Julie Kenner - 12 Gifts for Christmas

“You delight in being cruel,” she said, her words too careful, as if they cost her. “But I am not going to stand here and be your punching bag. I wanted to tell you I was leaving you to your face, assuming I ever saw it again, and now I have.” She pulled in a shaky breath, and her mouth twisted slightly. “Goodbye, Rafi.”

He let her walk away from him. He was barely aware of the room around them, so inured was he to the trappings of the Qaderi wealth and consequence. The ancient, sumptuous tapestries that cascaded down the walls were lost on him; they served only to frame Lucy in reds and golds as she moved over the deep carpet, past the magnificent four-poster bed that rose like an edifice in the middle of the room.

He watched that mesmerizing sway of her hips, and could not help but admire the perfect hourglass lushness of her body, her voluptuous curves. She had mesmerized him back in Manchester, and she bewitched him now.

She was a wild magic, this woman, and he had lost everything because of her. His self-respect. The politically advantageous marriage he’d been plotting for years. His standing in his particular Alakkulian circle of high-ranking ministers and power brokers, all of whom had expected better from Rafi Qaderi than a shotgun wedding to a woman like her. In some parts of Alakkul, it might as well still be the twelfth century—and to those of his countrymen, some of whom graced the halls of power for all that they were hidebound, a cocktail waitress might as well be a scarlet-painted whore. Even his own staff had been appalled that he could fall so low.

She had ruined him. But the greater sin was that he had let her.

“I appreciate the high drama of this performance, Lucy, I truly do.” He did not bother to raise his voice. She stopped walking, though she did not turn around. “But it is wasted on me. I fly back to Germany in the morning.” He shook his head. “Assuming your great emergency does not conveniently strike in the dark of night, of course.”

She did turn then. He had the strangest notion that she was someone else for a moment—the woman she was pretending to be, all elegance and affront, staring at him from across the lavish room as if he had gravely disappointed her. Again. It was no doubt the incongruity that made him feel something perilously close to shame.

“I am not playing games, Rafi.” Her voice was quiet, but he heard the faint tremor in it.

Why should that affect him? And yet something moved through him, acid and heavy, that felt too much like regret.

“My flight to Manchester leaves tomorrow,” she said, still in that cool, detached tone. “I’ve hired a car to pick me up and take me to the airport in the city. Soon it will be as if I was never here at all.”

“It is far too late for that, much as we both might wish it otherwise,” he said, and he almost did regret the coldness of his tone and the way she visibly steeled herself against it, as if she expected nothing more from him. “But I have no intention of letting you go, Lucy.”

“You have no choice—” she began, that hectic color working over her pale skin again, and he should not have taken such satisfaction in that.

“There will be no separation, no divorce, no hint of scandal at all,” he said softly, watching her brace herself against each word. “This is the marriage you wanted, Lucy. The one you worked so hard to achieve. I suggest you enjoy it. We are both stuck in it for the rest of our lives.”

She only stared at him for a moment, her expression unreadable, and then she turned and left the room.

LUCY settled herself in the small sitting room off the master suite later that evening, fighting to get her riotous emotions under control. She only had to make it through this one night, she reminded herself, and in the morning she would get on that flight and put all of this—this painful, impossible chapter of her life—behind her. She couldn’t wait. She curled up on her favorite settee, and let her thoughts run wild as she looked out at the thick, dark night that had fallen outside.

Rafi was her husband, and there was no denying that he was a powerful man—but he was not the god she’d believed him to be once upon a time, not by a long shot. If she wanted to leave him, to divorce him—and she did, she told herself fiercely, of course she did—then she would do so. He could not control her. He could not—

“What is this?” His voice was dry, amused. “A strategic retreat?”

Lucy stiffened. She turned to look at Rafi as he moved into the room in that low, confident way of his. He had changed and showered; he smelled of the scented soap he preferred and his dark black hair gleamed. He’d traded his perfect suit for dark trousers and a simple long-sleeved shirt that showcased his impossibly breathtaking physique. He was, quite simply, the most beautiful man she had ever known.

Lucy remembered, suddenly, the first time she’d seen him. She’d been covering a friend’s shift at the Manchester nightclub where she worked, and she’d been dead on her feet. Oh, she’d smiled and flirted with the punters by rote, but she’d been counting down the minutes to closing time. She hadn’t seen him come in; she’d only noted the new group of men at one of her tables. Corporate swells, from the look of them, she’d judged, and she’d plastered on her best smile.

Rafi had been sprawled across the banquette, careless and nearly regal in his indolence. She’d noticed that confidence first. And then he’d glanced up at her, and everything had stopped. The noise of the crowd, the music, the boisterous sounds of his friends. All gone. There had only been that arrested look in his thundercloud gaze, and that faintly dazed expression on his harshly masculine, impossibly beautiful face as they’d locked eyes. And that sweet, addictive pulse, long and low and insistent, in her blood. Her throat. Between her legs.

She’d asked for his drink order and lost herself, then and there.

It was no different now, Lucy realized helplessly. She jerked her gaze away from his body, wishing her own did not ready itself for him so quickly, so thoughtlessly. As if nothing had happened between them at all. As if none of it mattered.

“It’s almost Christmas,” she said instead of responding to him. She pulled the wrap she wore tighter around her, and looked out the window instead of at him. “Only a few days to go now.”

“That generally happens around this time of year,” he agreed, though she told herself his voice was not as cold as it had been before. “It is unavoidable, apparently.”

Lucy heard the derision in his voice, and thought, not for the first time, how little she knew this man who had changed the whole of her life. That should not have made her feel too big for her own skin, and yet it did.

“I love Christmas,” she said softly. She sensed more than saw him drop into the chair closest to her, and then he stretched out his long legs and she could scarcely avoid them. Even so, she kept her eyes trained on her own lap. “Growing up, there wasn’t any money for gifts, so on Christmas morning Mum would tell us stories instead. About how we would be princesses when we were older, how we’d never be cold again and how we would eat whatever we liked in golden palaces, bathed in sun and laughter.” She smiled. “That was my favorite part. Even when there were gifts, I preferred the stories. I used to lie by the fire and imagine they all came true.”

She didn’t know why she’d told him that. Surely she should have learned better by now. He was not at all what she wanted him to be, and she could not understand why she insisted on testing that theory. It never ended well.

“I suppose that your story did come true,” he said after a moment, and there was an odd note in his voice. She looked up and found herself snared in his dark gaze. She caught her breath. He waved a hand at the room surrounding them, the paintings on the walls, the lavish furnishings. But then his cruel mouth crooked into that smirk she recognized too well, and whatever warmth she’d started to feel disappeared. “How enterprising of you.”