‘I found out I was pregnant, but he’d been moved to the Huntingdon office by then and I was commuting, which wasn’t really satisfactory, and then the housing market collapsed. So I contacted my professor and he offered me this job, which kept us going, and then just after I had Josh, David died.’
‘And do you miss him?’ he asked. His voice was casual, but there was something strange going on in his eyes. Something curiously intense and disturbing. Jealousy? Of a dead man? ‘Yes, of course I miss him,’ she said softly. ‘It’s lonely in the house by myself, but life goes on, and I’ve got Josh, and I’m OK. He was a nice man, and I did love him, and he deserved more from me than I was ever able to give him, but I never felt the way I did with you, as if I couldn’t breathe if he wasn’t there. As if there was no colour, no music, no poetry. No sense to my life.’
His eyes burned into hers. ‘And yet you walked away from me. From us.’
‘Because it was killing me, Sebastian. You were killing me, the person you’d become. You never had any time for me, we never went anywhere or did anything that didn’t serve another purpose. It was all about business, about making contacts that would make more money. I felt like an ornament, or a mistress, someone who should just be grateful for the crumbs that fell from your table. But I didn’t want crumbs, I wanted you, I wanted what we’d had, but you shut me out, and you broke my heart, and I never want to let anyone that close to me ever again.
‘So, no, I didn’t feel for David the way I did for you. I didn’t want to. He didn’t give me what I’d thought I wanted when I was little more than a kid and everything was starry-eyed and rose-tinted, but he loved me, and he took care of me, and he made me happy.’
‘And he cancelled the life insurance.’
Damn him! ‘He had no choice! We were really struggling—’
‘Did he tell you he was doing it? Did you discuss it? Or did he just do it and hope for the best? Because I would never have done that to you, Georgia,’ he said passionately. ‘I would never have left you so unprovided for. Would never have compromised your safety or security like that.’
‘You have no idea what you would have done in those circumstances—’
‘I know I’d starve before I did that—’
‘You have no right to criticise him!’
‘You were mine!’ he said harshly. ‘And you gave him all the things you’d promised me. Marriage. A child. Hearth and home and all of that—hell, George, we had so many dreams! How could you walk away? I loved you. You knew I loved you—’
His voice cracked on the last word, and her eyes flooded with tears; she closed them, unable to look at him any longer, unable to watch his face as he bared his soul to her. Because she had left him, and he had loved her, but she hadn’t been mature enough or brave enough to cope with what he’d asked of her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her heart aching with so many hurts and wrongs and losses she’d lost count. ‘If it helps, I loved you, too, and it broke my heart to leave you.’
She heard him swear softly, then heard the sound of his footsteps as he walked up to her, his voice a soft sigh.
‘Ahh, George, don’t cry. No more tears. I’m sorry.’
She felt his hands on her shoulders, felt him ease her close against his chest, and with a ragged sigh she rested her cheek against his shirt and listened to the steady thudding of his heart. His arms closed around her, cradling her against his warmth and solidity, the mingled scent of his skin and the cologne he’d always used wrapping her in delicious, heart-wrenching familiarity.
She slid her arms around his waist, flattening her palms against the broad columns of muscle that bracketed his spine, and he held her without speaking, while their breathing steadied and their hearts slowed, until the tension left them.
But then another tension crept in, coiling tighter, pushing out everything else until it was the only thought, the only reason for breathing.
The only reason for being.
She felt his head shift, felt the warmth of his lips press tentatively against her forehead, and she tilted her head and met his blazing eyes.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE KISS WAS INEVITABLE.
Slow, tender, fleeting, their lips brushing lightly, then gradually settling. Clinging. Melding into one, until she didn’t know where she ended and he began.
She curled her fingers into his shirt, felt his fingers tunnel into her hair and steady her head as he plundered her mouth, taking, giving, duelling with her until abruptly, long before she was ready, he wrenched his head back and stepped away.
She pressed trembling fingers to her aching, tingling lips. They felt as if his had been ripped away from them, tearing them somehow, leaving them incomplete. Leaving her incomplete.
She looked up, and his eyes were black as night, his chest rising and falling unsteadily. She could hear the air sawing in and out of his lungs, see the muscle jumping in his jaw as he took another step away.
‘I think you’d better go to bed,’ he said gruffly, and handed her the baby monitor from the table.
She nodded, her heart thrashing, emotions tumbling one over the other as she turned and all but ran back to her room.
What had she been thinking of, to let him kiss her? After all that had happened, all the water under the bridge of their relationship, everything that had happened since—she must have been mad!
She’d finally found peace, after years of striving, of what had felt like settling for second best—which was so unfair on David, so unfair, but how could he compete with Sebastian? He couldn’t. And, to be fair to him, she’d never asked him to. But still, it had felt like that, and it was only with Josh’s birth and the bond that had formed between them after David’s death that peace had finally come to her.
And now Sebastian had snatched it away, torn off the thin veneer of serenity and exposed the raw anguish in her heart. Because she still loved him. She’d always loved him, and now she was hurting all over again, her heart flayed raw by the knowledge of what she’d lost and what she’d done to him, but there was no way she could go back to that lifestyle, to the way he lived and the man he’d had to become.
She changed into her pyjamas and crawled into bed, lying there in a soft cloud of goose down and Egyptian cotton while her thoughts tumbled endlessly and went nowhere.
She heard him come upstairs to bed at something after midnight, but the sound didn’t wake her because she was still lying awake, listening to the wind howling round the house, battering the windows with its unrelenting assault. There was no way she was getting out of there any time soon. The lane would be full to the top by now, the snow trapped against the crinkle-crankle wall with no escape, piling up endlessly as the wind drove it off the field.
Trapping her and Josh inside with Sebastian.
Oh, why had she let him kiss her?
Or had she kissed him? She wasn’t sure, she only knew it had been the most monumental mistake. It had broken down the barriers between them, ripped away her flimsy defences, opened the Pandora’s box of their relationship, and try as they might, they’d never get the lid back on it in one piece.
She closed her eyes. She was so not looking forward to tomorrow...
* * *
He just couldn’t sleep.
Well, there might have been a few minutes here and there, but mostly he just lay awake trying not to think about that kiss while he listened to the wind battering the house and blocking them in forever.
There was no way he was getting her out of here today. No way at all. Which was all made a whole sight more difficult by the fact that he’d let his guard down and weakened like that.
He should have kept his mouth shut, not dragged it all out again. And his voice cracking like that! What the hell was that about? He was over her...
Liar.
&nbs
p; He sighed harshly. OK, so he wasn’t over her, not totally, but he hadn’t had to tell her that quite so graphically. He certainly hadn’t needed to kiss her!
And now they were stuck here, forced together, with no prospect of escape for days. He rolled onto his front and folded his arms under his head, banging his forehead gently on them to knock some sense into himself.
Not working. So he lay there, fuming at his stupidity and resigning himself to a fraught and emotionally draining couple of days ahead.
It could have been worse. At least they had Josh there between them. They could hardly fight over his head, and he’d just have to make sure they were only together when he was around.
Although that was a problem in itself, because Josh, with his mother’s eyes and engaging personality, was a vivid and living reminder of all he’d lost when she’d walked away. Josh could have been his son. Should have been his son. His first known living relative.
His family.
He swallowed hard, the ache in his chest making it hard to breathe.
It was no good. He’d never get to sleep again. He threw off the covers, tugged on his clothes and went downstairs. If nothing else, he could get some work done.
But he couldn’t concentrate, and he ended up in the kitchen making yet more coffee at shortly before six in the morning. He put in some toast to blot it up a bit and give his stomach lining a rest, then sat at the table to eat it.
Not a good idea.
Little boys, he discovered, woke early, and he ended up with company.
Georgia, sleep-tousled, puffy-eyed and with a crease on one cheek, stumbled into the kitchen with Josh on her hip and came to an abrupt halt.
‘Ah. Sorry.’
Not as sorry as he was. She was wearing pyjamas, but they were soft and stretchy and the child’s weight on her hip had pulled the top askew and exposed an inviting expanse of soft, creamy flesh below her collar bone that drew his eyes like a magnet.
She followed the direction of his gaze and tugged it straight, colour flooding her cheeks, and he dragged his eyes away and jerked his head at the kettle.
‘It’s just boiled if you want tea?’
‘Um—please. And do you have any spare milk? Josh usually has some when he wakes up.’
‘Sure. I tell you what, why don’t I get out of your way while you do whatever you want to do in here? Just help yourself to whatever you need.’
He left the room with almost indecent haste, and Georgie put Josh down on the floor and let her breath ease out of her lungs on a sigh of relief. She’d forgotten just how good he looked, how sexy, with his hair rumpled and his jaw roughened with stubble.
And tired. He’d looked tired, she thought, as if he’d been up all night. Because of the kiss? Or the wind, hammering against the house until she thought the windows were coming in? Between the kiss and the wind, they’d made sure she hadn’t slept all night, and she’d only just crashed into oblivion when Josh had woken.
She hadn’t realised it was so early until she saw the kitchen clock, because the snow made it lighter, the moon reflecting off it with an eerie, cold light that seemed to seep through the curtains for the sole purpose of reminding her of the mess she was in.
Why had she let him kiss her?
‘Biscuit,’ Josh said, and she sighed. They had this conversation every day, but he never gave up trying.
‘No. You can have a drink of milk and a banana. There must be some bananas.’
She opened the pantry cupboard and found the fruit in a bowl. She pulled off a banana and peeled it and broke it into chunks for him, and left him kneeling up on a chair and eating it while she made some tea and warmed his milk in a little pan. She would have given it a couple of moments in the microwave, but she couldn’t find one. She’d have to ask about that.
She sat down with her tea next to Josh, in the place where Sebastian had been. He’d left half a slice of toast on the plate, with a neat bite out of it, and she couldn’t resist it. She should have finished her supper the night before instead of running out on him, and she was starving.
‘Me toast,’ Josh said, eyeing it hopefully, and she tore him off a chunk and ate the rest.
‘More.’
‘I’ll make you some in a minute. Let’s go and get dressed first.’
She took him upstairs, protesting all the way, and heard water running. Sebastian must be showering, she realised, and tried really, really hard not to think about that, about the times she’d joined him in the shower, getting in behind him and sliding her arms around his waist—
‘Right. Let’s get you dressed.’
‘Then toast?’
‘Then I have to get ready, and then you can have toast,’ she promised, but she dragged out the dressing and teeth cleaning and face washing as long as possible, then sat Josh on the bed with a book while she washed and dressed herself and tidied the room.
The sound of running water from Sebastian’s room had stopped, she realised as she tugged the bed straight. There was no sound at all, no drawers shutting or boards creaking. He must have finished in the shower and gone downstairs again. With any luck he was in the study, and if not, he could show her where the toaster was to save her scouring the kitchen for it.
She retrieved Josh from the bathroom where he was driving the nailbrush around on top of the washstand like a car.
‘Toast?’ she said, and he beamed and ran over to her, taking her outstretched hand. He chattered all the way down the stairs and into the kitchen, and she was suddenly really, really glad that he’d been with her in the car, that she hadn’t been stuck here with Sebastian on her own.
Not with all the fizzing emotions in her chest—
She found the bread, but there wasn’t a toaster and he wasn’t around. She was still standing there with the bread in her hand and contemplating going to find him when Sebastian came back into the room.
She waved the bread at him. ‘I can’t find the toaster.’
‘Ah. There’s a mesh gadget for that in the slot on the left of the Aga. Just stick the bread in it and put it under the cover, and then flip it. It only takes a few seconds each side so keep an eye on it.’
He pulled the thing out and handed it to her, then headed into the boot room.
‘I’m just going to check the lane,’ he said. ‘See how bad it is.’
‘Really? It’s almost dark still.’
Except it wasn’t, of course, because of the eerie light from the snow and the fact that she’d dallied around for so long getting ready.
Even though she’d resisted putting make-up on...
The door shut behind him, and she put the bread between the two hinged flaps of mesh, laid it on the hotplate and put the cover down. Delicious smells wafted out in moments, and she flipped it and gave it another moment and then buttered the toast while the kettle boiled again.
It smelt so good she made a pile of it, unable to resist sinking her teeth into a bit while she worked, and all the time she wondered how he was getting on and what he’d found at the end of the drive.
* * *
Sheesh.
He stood inside the gates—well inside, as he couldn’t actually get near them without a shovel and a few hours of solid graft—and stared in shock at the lane beyond.
He was already up to his knees in snow and it was getting deeper with every step. Beyond the gates, the snow reached to head height at either side of the entrance. It only dipped opposite the gates because the snow had had somewhere to go.
Straight across the entrance, through the bars of the gates and right up the drive.
There was at least a foot everywhere, but it wasn’t smooth and level. It was sculpted, like sand in the Sahara, swirls and peaks and troughs in shades of brilliant white and cold bluey-purple in the light of dawn.
&n
bsp; Beautiful, fascinating—and deadly. If he hadn’t been here they could have been trapped inside the car, buried alive in the snow, slowly and gradually suffocating in the freezing temperatures—
He shut off that line of thought and concentrated on the here and now. It wasn’t good.
In a freewheeling part of his brain that he hadn’t even consulted he realised Georgie wouldn’t even be able to get away if they landed a helicopter in the field opposite, despite the fact that it was virtually bare of snow now, because the snow in the lane was so deep they’d never cross it. Not that he’d really contemplated hiring a helicopter on Christmas Eve to take her and Josh away and bring his family back, but even if he had...
And the snow wasn’t going anywhere soon. Although the wind had finally died away, it was cold. Bitterly, desperately cold, the change from the previous few days sudden and shocking, and he shrugged down inside his coat with a humourless laugh.
He hadn’t needed a cold shower. He should have just come out here. Naked. That might have done the trick. The shower certainly hadn’t.
He gave the lane one last disparaging look and waded back to the house, walking in to the smell of toast and the sound of laughter, and for a moment he felt his heart lift.
Crazy. Stupid. She left you.
But even so, he’d still have her there for another twenty-four hours at least. More, probably, and nobody was going to worry about this tiny little lane given that it was as bad elsewhere in the county as it was here. He’d already known it, he’d seen it on the news, and only wild optimism had sent him down the drive to check...
He swept the snow which had fallen in through the doorway back out into the courtyard, shut the door, stamped the snow off his boots and put them on the rack, hung up his coat and went back into the kitchen.
She’d made a pot of tea and was sitting at the table with Josh and a pile of hot buttered toast, playing peeka-bo behind a slice of toast. Josh, his face smeared with butter and crumbs, was giggling deliciously and Sebastian felt his heart squeeze.
SNOWED IN WITH THE BILLIONAIRE Page 6
