“I’m afraid Leo’s right,” Ava said, terribly afraid that she might be sick if she didn’t soon find some relief from the hammers pounding inside her skull.
“You have turned rather pale,” Gail Manville allowed. “Perhaps it might be best if someone took you home. Wait here and I’ll go alert your parents.”
“Don’t do that.”
Leo’s peremptory tone had Mrs. Manville raising her eyebrows in annoyed surprise. “And why not, Leo?”
“Because it’ll disrupt the party and put a damper on the whole evening, which would be a shame, considering all the trouble you’ve gone to to make it a success.
A burst of distant laughter lent emphasis to his words. Mrs. Manville tapped a manicured forefinger against her pursed lips, clearly caught between not entirely trusting the situation and not wanting her gala evening spoilt by something as trivial as a migraine attack. “Perhaps you’re right. Well…since you’ve already offered to play chauffeur, would you mind…?”
“Not a bit,” he said, with what struck Ava as unnecessary enthusiasm. “I’ll bring my car around to the back entrance.”
“No.” Ava waved a feeble hand. Being alone in a car with him would only exacerbate a situation already threatening to run amok. “Our house is only four doors away, and a walk in the fresh air might help.”
“Then I’ll come with you to be sure you make it home safely.” Overriding her protests, he pressed her down on the bench again. “Stay put, while I get your coat and boots.”
When he was gone, Mrs. Manville inquired with only a veneer of sympathy, “Do you need a doctor, Ava?”
“No. I have medication at home which will help.”
“You never used to get headaches.” She made it sound like an accusation. “What brought this one on?”
“I’m afraid it was the mousse at the dessert buffet. I never touch chocolate as a rule, but I couldn’t resist it tonight. Please don’t be concerned, Mrs. Manville. The medication kicks in very quickly.”
“Then I’ll wish you good night and hope you feel better in the morning.” On the verge of leaving, Deenie’s mother paused. “I hope I don’t have to remind you that Deenie has already laid claim to Leo’s attentions, Ava,” she said, over her shoulder. “Please don’t impose on his time any more than is absolutely necessary.”
“Deck the Halls” was the song of choice belting out of the music room as he searched for the coat and high leather boots Ava had described, and a particularly boisterous Fa-la-la-la-la! camouflaged his footsteps when he returned to the conservatory. But nothing, Leo decided, could mask the chill in Gail Manville’s voice as she leveled her final directive at Ava.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think she didn’t like you,” he said, kneeling in front of Ava and cradling her elegant feet prior to sliding them into the boots. “Considering she’s known you practically all your life, she’s not exactly gushing warm concern.”
“She likes me well enough—as long as I don’t threaten Deenie’s place in the spotlight.”
“Meaning what?” he asked, trying to quell his jolt of awareness when she raised one leg to ease her foot into its boot. But a man needed to be made of sterner stuff than he possessed to remain unmoved when the skirt of her dress slithered over his hands in cool, satiny whispers to reveal a delectable hint of sleek, silk-clad thigh.
Oblivious to her effect on him, she said, “She’s always been very ambitious for Deenie. We—Deenie and I, that is—weren’t much more than babies when we began taking ballet classes together, but right from the start Mrs. Manville viewed me as potential competition. If I was chosen to perform a solo at the annual dance recital, she saw to it that Deenie performed two. It wasn’t until I started to grow like an ungainly weed and clearly would never make my mark as a prima ballerina at any level that she relaxed enough to let my friendship with Deenie flourish on its own merit.”
Ungainly weed, my left foot! He had no recollection of Ava as a small child, nor was he much given to flowery comparisons. But if what he’d just heard was true, small wonder Gail was practically frothing at the mouth. Because there was little doubt that the “competition” had blossomed into a woman more exquisite than anything blooming in the Manville conservatory.
“Given such poor growing conditions, I’m surprised your friendship thrived at all,” he said, wishing the same was true of his nether regions which, at that glimpse of feminine thigh and contrary to his most earnest efforts, showed a lively interest in sprouting past socially acceptable proportions. “But that hardly explains why Gail was so flinty-faced with you just now.”
“She’s a mother, Leo, and she’s no fool. She sensed there was more going on between you and me than there should have been. She’s afraid for Deenie.”
“She should be,” he said, “but not for the reasons you’re implying. Deenie’s badly off-balance, and it has nothing to do with you, nor, I’m beginning to think, with me. Something else is going on with her, and I’m hoping like hell she’ll have the guts to spill it out before….”
“Before what?” Ava’s gaze, big, grey and beautiful anytime, widened so much that her upper lashes almost touched her elegant brows.
“She goes completely over the edge. Right now, though,” he said, helping her into her coat and escorting her through a side door to a path leading down to the lakefront walk, “I’m more concerned about getting you home. You look about ready to pass out.”
“Actually, I’m feeling a bit better,” she said, inhaling deeply of the sharp night air. “The headache’s subsided to a dull roar again.”
“What brought it on to begin with?”
“Mrs. Manville asked me the same thing. I told her the chocolate mousse was to blame.”
“And was it?”
“No. I didn’t have any.” She lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I suspect it’s just a tension headache. And don’t bother to ask the reason for that, when we both know full well why.”
“Don’t you take on my problems and make them yours.”
“How can I help it?” Her hair, as she swung a glance at him, gleamed in the moonlight. “I’m supposed to be Deenie’s dearest friend, yet I find myself wishing….”
“What?” he asked, when she dwindled into silence.
“That I didn’t care about her so much. Because then my conscience wouldn’t be bothering me the way it is.”
He heard a world of misery in her voice; a potent regret. “Don’t blame yourself,” he said, pinning her arm in the crook of his elbow and catching her hand in his. “What was, at best, a superficial attraction between Deenie and me floundered long before you came on the scene. You’re not the one who took the bloom off the rose.”
He knew that to be true, but she wasn’t buying it. “Yes, I am,” she said brokenly. “If I weren’t here, she might have come to the realization that things between you weren’t working out, and ending it would have been mutual. As it is now, you’re using me as the excuse to break off with her, and even if she can forgive me, I’ll never forgive myself—or you for putting me in the middle of it all.”
They’d reached the bottom of her garden by then, and were shielded from the houses on either side by a stand of pines. Slipping free of his hold, she unlatched a wrought-iron gate set in the low stone wall enclosing the property.
The night was clear, with a million stars and a cold-faced moon. The lake lay glassy and still beneath a thick layer of ice. But a fitful wind had sprung up, nipping and plucking at Ava’s hair like a puppy with a toy. Unable to help himself, he reached out and snagged a wayward strand in his bare fingers.
“Three wise men followed a star and found a saviour,” he said, tugging her back to face him. “Do you suppose I could be as lucky?”
“It all depends.” Her voice quivered, as if it, too, were at the mercy of the wind. “What is it you want to be saved from?”
“Myself,” he said. “And you.”
Her gaze flared in the gloom, so wide that he saw the pi
nprick reflection of the starlight in her pupils. “Oh, Leo, stop playing with me! Stop trying to make me believe one thing and letting Deenie believe another. It’s wrong.”
“Wrong?” He drew her to him. Slipped his hands inside her coat and shaped the pattern of her body, committing to memory the sweet indentation of her waist, the gentle flare of her hips. “How can this be wrong?” he murmured against her mouth. “You tell me that, Ava.”
CHAPTER SIX
AVA’S heart missed a beat. “Let me go,” she pleaded, her eyes too full to hold back the tears.
But he wasn’t listening. Or if he was, he chose to ignore an entreaty she knew to be half-hearted at best. Because although she was saying all the correct and proper things, her body was betraying her with bold impropriety. Yearning toward him. Finding refuge in the warm, solid strength of him. And just by the way it curved against him, giving him explicit permission to go ahead and kiss her.
Which he did. And if, that first time—in the dark, in the stable—their mouths had blundered together by accident, this time they came together with slow and sensuous deliberation.
And if there weren’t celestial trumpets sounding from the heavens, there should have been, because something tumultuous and jubilant drowned out the feeble protests of her conscience. Something drove her not to care about anything but the stolen ecstasy of the moment.
Under cover of her coat, a heavy black velvet lined with quilted scarlet satin which swirled around to cloak them in intimacy, his hands stole from her hips with brazen urgency and cradled her bottom. “Come to me,” he begged against her lips, and she knew what he meant.
Knew because, even as he asked, he pulled her closer until her pelvis swayed in tandem with the bold, rocking rhythm of his hips, and the liquid pull of her own desire pooled between her thighs at the proud thrust of his arousal pressing against her belly.
A wild tension thrummed within her, so intense that if he’d lifted the hem of her dress and pulled down her panties, she’d have parted her legs and let him take her there and then, and never mind that the temperature hovered some fifteen degrees below freezing. Or that the two of them could have been discovered by anyone happening along the lakefront walk. Or that her betrayal of her best friend grew more despicable with every second which passed.
For the space of a blissful minute or more, she was a creature possessed. So receptive to his advances that her mouth opened in invitation without his having to resort to persuasion. So hungry and desperate to belong to him—in his heart, where it really mattered; and know that he belonged to her in the same way—even if it was just for now and he’d have changed his mind by tomorrow, just as he had with Deenie—that she was beyond shame. So wanting and aching and willing that she didn’t care that, in the morning, she’d despise what she’d become and what she’d done.
Sadly—or perhaps not!—he lived by a less flexible code of ethics. Like a man suddenly waking from a nightmare, he lifted his head and thrust her away from him so abruptly that if the gate hadn’t been at her back, she’d have missed her footing on the snow and gone sprawling.
“What the devil am I doing?” he exclaimed hoarsely, swiping the back of his hand across his mouth. “Ava, forgive me!”
“There’s nothing to forgive,” she whimpered and, depraved weakling that she was, would have flung herself again into his arms if he hadn’t fended her off with both hands.
“Oh yes, there is!” he said, the horror and disgust in his voice impossible to miss.
“Leo…!”
“Listen to me, Ava.” His voice shook with the force of the emotions at war within him. “I want you about as badly as any man can want a woman. But not, God help me, like this. Not like some out-of-control teenager groping around under cover of dark. And most of all, not furtively, as if we have no right to desire one another.”
The bitter night air shot into her lungs and put paid to the recklessness which had clouded her mind. Repelled by her own wantonness, shamed that he was the one with conscience enough to call a halt to their deplorable behaviour, she retorted sharply, “A better reason might be, not as long as another woman’s under the impression you’re about to ask her to marry you.”
“If that’s what Deenie’s told you, she’s delusional!” he said flatly.
“Is she? Or is it closer to the truth to say you’re enjoying playing both ends against the middle?”
“If that’s what you really believe, then you don’t know me at all.”
“Perhaps not, but this much I do know. I’m not about to enter into a tug of war over any man, and I’m definitely not interested in someone who’s as cavalier about his relationships as you appear to be. You didn’t mind using Deenie when nothing better presented itself, and it seems you have no qualms about ditching her now that you think you’d rather have me.”
“For what it’s worth, Ava, I never ‘had’ Deenie.”…a man’s actions can speak louder than words…! “So you say!”
“Yes, I do,” he agreed, with deadly calm. “But if my word carries so little weight with you, perhaps I’m wasting my time trying to convince you I’m neither toying with her affections nor coming on to you because I’m ready for a change of pace.” He tugged up the collar of his overcoat and turned away. “My apologies for having overstepped the mark with you. It won’t happen again.”
“I was starting to worry about you,” her mother remarked, when Ava straggled into the kitchen just after ten o’clock the next morning. “Gail mentioned that you left the party early because you were tired, but even so, it’s not like you to sleep so late. And if you don’t mind my saying so, honey, you still look a bit peaked.”
In fact, Ava had been awake through most of the night, plagued by doubts. Had she judged Leo too harshly? Was Deenie playing some sort of game whose rules were known only to her? Was it really possible that after all the years they’d known each other and all the confidences they’d shared, Deenie had deliberately set out to deceive her supposed best friend?
“It’s just the jet lag catching up with me,” Ava told her mother. “It’ll pass before the day’s out. Is there any coffee left?”
“Plenty. I just made a fresh pot.” Her mother filled a cup and passed it across the breakfast bar. “Deenie phoned to remind you you’re going shopping together this afternoon to find gorgeous outfits for New Year’s Eve.”
“Oh….” Gloomily, Ava leaned on one elbow and stirred her coffee. “I’d forgotten about that.”
“She suggested picking you up here around two, but you mentioned wanting to buy a couple of Christmas gifts, and since I have to run a few last-minute errands as well, I thought it would be nice if we went into town together. We can do what we have to do, then get together for lunch before you meet Deenie at The Soiree Boutique, which is where she wants to shop. How does that sound?”
“Lovely,’ Ava said, striving to inject a little enthusiasm into her voice. Not that she didn’t want to spend time with her mother, because she did, but the thought of keeping up a cheerful front with Deenie appealed not at all.
“Lovely!” Her mother came around the breakfast bar and gave her a hug. “That’s what we’ll do, then.”
Christmas was only two days away, and Owen’s Lake town center, as always, looked picture-postcard charming. That morning, the air was so crystal clear, it almost rang. The snow huddled purple-blue in the shadows of the steep courthouse roof. In the middle of the square, some prankster had crowned the marble statue of Charles Owen with an evergreen wreath. It hung tipsily over one eye, hilariously at odds with the founding father’s air of timeless dignity.
Not far away, Stuart Shultz, who had to be eighty if he was a day and whose long white beard was real, sported the same red felt Santa Claus suit he’d worn for as long as Ava could remember, and did a roaring business selling hot chocolate and roasted chestnuts from his decorated stall.
On the corner, his wife Violet, dressed as Mrs. Claus in a long green skirt and lace-trimmed blouse under he
r red-checkered apron, doled out fresh-from-the-oven gingerbread men to the children passing by her shop while, from Saint Martha’s church at the other end of the square, came the sound of the boys’ choir practicing “Silent Night” for the Christmas Eve carol service.
This was what Christmas should be all about, Ava thought, swallowing the sudden lump in her throat. Not stealthy kisses and clandestine trysts with a man she wasn’t sure she could trust, but the pure, soaring voice of a boy soprano, and the wide-eyed innocence of children as a kind old couple who’d never had babies of their own put on a show that made even adults half believe in Santa Claus.
Her mother, waiting for her in the dining room of The White Horse Inn, at a table set between the fireplace and a window overlooking the lake, noticed at once that something was amiss. “We both need this,” she said, pushing one of two glasses of sherry toward Ava and raising the other in a silent toast, “and then you’re going to explain why you’re looking as if you’ve just lost your best friend. And don’t bother telling me I’m imagining things, because I know you too well.”
“I can’t talk about it,” Ava said, but the sherry loosened her tongue and she found herself spilling out her heart to the one person in the whole world who’d continue to love her, no matter how far she fell from grace. “Oh, Mom, I might well have lost my best friend, and it’s all because of Leo.”
“Leo Ferrante?” Her mother set down her glass and blinked in surprise. “Good gracious, what’s he done?”
“It’s what I’ve done.” No use blaming Leo, after all. He’d never have put the moves on her if she’d taken the moral high road to begin with, instead of throwing herself at him.
“I understand he walked you home last night,” her mother said. “Is that what this is all about?”
“Not really. It began before that.” Ava blotted her mouth with her napkin and heaved a sigh. “When Deenie first told me she was thinking of settling down with him, I was surprised because she’d always said she was married to the ballet. But she convinced me she was making a change for the better. She insisted she’d never been happier, that I’d love Leo, that he hadn’t changed a bit from when we both mooned over him in our teens, and that he was the perfect man for her.”
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