Christmas Nights (21 page)

‘
Leave
you here…?’

Somehow or other he had detached her hand from his jacket and was now holding it in his own. Dizzily Lisa marvelled at how warm and comforting, how strong and safe it felt to have that large male hand enclosing hers. She could almost feel the warmth from his touch—his body—flooding up through her arm like an infusion of life-giving blood into a vein.

‘Leave you
here
in this temperature?’ he said, adding roughly, ‘Are you crazy…?’

She couldn’t see him properly any more, Lisa realised, and she thought it must be because the tears that had threatened her eyes had frozen in the intense cold. She had no idea that she had actually spoken her sentiments out loud until she heard him respond, ‘Tears don’t freeze; they’re saline… salty.’

He had let go of her hand and as Lisa watched him he stripped off his jacket and then, to her shock, took hold of
her and bundled her up in it like an adult wrapping up a small child.

‘I can’t walk,’ she protested, her voice muffled by the thickness of the over-large wrapping.

‘You’re not going to,’ she was told peremptorily, and then, before she knew what was happening, he was picking her up and carrying her the short distance to his car, opening the passenger door and depositing her on the seat.

The car smelled of leather and warmth and something much more intangible—something elusive and yet oddly familiar… Muzzily Lisa sniffed, trying to work out what it was and why it should inexplicably make her want to cry and yet at the same time feel oddly elated.

Oliver had gone over to her car, and as he returned Lisa saw that he was carrying her case and her handbag.

‘I’ve locked it… your car,’ he told her as he slid into the driver’s seat alongside her. ‘Not that anyone would be likely to take it.’

‘Not unless they had some petrol with them,’ Lisa agreed drowsily, opening her mouth to give a yawn which suddenly turned into a volley of bone-aching sneezes.

‘Here.’ Oliver handed her a wad of clean tissues from a pack in the glove compartment, telling her, ‘It’s just as well I happened to be passing when I did. If you’re lucky the worst you’ll suffer is a bad cold; another hour in these temperatures and it could have been a very different story. This road is never very heavily trafficked, and on Christmas Eve, with snow forecast, the locals who do use it have more sense than to…’

He went on talking but Lisa had heard enough. Did he think she had wanted to run out of petrol on a remote Yorkshire road? Had he forgotten whose fault it was that she had been there in the first place instead of warmly tucked up in bed at Henry’s parents’ home?

Tears of unfamiliar and unexpected self-pity suddenly filled her eyes. ‘It isn’t Christmas Eve,’ she told him aggressively, fighting to hold them back. ‘It’s Christmas Day.’

It was the wrong thing to say, bringing back her earlier awareness of how very fragile were the brightly coloured, delicate daydreams that she had cherished of how this Christmas would be—as fragile and vulnerable as the glass baubles with which she had so foolishly imagined herself decorating that huge, freshly cut, pine-smelling Christmas tree with Henry.

It was too much. One tear fell and then another. She tried to stop them, dabbing surreptitiously at her eyes, and she averted her face from Oliver’s as he started the engine and set the car in motion. But it was no use. He had obviously witnessed her distress.

‘Now what’s wrong?’ he demanded grimly.

‘It’s Christmas Day,’ Lisa wept.

‘Christmas Day.’ He repeated the words as though he had never heard them before. ‘Where would you have been spending it if your car hadn’t run out of petrol?’ he asked her. ‘Where were you going?’

‘Home to London, to my flat,’ Lisa told him wearily. Despite the fact that at some point, without her being aware of it, he had obviously noticed that she was shivering and had turned the heater on full, she still felt frighteningly cold.

‘My parents are both working away in Japan so I can’t go to them, and my friends have made other plans. I could have gone with them, but…’

‘But you chose to subject yourself to Henry’s mother’s inspection instead,’ he taunted her unkindly.

‘Henry and I were planning to get engaged,’ Lisa fought back angrily. ‘Of course he wanted me to meet his parents, his family. There was no question of there being any “inspection”.’

‘No? Then why the urgent necessity for a new wardrobe?’

Lisa flushed defensively.

‘I just wanted to make a good impression on them, that’s all,’ she muttered.

‘Well, you certainly did that all right,’ he mocked her wryly. ‘Especially—’

‘I would have done if it hadn’t been for your interference,’ she interrupted him hotly. ‘You had no right to imply that you and I had been… that those clothes…’ She paused, her voice trailing away into silence as she saw the way he lifted one eyebrow and glanced unkindly at her.

‘I spoke nothing but the truth. Those clothes were bought by my cousin for his girlfriend—his lover…’

‘It might have been the truth, but you twisted it so that it seemed… so that it sounded… so that…’

Lisa floundered, her face flushing betrayingly as he invited helpfully, ‘So that what?’

‘So that people would think that you and I… that you had bought those clothes for me and that you and I were lovers,’ she told him fiercely.

‘But surely anyone who really knows you… a prospective fiancé, an established lover, for instance… would automatically know that it was impossible for us to be lovers?’ he pointed out to her.

‘Henry and I are not lovers.’

Lisa bit her lip in vexation. Now what on earth had prompted her to tell him that? It was hardly the sort of thing she would normally discuss with someone who was virtually a stranger.

Again the dark eyebrows rose—both of them this time—his response to her admission almost brutally comprehensive as he asked her crisply, ‘You’re not? Then what on earth were you doing thinking of getting engaged to him?’

Lisa opened her mouth but the words she wanted to say simply wouldn’t come. How could she say them now? How could she tell him, I loved him, when she knew irrevocably and blindingly that it simply wasn’t true, that it had possibly and shamingly never been true and that, just as shamingly, she had somehow managed to delude herself that it might be and to convince herself that she and Henry had a future together?

In the end she had to settle for a stiff and totally unconvincing, ‘It seemed a good idea at the time. We had a lot in common. We were both ready to settle down, to commit ourselves. To—’ She stopped speaking as the sound of his laughter suddenly filled the car, drowning out the sound of her own voice.

He had a very full, deep, rich-bodied and very male laugh, she acknowledged—a very… a very… a very sensual, sexy sort of laugh… if you cared for that sort of thing… and of course she didn’t, she reminded herself firmly.

‘Why are you laughing?’ she demanded angrily, her cheeks flying hot banners of scorching colour as she turned in her seat to glare furiously at him. ‘It isn’t… there isn’t anything to laugh at…’

‘No, there isn’t,’ he agreed soberly. ‘You’re right… By rights I— How old are you? What century are you living in? “We had a lot in common. We were both ready to settle down…’” he mimicked her. ‘Even if that was true, which it quite patently is not—in fact, I doubt I’ve ever seen a couple more obviously totally unsuited to one another—I have never heard of a less convincing reason for wanting to get married.

‘Why haven’t you been to bed with him?’ he demanded, the unexpectedness of the question shocking her, taking her breath away.

‘I don’t think that’s any of your business,’ she told him primly.

‘Which one of you was it who didn’t want to—you or him?’

Lisa gasped, outraged. ‘Not everyone has… has a high sex drive… or wants a… a relationship that’s based on… on physical lust,’ she told him angrily. ‘And just because…’

Whilst they had been talking Oliver had been driving, and now unexpectedly he turned off the main road and in between two stone pillars into what was obviously the drive to a private house—a very long drive, Lisa noted, before turning towards him and demanding, ‘What are you doing? Where are you taking me? This isn’t a garage.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ he agreed calmly. ‘It’s my home.’

‘Your home? But—’

‘Calm down,’ Oliver advised her drily. ‘Look, it’s gone one in the morning, Christmas morning,’ he emphasised. ‘This isn’t London; the nearest large petrol station is on the motorway, nearly thirty miles away,
if
it’s open—and personally what I think you need right now more than anything else is a hot bath and a good night’s sleep.’

‘I want to go home,’ Lisa insisted stubbornly.

‘Why?’ he challenged her brutally, and reminded her, ‘You’ve already said yourself that there’s no one there. Look,’ he told her, ‘since it is Christmas, why don’t we declare a cease-fire in our… er… hostilities? Although by choice neither of us might have wanted to spend Christmas together, since we are both on our own and since it’s patently obvious that you’re in no physical state to go anywhere, never mind drive a car—’

‘You’re spending Christmas on your own?’ Lisa interrupted him, too astonished to hold the question back.

‘Yes,’ he agreed, explaining, ‘I was to have spent it entertaining my cousin and his girlfriend, but since they’ve made up their quarrel their plans have changed and they flew to the
Caribbean yesterday morning. Like you, I’d left it too late to make alternative plans and so—’

‘I can’t stay with you,’ Lisa protested. She was, she recognised, already starting to shiver as the now stationary car started to cool down, and she was also unpleasantly and weakly aware of how very unappealing the thought of driving all the way back to London actually was—and not just unappealing either, she admitted. She was uncomfortably conscious that Oliver had spoken the truth when he had claimed that she was not physically capable of making the journey at present.

‘We’re strangers…’

‘You’ve already accepted a lift in my car,’ he reminded her drily, adding pithily, ‘And besides, where else can you go?’

All at once Lisa gave in. She really didn’t have the energy to argue with him, she admitted—she was too cold, too tired, too muzzily aware of how dangerously light-headed and weak she was beginning to feel.

‘Very well, then,’ she said, adding warningly, ‘But only until tomorrow… until I can get some petrol.’

‘Only until tomorrow,’ he agreed.

‘Y
OU LIVE HERE ALL ALONE
?’ Lisa questioned Oliver, breaking into his conversation as she curled up in one corner of the vast, deep sofa where he had taken her and told her sternly she was to remain until he returned with a hot drink for her.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I prefer it that way. A gardener comes twice a week and his wife does the cleaning for me, but other than that—’

‘But it’s such a big house. Don’t you…?’

‘Don’t I what?’ Oliver challenged her. ‘Don’t I feel lonely?’ He shook his head. ‘Not really. I was an only child. My mother died when I was in my teens and my father was away a lot on business. I’m used to being on my own. In fact I prefer it in many ways. Other people’s company, their presence in one’s life isn’t always a pleasure—especially not when one has to become responsible for their emotional and financial welfare.’

Lisa guessed that he was referring obliquely to his cousin, and she sensed that he was, by nature, the kind of man who would always naturally assume responsibility for others, even if that responsibility was slightly irritably cynical rather than humanely compassionate. It also probably explained why he wasn’t married. He was by nature a loner—a man, she suspected, who enjoyed women’s company but who did not want to burden himself with a wife or children.

And yet a house like this cried out for children. It had that kind of ambience about it, that kind of warmth; it was a real
family home for all its obviously priceless antiques. It had a lived-in, welcoming feel to it, Lisa acknowledged—a sense of having been well used and well loved, a slightly worn air which, to her, gave it a richness that far surpassed the sterile, elegant perfection of a house like Henry’s parents’.

It didn’t surprise Lisa to learn that the house had been in Oliver’s family for several generations but what did surprise her was how at ease, how at home she actually felt here, how unexpectedly easy it was to talk to Oliver after he had returned from the kitchen with a huge mug of piping-hot chocolate which he insisted she drink, virtually standing over her until she had done so.

She had suspected from the taste of it that something very much more alcoholic than mere milk had been added to it, but by that stage she had been so grateful for the warmth of her comfortable niche in the deep sofa, so drowsily content and relaxed that there hadn’t seemed to be any point in mentioning it, never mind protesting about it.

Now, as she yawned sleepily, blinking owlishly, her forehead pleating in a muzzy frown as she tried to focus on the fireplace and discovered that she couldn’t, she was vaguely aware of Oliver getting up from his own chair and coming over to her, leaning down towards her as he firmly relieved her of the now empty mug.

‘Bath for you, and then bed, I think,’ he told her firmly, sounding so much as her father had when she had been a little girl that Lisa turned her head to look at him.

She hadn’t realised that he was quite so close to her, nor that his grey eyes had a darker outer rim to them and were not flat, dead grey at all but rather a mystical mingling of so many silvers and pewters that she caught her breath a little at the male beauty of them.

‘You’ve got beautiful eyes,’ she heard herself telling him
in a soft, slightly slurred… almost sexy voice that she barely recognised as her own.

She was unaware that her own eyes were registering the shock of what she had said as Oliver responded gravely, ‘Thank you.’

She was, she recognised, still holding onto her mug, even though his own fingers were now wrapped securely around it—so securely in fact that they were actually touching her own.

Some of that molten silver heat from his eyes must have somehow entered his skin, his blood, she decided dizzily. There could be no other reason for those tiny, darting, fiery sensations of heat that she could feel where her own flesh rested against his.

‘So are yours…’

‘So are yours’? Uncomprehendingly, Lisa looked at him and watched as he smiled a slow, curling, sensual smile that made her heart soar and turn over and do a bellyflop that left her as shocked and winded as though her whole body had actually fielded a blow.

‘Your eyes,’ Oliver told her softly. ‘Your eyes are beautiful too. Do you always keep them open when you kiss?’

‘Why?’ Lisa heard herself croak shakily. ‘Do you?’

As she spoke her glance was already drifting down to his mouth, as though drawn there by some potent force that she couldn’t control.

‘That depends,’ Oliver was drawling, ‘on who I’m kissing…’

He was looking at her mouth now, and a panicky, unfamiliar feeling of mingled excitement and shock kicked into life inside her, bringing with it some much needed sobering sanity, bringing her back to reality.

Lisa gulped and turned her head away, quickly withdrawing her hand from the mug.

‘I… I…’

As she fought to find the words to explain away her totally uncharacteristic behaviour and conversation, she was overcome by a sudden fit of sneezing.

Quickly reaching for the box of tissues that Oliver had brought her, she hoped that he would put her flushed complexion down to the fever or the cold that she had obviously caught rather than to her self-conscious embarrassment at what she had said.

What on earth had come over her? She had practically been flirting with him… asking him… inviting him…

Thankfully, Lisa buried her face in another tissue as she sneezed again.

When she had finished, determined to dispel any erroneous ideas that he might have gained from her unguarded and totally foolish comments, she said quickly, ‘It must have been wonderful here at Christmas when you were young—your family… this house…’

‘Yes, it was,’ he agreed, before asking, far too perceptively for Lisa’s peace of mind, ‘Weren’t your childhood Christmases good?’

‘Yes, of course they were,’ Lisa responded hastily.

‘But?’ he challenged her.

‘My parents travelled a lot with their work. They still do. Whilst I dreamed of traditional Christmases in a house with log fires and a huge tree surrounded by aunts and uncles and cousins, going to church on Christmas morning and doing all the traditional British Christmas things, the reality was normally not roast turkey with all the trimmings but ice cream on an Australian beach or sunshine in Japan.

‘My parents did their best, of course. There were always mounds of presents, and they always made sure that we spent Christmas and Boxing Days together, but somehow it just wasn’t the same as it would have been if we’d been here…
It’s silly of me, really, but I suppose a part of me still is that little girl who—’

She stopped, embarrassed by how much of herself she had inadvertently revealed. It must be whatever it was he had obviously added to her hot chocolate that was making her so loquacious and communicative, she thought. She certainly wasn’t normally so open or confiding with people she barely knew, although in some odd way it felt as though she had actually known Oliver for a very long time.

She was still frowning over this absurdity when he handed her a glass of amber liquid that he had just poured.

‘Drink it,’ he told her when she looked at it doubtfully. ‘It’s pure malt whisky and the best antidote for a heavy cold that I know.’

Reluctantly, Lisa took the glass he handed her. Her head was already swimming slightly, and she felt that the last thing she needed was any more alcohol, but her father was also a great believer in a hot toddy as a cure for colds and so hesitantly she began to sip the tawny golden liquid, closing her eyes as it slid smoothly down her throat, spreading the most delicious sense of beatific warmth throughout her body.

There was something so comforting, so safe, so… so pleasurable about being curled up cosily here in this house… with this man… With this man? What did that mean? Where had that thought come from?

Anxiously Lisa opened her eyes and started to sit up.

‘Was that why you wanted to marry Henry, because you thought he could provide you with the traditional lifestyle you felt you’d missed out on?’ she heard Oliver asking her.

‘Yes… yes, I suppose it was,’ she agreed huskily, caught too off guard to think of prevaricating or avoiding the question, and then flushing slightly as she saw the way Oliver was looking at her.

‘It would have been a good marriage,’ she defended herself.
‘We both wanted the same things…’ As she saw the way his eyebrows rose, she amended herself shakily, ‘Well, I thought that we did.’

‘I’ve heard of some odd reasons for getting married,’ she heard Oliver telling her drily, ‘but marrying someone because you think he’ll provide you with a traditional Christmas has to be the oddest…’

‘I wasn’t marrying him for that—’ Lisa began indignantly, stopping when another volley of sneezing mercifully prevented her from having to make any further response or explanation.

‘Come on,’ Oliver told her. ‘I think it’s time you were in bed.’

The whisky that she had drunk was even more potent than she had realised, Lisa acknowledged as Oliver led the way back into the warm, panelled entrance hall and up the stairs.

Just where the stairs started to return towards the galleried landing, Lisa paused to study two large oil paintings hung side by side.

‘My grandparents,’ Oliver explained, adding informatively, ‘My grandfather commissioned the artist to paint them as a first wedding-anniversary present for my grandmother.’

‘You look very like him,’ Lisa told him. And it was the truth, only the man in the portrait somehow looked less acerbic and much happier than Oliver—much happier and obviously very much in love with his young wife. In the portrait his face was turned slightly towards her matching portrait, so that for a moment it seemed as though the two of them were actually looking at one another.

‘It’s this way,’ Oliver told Lisa, touching her briefly on her arm as he directed her across the landing and towards one of the bedrooms.

‘Since my cousin Piers and his girlfriend were supposed to
be spending Christmas here a room had already been made up for them and you may as well sleep there.’ As he spoke he pushed open one of the seven wooden doors leading off the landing. Lisa blinked dizzily as she stepped inside the room.

It seemed huge—almost as large, she was sure, as the entire floor space of her own small flat. It was so large, in fact, that in addition to the high, king-sized bed there was also a desk and chair and a small two-seater sofa drawn up close to the open fireplace.

‘The bathroom’s through that door,’ Oliver told her, indicating one of a pair of doors set into the wall. ‘The other door opens into a walk-in wardrobe.’

A walk-in wardrobe. Lisa blinked owlishly before reminding him, ‘Well, that’s something I shan’t be needing.’ When he frowned she explained, ‘I don’t have any other clothes with me. The others are the ones I—’

‘Hurled at me in a fit of temper,’ Oliver finished for her.

She had started to shiver again, Lisa noticed, hugging her arms around herself despite the warmth of the bedroom, with its soft fitted carpet and heavy damask curtains.

That whisky really had gone to her head, she acknowledged as a wave of dizziness swept over her, making her sway and reach out instinctively for the nearest solid object to cling onto—the nearest solid object being Oliver himself.

As he detached her hand from his arm she looked up at him muzzily, only to gasp in startled surprise as she was suddenly swung very firmly up into his arms.

‘What… what are you doing?’ she managed to stammer as he strode towards the bed, carrying her.

‘Saving us both a lot of time,’ he told her drily as he deposited her with unexpected gentleness on the mattress before asking her, ‘Can you manage to get undressed or…?’

‘Yes, of course I can,’ Lisa responded in a flurry of mingled
indignation and flushed self-consciousness, adding defensively, ‘I… I just felt a little bit dizzy, that’s all… I’m all right now…’

He didn’t look totally convinced, and Lisa discovered that she was holding her breath as she watched him walk towards the bedroom door, unable to expel it until she was sure that he had walked through it and closed it behind him.

He really was the most extraordinary man, she decided ten minutes later as she lay in a huge bath of heavenly, deep hot water.

At Henry’s parents’ house both baths and hot water had been rationed and now it was sheer bliss to ease her aching limbs into the soothing heat, even if something about the steamy atmosphere of the bathroom did somehow seem to increase the dizzying effect that the whisky had had on her system. She felt, she recognised when she eventually reluctantly climbed out of the bath and wrapped herself in one of the huge, warm, fluffy towels on the heated rail, not just physically affected by the alcohol but mentally and emotionally affected by it as well, as though she was on some sort of slightly euphoric high, free of the burden of her normal, cautious, self-imposed restraints.

Shaking her head, she towelled herself dry, remembering only when she had finished that she had no night-clothes.

Shrugging fatalistically, she wrapped herself in another towel instead and padded towards the bed, discarding it as she climbed into the bed’s welcoming warmth.

The bedlinen was cotton and deliciously soft against her skin. It smelled faintly of lavender. She breathed in the scent blissfully as she closed her eyes. After the austere regime of Henry’s parents’ home this was luxury indeed.

She was just on the point of falling asleep when she heard the bedroom door open. In the half-light from the landing
she could see Oliver walking towards the bed carrying something.

As he reached the bed she struggled to sit up.

‘I’ve brought you a hot-water bottle,’ he told her. ‘Just in case you get cold during the night.’

His thoughtfulness surprised her. He was the last person she would have expected to show such consideration, such concern.

Tears filled her eyes as she took it from him, and on some impulse, which when she later tried to rationalise it she could only put down to the effects of the whisky on her system, she reached out and lifted her face towards his, kissing him.