12 Gifts for Christmas Read online

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

  CHAPTER THREE

  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.”

  “Not at all,” she said, squaring her shoulders against that dry, insinuating tone. Meeting his eyes as if he had no power to hurt her, when they both knew better. But what else did she have? What else could she do? “In the stories my mother told me, the handsome man who inevitably swept me away from my former life was kind.”

  His dark gray eyes gleamed, but she still did not look away. Whole hours could have passed. Days. And still he gazed upon her as if he were reading into the most shadowed corners of her soul. Lucy was far too afraid of what he might find there.

  Restless and something else, something she was afraid to name, she got to her feet and moved away from him. Distance was good, she thought. Safer. She went and stood by the fire that crackled invitingly in the grate, and welcomed the heat of the flames against her skin. Better to be burned by fire than by Rafi. Burns from a flame healed. The kind of damage Rafi inflicted lasted forever.

  “I don’t understand you,” he said quietly, in that cold way of his that sliced into her and made her bones weak. “You play the part of the victim so beautifully, but we both know you are no such thing. And yet you never drop the act, not even when we’re alone.”

  It was too much. This never-ending assault. Why had she thought that summoning him here would be better than surviving somehow the long insult of his absence? What could she have been thinking?

  She whirled to face him, a storm inside of her, building by the moment and tearing her apart.

  “What do you want from me, Rafi?” she begged him. She forgot about pride, about shame. She searched his face, her hands open in supplication. “How long do you plan to punish me? I hardly became pregnant on my own, did I?”

  He rose to his feet then, his eyes stark, his mouth a tight line. She thought he paled.

  “You dare to throw that lie at me?” he asked, his voice the barest thread of sound. “Now? After you have been exposed?”

  “Exposed?” She shook her head, reeling, her heart pounding. She felt sick. “Is that what you call it?”

  “The word I prefer is trapped,” Rafi growled, advancing on her. He towered over her, his eyes black. Condemning. “Your claims of pregnancy, which I, a man of honor, could only address in one way. Followed by your claims of a conveniently timed miscarriage, barely a month after the wedding. And this after I had proclaimed your innocence, your innate goodness, to the whole of my country. How much of a fool do you take me for, Lucy?”

  She stared at him in horror.

  “Is that who you think I am?” she asked, stunned. Horrifed.

  “That is exactly who you are,” he retorted.

  Which made him far less of a fool than she was, she realized, her stomach lurching. This, finally, explained the way he’d treated her for these long months. He despised her. Believed her to be the worst kind of woman.

  And she was the idiot who was still in love with him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  LUCY stared at him, looking stricken. As if he’d wounded her, deeply and unfairly. Rafi bit back a curse. How did she do that? How could she act as if the truth were a weapon wielded against her?

  She is good at what she does, his aide, Safir, had said to him months ago when Rafi had uncharacteristically let some of his anguish at her betrayal slip out. She has made it her life’s work, he’d said.

  She really was good at it, Rafi thought. She had lied her way into what was, for her, a spectacular marriage. He was the one who had to suffer the consequences.

  “So that’s why you disappeared,” she sa
id after a long moment. “You think I lied about the baby and the miscarriage.” Her brown eyes were wide with distress, and one delicate hand hovered near her throat. This close, he could smell her unique, intoxicating scent. The faintest hint of jasmine, the suggestion of her warmth. He longed to haul her into his arms, to lose himself in her as he had before. “That’s why this is the first time I’ve seen you in more than three months.”

  “Despite all evidence to the contrary,” he said quietly, deliberately, holding her gaze with his, “I did not want to suspect you of this. I wanted to believe you were exactly who you claimed to be. A woman as swept away by what happened between us as I was.”

  It hurt him to admit that, but it was true. It was just as every one had warned him, though he had been so determined not to believe it in the beginning. But what he had never admitted was that there was some part of him that had been relieved—because if she were that scheming, that grasping, it absolved him of responsibility, didn’t it? Every man had a weakness, even him. And he would spend the rest of his life coming to terms with what his own weakness had wrought.

  “You wanted to believe it,” she said softly, her eyes moving over his face as if she searched for something. Her lips trembled slightly as if she fought off some great emotion. “But you did not.”

  “My investigator found out quickly enough that you weren’t supposed to be working at the club that night,” Rafi said. “The only question is, how did you know I would be there? Did you target me specifically, or were you simply casting a wide net? I must commend you, Lucy. I was completely taken in.”

  He let out a hollow laugh, but he could not seem to help the way he drifted closer to her, as if compelled. She did not move away.

  “Your investigator,” she said. She swallowed. “You mean your aide. Safir.”

  “He is a loyal employee,” Rafi said darkly. “Far better than I deserve. He dared to tell me the truth about you when I refused to see the evidence before me.”

  “Let me guess,” she said in a tone he could not quite read—one both bitter and very nearly amused, at odds with the turmoil in her coffee-colored eyes. “A cocktail waitress must be in want of a wealthy husband, and any one will do.”

  Ignoring her words, he reached out and traced the line of her collarbone, a hard satisfaction moving through him when she shivered in response. She pulled her wrap tighter around her as if she were cold, but he knew better. Whatever her plans, whatever her schemes, she could not have been prepared for this fire that raged between them—this wild, maddening rush.

  He had stayed away because he could not keep his hands off of her when he was near her. She was temptation incarnate. Tonight, with her blond curls piled on her head, she looked beautiful, and all he could think about was tasting the elegant line of her neck. He wanted to peel the layers of her clothing from her magnificent body and bury himself within her, again and again and again. When he touched her, he didn’t care that he was Rafi Qaderi and she was nobody. He didn’t care that she had altered the course of his life.

  He only wanted her. Here, now.

  And this close to her, he could not think of a single reason why that was a bad idea.

  “You have bewitched me,” he muttered harshly in his own language, well aware she would not understand the words. And then, yielding to the very same urge that had brought them here in the first place, he took her mouth with his.

  Rafi’s kiss was hot, slick.

  Perfect.

  She should push him away. She should denounce him and the horrible things he thought about her. She should tell him the truth.

  But Lucy could not bring herself to do any of those things. She was awash in sensation. The way he pulled her into his arms, pressing her against the enticing wall of his chest. The way he angled his head for a better fit, tasting her, teasing her, making her whole body hum with approval and need.

  She loved him.

  It was that simple. That disastrous. She loved him and he hated her, just as she would no doubt hate herself when this was over—when she was left to reflect on the fact that she was so weak, so easy, that she could listen to him say such ugly things about her and then let him kiss her as if he had every right.

  But it had been so long. And oh, how she ached for him. For this. All the long, lonely days and nights seemed to disappear like smoke. All the agony, the pain and the terrible truth of what had happened to her seemed less bright, less vicious, when he kissed her like this.

  As if he felt the same wild fire, the same mad connection.

  As if he were as helpless to control it as she was.

  As if he’d missed her, missed this, too.

  It was that last thought that finally penetrated the fog and forced Lucy to take a step back. One hand flew to her mouth and she could only stare at him while her body objected to the space she’d put between them. Her breasts felt too heavy, too full. Her heart shuddered against her ribs. And low in her belly, she ached. Burned.

  But he hadn’t missed her, had he. He had believed whatever poisonous things Safir had told him. He would have been content to stay away on his endless business trips forever—would have done so, in fact, had she not claimed she needed him here, that it was an emergency. He’d had no intention of ending these months of punishment. He’d had no intention of coming back at all.

  “Do you think you can just kiss me and it will be as if none of this ever happened?” she asked. She wanted to sound tough, strong, but her voice was barely a whisper.

  “There is no pretending it didn’t happen,” he said darkly. His gaze was trained on her mouth and she could not help the surge of heat within her. “But why not celebrate the one thing we ever did well? Surely we should take our compensations where we can. We have so little else.”

  “We have nothing,” she said, surprised at her own voice. How clear it was. How little it shook. “You will leave tomorrow morning and who knows when you’ll be back. In six months? A year?” She tossed her head. “You can’t abandon me with so little regard for me and then expect me to fall into your bed at a moment’s notice!”

  “Expect? No.” His fingers brushed her cheek, traced the shape of her mouth. “But why deny this passion when we are both in the same room?”

  “Because it is the biggest lie of all!” Lucy cried. She jerked her head from his clever fingers and moved away from him, toward the door. “And it doesn’t matter, anyway. This time, I’m the one leaving, and I won’t be back at all. You can count on it.”

  “Lucy …” He said her name but she didn’t know if it was to plead with her or to curse her.

  Not that it made a difference, she told herself fiercely. She needed only to survive the night. In the morning Rafi would be gone, she would be on a one-way flight back to reality and she would finally be able to breathe again.

  She just had to make it through the night.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WHEN Lucy woke the next morning, tucked away in one of the lesser bedrooms—behind a locked door to be safe as much from herself as from him—the world outside her window was pure white.

  Snow fell inexorably from above, just as it must have been falling throughout the night because the usually breathtaking view was entirely obscured. She could not see six feet from her window, much less into the great valley below.

  There was a terrible sinking sensation in her belly and a quick check of her messages confirmed her fears. Her car could not make it through the snow and all the flights had been canceled.

  She wasn’t going anywhere. And neither was Rafi.

  She dressed quickly and then made her way through the house. Even today, she was unable to walk through the grand halls without marveling at the Qaderis’ power, their grace and consequence. It was evident in the richly appointed rooms, the banquet halls, even the smallest vase upon an incidental table—everything was clearly precious. Ancient. Part of the great sweep of Alakkul’s history.

  Except for her. She was nothing but the cocktail waitress whom R
afi believed had trapped him into marriage.

  It was no wonder her stomach twisted when she walked into the breakfast room and found him sitting there, lounging back in one of the elegant chairs with a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and his brooding gaze directed out the windows.

  The fire crackling away in the nearby fireplace was nothing next to the heat of his gray eyes when he turned them on her. Lucy froze.

  “You’re still here,” she said stupidly even though she’d known he would be. Was she distraught? Or relieved?

  He only gestured toward the window and the snow that continued to fall, silent and impassable. The roads in these mountains were treacherous at the best of times; it would be days before they’d be cleared, and then only once the snow stopped falling.

  But her mind reeled away from what that must mean. For both of them.

  It was almost funny, she thought from some kind of distance, her gaze trapped in his far darker one. She’d gone to so much trouble to get him here and now that he’d be stuck here for some time—now that they were both stuck here—she wanted no part of it.

  “It looks as if your wish has come true,” he said with an edge in his voice, as if he blamed her for the snowfall on top of everything else. “I will be here for Christmas after all. You must be thrilled.”

  Thrilled, Lucy thought as her heart fluttered wildly and her throat clenched tightly, was not at all how she would describe her feelings. She swallowed and told herself to pull it together. He lounged there at the end of the table, looking impossibly big and dangerous, but she assured herself it was just nerves and nothing else that swelled and contracted within her, sharp and rhythmic, making it hard to breathe.

  “Christmas is in three days,” she said. She forced a bland smile. “Anything can happen.”

  It was the longest day of his life.

  Rafi found himself in the old library later that afternoon, swirling his drink in a crystal tumbler as he scowled into the fireplace. He felt restless. Hunted. As if she were right there with him, crowding him. An itch he could not reach, that would not leave him be.