared for the great lurch of her heart, Thea’s legs gave way, and she fell smack on her bottom, taking Clara with her.

  The two girls promptly dissolved into helpless giggles, which left Rhys to lean down a hand.

  ‘I’m not sure I’m very steady myself,’ he confessed, ‘but I’ll do my best.’

  Clara had already scrambled up, and between them they got Thea upright, although her legs were trembling so much she didn’t think they would stay that way for very long.

  She couldn’t take her eyes off Rhys. Paralysed by the fear that this would turn out to be a dream, she just stared and wondered what on earth she could say to keep him there. Then she remembered what Nell had said about simply saying hello and seeing where it took them.

  ‘Hello,’ she said shakily.

  Rhys smiled at her. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Dad, Clara and I can skate together now,’ said Sophie artlessly, ‘so you and Thea can sit down if you want.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ said Rhys, watching the two girls skate off, miraculously restored to competence. ‘Well?’ he said to Thea, who had hardly noticed they were gone. ‘Do you think we can make it back to the side?’

  ‘I might need to hang on to you,’ she managed to say huskily, and Rhys took her firmly by the hand.

  ‘If you hang on to me and I hang on to you, I think we’ll make it,’ he said.

  Thea felt in a curious state of limbo as she took off her boots, still hardly able to believe what was happening. For a while she just sat there by his side, reliving that feeling of his hand closed firmly around hers, the blissful security of knowing that he was strong enough and steady enough to stop her falling.

  It was almost as if the touch of his hand had said everything that needed to be said. As if everything had been explained and understood without saying a word. Thea could feel herself filling up with a warm and wonderful sense of certainty.

  ‘Did Clara set this up?’ she asked at last.

  ‘I believe it was a joint effort. Sophie certainly chose the venue.’ Rhys glanced around the echoing hall, at the crowded ice rink and the hard green plastic seats. ‘I’m not sure she’s quite got the hang of romance yet.’

  ‘So you knew all about it?’

  ‘Not until yesterday. I guessed something was up when I went to pick Sophie up from Clara’s. I met your sister. She’s nice, isn’t she?’

  ‘Nell knew?’

  Thea remembered the brilliance of Nell’s eyes earlier, the way she had hugged her and whispered, ‘Good luck’. Of course she had known.

  ‘She hadn’t known long. The girls worked it all out themselves,’ said Rhys. ‘They were sure that we were both unhappy and they decided to do something about it.’

  ‘Have you been unhappy?’ asked Thea.

  ‘Yes,’ he said simply, looking into her eyes, his own very light and clear. ‘I’ve missed you, Thea. I’ve missed you more than I would have thought possible.’

  ‘I’ve missed you too,’ she said and, when he held out his hand, she took it and held it tightly as the awful tightness around her heart began to ease.

  ‘I’m in love with you,’ said Rhys in the same direct way. ‘I think I’ve been in love with you since you sat on our terrace that morning. You took that deep breath to smell the coffee, and you smiled at me, and I was lost.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

  ‘I didn’t want to admit it, not even to myself. I didn’t want to fall in love. I’d made up my mind that I was going to devote myself to Sophie, and I felt guilty about thinking about anyone except her, but it was so hard not to when you were there, smiling, talking, so easy to be with. I clung to the idea that it was all a pretence, and that it didn’t really mean anything when I kissed you, but it got harder and harder to remember that it wasn’t real.’

  ‘I know,’ said Thea with feeling, curling her fingers around his.

  ‘Do you?’ he asked seriously, and she nodded.

  ‘Yes, I do, Rhys. I know exactly what it’s like to fall in love with someone when you least expect to, when you don’t really want to. When you think they’re just pretending to be in love with you.’

  ‘I didn’t think you could love me.’ Rhys sounded uncertain for the first time. ‘I thought you were just pretending.’

  A smile was tugging at the corners of Thea’s mouth, and she ran her free hand up to his shoulder.

  ‘I’m not pretending now.’

  He kissed her then, a long sweet kiss on the hard plastic seats with the hissing ice and the shrieking children in the background, and Thea wound her arms around his neck and kissed him back as her heart swelled with happiness and joy spilt in a dizzying rush along her veins.

  They were roused by the sound of clapping. Sophie and Clara were leaning on the edge of the rink, beaming with self-satisfaction. ‘Can we be bridesmaids?’

  Rhys sighed. ‘Go away,’ he said, without taking his arms from around Thea. ‘I haven’t asked her to marry me yet.’

  ‘Oh, Dad, what have you been doing?’ Sophie rolled her eyes. ‘You will, won’t you, Thea?’

  Thea started to laugh. ‘Who’s making the proposal here?’

  ‘Well, you did say you would prefer being proposed to in public rather than in a boring candlelit restaurant,’ Rhys reminded her. He made to get up. ‘Would you like me to find a microphone and everybody can watch?’

  ‘No!’ Half laughing, half horrified, Thea caught at his sleeve and pulled him back down beside her. ‘No, it’s quite public enough here with just the four of us!’

  ‘All right then. Will you marry me, Thea?’

  ‘Say yes,’ hissed Clara.

  ‘Yes,’ said Thea obediently.

  ‘And now will you go away?’ Rhys said to the two girls. ‘It would be nice to kiss Thea without an audience for once.’

  ‘Ooh,’ chorused the girls, but they waggled their hands and skated away, their mission accomplished.

  ‘Don’t forget the ring, Dad,’ Sophie shouted over her shoulder.

  ‘What ring?’ mumbled Thea a few minutes later as she emerged from his kiss. ‘You must have been very sure of me!’

  ‘No,’ said Rhys, suddenly serious. ‘I was just very hopeful. Anyway, it’s just this old thing.’ He pulled out a familiar box and took the sapphire ring out to slip it back on to Thea’s finger. ‘I’m not sure whether Lynda would have noticed if you were wearing it or not that evening. That was just an excuse. I just wanted to see you wearing my ring. When you gave it back that night it felt like a slap in the face.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Thea, kissing him to make up for it. ‘I won’t give it back again.’

  They sat on, oblivious to the cold, while Sophie and Clara whizzed around the ice rink, well pleased with their afternoon’s work. Thea snuggled into Rhys’s side.

  ‘We’ve wasted so much time!’ she said with a sigh. ‘Why didn’t you tell me how you felt in Crete?’

  ‘I thought you were still in love with Harry,’ he pointed out. ‘You’d been very honest about him, and it seemed as if you were just being nice about taking part in the pretence. I didn’t feel as if I could tell you, and anyway, I wasn’t even that sure how I did feel then. I kept telling myself that it was just a holiday romance and that I’d get over it when I got home, but I didn’t. I couldn’t get you out of my mind, so when Lynda asked to meet you I jumped at the excuse to see you again.

  ‘When I did, I realised it wasn’t just Crete,’ he said, laying his palm against her cheek and turning her head so that he could look into her glowing grey eyes. ‘It was you. It’ll always be you.’

  He kissed her softly, sealing the promise.

  ‘You could h
ave said something then,’ said Thea when she had kissed him back.

  ‘I was going to. I thought it would be best if I tried to start again, like a proper relationship, so I suggested dinner, and I thought it was all going to be OK, especially when I met you at the tube. But then you backed off after meeting Lynda.’

  She had, Thea remembered guiltily. ‘Is that why you seemed so angry?’

  ‘I was angry. I was angry with her for interfering, angry with you for letting her put you off, and angriest with myself for getting in such a mess and handling it all so badly. You were still preoccupied with Harry, or at least that’s what you made me think, so I decided I should just leave things for the time being and concentrate on Sophie.

  ‘The trouble was that I couldn’t concentrate properly when Sophie kept talking about you. She was always asking when we would see you again, if we could go on holiday again…She kept saying how much she liked you and how much fun it had been when we were engaged, until I couldn’t bear it any longer. I told her that you were in love with someone else and hadn’t got over it, so that was the end of it.’

  ‘Poor Sophie.’

  Rhys snorted. ‘Poor Sophie wasn’t about to accept that it was the end of it at all. She reported everything back to Clara, who had apparently decided that you and I were both being very silly and that if we’d had any sense we would have made the engagement a real one while we were still in Crete.’

  ‘I hate the way Clara’s always right,’ said Thea, resting her face against his shoulder.

  ‘Anyway, Clara told Sophie that you weren’t in love with Harry any more at all.’

  ‘I told you that too!’

  ‘You didn’t tell me that Harry had wanted to get back together with you and that you’d said no. I was under the impression that you were still nursing a broken heart, but when Sophie told me that I began to wonder why you hadn’t taken him back when you had the chance. And then it wasn’t a very big step to hoping that you’d discovered that you didn’t really love him at all.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Thea, nuzzling his throat. ‘I was far too much in love with you by then.’

  She felt Rhys smile into her hair and then bend his head to kiss her again, another long, long kiss that left her breathless and dizzy with happiness.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked. ‘I don’t want you to feel that you were bullied into marrying me by those girls.’

  Thea thought about the reasons she had decided to walk away at the tube station that day, and then she thought about what Nell had said, about not letting true love slip through her fingers because she wasn’t prepared for some hard times. Nell had told her that she had to make a choice, and Thea was making it now. She wanted to be Rhys’s future, not his past.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure,’ she said. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘What about Sophie?’ she persevered a little hesitantly. ‘I don’t want you to feel torn between us.’

  ‘You saw how keen Sophie was for us to get married,’ said Rhys. ‘I don’t think she’s going to feel left out, and she won’t be. I thought I would feel guilty about that, but I had a long talk with your sister when I picked Sophie up yesterday, and she said a very wise thing.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘She said that the best thing I could do for Sophie was to give her the example of a loving relationship. She said Sophie needed to see that adults could live together and laugh together and love together. How else would she learn to do that herself when she was grown up?’

  Good old Nell.

  ‘You said once that we didn’t have anything in common,’ Rhys went on. ‘It’s true that you don’t know much about rocks and I don’t know much about shoes, but I can’t imagine living and laughing and loving with anyone but you, Thea. If we’ve got that in common, we don’t need anything else, do we?’

  ‘No,’ said Thea, pulling his head down for another kiss, ‘we don’t.’

  Thea stood in the panelled room and watched the children running around, thoroughly over-excited after the wedding ceremony and wilder still at the prospect of hanging up their stockings when they got home.

  The hotel had been beautifully decorated for Christmas. A great fire burned at one end of the room, the leaping flames casting jumping shadows over the gleam of gold on her finger, while a spectacular Christmas tree stood at the other, spangled with lights and hung with gold and silver baubles.

  She stepped back as a gaggle of flushed and giggling children ran past, Sophie and Clara in the thick of it all as usual. Both girls were wearing bridesmaids’ dresses in a deep, warm green colour that suited their vivid personalities much better than a pastel shade would have done.

  Thea had imagined them each wearing a simple Christmas rose in their hair, but their hearts had been set on the little tiaras they had spotted in the wedding shop, and in the end she had given in. It was hard to resist when she was constantly being reminded that if hadn’t been for them she wouldn’t be getting married at all.

  She herself was wearing a suit of ivory shot silk, but the unaccustomed elegance ended there. Defying even the hair-dresser’s ministrations, her hair rioted about her face as normal, but she had decided to opt for the natural look. On a day like this, even her hair didn’t matter.

  Oops! Thea nearly spilt her glass of champagne as Damian—or was it Hugo?—cannoned into her, in hot pursuit of the others.

  ‘We’ve got to invite Kate,’ she had said to Rhys. ‘If it hadn’t been for her, we might never have thought of a Christmas wedding.’

  They might never have pretended to fall in love.

  They might never have done it for real.

  And she might not be standing here now, with a brand new ring on her finger, and a brand new husband talking to her father a few feet away.

  Thea could see Kate and Nick talking to Nell now. Kate had been gracious, if a little disapproving at the speed with which the wedding had been arranged.

  ‘Two months!’ she had exclaimed. ‘I wonder you found anywhere—and on Christmas Eve too!’

  ‘We were lucky the hotel had a cancellation.’

  ‘Very lucky,’ Kate had said, so obviously torn between satisfaction at getting another couple of singletons married off and a certain irritation that they had managed to arrange everything perfectly without her advice, that Thea had had to suppress a smile.

  ‘What are you smiling about?’ Rhys slipped an arm around his bride and she kissed him.

  ‘I was just thinking about luck,’ she said.

  ‘That’s funny, I was just thinking what luck it was that you’re standing right where you are.’

  ‘Standing…?’ Puzzled, Thea followed his glance upwards to where a huge bunch of mistletoe hung from the chandelier. Several guests had stopped and were watching, smiling as they realised his intent too, and she laughed.

  ‘Don’t you think that just once, Rhys, you could kiss me in private, without an audience?’ she said with mock severity.

  Rhys smiled as he drew her into his arms. ‘Later,’ he promised.

  ISBN: 978-1-4603-6638-7

  CHRISTMAS EVE MARRIAGE

  First North American Publication 2004.

  Copyright © 2004 by Jessica Hart.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Boo
ks S.A.

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  *CITY BRIDES trilogy