Snowbound Seduction: A Night of No Return / To Claim His Heir by Christmas / I'll Be Yours for Christmas. Sarah Morgan
‘Yes. Because last night was a one-off and is never going to happen again.’ He knew from experience that it was better to spell it out but if he’d expected her to wilt then again she surprised him.
‘I know that. But knowing that doesn’t make it any easier to work together. It would be horribly, hideously awkward. It’s already horribly, hideously awkward and since you obviously prefer to be blunt about the whole thing, I’ll be blunt too. I cannot believe I had sex with my boss. I cannot believe I was so unprofessional.’ She fiddled with the edge of her sweater and then turned away from him but Lucas wasn’t having that.
‘Why are you blaming yourself?’ He closed his hands around her shoulders and spun her round to face him, forcing her to look at him. ‘What happened last night was my responsibility, not yours.’
‘That isn’t true. You didn’t know what you were doing.’ She looked pale and tired and suddenly he remembered the nightmare drive she’d had to reach him the night before. That alone must have been exhausting. And then there had been everything that had happened afterwards.
He gave a humourless laugh. ‘Emma, I knew exactly what I was doing.’ Escaping. Taking ruthless advantage of a decent young woman who ordinarily wouldn’t have found herself anywhere near a man as damaged as him.
‘It was my fault. You were out of your mind with grief,’ she said softly. ‘I handled it badly.’
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘You told me to go away. Over and over again you told me to go. And did I listen? No, of course not.’ Her tone was loaded with self-recrimination. ‘It was so arrogant of me to think I could help. Stupid. There was nothing that could have helped, I see that now.’
‘You did help.’ And that had come as a surprise. For those moments in front of the flickering fire, the pain had eased. But at what cost? Guilt gnawed at him. ‘I owe you an apology.’
‘For what?’
‘I used you.’ His brutal honesty made her flinch.
‘That isn’t the way I see it.’
‘Well, it’s the way it was.’ He refused to gild the truth and when she tried to pull away he tightened his grip, refusing to let her duck the subject. With that in mind he asked the question that had been playing on his mind since waking. ‘I was rough. Did I hurt you?’
‘No! You were amazing. The whole thing was incredible. To be wanted like that and—oh God, I can’t believe I just said that—’ She covered her face with her hands, her moan muffled. ‘Please, just shoot me right now. Shoot me and end this. This has to be the single most embarrassing moment of my life. Please—if you’re a nice man you’ll accept my resignation and then I’ll never have to face you again.’
There was something so hopelessly endearing about her that had the situation not been so serious, he would have smiled. ‘I’m not a nice man and you’ll be facing me on a daily basis, so you might as well get used to it.’ He tugged her hands away from her face. ‘And because I’m not a nice man I’m going to embarrass you even more by asking when you last had sex with someone.’
‘That is such a personal question—’ And then she caught the ironic lift of his eyebrow and turned vivid scarlet. ‘You’re thinking that we’ve already made this personal—’
‘Just a little.’ He made a concerted effort to delete thoughts of the way her lithe, naked body had felt under his. ‘So when?’
‘I don’t know. It’s been a while.’
Which confirmed all his worst fears. ‘Why?’
‘Meeting people isn’t as easy as it looks in the movies. During the week I only meet people at work and I don’t want to have a relationship with someone I work with—’ she caught his eye and turned fiery red ‘—and before I took the job with you...well, there was someone actually,’ she admitted reluctantly, ‘but it didn’t work out and that’s probably a good thing because although I thought I was in love with him, it turned out I wasn’t.’
Love.
Hearing the word was enough to make him release her but she looked so miserable that he felt the need to lighten the atmosphere. ‘So let me guess—you met this loser at school and when he fumbled under your skirt you hit him with your pencil case and after that he could never father children.’ He was rewarded by a gurgle of laughter.
‘Close.’
‘It was a school bag and not a pencil case?’ Tara would have been bitching about how tired she was, he thought. He would have been treated to sulks and moods, not a sweet smile. And never in a million years would Tara have let him see her without make-up.
‘It was a little more mundane than that. And it wasn’t at school. I didn’t have time for boys when I was at school.’ Avoiding his gaze, she turned back to the window, staring down at the acres of parkland and woodland that wrapped itself around the castle. ‘I was fourteen when Mum got pregnant. When other girls were discovering make-up and dating, I was helping with a baby.’
‘Why? Where was your mother?’
‘She died.’ Slowly, she turned her head, her eyes uncertain as she looked at him. ‘This is way too much information. Do you honestly want to hear it?’
‘Yes.’ Lucas surprised himself by saying that. ‘All of it.’
She gestured awkwardly. ‘It’s just that we don’t normally do the whole personal conversation thing—’
‘Well, we’re doing it now. I think we’ve already overstepped what might be considered personal boundaries and we’ve definitely passed the point of worrying about what we normally do,’ he said dryly, ‘so just talk. I want to know what happened.’
She paused. ‘Mum found out that she was pregnant, and it was...difficult. For all of us. She was a single parent. My dad left when I was a baby so it was just her and us. And then Jamie.’
‘So Jamie’s dad isn’t your father?’ Relationships, he thought. Always complicated.
‘No. And Jamie’s father...well, he wasn’t around either.’ She didn’t look at him. ‘And then, neither was my mum. Five days after the birth she had a pulmonary embolism—a blood clot that lodged in her lung. Something to do with the birth and the hospital missed it.’ She leaned her forehead against the window and stared down at the snow. ‘She died when Jamie was just days old. And that was really...hard.’ That single word encapsulated so much unspoken emotion.
He tried to imagine how that must have felt—to be fifteen and rushing home to care for a baby at a time when she was still a child herself. ‘How the hell did you manage?’
‘My grandparents moved in with us for a few years, and that was the worst time of all. When they first found out Mum was pregnant, they were horrified and they said so. Truthfully, they were vile to her.’ Her composure slipped slightly, exposing a seam of anger. ‘Then when she died they couldn’t separate how they felt from the way they reacted to Jamie. They saw Jamie as the reason she was dead and it was just horrible. It was obvious that they just saw him as a mistake and a burden. That’s why I snapped at you just now. That was exactly the word they used. “Sacrifice”. They told us that Mum had ruined everyone’s lives and if we kept Jamie we’d be throwing our lives away. They wanted us to put him up for adoption. They didn’t want him—their own flesh and blood. Can you believe that?’
Lucas felt the ache in his temples. The pressure.
Yes, he could believe that.
‘But you refused.’
‘It was a hideous time. My sister and I decided to consult a lawyer and after a long, complicated battle which I don’t intend to bore you with, we were given custody.’
‘Long and complicated?’ Another understatement,