Lilian Darcy - The Baby Made at Christmas

Still that mouth didn’t soften, but at least it kissed back. Oh, boy, did it kiss back! A rough, angry sort of kiss that came with hard arms around her and muscles tense with frustration and need. She guessed a kiss like this was trying to tell her something, but she didn’t buy it...even though she liked it, a lot.

You want a kiss, Lee, you’ll get a kiss, he seemed to be saying. You’ll get my hands on your butt and my tongue in your mouth and the taste and smell of me, and, yes, it’s damned good and we both know it.

He hadn’t shaved since he left Colorado, it felt like. The three-day growth of beard rasped at her skin as his mouth moved against hers, and of course it felt good. It felt fantastic. He smelled good, too—a mix of car freshener and salted nuts and snow. She put her whole heart into kissing him, threading her fingers through his hair, tilted her face to one side, letting her tongue sweep his mouth deeper and deeper, tangling with his. Any minute now, she’d start undressing him, and he’d get rid of her robe in about four seconds—it was already wide-open, and the belt was on the floor—and this would end the way it always did.

But no.

He kept on punishing her with his body, and she couldn’t get her hands down to start unfastening his shirt. Still, that didn’t matter for now. He pulled her naked hips against the soft rasp of his jeans and tightened his arm muscles until their strength almost hurt, and as far as she was concerned, all he was doing was proving her point, not his.

Admit it, Mac....

Admit what?

“No, Lee, hell!” he growled suddenly. “I won’t do this.” He removed the rough mouth with a last rasp of unshaved jaw across her cheek, grabbed her wrist and pulled her hand away from its sneaky caress of his face, then bracketed her hips and pushed.

He took the two front sections of her robe and lapped them across each other, his knuckles bumping her breasts. For a fraction of a second she thought he was going to let those knuckles soften and slow, brush them over her darkened nipples, push the robe open again and cup her, but no. Maybe that was just her hungry imagination, or maybe he’d simply taken hold of his willpower and changed his mind.

He bent and picked up the belt of the robe, passed it behind her, then knotted it in front, tight. “We’ve never had angry sex before, and now’s not the time to start.”

She stepped back. “Doesn’t have to be angry.” He looked so good, her heart was pounding, confusing her.

How happy am I that he’s here? Too happy. Scary happy. Don’t like it.

“Does when I am,” he said.

“So what’s going to get you to stop being angry?” She took a breath. “And what’s going to get you to leave?”

So I feel safe again. Safe from my heart.

The breath went out of him at this, a big whoosh of it, as if she’d punched him in the gut. He pivoted away from her and leaned on the bench. He looked very, very tired, suddenly, and she wondered how long the two thousand miles of driving had taken him. Nonstop it would have to be at least thirty hours. More. Two days, or three? Had he driven at night, or stopped at a motel?

“You want me to leave?” he growled.

She lifted her chin. “If you’re angry, yes. If we can’t talk, because all that happens is accusations flying back and forth, then yes, it’s best if you leave. Don’t you think?”

“I’m not leaving.”

“So you want us to talk things through?”

“What I want—” He stopped.

She waited.

“I’ve had some time to think, now. You didn’t give me that before.”

“You never asked for it, or showed the slightest indication that you needed it.”

“Because I was in shock. I was... This is huge, all of it. You don’t know—you can’t know... You were four or five days ahead of me with what was happening, and it was completely unfair of you to expect me to catch up right away. Maybe I didn’t say the right things, but I don’t think you did, either.” His eyes blazed darkly.

“I tried.”

“So did I.”

They glared at each other and he pulled at the collar of his shirt as if it was uncomfortable. His hair feathered against the blue fabric, and before she’d even thought about what she was doing, she reached up and tidied it for him so that it sat in neat waves, overlapping his collar by a good two inches. She loved his hair. She loved that he’d forgotten to fight her off, when really she had no right to touch him like this.

“So tell me about your thinking,” she said.

He took a big breath. “I want us to try and make a go of this, Lee.”

She didn’t even know what that meant. Make a go of what? Having sex? Hadn’t they done that already? Wasn’t that the whole problem?

They’d been far too stunningly successful at the whole point of having sex, and now her idea about what to do next didn’t remotely mesh with his. “What do you mean?” she said eventually. Pathetically.

“I’m moving east. Correction, I have moved.”

“You’ve—”

“Brought everything. Wasn’t much I really needed. I’ll unpack after we’ve had that coffee.”

“Unpack?”

He turned to her again. His mood had—how could you describe it?—changed color, or something. The black obsidian of anger held a gleam of wicked white light. He almost smiled, but not quite. “Didn’t you say this place had four bedrooms?”

Chapter Two

Three months earlier, Colorado

Maybe I should have gone home for Christmas.

The Narman family was in residence at their luxurious Aspen vacation home, which meant that caretaker Lee didn’t have the run of the house as she always did when they weren’t here. They were generous with this. “Of course you must use the whole place. That’s exactly what we want. For it to look lived in.”

She tried to be generous in return, going above and beyond what they expected of her, airing the huge rooms out whenever she could, and keeping everything scrupulously clean, preparing the house with fresh flowers and freshly made beds and handpicked groceries when they were due to arrive.

It was a cushy arrangement that she had at this place, with its ski-in ski-out access to the Aspen Highlands slopes, and she didn’t want it to change. The family usually stayed here only a few weeks a year.

This time, they were spending the full ten days from before Christmas until after New Year’s, and they’d brought a large party of family and guests, so that even in the cozy little janitor’s apartment on the lowest level of the house, which Lee retreated to when the family was around, she could hear the noise of partying and children, and the frequent heavy clump of boots in the ski room overhead.

She tried to ignore it. It was only six in the evening, so things probably weren’t going to quieten down anytime soon. The floorboards were thumping, there was yelling and laughter and music, doors banging, kids crying, the occasional shriek, the sound of water whooshing through the pipes that ran through the ceiling above her head.

Forget her book; she couldn’t concentrate on the story. Try some TV. She switched it on, but couldn’t find anything that really appealed. How about something to eat? She had deli pasta and sauce in the refrigerator, and had been thinking about a long soak in the tub, followed by the meal, a glass of wine, read her book while she ate.... So cozy and quiet.

“It’s not going to work,” she said out loud. Living on your own, you did tend to talk to yourself, sometimes. Nothing wrong with that.

But maybe there was something a little wrong with how disappointed she was about the disruption to her quiet, cozy evening.

Maybe I should have gone home, she thought again.

It was just under four weeks since Tucker had called. Tucker, her ex-fiancé, who was now engaged to her baby sister. He’d more or less asked Lee’s permission to be in love with Daisy, and while Lee appreciated the gesture and had not the remotest desire to still be engaged to Tucker herself, let alone married to him—it was more than ten years since they’d called it off, after all—there was a tiny part of her that felt...odd about it. Daisy and Tucker were getting married in March.