Christmas Nights

by Penny Jordan

  ‘At last, sleepyhead, I thought you were never going to wake up,’ he’d teased her as she had opened the window, laughing at her as she’d gasped a little at the cold shock of the frosty air.

  ‘I’m not sleepy,’ Lisa had corrected him indignantly. ‘It’s just that I’m…’ she had begun, and then had stopped, flushing slightly as she’d acknowledged the real reason why her body was aching so deliciously, why her energy was so depleted.

  As Oliver had looked silently back at her she had known that he too was remembering just why it was that she had fallen into such a deep sleep in the early hours of the morning.

  She was remembering the night, the hours they had spent together again now as she went to help him brush the snow from his collar, the scent of him, overlaid by the crisp, fresh smell of the snow, completely familiar to her now and yet at the same time still headily erotic.

  When previously she had read of women being aroused by the body smell of their lover she had wrinkled her own nose just a little fastidiously, never imagining that there would ever come a time when she not only knew just how those women had felt but also actively wanted—no, needed, she corrected herself as her stomach muscles clenched on a weakening surge of emotion—to bury her face against her lover’s body and breathe his scent, to trace the outline of his bones, his muscles, absorb the texture of his flesh and the whole living, breathing essence of him.

  ‘It’s too soon for this… for us…’ she had whispered shakily last night in the aftermath of their second loving. ‘We can’t be…’

  ‘Falling in love,’ Oliver had supplied for her, and had challenged her softly between kisses. ‘Why not? People do.

  ‘What is it you’re really afraid of, Lisa?’ he had asked her later still, after his mouth had caressed every inch of her body, driven her to unimaginable heights of ecstasy and he had whispered to her that she was everything he had ever dreamed of finding in a woman… everything he’d begun to think he would never find, and she had tensed in his arms, suddenly afraid to let herself respond to him as her senses were urging her to do, to throw caution to the wind to tell him what she was feeling.

  ‘I’m afraid of this,’ she had whispered huskily back, ‘of you…’

  ‘Of me?’ He held her slightly away from him, frowning at her in the darkness. ‘Look, I know the circumstances surrounding our initial meeting weren’t exactly auspicious, and yes, I agree, I did rather come the heavy, but to be confronted with Piers within thirty minutes of my plane landing from New York after a delay of over five hours and to discover what he’d done—’

  ‘No, it’s not that,’ Lisa assured him quickly. She was fully aware now that the arrogance that she had believed she had seen in him was simply part of a protective mask behind which he hid his real personality. ‘It’s us… us together,’ she told him, searching for the right words to express her feelings. ‘I’m afraid that… everything’s happening so fast. And it’s not… I’m not…

  ‘This isn’t how I ever thought it would be for me,’ she told him simply in the end. ‘I never imagined I could feel so… that I could…’ She paused, fumbling for the words and blushed a little as she tried to tell him how bemused, how shocked, almost, she still was by the intensity not just of his desire for her but of her own for him. It was so out of character for her, she told him, so unexpected…

  ‘So unwanted,’ he guessed shrewdly.

  ‘It isn’t how I thought my life was going to be,’ she persisted. ‘None of it seems quite real, and I’m afraid. I don’t know if I can sustain this level of emotional intensity, Oliver… I feel like a child who has been handed a Christmas gift so far outside its expectations that it daren’t believe it’s actually got it. I’m afraid of letting myself believe because I’m afraid of the pain I’ll suffer if… if it proves not to be real after all.’

  ‘Don’t you think I feel exactly the same way?’ Oliver challenged her.

  ‘You’ve been in love before,’ she told him quietly. ‘You’ve experienced this kind of sexual intimacy… sexual ecstasy before, but I—’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head decisively. ‘Yes, I’m more sexually experienced than you are, but this… Take my word for it, Lisa—this is something different… something special.

  ‘Look,’ he added when she said nothing. ‘With all this snow, there’s no way either of us can leave here now until it thaws; let’s use the time to be together, to get to know one another, to give our feelings for one another a chance. Let’s suspend reality, if you like, for a few days and just allow ourselves to feel instead of questioning, doubting…’

  He had made it all sound so easy, and it was easy, Lisa acknowledged now as his arms closed around her. Too easy… That was the trouble.

  Already after only a few short, fateful hours she was finding it hard to imagine how she had ever lived without him and even harder to imagine how she could ever live without him in the future. It would be so easy simply to close her eyes, close her mind to her thoughts and concentrate instead on her feelings. She could feel her heart starting to thump heavily with the intensity of her emotions.

  ‘Stop worrying,’ Oliver whispered against her mouth, correctly guessing what she was thinking. ‘Everything’s going to be fine. We’re going to be fine.’

  ‘This really is the best Christmas I have ever had,’ she told him huskily ten minutes later as he lifted his mouth from hers.

  ‘You are the best Christmas I have ever had,’ Oliver responded. ‘The best Christmas I ever will have.’

  In the end they had four full days together, held for three of them in a captivity from which neither of them truly wanted to escape by the icy frost that kept the roads snowbound. And during those four days Lisa quickly discovered how wrong she had been in her original assessment of Oliver as being arrogantly uncaring.

  He did care, and very deeply, about those who were closest to him but, as he freely admitted, the loss of his mother whilst he had still been so young had made him cautious about allowing others to get too close to him too quickly.

  ‘But of course there are exceptions to every rule,’ he had told her huskily, ‘and you are my exception.’

  She had given up protesting then that it was too soon for them to be in love. What was the point in denying what she knew she felt about him?

  ‘I still can’t believe that this… that we… that it’s all really happening,’ she whispered to Oliver on the fourth morning, when the thaw finally set in, her voice low and hushed, as though she was half-afraid of even putting her doubts into words.

  ‘It is happening,’ Oliver reassured her firmly, ‘and it’s going to go on happening for the rest of our lives.’

  They were outside, Lisa watching as Oliver chopped logs to replace those they had used. Dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, he had already discarded the checked woollen shirt that he had originally been wearing, the muscles and tendons on his upper arms revealed by the upward swing of the axe as he chopped the thick fir trunks into neatly quartered logs.

  There was something about watching a man engaged in this kind of hard physical activity that created a feminine frisson of awareness of his masculinity, Lisa acknowledged as Oliver paused to wipe the sweat from his skin. She didn’t want this special time that they were sharing to come to an end, she admitted. She was afraid of what might happen when it did. Everything had happened so fast—too fast?

  ‘Nearly finished,’ Oliver told her, mistaking the reason for her silence. ‘I should be back from New York by the end of the week,’ he added as Lisa bent down to retrieve the logs that he had already cut and carry them over to where the others were neatly stacked.

  Lisa already knew that he was booked on a flight to New York to complete some protracted and difficult business talks he had begun before Christmas—the reason he had been so irritable and uncompromising the first time they had met, he had explained to her.

  ‘I wish I didn’t have to go,’ he added, ‘but at least we’ll be able to spend New Year’s
Eve together and then… When are your parents due back from Japan?’

  ‘Not until the end of February,’ Lisa told him.

  ‘That long.’ He put down the axe and demanded hastily, ‘Come here.’

  Automatically Lisa walked towards him. The hand he extended to cup the side of her face and caress her skin smelled of freshly cut wood and felt slightly and very, very sensually abrasive, and the small shiver that ran through her body as he touched her had nothing to do with being cold.

  ‘I could take some leave at the end of January and we could fly out to Japan together to see them then…’

  Lisa knew what he was suggesting and her heart gave a fierce bound. So far they had not talked seriously about the future. Oliver had attempted to do so but on each occasion she had forestalled him, not wanting to do or say anything that might destroy the magic of what they were sharing, fearing that by allowing reality and practicality into their fragile, self-created world they might damage it. Their relationship, their love was so different from anything she had ever imagined experiencing or wanting to experience that part of her was still half-afraid to trust it… half of her?

  And besides, she had already written to her parents to tell them that she and Henry would be getting engaged at Christmas and, whilst she suspected that they would never have been particularly keen on the idea of having Henry for a son-in-law, she felt acutely self-conscious about suddenly informing them that she had fallen head over heels in love with someone else.

  It was so out of character for her, and the mere thought of having to confess her feelings for Oliver to anyone else made her feel defensive and vulnerable. She had always taken such a pride in being sensible and level-headed, in making carefully thought-out and structured decisions about her life. She wasn’t sure how she herself really felt about this new aspect to her personality yet, never mind being ready to expose it to anyone else.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Oliver asked her as he felt her tensing against his touch. ‘You don’t seem very happy with the idea of me meeting your parents.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ Lisa denied. There was, she had discovered, an unexpected corner of vulnerability in him which she suspected sprang from the loss of his mother—something that, if not exactly a fear of losing those close to him, certainly made him slightly more masculinely possessive than she would have expected in such an otherwise controlled and strongly emotionally grounded man. And it was, at least in part, because of this vulnerability that she had felt unable to tell him of her own fears and uncertainties.

  ‘No? Then what exactly is it? Or is that yet another subject you don’t want to discuss?’ Oliver asked her sarcastically as he released her and picked up the axe, hefting it, raising it and then bringing it down on the log that he had just positioned with a force that betrayed his pent-up feelings.

  Dismayed, Lisa watched him. What could she say? How could she explain without angering him still further? How could she explain to him what she felt when she truthfully didn’t fully understand those feelings herself?

  ‘It isn’t that I don’t want you to meet them,’ she insisted. ‘It’s just… well, they don’t even know yet that Henry and I aren’t…’ She knew immediately that she had said the wrong thing and winced as she witnessed the fury with which Oliver sliced into the unresisting wood, splitting it with one unbelievably powerful blow, the muscles in his arms cording and bunching as he tightened his grip on the axe.

  ‘You’re saying that they’d prefer you to be marrying Henry, is that it?’ he suggested dangerously.

  ‘No, of course they wouldn’t,’ Lisa denied impatiently. ‘And besides, I’m old enough to be able to make up my own mind about who I want to commit myself to.’

  ‘Now we’re coming to it, aren’t we?’ Oliver told her, throwing down the axe and confronting her angrily, his hands on his hips, the faded fabric of his jeans stretching tautly against his thighs.

  Just the sight of him made her body ache, Lisa acknowledged, but physical desire, sexual desire, could surely never be enough to build an enduring relationship on? And certainly it was not what she had envisaged building a lifetime’s commitment on.

  ‘It’s not your parents who might reject me, is it, Lisa? It’s you… Despite everything that has happened, all that we’ve shared.’

  ‘No, that isn’t true,’ Lisa denied.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ Oliver bit out grimly as he turned away from her to pick up another large chunk of wood.

  Numbly Lisa watched him manhandling it onto the trestles that he was using to support the fir trunks whilst he chopped them into more easily manageable pieces. Above them the sky had started to cloud over, obliterating the bright promise of the morning’s sunshine, making her feel shivery and inadequately protected from the nasty, raw little wind which had sprung up, even in the fine wool jacket she was wearing.

  The weather, she recognised miserably, was very much only echoing what was happening to them—the bright promise of what they had shared was being threatened by the ominous thunderclouds furrowing Oliver’s forehead and her own fear that what he had claimed he felt for her might prove too ephemeral to last.

  After all, wasn’t the classic advice always to treat falling in love too quickly and too passionately with caution and suspicion? Wasn’t it an accepted rationale that good love—real love—needed time to grow and didn’t just happen overnight?

  As she watched Oliver silently releasing his anger on the wood, his jaw hardening a little bit more with each fierce blow of the axe, Lisa knew that she couldn’t blame him for what he was feeling, but surely he could understand that it wasn’t easy for her either? She was not programmed mentally for the kind of thing that had happened to her with him; she had not been prepared for it either, not…

  ‘There’s no need for you to stay.’

  Lisa stared at Oliver as she heard the harsh words, the cutting edge to his voice reminding her more of the man she had first met than the lover she had become familiar with over the last few precious days.

  ‘The wind’s getting cold and you’re shivering,’ he added when she continued to stare mutely at him. ‘You might as well go back inside; I’ve nearly finished anyway.’

  He meant that there was no need for her to stay outside and wait for him, Lisa realised, and not that she might as well leave him and start her return journey home, as she had first imagined.

  The relief that filled her was only temporary, though. Didn’t the fact that she had so easily made such a mistake merely confirm what her sense of caution was already trying to make her understand—that she didn’t really know Oliver, that no matter how compatible they might be in bed out of it there were still some very large and very important gaps in their knowledge of each other?

  Quietly she turned away from him and started to walk back towards the house. Behind her she heard the sound of the axe hitting a fresh piece of wood. She had almost reached the house when she heard Oliver calling her name. Stopping, she turned to watch him warily as he came running towards her.

  As he reached her he took hold of her, wrapping her in his arms, telling her fiercely, ‘God, Lisa, I’m such a… I’m sorry… the last thing I want us to do is fight, especially when we’ve got so little time left… Lisa?’

  As she looked up at him he cupped her face in his hands, his thumbs caressing her skin, his hair tousled from the wind, his eyes dark with emotion.

  Standing close to him like this, feeling the fierce beat of his heart and the heat of his body, breathing in the scent of him, unable to resist the temptation to lift her hand and rub away the streak of dried earth on his cheek, to feel already the beginning of the growth of his beard on his jaw which he had shaved only that morning, Lisa acknowledged that she might just as well have downed a double helping of some fatally irresistible aphrodisiac.

  ‘Lisa…’

  His voice was lower now, huskier, more questioning, and she knew that the shudder she could feel going through him had nothing to do with the after-effects of
the punishing force he had used to cut up the logs.

  She was the one who was responsible for that weakness, for that look in his eyes, that hardness in his body, and she knew that she was responding to it, as unable to deny him as he was her, her body nestling closer to his, her head lifting, her lips parting as he started to kiss her, tenderly at first and then with increasing passion.

  ‘I can’t bear the thought of losing you,’ he whispered to her minutes later, his voice husky and raw with emotion. ‘But you don’t seem so concerned. What is it, Lisa…? Why won’t—?’

  ‘It’s too soon, Oliver, too early,’ Lisa protested, interrupting him, knowing that if she didn’t stand her ground now, if she allowed her brain to be swayed not just by his emotions but by her own as well, it would be oh, so fatally easy, standing with him like this now, held in his arms, to believe that nothing but this mattered—it would be too late, and there would be no one but herself to blame if at some future date she discovered…

  ‘I could make you commit yourself to me,’ Oliver warned her, his mood changing as his earlier impatience returned. ‘I could take you to bed now and show you…’

  ‘Yes, you could,’ Lisa agreed painfully. ‘But can’t you see, Oliver…? Please try to understand,’ she begged him. ‘It isn’t that I don’t love you or want you; it’s just that… this… this… us… isn’t how I envisaged it would be for me. You’re just not the kind of man I—’

  ‘You mean that I’m not Henry,’ Oliver supplied harshly for her, his arms dropping back to his sides as he stepped back from her.

  Lisa closed her eyes. Here we go again, she thought tiredly. She had meant one thing and Oliver had taken the words to mean something completely different—just as she had misunderstood him earlier when she had thought he was telling her to leave. And if they could misunderstand one another so easily what real chance did they have of developing the harmonious, placid relationship that she had always believed she needed? Some people enjoyed quarrels, fights, emotional highs and lows, but she just was not one of them.