Читать книгу 12 Gifts for Christmas - Джулия Кеннер, Джулия Кеннер - Страница 8

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.