12 Gifts for Christmas

by Various

  She had avoided him for hours, yet he was as wild as if she’d had him naked in their bed, begging for her touch. He, who had never begged. He, who was more and more convinced that she possessed some supernatural power that enslaved him to her whenever he was near her. Even if she was only under the same roof.

  With a growl of impatience, he tossed back the remainder of his drink and slapped the tumbler down on the mantelpiece. He raked his fingers through his hair. This enforced seclusion was clearly making him insane. He was supposed to be back in Germany by now, talking contracts and profit margins. Not … trapped here. With her.

  He had hardly slept the night before. Being near Lucy made him edgy. As if he were suddenly made entirely of angles. He’d tossed in his magnificent four-poster bed, unable to sleep, images of Lucy haunting him. Taunting him and teasing him.

  He remembered that first, delicious night. As he’d watched her work, he had been blindsided by the maelstrom of lust and need she had stirred within him. He had hardly known what he’d been doing, but he’d waited for her at the club until her shift was over and then taken her back to his hotel. She’d gone with him eagerly, seemingly as dazed by their connection as he was. The instant the doors of the hotel’s lift had closed behind them, he’d had his hands on her rich curves and his mouth on hers. He’d urged her legs around his waist and pressed her to the wall within moments of entering his hotel suite. He remembered the fierce, incomparable joy of that first slick entry, right there against the wall. He remembered her soft cries, the look of wonder on her face.

  And that had only been the beginning.

  Now, as the snow fell outside, he tortured himself with images of that first long night and the holiday he’d coaxed her into taking with him afterward.

  I’ll take you to Paris, he’d said, and he’d done so, but it had hardly mattered where they were. They might as well have stayed in Manchester for all they’d seen of the City of Lights. He had no memory of the weather or anything else. It might have been a heat wave or a blizzard. Rafi hadn’t known and hadn’t cared. But he remembered her body in perfect detail. Every freckle, every curve. He knew the texture of her nipples against his tongue and the sweet weight of her astride him, riding them both into oblivion.

  He’d thought he’d known her just as well.

  “Even the great Rafi turns out to be fallibly mortal,” his cousin Adel had teased him in a family meeting not long after Rafi’s quick wedding—and not long after the phone call that had ripped his heart to shreds. “I would never have believed it possible.”

  “We are not all of us destined to wed the future Queen of Alakkul, should she ever be found,” Rafi had replied, forcing a smile. He was known for his cool head, his unshakable resolve—and yet he had fallen for the oldest trick imaginable? A temptress and a liar?

  “A beautiful woman should be a prize, Rafi,” Adel had replied, his gaze too calm, too knowing. “Not a curse.”

  But Rafi did not believe it. Would not let himself believe it—and he was certain his cousin, who had given over his life to his duty and the glory of their country, was only being kind.

  It still filled him with a kind of rage, sharp and deep.

  But that, he knew, was not the true reason he despaired of himself.

  How could Lucy have betrayed him in every possible way—ruined him and shamed him, tricked him and used him—and he still wanted her this much? Even now, when betrayal and bitterness twisted inside of him and fused into something darker, something hotter, he wanted her.

  It was lucky his cousin was meant to be king and not him—because he would no doubt walk away from a throne for this woman, just as he had walked away from all he held dear, all he’d believed to be true about himself.

  He remembered with perfect clarity when he’d realized he was nothing like the man he’d always thought he was. It had been during another meeting in another hotel in another interchangeable city somewhere in Europe. His aide had been reading out his messages in his usual bland tone. The standard petitioners for the Qaderi fortune, the regular communications from people such as the family doctor and the senior housekeeper and the usual sheaf of messages from Lucy.

  “It is nothing out of the ordinary,” Safir had said in summary of Lucy’s calls, shrugging.

  “Of course not,” Rafi had replied curtly, remembering with searing pain the last phone call he had taken from her, the one where she’d revealed her true nature. “My wife is nothing if not consistent.”

  And even then, even as he’d pretended otherwise, he’d ached for her. Ached for all the things he’d believed she was, that he knew she could never and would never be.

  Rafi pulled in a breath and turned to look out at the falling snow. Still it came, trapping him. Stranding him. Making him a captive in his own home. Making a mockery of the lies he’d told himself about the distance between him and Lucy.

  But maybe he had been seeing this from the wrong angle all along, he thought then, as his body hardened, readying itself. Perhaps he should not have distanced himself when he learned the extent of her betrayal. In the end, what did it matter? There would be no divorce. And one day, there would be heirs. So what was he fighting?

  CHAPTER SIX

  RAFI was prepared for more fireworks. In fact, he craved them. He didn’t care what lies Lucy told tonight, he assured himself as he prowled through the old house, the seat of his family’s power for centuries. He didn’t care that she was the most inappropriate bride he could possibly have chosen and that she had used his honor against him. He didn’t care about any of it.

  He only wanted her—badly—and if they had to fight in order to light that spark between them … he was happy to fight.

  He was almost smiling in anticipation when he swung into the master suite, expecting to find her once again tucked away in the small sitting room she preferred. But instead he stopped dead, his heart hammering against his chest in a manner he refused to examine too closely.

  She was curled up on the far side of the great bed, fully dressed, her hands beneath her cheek. From the doorway, he could see only the shape of her in the low lights that spilled from the dressing room. That perfect hourglass that called to the male in him, that delectable shape that had inspired artists and lovers throughout the ages. The beauty of a woman’s curves—his woman’s curves—nearly took his breath.

  He moved to the side of the bed and looked down at her, aware that he was scowling again, though he could not have said why. In sleep, she appeared younger than she ought to, and infinitely more fragile. He saw not a scheming tramp who’d set out to ensnare him, but an exhausted, beautiful woman. His gaze shifted to her mouth, that wicked, deliciously carnal mouth.

  His hand reached out of its own accord and he watched it as if it belonged to someone else, watched his fingers trace a pattern over the flushed, warm satin of her cheek. She murmured something in her sleep, incoherent and soft, and then settled against the bed.

  He should not have felt that clutching sensation in his chest, as if his heart were involved in this. He should not have felt the quiet of the room and the blanketing silence of the snow outside as some kind of sacrament. The lust that had spurred him into coming here melted into something else, something far more dangerous.

  But he could not seem to help himself. He crawled onto the bed beside her, yielding to a compulsion he did not dare study too closely. For a while he lay next to her, soaking in the peace of it. The quiet sense of belonging that he now admitted had always existed, no matter what betrayals were piled on top of it.

  And still she slept. Even when he moved closer and pulled her into his chest. Even as he held her, stroking her hair and freeing the wild golden curls from the tight bun she’d kept them in. Even when his lips gently brushed the crown of her head. And even as he drifted off himself, holding her as if the only thing that had ever been between them was this.

  Lucy was deliciously, impossibly warm. She woke slowly, savoring the heat, and it took her long time to
realize where it was coming from. She was sprawled across Rafi’s chest like a cat in a sunbeam.

  Gasping, she reared back—to find Rafi wide-awake and watching her.

  “Let go of me.” But her voice was the barest thread of sound. His fascinating mouth quirked.

  “I am not holding you,” he pointed out, entirely too rationally. Very nearly amused. “You are lying on me.”

  “I only lay down for a moment,” she began, but then he shifted beneath her. The slide of his body against hers made her shiver, as a heat of a different kind washed over her, humming into something molten and incandescent. Nor was he immune. She could feel the evidence of his desire, hard between them. She could see the flare of passion in his dark gray gaze.

  It would be so much easier if she didn’t want him, too. If she didn’t love him.

  “I cannot divorce you,” he said then, his hands moving to tangle in her hair. “I cannot let you leave. Qaderis keep their vows. They do not bow to the whims of modernity and merrily divorce.”

  Lucy couldn’t seem to catch her breath. She couldn’t seem to pull away. She felt caught in his eyes, suspended. Her breasts were too full, pressed against the hard wall of his chest.

  “What do you know about vows?” she asked. “You keep yours in name only from as far away as possible, don’t you?”

  “I am not far away now,” he said quietly, his gaze intense. Searing into her. “With my body, I thee worship.” His lips crooked. “If you’ll let me.”

  She shuddered as one of his hands traveled down her back, spreading fire down the length of her spine, making her yearn to move against him. With him. It had always been like this. He need only touch her, and she was his. She had followed him out of the nightclub, into his hotel room and then all the way across the planet to this tiny little country. She should hate him for it, for this power he wielded over her treasonous body, but she didn’t. She couldn’t.

  She loved him.

  She stared down at his beautiful face, so male and arrogant and uniquely Rafi, and she could not even manage to berate herself for that weakness as she had over these last months.

  He had treated her terribly, there was no denying it. The parts of her he’d hurt still ached with it, and she thought sometimes they always would. But that didn’t change the man she knew was there, beneath all that, beyond what had happened between them. She still believed in that man. The honorable person who had vowed to protect her—and he had done so. Just not from himself.

  “Lucy …” The way he said her name, with the faintest touch of his Alakkulian accent and that fire in his eyes, still undid her. Just as it always had.

  She had lost so much and been so alone. She loved him. Tonight he was her husband. He would no doubt leave again as if he had never been, and she would return to England and reality—so what harm was there in treating this like all those dreams she’d had in all the lonely months she’d languished here, by herself?

  She didn’t want to think anymore. She didn’t want to wonder and worry and rip herself to pieces trying to understand what had happened to this marriage, what had stolen this very connection away from them. Here, now, she just wanted to feel.

  No matter how much she might live to regret it.

  She bent her head and kissed him.

  The fire between them blazed white hot. He pulled her closer, angling his mouth for a deeper fit, and then rolled her over, his hands moving to learn her curves anew.

  And Lucy could do nothing but delight in it. In him. At last.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE snow fell all through the night, and into the next day. It cocooned them, Lucy thought sometime the next morning, gazing out at the drifts of white. It softened the reality of their fractured marriage, let them concentrate instead on what they had at that moment.

  This connection. This fire. The insatiable wildness of their passion that nothing seemed to dim.

  She shut off her mind and pushed away all the darkness of the past months, choosing to bask in Rafi as she had so long ago on that trip to Paris.

  Through the day, they fed each other in the great four-poster bed. They tasted each other again and again. And they talked. About the world, about the small, inconsequential things that made up their lives. He was funny, intriguing. And so impossibly sensual.

  If she had not already been in love with him, Lucy knew, this little interlude would have sent her head over heels.

  But there was so much left unsaid, so much pain and heartbreak, that even a stolen day or two surrounded by the snow could not keep it all at bay. Perhaps it was her knowledge that this bliss could not—would not—last that made the idyll that much sweeter.

  It was Christmas Eve, though Lucy had not dared mention it, aware of Rafi’s dislike of all things Christmas.

  That evening, they sat before the great fireplace that dominated one wall in the master suite, both of them exhausted in the most delicious way. She leaned back against his bare chest as he toyed with her curls, twining them around his fingers.

  I will always remember this instant, this feeling, she thought. No matter what happens.

  “I wish we could be like this forever,” she said on a happy sigh, caught up in the joy of the moment—in the sense of rightness that moved through her.

  She regretted the words immediately.

  He stiffened behind her, then set her away from him. She closed her eyes as all the pain and hurt she’d been ignoring came rushing back, full force.

  “I do, too,” he said in a low, bitter voice. “But I am not the one who made this impossible.”

  Her hands curled into fists, and she turned to look at him. His gray eyes were so troubled, his mouth so grim. And he still glared at her as if he had every reason to hate her. And did.

  It was too much.

  Everything she’d been through, everything she’d struggled to survive—all of it rolled through her, incinerating her, scalding her.

  “No. You did this, Rafi.” She threw the words at him, letting her anger show, letting him see what he’d done to her. “You destroyed this marriage, not me!”

  “I’m not going to play your games,” Rafi said roughly, but he was shaken by what he saw in her eyes. The condemnation. The deep, abiding pain, as if he’d wounded her. But how was that possible? She was the one who’d betrayed him … hadn’t she?

  He should never have touched her again. He should have crawled through the snow to stay away from her.

  “Listen to me,” she said in a low, serious voice. Her eyes locked on his. “I am only going to say it once. I was pregnant.

  I never lied about that—why would I? Did you think it was my life’s ambition to marry a man I hardly knew? To move to the other side of the world to a place where I’d be scrutinized, judged and found wanting every time? But I did it because I loved you and I thought it was the right thing to do for our child.”

  “Our child,” he repeated, hearing the fury in his own voice, feeling it surge through him. “How dare you pretend—”

  “I lost the baby,” she hissed at him, her brown eyes filling with tears. She jabbed a finger in the direction of the vast bathroom. “In that room. On that floor. It was horrible, and do you know what was worse, Rafi? Being told that you believed I’d made the whole thing up.”

  “You said it yourself!” he snapped, his temper blazing as his mind reeled. But he remembered it vividly. “I was in Sydney. I’d had back-to-back meetings for weeks on end in Singapore, New Zealand, Australia. But I called you the second I could get away. I asked after your pregnancy and you said, as clear as day, ‘There is no baby.’ You admitted it.”

  “I was grieving!” she protested. “There was no baby because I’d lost it!”

  The tears were moving down her cheeks now and she did nothing to check them. She reached for the blanket they’d kicked aside in their last round of passion, and Rafi noticed that her delicate hands were shaking.

  “Lucy—” he began, but she made a slashing gesture throug
h the air, cutting him off.

  “You made it plain from the start that I was marrying far above my station,” she said, each word like a bullet, each one slamming into him. “You made no secret of the fact that I was beneath you—that sleeping with me was all right for an illicit week in Paris, but should never have gone beyond that. That I should be grateful that you were so honorable, so good, that you would condescend to do the right thing by a trashy little nobody like me.”

  “I never said that,” he bit out, as a deep shame moved through him. “Not any of it.”

  “You didn’t need to say it.” Lucy gathered the blanket around her and rose to her feet, looking down at him as if she were some kind of goddess. “Everything you did made your position perfectly, painfully obvious.” She waved her hand at the room around them, encompassing the gleaming lights in the ancient sconces on the walls, the historic tapestries. “You hid me away in your family’s country house where I could gaze out at the capital city from afar but never embarrass you by setting foot near your exalted social circles. But I didn’t care, because I was in love with you and I was having your baby.”

  There was something in her voice that was making the fine hairs on the back of his neck stand at attention. He was all too afraid that it was the ring of truth.

  “Lucy,” he said again. “Please …”

  But she ignored him.

  “You left me here,” she continued in that same way, as if it cost her, as if speaking to him like this required her to be brave. The thought made something in him ache. “And I saw it as a perfect opportunity to get to know your world. To transform myself into the kind of wife you wouldn’t have to hide away or be ashamed of.”

  He remembered, suddenly, what she’d been wearing when he’d arrived—how elegant he’d thought her. How much of a change it had been from the louder, trendier clothes she’d worn before.