His Christmas Acquisition (5 page)

‘I’m sure he’ll think about it. Just stop nagging him, Jess!’ Jamie was pretty sure that she could convince Ryan to ignore
her sister’s rantings. He was a guy who was in great demand. The last thing he would want to do would be to sit around a small pine table in a kitchen and dine on a turkey reluctantly cooked by his secretary. Just the thought of it made her shiver in nervous apprehension.

‘It’s wonderful the way you can answer on my behalf.’ Ryan grinned at Jamie, who scowled back at him. ‘It’s probably why we work so well together. You know just when to read my mind.’

‘Ha-ha. Very funny.’

‘But she’s right.’ He stood up and glanced at Jessica. ‘I’ll think about it and let Jamie know.’

‘Or you could let me know. I’ll give you my mobile number and you can get in touch any time at all. No need to go through Jamie.’

He left five minutes later and Jamie sagged. The peace of having her sister upstairs safely in bed was greatly diminished by the nasty tangle of thoughts playing in her mind.

Not only had Ryan found out more about her in the space of an hour than he had in eighteen months, but she was now facing the alarming prospect that, having wedged his foot through the door, it would be impossible to get him to remove it.

Everything that had always been so straightforward had now been turned on its head.

And what if the man decided to descend on them for Christmas lunch?

Apprehension sizzled in her and, alongside that very natural apprehension, something else, something even more worrying, something that closely resembled … anticipation.

C
HRISTMAS’S
rapid approach brought a temporary lull in the usual relentless work-ethic. Ryan Sheppard made a very good Christmas boss. He entered into the spirit of things by personally supervising the decorations and cracking open champagne at six every evening for whoever happened to be around in the countdown to the big day. Extra-long lunch hours shopping were tactfully overlooked. On Christmas Eve, work was due to stop at twelve and the rest of the day given over to the Secret Santa gift exchanges and an elaborate buffet lunch which would be prepared by Ryan’s caterers.

On the home front, Jamie was stoically putting up with a sister who had decided to throw herself into the party season with gay abandon. She tagged along to all the Christmas parties to which Jamie had been invited, flirted outrageously with every halfway decent-looking bachelor, and in the space of a week and a half collected more phone numbers than Jamie had in her address book. There was, ominously, no mention of Greg. If they were in contact, it certainly wasn’t via the landline. Jamie had stopped asking because the response of tear-filled eyes, followed by an angry sermon about the valuable space for which she was still searching, was just too much of a headache.

A tree had been erected and Jessica had enthusiastically
begun helping with the lights, but like a child, had become bored after fifteen minutes, leaving Jamie to complete the task. Clothes were left strewn in unlikely places and were retrieved with an air of self-sacrifice whenever Jamie happened to mention the state of the house. The consequence of this was that Jamie’s peaceful existence was now a round-the-clock chore of tidying up behind her sister and nagging.

Of course, Jamie knew that she would have to sit her sister down and insist on knowing when she intended to return to Scotland, but like a coward she hid behind the Christmas chaos and decided to shelve all delicate discussions until Boxing Day at the very least.

There was also the hurdle of Christmas day to get through. Ryan had, totally unexpectedly, accepted Jessica’s foolish invitation to lunch and, with the prospect of three people cutting into a turkey that would be way too big, Jamie had invited several other members of staff to come along if they weren’t doing anything.

Three guys from the software department had taken her up on the invitation, as well as a couple of her girlfriends whom she had met at the gym when she had first arrived in London.

Jamie anticipated an awkward lunch, but when she mentioned that to her sister, Jessica had smiled brightly and assured her that there was no need to worry.

‘I’m a party animal!’ she had announced. ‘I can make any gathering go with a bang, and I’ve got loads of party hats and crackers and stuff. It’ll be a blast! So much better than last year, which was a deadly meal round at the in-laws’. I can’t wait to fill Greg in when the last guest leaves.’

‘I’m surprised you even care what he thinks,’ Jamie had said and was vaguely reassured when her sister had gone bright red.

Not that she had dwelled on that for any length of time.
Most of her mind for the past week had been taken up with the prospect of Ryan descending on her house for Christmas lunch.

And now the day had finally arrived. It came with dark, leaden skies and a general feeling of anticlimax; although some snow had been forecast, it appeared to be in the process of falling everywhere else but in London.

From downstairs came the thud of music, a compilation of songs which Jessica had prepared during her spare time. Peace seemed a distant dream. At eight-thirty, Jamie had thoroughly cleaned the bathroom, which had been taken over by her sister in a series of undercover assaults, so that each day slightly more appeared on the shelf and in the cabinet.

Now, sitting and staring at her reflection in the mirror, Jamie wondered how much longer she would be able to cope with a very hyper Jessica.

Then she thought about her outfit: a long-sleeved black dress that, she knew, would look drab against the peacock-blue of Jessica’s mini skirt and her high wedges that would escalate her height to six feet.

By the time the first guest arrived, Jamie was already settling into her role of background assistant to her life-and-soul-of-the-party sister.

Every nerve in her body was tuned to the sound of the doorbell, but when Ryan eventually appeared, she was in the kitchen, as it happened, doing various things with the meal. Outside alcohol was steadily being consumed and Jessica was flirting, dancing and enjoying the limelight, even though the guys concerned were the sort of highly intelligent eccentrics she would ordinarily have dismissed as complete nerds.

The sound of his voice behind her, lazy and amused, zapped her like a bolt of live electricity and she leapt to her
feet and spun around, having been peering worriedly into the oven.

‘Well,’ he drawled, walking into the kitchen and peering underneath lids at the food sitting on the counter, ‘looks like the party’s going with a swing.’

‘You’re here.’

‘Did you think that I wasn’t going to turn up?’ Since the last time he had seen her in jeans and a tee-shirt, he had found himself doing quite a bit of thinking about her. As expected, she had mentioned nothing about her sister when she had been at work, which didn’t mean that their working relationship had remained the same. It hadn’t. Something subtle had altered, although he had a feeling that that just applied to him. She had been as efficient, as distant and as perfectly polite as ever.

‘I’m nothing if not one-hundred-percent reliable.’ He held out a carrier bag. ‘Champagne.’

Flustered, she kept her eyes firmly on his face, deliberately avoiding the muscular legs encased in pair of black trousers and the way those top two undone buttons of his cream shirt exposed the shadow of fine, dark hair.

‘Thanks.’ She reached out for the carrier bag and was startled when from behind his back he produced a small gift-wrapped box. ‘What’s this?’

‘A present.’

‘I’m still working my way through the bottle of perfume you gave me last year.’ She wiped her hands and then began opening the present.

Her mouth went dry. She had been privy to quite a few of his gifts to women. They ranged from extravagant bouquets of flowers to jewellery to trips to health spas. This, however, was nothing like that. In the small box was an antique butterfly brooch and she picked it up, held it up to the light
and then set it back down in its bed of tissue paper before raising her eyes to his.

‘You bought me a butterfly,’ she whispered.

‘I noticed that you had a few on your mantelpiece in the sitting room. I guessed you collect them. I found this one at an antique shop in Spitalfields.’

‘It’s beautiful, but I can’t accept it.’ She thrust it at him and turned away, her face burning.

‘Why not?’

‘Because … because …’

‘Because you don’t collect them?’

‘I do, but …’

‘But it’s yet another of those secrets of yours that you’d rather I knew nothing about?’

‘It just isn’t appropriate,’ Jamie told him stiffly. In her head, she pictured him roaming through a market, chancing upon the one thing he knew would appeal to her, handing over not a great deal of cash for it, but it never took much to win someone over. Except, she wasn’t on the market to be won over. Nor was he on the market for doing anything but what came naturally to him—thinking outside the box. It was why he was such a tremendous success in his field.

‘Okay, but you know that it’s an insult to return a gift.’ Ryan shrugged. ‘I’m in your house. Consider it a small token of gratitude for rescuing a lonely soul from wandering the streets of London on Christmas day.’

‘Oh, please.’ Her breathing was shallow and she was painfully conscious of the fact that whilst outside the music was blaring, probably getting on the neighbours’ nerves, inside the kitchen it was just the two of them locked in a strange intimacy that terrified her.

This was not what she wanted. She urgently reminded herself of Greg and her foolish love-sick infatuation with
him before Jessica had arrived on the scene and stolen his heart.

But to insist on returning the brooch would risk making just too big a deal of it. It would alert him to the fact that for some reason his gesture bothered her.

‘I haven’t got anything for you,’ she said uncomfortably.

‘I’ll live with that. Why butterflies?’

‘My father was keen on them,’ Jamie said awkwardly as another piece of information left her and travelled across to him. ‘Mum told us a lot about him. He loved to travel. He particularly loved to travel to study insects, and out of all the insects butterflies interested him most. He liked the fact that there were so many different varieties of them and they came in so many different colours and shapes and sizes. Mum said that he figured they were a lot more interesting than the human species.’

Her voice and expression had softened as she lost herself in a memory that hadn’t surfaced for years. ‘So I started collecting them when I was a kid. I just keep the better ones on show, but I have a box upstairs full of silly plastic ones I had when I was growing up.’ A sudden blast of music hit her as the kitchen door was pushed open and the moment of crazy reminiscing was lost with the appearance of Jessica, now wearing a shiny party hat and with her arm around one of the computer geeks, who looked thrilled to death with the leggy blonde clinging to him.

‘Enjoy the attention, buddy.’ Ryan grinned at his top software-specialist. ‘But bear in mind the lady’s married.’

Outside, the party of six guests had swelled to ten. Jessica had asked a couple of others ‘to liven things up’. Bottles of wine were ranged on the sideboard in the living room and the chairs had been cleared away to create a dance floor of sorts.

Walking into the room was like walking into a disco, but
one where the decor was comprised of a Christmas tree in the corner and random decorations strung along the walls. In the centre of it all, Jessica was living up to her reputation as a party animal.

Swaying to the music with a drink in one hand and her eyes half-closed, she was the peacock, proud of her stupendous figure, which outranked even those of the gym queens at the side, and the cynosure of all male eyes.

When the beat went from fast to slow, Jamie looked away as Jessica draped herself over Ryan.

So what else had she expected? That he would actually be able to resist the allure of an available woman? A dull ache began in her head. She mingled and chatted and even halfheartedly danced with her colleague Robbie who charmed her with an enthusiastic conversation about something he was working on at the moment, something guaranteed to be bigger and better than anything else on the market.

While Ryan danced on with Jessica.

Several of the neighbours began popping in, drawn by the music. On either side, they were young, professional couples whom Jamie had glimpsed in passing. Now, she realised that they were people with whom she could easily become friendly, and the distraction was a blessing. It took her out of the living room and into the kitchen, where they congregated and compared notes on the neighbourhood.

She wasn’t too sure how the matter of eating was going to be achieved. As expected, the bulk of the preparations had been left to her while her sister had stalked ineffectively around the kitchen with a glass of wine in her hand, sighing and making useless suggestions about what could be done to speed up the whole process. ‘Dump the lot and order in a Chinese’, had been one of her more ridiculous offerings, especially considering she had been the one to insist on the full turkey extravaganza.

Flushed from the heat in the kitchen, and nursing enough low-level resentment to sink a small ship, Jamie was fetching the wretched turkey out of the oven when Ryan’s voice behind her nearly made her drop the hapless bird.

‘You need a hand.’

Jamie carefully deposited the aluminium baking dish on the counter and glanced across to him.

‘I’m fine. Thank you.’

‘Just stating the obvious here, but martyrs aren’t known to be the happiest people on the face of the earth.’

‘I’m not being a martyr!’ She turned to look at him, hacked off and grim. ‘I was coerced into doing …
this.
’ A sweeping gesture encompassed the kitchen, which looked as though it had been the target of a small explosion. ‘So I’m doing it.’

‘Exactly—you’re being a martyr. If you didn’t want to do all …
this—
’ he mirrored her sweeping gesture ‘—then you shouldn’t have.’

‘Do you have any idea what my sister’s like when she doesn’t manage to get her own way?’ Jamie cried with a hint of hysteria in her voice. ‘Oh, no, of course you don’t, because
you
haven’t had years of her! Because
you
are only being shown the smiling, sexy side that leaves men breathless and panting.’

‘My breathing’s perfectly normal.’ He rescued the potatoes and began searching around for other dishes, into which he began piling the food. ‘Look, why don’t you go and drag your sister in here and force her to give you a helping hand?’

Jamie opened her mouth to tell him just how silly his suggestion was—because Jessica never, but
never
, did anything she didn’t want to do—and instead sighed wryly.

‘That would come under the heading of “mission impossible”.’

‘In that case, I’m helping, whether you like it or not.’

‘You’re my boss. You’re not supposed to be in here helping.’

‘You’re right, I am your boss—you are therefore obliged to do whatever I ask.’

Jamie couldn’t help it. She went bright red at the unintended innuendo and was mortified when Ryan burst out laughing.

‘Within reason, of course …’ He raised his eyebrows in amusement. ‘Although I gather from your sister that there wouldn’t be any outraged boyfriend threatening to break my kneecaps if I decided to push the point …’

He was still grinning.
Laughing
at her. She turned away abruptly, knowing that the back of her neck was giveaway-red and that her hands were shaking as she poured gravy into the gravy boat and busied herself with the roast potatoes.