12 Stocking Stuffers

by Beverly Barton

  She’d spent the better part of two days in a plane. She should have reeked of stale aircraft food and recycled air. Instead, she tasted delicious. Peaches again.

  “Your perfume is driving me wild,” he said against her mouth.

  A tremor raced over her. She brought her hand up to cover his, to push it and him away. “Please don’t—!” she began.

  “I won’t,” he said.

  But he did. This time, he kissed her, and no two ways about it. He cupped her head and took advantage of her gasp of shock to trace his tongue over the silken inner lining of her lips. And just for a nanosecond, she responded, curving her body to fit against his and angling her mouth to give him greater access.

  Big mistake! The violins and stars he’d denied experiencing with Deenie made a belated appearance, seeming not to care that they’d shown up for a woman he hadn’t seen in years, and there was no telling what he might have tried next if Ava hadn’t come to her senses. Which she did with a vengeance, by hauling off and cracking her palm across his cheek at the same time that she reared back and yanked her hair free from his watchband.

  “You had no right to do that!” she spat.

  “I know,” he said, prepared to shoulder the blame. “I’m sorry.”

  But he wasn’t. He was dazzled. Dazed. Exhilarated.

  “Then why did you?”

  He shook his head, less to refute her question than to clear his mind. “Search me! Temporary insanity?”

  She drew in a hissing breath. “Make a joke of it if you like, but I don’t mind telling you, your behaviour disgusts me.”

  “It didn’t a minute ago,” he said, ticked off by her holier-than-thou attitude. “If anything, you seemed to enjoy it.”

  “In your dreams, Leo Ferrante! If Deenie had any idea…!”

  “Who’s going to tell her? You?”

  “I should,” she said. “She has a right to know—”

  “What? That I kissed you and you liked it?” He flopped onto his back and sighed wearily as common sense replaced his brief euphoria. “Look, Ava, I made a mistake and you didn’t exactly rebuff me, but it won’t happen again. Let’s not make more out of it than that.”

  He thought he’d put the matter to rest and was almost dozing off when she said in a small voice, “I feel so ashamed. I don’t know how I’ll ever face her without blushing. It’s not just that we kissed, it’s everything you’ve told me—about not being madly in love with her, and all that. You never should have said such things.”

  “Probably not. But there’s something about lying next to you in the dark that makes me do and say things regardless of the consequences.”

  “You definitely shouldn’t be saying that!”

  He shouldn’t be touching her, either, but the mattress was too narrow to allow for the luxury of distance and no matter how he tried to preserve an illusion of decency, some part or other of him—his leg, his hip, his shoulder—kept rubbing up against her.

  Pretending the contact was meaningless didn’t carry a whole lot of weight with his hormones coming to a slow boil and him no more able to stop than he could put an end to the storm raging outside. So much for a dead libido!

  As for Ava—hell, she could deny it all she liked, but she was far from oblivious, as well. He could hear the rapid, unnatural rhythm of her breathing. Sense the brittle tension stretching her nerves so tight they were ready to snap.

  “Is there some guy waiting for you, back in Africa?” he asked, hoping like blazes she’d say yes.

  “No,” she said on a faint breath of despair.

  “Why not?”

  She shrugged, a fatal error of judgement on her part because it provided yet one more reminder of how little stood between them. Or, more accurately, it made him aware that what stood between them had taken on a life of its own even though it had no business standing at all! “I just haven’t met the right man yet.”

  “How will you know when you do?”

  “It will feel right,” she said, sounding winded.

  He reached for her. May God forgive him, he couldn’t help himself. “But this feels right, Ava,” he murmured, stroking his hand over her jaw and down her neck, “so there must be more to it than that.”

  She trembled under his touch. “How can you say that, when we both know that what you’re doing and saying is completely unacceptable?”

  It was the politically correct response he expected, but the indignation which would have given it substance became lost in a sigh of defeat. He rapped gently against her temple. “Knowing up here is one thing. Accepting it as truth here…” He drew his hand down her face, her throat, and didn’t stop until his palm lay snug and flat beneath her left breast. “Ah, Ava, that’s quite another. And knowing I shouldn’t kiss you again isn’t doing a damn thing to make me want it any less.”

  “Don’t, Leo!” she begged—another politically correct answer, but even as the tortured plea escaped, her mouth bumped against his again.

  “Our being here at all is totally inappropriate,” he said, charged with awareness that if he moved his hand just a fraction, her breast would nestle against his palm. “We both expected we’d be spending the night someplace else. But it doesn’t change the fact that we’re lying side by side, there’s no one here to monitor what we say or do, and that, if I could live with myself afterward, I’d make love to you.”

  She didn’t come up with any smart rebuff this time. Instead, she grew so perfectly still that he’d have said she froze—except that implied bone-chilling cold, and even though the temperature had dipped to well below freezing outside, the currents swirling around that unheated tack room were suddenly stifling.

  When the beating silence became more than he could tolerate, he moved his open hand and brought it to rest, fingers splayed, between their two bodies. “Ava?”

  He knew she couldn’t see the gesture, but surely she sensed it, and recognized the question it asked?

  Seconds ticked by, measured by the heavy thud of his heart. Then, when he was just about ready to give up hope that she’d respond, her much smaller hand settled on top of his, aligning itself as best it could, palm to palm, thumb to thumb, finger to finger.

  He found it the most profoundly erotic touch he’d ever experienced. More moving than a kiss. More arousing than the most intimate commingling of flesh between a man and a woman. And not nearly enough to satisfy the surge of desire boiling through his blood.

  Decency be damned! If she’d let him, he’d have taken her with all the speed and fervour at his command. Locked himself deep inside her and let the devil take the hindmost. Sold his soul for the thrill of bringing her to orgasm, and then, when she was helpless and liquid around him, filling her with the rush of his own release.

  He didn’t because, even as he rose up and over her in the dark, she said in a small, sad voice, “I know. And we can’t.”

  Defeated, he fell back to the hay, the explosive hiss of his escaping breath betraying more eloquently than words what it cost him to ignore the rapacious demands of a body never more vibrantly alive, and submit instead to the belated tug of conscience.

  “No,” he said glumly. “We can’t. But if we could, I’d love you all night long. And the next time someone asked if there’s a special man in your life, you wouldn’t say you’re still waiting for him to show up, because—”

  “Leo, please! I’m so confused…so tired….”

  “Yeah, me, too.” He expelled another breath and felt it balloon above his face in chilly condensation. Now that the heat of the moment had passed, the air was penetratingly cold. Sliding his arm over her waist, he tugged her close enough that she was molded against him, thigh to thigh, hip to hip, breast to chest.

  She burrowed her head against his shoulder and uttered a little moan. Of protest? Misery? He couldn’t be sure. The only certainty was that it was colder than a witch’s thorax in that room, and horse blankets and hay alone weren’t enough to ward off the creeping chill of winter.

&
nbsp; “Your virtue’s safe,” he said, “but if we don’t conserve body heat, we’ll both wind up dead before morning. Cuddle up, sweetheart, and try to get some sleep or you’ll look like hell tomorrow.”

  She supposed she did—get some sleep, that was—because after some initial skittishness, a great feeling of calm overtook her and the next time she became aware of her surroundings, a pale, cold light filtered through the square of window on the far wall. The second thing she noticed was that her legs were snugly pinned by Leo’s, and his blue eyes were watching her with the shuttered expression of a man not about to reveal a hint of what he was thinking.

  But if the workings of his mind remained a mystery, she was left in little doubt about her own. Embarrassment and guilt swept over her in equal measure. How could she have allowed him to kiss her—to come disgracefully close to making love to her? And how would she ever again face Deenie without cringing?

  “No need to look so stricken, Ava,” Leo said. “Neither of us surrendered to our baser instincts in sleep. If anyone asks, you can truthfully say you upheld your scruples in the face of adversity.”

  “And what will you say, should anyone ask you?” she retorted, immeasurably ticked off that he sounded so unruffled when she was all of a-dither at finding his thigh flung over her hip and the lovely warm length of his torso pressed up against hers.

  “That you snore,” he said blandly.

  “I certainly do not!”

  “How do you know? Did you ask the last man you slept with?”

  “That’s none of your business,” she said, not about to admit that the closest she’d come to “sleeping” with anyone was in the back seat of her prom date’s car when she was eighteen—a disastrous, fumbling affair which had ended when he’d suffered the humiliation of premature ejaculation before he’d divested her of her bra—and a couple of semi-hot dates with an ambulance driver when she was in nursing school.

  “No,” Leo said. “I guess it’s not.” He lifted the blankets and let a gust of cold air sweep away the cosy warmth between their bodies. “And lying here speculating won’t get my vehicle out of the ditch.”

  He rolled cautiously to his feet, stretched guardedly, and reached for his sheepskin jacket. “You planning to spend the day down there, Ava?” he inquired, when she didn’t rush to join him.

  “No,” she said, eyeing her pantyhose which sprawled wantonly over a saddle rack. “I’m waiting for you to leave so that I can dress without an audience.”

  “Dress?” To her horror, he picked up her stockings and dangled them from one hand the way a husband might. With intimate familiarity. “If you’re talking about climbing into these, you might as well forget it. They’re still soaking wet. And your shoes,” he added, peering at the pitiful things which lay side by side on the floor like two drowned rats, “aren’t any better. You’ll have to throw yourself on the mercy of the lady of the house—always assuming she’s more charitably disposed toward us this morning than she was last night.”

  The lady of the house proved more than accommodating, as did her husband. She sent a pair of socks, boots a size too large, and an invitation to breakfast, while he hooked a tractor to Leo’s vehicle and hauled it out of the ditch. By ten o’clock, Ava and Leo were on their way, fortified with home-cured ham and farm fresh eggs, and with nothing to show for their overnight mishap but the faint whiff of horses clinging to their clothing.

  That, and a smothering air of disquiet.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “ASI understand it, coming home for the holidays is supposed to be a happy time,” Leo observed acidly, as they approached the outskirts of Owen’s Lake. “Unless you want to arouse the suspicions of everyone from the family dog to the town mayor, I recommend you trade in the look of long-suffering misery for something a little more cheerful and upbeat.”

  Ava shot him a poisonous glare. “Forgive me if I’m not as adept at covering up my sins as you appear to be!”

  “A minor indiscretion hardly amounts to sin, Ava. Stop blowing last night out of proportion and focus on today. If anyone’s to blame for what happened back there in the stable, I am. So leave me to deal with it.”

  Easy for him to say! He didn’t harbour a secret passion for someone who was strictly off limits. He wasn’t the one who’d been ready to abandon his scruples and betray his best friend for the dubious pleasure of one night of illicit love. “And if I can’t?”

  “You will if you concentrate on enjoying the kind of good, old-fashioned Christmas you’ve been missing for the last three years.”

  It wasn’t fair that, despite having spent the night on the floor in a stable, he managed to exude an aura of masculine sexuality so appealing that she went weak at the knees. Turning to stare out of the window before she forgot herself so far as to start drooling, Ava saw that he had a point. Owen’s Lake was decked out with a vengeance for the season. Last night’s blizzard had given way to blue skies and the cold clear brilliance of a northern winter sun, as different from Africa’s molten heat as diamonds from rubies.

  Platinum glittered from icicles draping the eaves of the grand Victorian homes typical of Owen Heights, the exclusive neighborhood where she’d been born. Huge holly wreaths hung on wrought-iron gates. Illuminated reindeer pulling sleighs romped across lawns buried under a thick quilting of snow. Lampposts sported miniature fir trees draped in sparkling lights.

  Half a mile farther along the boulevard, Leo turned the Expedition onto Charles Owen Crescent and a few minutes later pulled into the long driveway leading to her parents’ home. “Time to start smiling, sweetheart,” he muttered. “Here comes the family, all set to welcome home the nomadic daughter.”

  Indeed, the SUV had barely come to a stop under the porte-cochère before her parents and Jason, their golden retriever, shot out of the house in a tangle of legs and excitement. Her father yanked open the passenger door and, slithering to the ground in her too-big borrowed boots, Ava found herself wrapped in a bear hug which took her breath away.

  “Your mother’s had me up since dawn and just about driven me mad with her pacing back and forth,” he said. “And now that you’re here, she’s crying her eyes out. I tell you, Ava, I’ll never understand what makes a woman tick.”

  “Oh, hush up, you big softie,” her mother sobbed happily, wading between him and Jason’s thrashing tail and reaching for Ava. “Who was so impatient to see his little girl again that he was ready to strap on skis and piggyback her home last night, so that she could sleep in her own bed instead of a stranger’s house? Come here, darling, and give your mom a kiss. It’s wonderful to have you home again.”

  Her mother smelled of cinnamon and mincemeat and almond paste—lovely nostalgic reminders of Christmases past, when life had been full of simple, innocent pleasures, and affection freely expressed. That this year’s was clouded with guilt and secrets when it should have been the most joyful of all, filled Ava with a regret so intense that she, too, started to cry.

  “This is supposed to be a happy time,” Leo reminded her, with pointed emphasis.

  “That’s why they’re both in tears.” Blithely unaware of the hidden undercurrents swarming through the cold air, her father gave Leo one of those man-to-man slaps on the back meant to convey masculine amusement at the vagaries of women. “They cry when they’re sad, when they’re happy and when they’re mad. And just for good measure, they cry when they get married, so better get used to the sight, Leo, because from what I hear, you’ll be learning that firsthand before much longer. Here, let me give you a hand with that luggage, then come on in and join us for morning coffee.”

  The mere idea of Leo Ferrante cosying up for a visit under her parents’ roof was enough to dry Ava’s tears on the spot. “He can’t possibly!”

  “Why not?” her father said. “It’s the least we can do, to thank him for meeting your flight—and for taking such good care of you last night.”

  Oh, if he only knew the direction that care had taken!

  “T
hanks,” Leo said easily, running a hand over his jaw, “but although coffee sounds good, a shower and shave sound even better.”

  He looked, Ava thought, as eager to be gone as she was to be rid of him. “We absolutely understand,” she said, with what she feared must seem like insulting relief. “Goodbye, and thank you for…everything.”

  He leveled a satirical blue gaze her way. “Glad I could help.”

  Help? Averting her eyes, she bent to fondle Jason’s silky ears. Ye gods, things had been bad enough to begin with. How much worse they’d become was something only she and Leo would ever fully understand, and she didn’t appreciate his pitiful attempt to turn the situation into a joke!

  “Perhaps it’s just as well he didn’t stay,” her mother said, ushering everyone inside the house as he drove off. “Deenie plans on taking you out for lunch, so I’m kind of glad to have you to myself for a bit before you get caught up in all her Christmas plans. Go warm yourself up by the fire in the library, darling, while I pour the coffee and your father takes your bags up to your room, then we’ll all sit down for a nice long chat.”

  Yesterday, Ava would have liked nothing better. Now, the knowledge that she’d have to face Deenie before the morning was out cast a pall over her homecoming that no amount of rationalizing could dispel.

  I think he’s going to propose and give me a ring for Christmas, Deenie had written. But nothing Leo had said pointed in that direction, so whose version was closer to the truth?

  “Is everything all right with you, Ava?” her father asked, eyeing her as she pulled off her borrowed boots.

  “Of course,” she said brightly. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “I’m not sure. But I do know that, for a woman who claimed she couldn’t wait to come home again, you don’t look particularly pleased to be here.”

  “Oh, I am!” she exclaimed, aghast that her parents might think they were the reason she wasn’t brimming over with festive cheer. “I always miss you and Mom, but especially at this time of year.”