Читать книгу Santa Baby: 5 Sexy Reads For Cold Winter Nights - Charlotte Phillips, Charlotte Phillips - Страница 17

‘It doesn’t need to stop here,’ he said.

He leaned up on one elbow, the pillow rucked up beneath his naked chest, dark hair tousled from the night they’d spent tangled together. Golden shards of morning sunlight slipped into the room through the chink in the silk curtains and her stomach churned miserably at the ticking away of minutes until he would be leaving. Part of her wished she’d just left while he slept, like last time. It had been infinitely easier than this.

Her heart gave a tiny leap and she forced it back down. To go along with this would have no better outcome, she’d just be delaying the loss for a few weeks. The moment he was back in the midst of his family with all that history, all that responsibility, she would lose her charm. She didn’t fit in with a family. She’d never been able to hold her own with her parents, so why the hell should she assume she’d do better on that front with him? Better to let him go now, no matter that it was a wrench. She’d managed it before and she could do it again.

She smiled.

‘Of course it does. It was always going to stop here. Just like it was always going to stop back in Devon. Don’t try to make it into something it isn’t.’

He sat up in bed next to her.

‘I’m not. I’m just asking. Why it has to come to a standstill at all.’

She sighed.

‘It is what it is, Tom.’

‘And what is that?’

He held her gaze, waited for her answer.

‘It’s a fling,’ she said, slowly, as if explaining to a toddler. ‘It’s down to circumstance. Five years ago you and I were a spur of the moment one-night stand. It was a fluke. Hotel room. Same place, different time. If you want to pin a name on it, I guess you could call it a holiday romance.’

‘And now?’

‘Basically the same thing. Same rules, same situation. Both of us are taking time out for a few days from our normal lives – you’re stuck here because of the weather and I’m on a shopping break. You and I have never existed in the real world, so what the hell makes you think we could?’

‘Fate is on our side.’

She rolled her eyes.

‘Will you stop going on about bloody fate? I control fate, not the other way around. It’s the only way to make sure I don’t get kicked in the arse by it.’ She sat up in bed herself now, as if warming to her subject. ‘Nothing that stands the test of time can be built on such a whim. Think about it. It makes sense really. Two random people brought together by a random situation, who barely even get to know each other beyond a couple of hours’ flirting. The chances of them having what it takes to go the distance are miniscule. The whole thing is built on physical attraction, on lust. It isn’t the foundation for anything long-lasting. You can’t possibly argue anything else. So what I’m saying is that this has been a fantastic couple of days. Just the way it was a fantastic night back then in Devon. But don’t pretend it can ever lead to anything more than that. We threw that possibility away at the outset because of the way we got together.’

He bunched fists together with sheer frustration at her smooth, determined, non-emotional bloody certainty.

‘You said the chances are miniscule and you might be right, but miniscule allows for the odd exception – right? We could buck the odds.’

He reached for her hand but she gently disentangled her fingers from his.

‘I know a hell of a lot about one-night stands and short-term flings,’ Ella said. ‘I know what I’m talking about.’

The horrified look on his face would have been funny in any other situation.

‘Not like that,’ she said quickly, shaking her head madly. ‘I’m not talking about me. I don’t actually make a habit of this. You’re…’

‘What?’

‘Well, you’re an exceptional case.’

‘How so?’

She looked him in the eye.

‘I have absolutely no idea. Maybe you’re just incredibly persuasive.’

‘So if you don’t make a habit of this kind of thing, what do you mean, you know about it?’

She took a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling with its gleaming chandelier.

‘I wasn’t talking about me. I was talking about my parents.’

‘Your parents?’

She nodded.

‘I’m the result of a one-night stand,’ she said. ‘Some drunken fumble in a dark alleyway outside a nightclub, fuelled entirely by too much alcohol.’

She had no idea of the proper circumstances, had never been able to stomach asking her mother for more details. Just her mother’s drunken revelation of the fact itself had been too much information for a fifteen year old girl, without all the surrounding details. But that was how she imagined it had been. Seedy. Not driven by love, or even by proper attraction. Just beer-goggles and lust.

‘My mother went ahead with the pregnancy,’ she said. ‘Obviously.’

‘What about your father?’

‘They were both teenagers,’ she said. ‘I saw him on and off for the first few years. They weren’t together but he still seemed to make an effort. Maybe that was part of the problem.’ She looked down at her hands, thinking back. ‘In my head I built him up to be so perfect.’ A rueful smile touched the corner of her mouth. ‘When he stopped making that effort I made excuses for him. Told myself my mother made it impossible for him to be around. They didn’t exactly get on like a house on fire, if you get my drift.’

He smiled at her, but the expression on his face was troubled.

‘Anyway, when my mother moved in with Gordy a few years ago I was old enough to make my own choices and I tracked my father down again. I think I expected to be welcomed into his life with open arms. I thought he’d be so pleased to see me again.’

‘And how did it go?’

Her stomach churned with the remnants of the awful disappointment she’d felt that day. It was dull now, not sharp and all-consuming as it had been then.

‘He was so far from delighted it wasn’t even funny,’ she said. ‘He shut the front door behind him and talked to me on his doorstep, fobbing me off, talking his way out of it. And all the time I stood there I knew it was because he had a proper family behind that front door. He’d never told them about me, I was just a secret, something to be hidden, kept away from his new, perfect life.’

He touched her hand.

‘Ella, I’m sorry. That’s awful.’

She shook her head furiously.

‘Don’t apologise. Not for him. I am SO over him. He was a total arse. Why the hell would I want to get to know someone like that? But you understand now, why I walked away without saying goodbye back in Devon. That perfect night could never be the foundation for anything strong or long lasting. You see that, don’t you? You can’t build a lasting relationship on a one-night stand.’

‘But you’ve gone way beyond that. It’s you against the world and no compromise. You’ll end up going through life on your own because you’re never prepared to let anyone else in.’

‘Because I know I can rely on myself. I’m not about to let myself down or disappear out of my own life because I’m too much trouble, am I? What I’m trying to say is that I should never have revisited it. I should never have tracked him down but I did because I believed things could be better second time around. That everything was worth a second chance.’

She looked up at him.

‘That’s why I was reluctant to speak to you at first, when we bumped into each other again. Not because I didn’t want to, or because I regretted what happened between us, but because I didn’t want to ruin it. I loved it, every second of it. I didn’t want to take the risk of finding out that you weren’t all that after all.’ She forced a smile up at him. ‘As it turned out, you were.’

‘I don’t care about any of that. When I get back from Barbados, we can get together. Let me show you things can be different for us.’

She sat up in bed and looked into his eyes, saw the determined expression. When he got back from Barbados. There was the point, right there. Family first. She could never compete with that, not in the long-term.

Self-preservation won out and she leaned forward to kiss him softly on the mouth.

‘You need to get going, Tom. You’ll miss your flight.’

****

He was back in the lobby, but checking out this time. Taxi booked, under time pressure now. Had it really only been a couple of days since he’d stood here and she’d teased him for grouching about the snow?

He glanced around the lobby and there was no sign of her. No sign that the weekend had even happened. He should have expected this. She’d made her excuses, left him alone to pack and hadn’t reappeared since. Why was he even surprised? After all she’d made it pretty clear that she didn’t do goodbyes. This was the way she wanted it, clearly she was able to move forward without looking back. It was a trick he really needed to perfect for himself.

For a moment he wondered if part of the perfection of this was that he knew it wouldn’t last? Knew because she wouldn’t let it. Easy to put things on a pedestal when they weren’t subjected to the test of time and daily life. Maybe she was right to let this go – he wasn’t happy in his own life, how could he drag her into it and expect her to be happy too?

Then he turned to head for the revolving doors and there she was. Thick sweater, jeans and her hair in soft waves, still lightly damp from the shower. He crossed the lobby toward her, put his bags down next to her. He could pick up the warm citrus scent of the hotel shampoo.

‘I thought you were going to skip the goodbyes,’ he said.

‘Yeah well,’ she said, smiling. ‘I thought I’d try a different approach this time around.’

He opened his mouth to speak and she stopped it with three fingers.

‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t ruin this by trying to make it into more than it can be. Let it be what it is. Let it be that perfect couple of days.’

‘That’s what you really want?’

Part of him wanted to shake her, talk at her until she gave in. Her infuriating insistence that this was nothing more than a fling. So entrenched in her own way of living that she had no room to consider anything else. No different from the last time. And yet she had changed since last time, hadn’t she? She’d gone through with the goodbye this time.

‘Maybe we’re destined to only ever meet by chance,’ he said instead. ‘Who knows, in five years we might run into each other in the street.’

She smiled into his eyes at that.

‘I’ll see you in five years then,’ she said.

And because his flight was on the brink of leaving, and his responsibilities were well overdue, and because she’d made it crystal clear how this was going to be, he turned and walked toward the waiting taxi.