Christmas Promises: The Christmas Eve BrideA Marriage Proposal for ChristmasA Bride for Christmas

by Lynne Graham

  ‘How the hell could you have expected to hang onto me after what you did?’ Rocco demanded with a savage abruptness that disconcerted her. His spectacular eyes rested with keen effect on her surprised face.

  ‘Only two possible explanations, aren’t there?’ The breeze clawing stray strands of her honey-blonde hair back from her flushed cheekbones, Amber tilted her chin, green eyes sparkling over him where he now stood only feet from her. ‘Either I was a dumb little bunny who was indiscreet with an undercover journalist or...I was bored out of my tiny mind with you and decided to go out of your life with a big, unforgettable bang!’

  ‘Dio...you were not bored in my bed,’ Rocco growled with raw self-assurance.

  Rocco only had to say ‘bed’ in that dark, accented drawl and heat pulsated through Amber in an alarming wave of reaction and remembrance. Punishing him for her own weakness, she let a stinging smile curve her generous mouth. ‘And how would you know, Rocco? Haven’t you ever read the statistics on women faking it to keep tender male egos intact?’

  The instant those provocative words escaped her, she was shaken by her own unusual venom. But she was even more taken aback by the level to which she had sunk in her instinctive need to deny even the physical hold he had once had on her. Ashamed of herself and furious with him for goading her to that point, she added, ‘Look, why don’t you just forget you ever saw me out here and we’ll call it quits?’

  ‘Faking it...’ His brilliant dark eyes flared to stormy gold, his Italian accent thick as honey on the vowel sounds of those two words. He had paled noticeably below his bronzed skin and it was that much more noticeable because dark colour now scored his hard masculine cheekbones. ‘Were you really?’

  Connecting with his glittering look of challenge, Amber felt the primal charge in the atmosphere but she stood her ground, none too proud of her own words but ready to do anything sooner than retract them. He was sexual dynamite and he had to know it. But he need not look to any confirmation of that reality from her. ‘All I want to do right now is get on with my work—’

  Without the smallest warning, Rocco reached for her arm to prevent her from turning away and flipped her back. ‘Was it work in my bed too?’ he demanded in a savage undertone. ‘Did you know right from the start what you were planning to do?’

  Backed into the constraining circle of his arms, Amber stared up at him in sensual shock, astonished at the depth of his dark, brooding anger but involuntarily excited by it and by him. Mouth running dry, breath trapped in her throat, she could feel every taut, muscular angle of his big, powerful body against hers. She shivered, conscious of the freezing air on her bare arms but the wanton fire flaming in her pelvis, stroked to the heights by the potent proof of his arousal, recognisable even through the layers of their clothing. The wanting, the helpless, craving hunger that leapt through her in wild response took her by storm.

  ‘I wouldn’t touch you again if I was dying...’ As swiftly as he had reached for her, Rocco thrust her back from him in contemptuous rejection, strong-boned features hard as iron.

  Her fair complexion hotly flushed, Amber turned away in an uncoordinated half-circle, heartbeat racing, legs thoroughly unsteady support. ‘Good, so go—’

  ‘I’m not finished with you yet.’ Leaving those cold words of threat hanging, Rocco strode off.

  In a daze, she watched him walk away from her. He had magnificent carriage and extraordinary grace for a male of his size. He soon disappeared from view, screened by the bulky evergreen shrubs flourishing below the winter-bare trees that edged the lawn surrounding the house. Amber only then realised that she was trembling and frozen to the marrow, finally conscious of the chill wind piercing her thin T-shirt. She grabbed her sweater out of the tumbledown greenhouse where she had left it and fumbled into its comforting warmth with hands that were all fingers and thumbs.

  What had Rocco meant by saying he wasn’t finished with her yet? She tried to concentrate but it was a challenge because she was so appalled by the way he had made her feel. Suppressing that uneasy awareness, she tensed in even greater dismay. Only minutes ago, he had told her that he intended to warn Harris Winton about the risk that she could be spying on him and his wife in the hope of selling some scandalous story to a newspaper.

  Dear heaven, she could not afford to lose her job, for it might not pay well but it did include accommodation. Small and basic the cottage might be, but it was the sole reason that Amber had applied to work for the Wintons in the first place. Indeed, the mere thought of being catapulted back into her sister Opal’s far more spacious and comfortable home to listen to a chorus of deeply humiliating ‘I told you so’s filled Amber with even more horror than the prospect of grovelling to Rocco!

  CHAPTER TWO

  ROCCO was certain to be lodged in the main suite of the opulent guest wing, Amber reckoned. Just to think that she had probably fixed that huge flower arrangement in there purely for Rocco’s benefit made her wince as she headed for the rear entrance to the sprawling country house.

  Helping out the Wintons’ kindly middle-aged housekeeper, who had been run off her feet preparing for guests the previous month, had resulted in Amber finding herself landed with another duty. The minute that Kaye Winton had realised that their gardener had done the magnificent floral arrangement in the front reception hall, she had demanded that Amber should continue doing creative things with flowers whenever she and her husband entertained.

  A time-consuming responsibility that Amber had resented, however, was now welcome as an excuse to enter the house. How on earth could she have let Rocco take off on that chilling threat? His suspicions about her were ridiculous, but she knew why he believed the Wintons might be the target for media interest of the most unpleasant kind. Harris Winton was an influential man, who was often in the news. But, for goodness’ sake, the whole neighbourhood, never mind the staff, knew about Kaye Winton’s extra-marital forays! Sometimes, men were so naïve, Amber reflected ruefully. A newspaper reporter would only need to stop off in the village post office to hear chapter and verse on the voracious brunette’s far-from-discreet affairs!

  Catering staff were bustling about the big kitchen. Leaving her muddy work boots in the passage and removing the clip from her hair to finger-comb it into a hopeful state of greater tidiness, Amber hurried up the stone service staircase in her sock soles. With a bit of luck, Rocco would be in his suite. If he was downstairs, what was she going to do? Leave him some stupid note begging him to be reasonable? Grimacing at that idea, Amber wondered angrily why Rocco was allowing his usual cool common sense and intelligence to be overpowered by melodramatic assumptions.

  I got burned. Well, if Rocco imagined the slight mortification of that newspaper spread on their affair eighteen months back had been the equivalent of getting burned, she would have liked him to have had a taste of what she had suffered in comparison. Her life, her self-respect and her dreams had gone down the drain faster than floodwater.

  In the guest wing, she knocked quietly on the door of the main suite. There was no answer but, as she was aware that several rooms lay beyond and Rocco might be in any one of them, she went in and eased the door closed behind her again. She heard his voice then. It sounded as if he was on the phone and she approached the threshold of the bedroom with hesitant steps.

  Rocco’s brilliant dark eyes struck her anxious gaze and she froze. Clearly, he had heard both her initial knock and her subsequent entrance uninvited. Her skin heated with discomfiture when, with a fluid gesture of mocking invitation, he indicated the sofa several feet from him. He continued with his call, his rich dark drawl wrapping round mellow Italian syllables with a sexy musicality that sent tiny little shivers of recall down her taut spinal cord. She recognised a couple of words, recalled how she had once planned to learn his language. With a covert rub of her damp palms on her worn jeans, she sat down, stiff with strain. He lounged by the wind
ow, talking into his mobile phone, bold, bronzed features in profile, his attention removed from her.

  He stood about six feet four and he had the lean muscular build of an athlete. Broad shoulders, narrow hips, long, long powerful legs. His clothes were always beautifully tailored and cut to fit him like a glove. Yet he could look elegant clad only in a towel, she recalled uneasily from the past. Her colour rising afresh at the tone of her thoughts, she looked away, conscious of the tremor in her hands, the tension licking through her smaller, slighter frame.

  They had been together for three months when Rocco had ditched her. For her, anyway, it had been love at first sight. He had called her ‘tabbycat’ because of the way she had used to curl up on the sofa beside him. When he had been out of the country over weekends and holidays, he had flown her out to join him in a variety of exotic places. Her feet hadn’t touched the ground once during their magical affair. All her innate caution and sense had fallen by the wayside. Finding herself on a roller coaster of excitement and passion, she had become enslaved. When the roller coaster had come to a sudden halt and thrown her off, she had not been able to credit that he’d been able to just abandon what she had believed they had shared.

  That was why she had kept on phoning him at first, accepting that he was furious with her about that ghastly newspaper story, accepting that that story had been entirely her fault and that she had had to be the one to make amends. Loving Rocco had taught her how to be humble and face her mistakes.

  And how had he rewarded her humility? He had kicked her in the teeth! Her delicate bone-structure tightened. She pushed her honey-blonde hair off her brow, raking it back, so that it tumbled in glossy disarray round her slim shoulders. Her hair needed cutting: she was letting it grow because it was cheaper. At the rate that her finances were improving, she thought ruefully, she would have hair down to her feet by the time she could afford a salon appointment again. Loving Rocco had also taught her what it was like to be poor...or, at least, how utterly humiliating it was, after a long period of independence, to be forced to rely once more on family generosity to survive.

  Her tummy churning with nerves, she focused on Rocco again, noting the outline of his long, luxuriant black lashes, comparing them to Freddy’s... Freddy’s hair was as dark as Rocco’s was fair, black as a raven’s wing. She squeezed her eyes tight shut and prayed for concentration and courage.

  ‘To what do I owe the honour of this second meeting?’ Rocco enquired drily. ‘I thought we were just about talked out.’

  Worrying at her lower lip, Amber tilted her head back. But she could still only see as high as his gold silk tie because he had moved closer. In a harried movement, she stood up again. ‘If you tell Harris Winton that there is the slightest possibility that I might be spying on him for some newspaper, I’ll get the sack!’

  Rocco studied her with inscrutable dark eyes. In the charged silence that he allowed to linger, his lean, powerful face remained impassive.

  ‘I can’t understand why you should even think such a thing of me...it’s nonsensical!’

  ‘Is it? I remember you telling me that you once very much wanted to be a journalist...’

  Amber stilled in consternation and surprise. Had she told Rocco that? During one of those trusting chats when he had seemed to want to know every tiny thing about her? Evidently, she had told him but she hadn’t given him the whole picture. During her teens, Amber’s parents had put her under constant pressure to produce better exam results and, when they’d finally realised that she was not going to become a doctor, a lawyer or a teacher, she had been instructed to focus on journalism instead. They had signed her up for an extra-curricular media studies course on which she had got very poor grades.

  ‘And how desperately disappointed you were when you couldn’t get a job on a newspaper,’ Rocco finished smoothly.

  For the first time it occurred to Amber that, eighteen months back, Rocco had had more reason than she had appreciated to believe that the prospect of media limelight might have tempted her into talking about their relationship. She was furious that one insignificant little piece of information casually given out of context could have helped to support his belief that she was guilty as charged.

  ‘Do you know the only reason I went for that job? My parents had just died... It was their idea that I should try for a career in journalism, not my own. And what I might or might not have wanted at the age of sixteen has very little bearing on the person I am now,’ Amber declared in driven dismissal.

  Rocco continued to regard her in level challenge. ‘I can concede that. But when we met, you were employed in a merchant bank and studying for accountancy exams. Give me one good reason why you should now be pretending to be a gardener?’

  ‘Because, obviously, it’s not a pretence! It’s the only job I could get...at least the only work that it’s convenient for me to take right now.’ In a nervous gesture as she tacked on that qualification, Amber half opened her hands and then closed them tight again, her green eyes veiling, for the last thing she wanted to touch on was the difficulties of being a single parent on a low wage.

  ‘Convenient?’ Rocco queried.

  ‘I live in a cottage in the coachyard here. Accommodation goes with the job. My sister lives nearby and I like being close to her—’

  ‘You never mentioned that you had a sister while I was with you.’

  Amber flushed a dull guilty red for she had allowed him to assume that she was as alone in the world as he was. Rocco was an only child, born to older parents, who had both passed away by the time he’d emerged from his teens.

  ‘So explain why you kept quiet about having a sister,’ Rocco continued levelly.

  But there was no way Amber felt she could tell him the honest truth on that score. She had been terrified that Rocco would meet her gorgeous, intellectual big sister and start thinking of Amber herself as very much a poor second best. It had happened before, after all. It didn’t matter that Opal was twelve years older and happily married. People were always amazed when they learnt that the highly successful barrister, Opal Carlton, was Amber’s sibling. From an early age, Amber had been aware that she was a sad disappointment to her parents, who, being so clever themselves, had expected equally great things from their younger daughter as well. Her best had never, ever been good enough.

  ‘Well, I have a sister and I’m very fond of her,’ she mumbled, not meeting his eyes because she was ashamed that she had kept Opal hidden like a nasty secret when indeed she could not have got through the past year without her sister’s support.

  ‘Why are you feeding me this bull?’ Rocco demanded with sardonic bite. ‘Nothing you’ve said so far comes anywhere near explaining why you should suddenly be clutching a wheelbarrow instead of fingering a keyboard!’

  Amber swallowed hard. ‘Within a month of that kiss-and-tell story appearing in print, I was at the top of the hit list at Woodlawn Wyatt. They said they were overstaffed and, along with some others, I lost my job.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ Rocco conceded without sympathy. ‘Merchant banks are conservative institutions—’

  ‘And the regular banks are still shedding staff practically by the day so I couldn’t find another opening,’ Amber admitted, tight-mouthed, hating the necessity of letting him know that she had struggled but failed to find similar employment. ‘I also suspect that, whenever a reference was taken up with my former employers, the knives came out—’

  ‘Possibly,’ Rocco mused in the same noncommittal tone. ‘But had you stayed in London—’

  ‘Being out of work in a big city is expensive. I hadn’t been with Woodlawn Wyatt long enough to qualify for a redundancy payment. I moved in with my sister for a while—’

  ‘This is a rural area but it’s also part of the commuter belt. Surely you could have found employment more—’

  Her patience gave ou
t. ‘Look, I’m happy as I am and I only came up here in the first place to ask you to back off and just forget you ever saw me!’

  Rocco lounged back against the polished footboard on the elegant sleigh bed, bringing their eyes into sudden direct contact and somehow making her awesomely aware that they were in a bedroom together. ‘Do you really mean that?’

  Amber blinked but it didn’t break the mesmerising hold of his arresting dark golden eyes for long enough to stifle the terrifying tide of sheer physical longing that washed over her. Memory was like a cruel hook dragging her down into a dangerous undertow of intimate images she was already fighting not to recall. Rocco tumbling her down on his bed and kissing her with the explosive force that charged her up with the passion she had never been able to resist; Rocco’s expert hands roving over her to waken her in the morning; the sheer joy of being wanted more than she had ever been wanted by anyone in her entire life.

  ‘What are you t-talking about?’ Amber stammered, dredging herself out of those destabilising and enervating

  memories.

  ‘Do you really want me to forget I ever saw you?’ Rocco viewed her steadily from beneath inky black lashes longer than her own.

  ‘What else?’ Already conscious of her heightened colour and quickened breathing, Amber was very still for every fibre of her being was awake to the smouldering atmosphere that had come up out of nowhere to entrap her.

  ‘Liar...’ The effect of the husky reproof Rocco delivered was infinitely less than the sudden sensual smile of amusement that curled his wide, eloquent mouth.

  Images from a distant, happier past assailed Amber: the sound of a smile in his deep voice on the phone, the feeling of euphoria, of being appreciated when he looked at her in just that way. What way? As if there were only the two of them in the whole wide world, as if she was someone special. Before Rocco came along, nobody had ever made Amber feel special or important or needed.