shook her head with a smile ‘Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong! There’s a specialist paint shop right in Winchester—we need look no further than there!’
We.
Her easy use of the word caused Luke a moment of chilly disquiet, until he silently chided himself for his out-and-out arrogance. Was he now worried that Holly was getting possessive, or passionate, about him? When there had been nothing in his behaviour—not a word nor a gesture—which she could have interpreted or misinterpreted as some kind of come-on.
Holly saw the way his shoulders stiffened, and she could sense immediately what he was thinking. Her fingers crept up to cover her mouth apologetically. ‘I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to be presumptuous.’
He shook his head. ‘You weren’t being presumptuous. And we’ll both go into Winchester to choose your paint.’ After all, he was the one who was paying for them’
‘But aren’t you...?’ She found that her words were tripping over themselves, as though they couldn’t quite decide in what order to leave her mouth. ‘Wouldn’t you...?’
He looked into her widened green eyes with something approaching amusement. ‘Wouldn’t I what, Holly?’
‘Wouldn’t you rather be doing something else?’
He most certainly would.
Her words created such a shockingly graphic image in his mind that Luke briefly closed his eyes in despair. It was simply sexual attraction, he told himself over and over again, as if repetition would make it more believable. Nothing more than that—a combustive hormonal reaction which she had provoked in him, and which would fade as inevitably as the sunlight would fade from the afternoon sky. Was she aware of it, too? he wondered. Did it pulse and hum around her, too—the feeling almost palpable?
His mistake had been to take her into his house in the first place. To rush in playing the Good Samaritan, trying to fool himself into minimising the potency of the attraction he felt towards her—as if, by rationalising it, it would go away of its own accord.
Because it wasn’t conveniently disappearing, and he somehow doubted that it would—unless you took sexual attraction through to its natural conclusion, which he had no intention of doing. For how could it disappear, if she continued to haunt him with those emerald eyes and that pale skin, and the careless cascade of coppery curls?
Maybe she was destined to always be one of those ‘if only’ women—if only he’d met her when he’d been in that sowing wild oats stage of his life. Holly Lovelace was enchantingly beautiful with her wild, artistic looks—great for a tempestuous affair, but...
The sooner she was set up in her newly decorated shop and out of his life, the better—and, just in case he was forgetting, he wasn’t in the market for a lover.
‘There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing,’ he lied. ‘And besides, Margaret is coming in to clean the house this morning, so we’ll leave for Winchester just as soon as you’re ready.’
Winchester was crowded.
Luke looked at the throbbing crowds in disbelief. ‘Where’s the execution?’
‘Sorry?’
‘I mean, why else could all these people be here?’
‘They’re Christmas shoppers,’ explained Holly, craning her neck to gaze up in awe at the cathedral.
‘But it’s only November!’ he scowled.
‘And some people buy their Christmas presents throughout the year. Apparently,’ she added hastily, in case he thought that she was among them!
Luke stared at the looped ropes of fairy lights which twinkled in one shop window, surrounding the puffy cheeks of a beaming cardboard Santa. The same compilation tape of Christmas songs seemed to be blasting out of every shop they passed. He shook his head and thought longingly of the stark beauty of Africa. ‘It’s crazy—crazy—this whole commercial Christmas trip! A celebration of consumption and consumerism!’
Holly shrugged, pleased to hear his views echoing her own. ‘I know. I keep planning to go into hibernation!’
They passed a florist’s, where pots of fragrant winter jasmine were stacked next to the gaudy crimson of the seasonal poinsettias. Luke saw a wreath—glossy green and spiky, and studded with berries the colour of blood. Ignoring the appreciative ogling of a young assistant through the window, he slowed down.
‘I guess it’s your birthday soon?’ he hazarded.
Holly blinked. ‘How did you know that?’ she demanded, and then laughed as she looked down and spotted the holly wreath. ‘Oh!’
‘Well, it’s a Christmas name, isn’t it?’ He looked at her, a question in his eyes. ‘Usually.’
‘Yes, you’re right. I was born on Christmas Eve.’
“‘The night before Christmas?”’ he quoted softly, until something in her eyes made him ask, ‘But you don’t enjoy your birthday?’
Maybe other men had always just asked the wrong questions in the past. Or maybe this man just asked the right ones. Whatever his gift, Holly found that she wanted to tell him things—personal things—in a way which was definitely not her usual style.
‘No, I don’t,’ she told him slowly. ‘Or, rather, I didn’t—not when I was little. It’s a difficult night of the year to get a babysitter—a fact that my mother never failed to remind me of. When I was older, she used to leave me while she went out, and in a way I preferred that. Less pressure—’
‘How old?’ he interrupted savagely.
Holly thought back. ‘Ten. Eleven. But people weren’t so paranoid about leaving children then,’ she added hastily, as some innate loyalty to her mother made her want to defend her.
‘And did you get presents?’
‘Oh, yes. Huge presents sometimes—if the boyfriend was rich enough. Other years they were a little thin on the ground.’
He said something very soft beneath his breath.
Holly dodged a shopper who was steaming down the high street like a Sherman tank and sneaked a glance at Luke’s hard profile. ‘So how did you spend your Christmases in Africa?’
His mouth tightened as he found himself reluctant to think about it—let alone talk about it. Last Christmas he had spent with Caroline. She had flown in from Durban and had managed to create a traditional turkey dinner on his antiquated old stove. She had even brought linen napkins in her suitcase, and her gift to him had been fine crystal glasses, out of which they had drunk champagne, although his throat had been so dry with the heat that he would have preferred beer. She had raised her glass to him and, in that freeze-framed moment, had seemed to personify calm. An oasis in the hurly-burly of what his life had been up until that point. She had talked wistfully of the babies she longed to have, and everything had suddenly seemed to make perfect sense.
He’d remembered fragments of a conversation he had once had with an Indian friend, and these had drifted back to him as he’d
