said it was a bad idea, too! ‘As you said, the food is getting cold, so I suggest that for now we just sit down and eat and think about this again later?’ He moved to pointedly pull back one of the chairs for her to sit down.
Mac regarded him quizzically as she sat. ‘You really do like having your own way, don’t you?’
‘Almost as much as you enjoy doing the exact opposite of what you know I want,’ Jonas acknowledged with a quick smile as he sat down opposite her before picking up the bottle of wine and deftly opening it.
Mac chuckled softly. ‘Interesting.’
‘Irritating for the main part, actually,’ Jonas admitted as he poured the wine into their glasses. He raised his own glass and made a toast. ‘To—hopefully—our first indigestion-free meal together!’
Mac raised her glass and touched it gently against the side of Jonas’s. ‘To an indigestion-free meal!’ she echoed huskily, not too sure about the ‘first’ part of the toast. It implied there might be other meals to come, and, as Mac knew only too well, she and Jonas always ended up arguing if they spent any length of time together.
Well…almost always. The times when they didn’t argue were even more disturbing…
‘You really do like Christmas, don’t you?’
Mac looked up from helping herself to some of the food in the cartons to see Jonas was looking at her brightly decked Christmas tree. ‘I would have said, doesn’t everyone?’ she replied. ‘But I already know that you don’t.’
‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ Jonas said.
‘No?’ Mac eyed him interestedly.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t dislike Christmas, Mac, it’s just a time I remember when my parents were forced to spend a couple of days in each other’s company, with the result they usually ended up having one almighty slanging match before the holiday was over. As my grandmother died on Christmas Eve, Joseph wasn’t particularly into celebrating it, either.’
‘What about your cousin Amy and her family?’
‘Amy always goes away with her partner for Christmas, and I’m not close to my uncle and aunt. What can I say?’ he drawled at Mac’s dismayed expression. ‘We’re a dysfunctional family.’
It sounded awful to Mac when she thought of her own happy childhood, and the wonderful memories she had of family Christmases, both in the distant past and more recently. ‘Why did you call your grandfather Joseph?’
Jonas gave a humourless smile. ‘Calling out “Granddad” on a building site didn’t go down too well with him, so it became a habit to call him by his first name.’
Looking at Jonas now, so suave, so obviously wealthy from the car he drove and the penthouse apartment he lived in, it was difficult to envision him as a rough and tough teenager working on a building site.
Yet there were those calluses Mac had noticed on his palms three days ago. And there was a ripcord strength about Jonas that didn’t look as if it came solely from working out in a gym. Wealthy or not, underneath all that suave sophistication, she realised he was still capable of being every bit as rough and tough as he had been as a teenager.
‘What?’ Jonas paused in eating his food to look across at her questioningly.
Mac shrugged. ‘I was just thinking that maybe you should think about starting your own Christmas traditions.’
From the way Mac had been looking at him so searchingly Jonas was pretty sure that hadn’t been what she had been thinking at all. Although quite what she had been thinking, he had no idea.
She was still something of an enigma to him, he recognised ruefully. There was no sophisticated game-playing with Mac. No artifice. As she had so emphatically told him, what you saw was what you got. And what Jonas saw he wanted very badly indeed…
He sighed. ‘It’s never seemed worth the bother when I only have myself to think about.’
Mac looked at him assessingly. ‘I’m taking a bet that you usually go away for Christmas. Somewhere hot,’ she qualified. ‘Golden sandy beaches where you can sunbathe, and there are waiters to bring you tall drinks with exotic fruit and umbrellas in them. Somewhere you can forget it even is Christmas,’ she teased.
‘You would win your bet,’ Jonas acknowledged with a smile.
She shook her head. ‘I can’t imagine ever going away for Christmas.’
Neither could Jonas when he could clearly see the distaste on Mac’s face. ‘What do you and your family do over Christmas?’ he asked.
Those beautiful smoky grey eyes glowed. ‘Nowadays we all converge on my parents’ house in a little village called Tulnerton in Devon. My mother’s parents, several aged aunts. All the presents are placed under the tree, and Christmas Eve we all have a family meal and then attend Midnight Mass at the local church together. When we get back Mum and I usually put the turkey in the oven so that it cooks slowly overnight and the house is full of the smells of it cooking in the morning when we sit down to open our presents. When I was younger, that sometimes happened as early as five o’clock in the morning,’ she recalled wistfully. ‘Nowadays it’s usually about nine o’clock, after we’ve checked on the turkey and everyone has a cup of tea.’
Jonas’s mouth twisted. ‘The perfect Christmas indeed.’
Mac eyed him ruefully. ‘To me it is, yes.’
Jonas reached out and placed his hand over hers as it rested on the tabletop. ‘I wasn’t mocking you, Mac,’ he said gruffly.
‘No?’
Strangely enough, no…It was all too easy for Jonas to envisage the Christmas Mac described so warmly. The sort of Christmas that many families strived for and never actually experienced. The sort of Christmas Jonas had never had. And never would have.
‘There are no arguments?’ he prompted.
Her eyes glowed with laughter. ‘Usually only over who’s going to pull the wishbone after we’ve eaten our Christmas lunch!’
His fingers curled about hers. ‘It sounds wonderful.’
Mac was very aware of the air of intimacy that now surrounded the two of them. But it was a different type of intimacy from a physical one. This intimacy was warm and enveloping. Dangerous…
She removed her hand purposefully from beneath Jonas’s to pick up her fork. ‘I’m sure there must have been arguments; you can’t put eight or ten disparate people in a house together for four or five days without there being the odd disagreement. I’ve obviously just chosen to forget them.’ She grimaced.
Jonas looked across at her with enigmatic blue eyes. ‘You don’t have to make excuses for your own happy childhood, Mac.’
‘I wasn’t—’
‘Weren’t you?’ he rasped.
Yes, she supposed she had been. Because Jonas’s childhood had borne absolutely no resemblance to her own. Because, although he wouldn’t thank her for it in the
