Читать книгу The Mills & Boon Christmas Wishes Collection - Мишель Смарт, Maisey Yates - Страница 61

CHAPTER FOUR

AT DAWN, HOLLY sneaked out of bed and crept into the bathroom to freshen up. She grimaced at her reflection. Her hair was a mess. Her face reddened in places by Vito’s stubble. Her mouth was very swollen and pink. And when she stepped into the shower she swallowed a groan because every muscle she possessed complained as if she had overdone it in a workout.

But no workout, she thought dizzily, could possibly have been more demanding than the stamina required for a night in bed with Vito Sorrentino. He was insatiable and he had made her the same way, she conceded in stupefaction. She felt as though she had changed dramatically in less than twelve hours. She had learned so much about herself and even more about sex. Her body ached in intimate places and a bemused smile tilted her lips as she emerged from the en-suite again.

Vito was sprawled across the bed, a glorious display of bronzed perfection. Luxuriant black lashes flickered as he focused on her. ‘I wondered where you were,’ he muttered.

‘Bathroom,’ she whispered, barely breathing as she slid back under the duvet.

Vito reached for her with a sleepy hand and pulled her back against him. She shivered in contact with the raw heat and scent of him. ‘Go back to sleep,’ he told her thickly.

He wanted her again. What the hell was wrong with him? How could he want her again when he had already had her so many times? She had to be sore too, he reminded himself in exasperation. He was being a selfish bastard. As soon as he heard the deep, even tenor of her breathing sink into sleep, he eased out of the bed, went for a cold shower and got dressed.

Nothing in Vito’s mental rule book covered what had happened the night before. He hadn’t had a one-night stand in many years and none had been extraordinary on any level. Sex was sex, a temporary release and pleasure. He was practical about sex, cool about sex. His desire had never controlled him and he would never let it do so. But then he had never ever been intimate with a woman he wanted over and over again, and his voracious hunger for Holly even after having her downright unnerved him. What was wrong with him? Was he in some weird frame of mind after the trying ordeal of the publicity fallout he had endured over the past week? In his opinion it certainly wasn’t normal to want a woman that much. It smacked of unbalance, of unhealthy obsession. It was fortunate that their time together had a built-in closing date, he told himself grimly.

Even so, it was Christmas Day as well as being Holly’s birthday and it bothered him that he had nothing to give her. Vito was so accustomed to gift-giving and other people’s high expectations of his gifts that he felt very uncomfortable in that situation. In an effort to make the day special for Holly he decided to make her breakfast in bed. He couldn’t cook but how difficult could it be to make breakfast? He could manage orange juice and toast, couldn’t he?

Holly was stunned when she blinked into drowsy wakefulness because Vito was sliding a tray of food on to her lap. She stared down in wonderment at the charred toast. ‘You made me breakfast?’

‘It’s your birthday. It’s not much but it’s the best I can do.’

Holly tried not to look at him as though he were the eighth wonder of the world but that was certainly how he struck her at that moment because nobody had ever given Holly breakfast in bed before, no, not even when she was ill. It was a luxury she could barely even imagine and that Vito should have gone to that much effort to spoil her thrilled her. So, she didn’t make a sound when her first sip of tea gave her a mouthful of the teabag that had not been removed and she munched through the charred toast without complaint. It was the thought that counted, after all, and that Vito had thought touched her heart. In addition, the effect of having Vito carelessly sprawled at the foot of the same bed sent her pulse rate rocketing. She remembered all the things they had done and tried desperately to feel guilty about them. But it didn’t work. One look into those inky-black-lashed dark golden eyes of his and she was shot off to another planet.

‘Thanks,’ she said even though it took great effort to locate her voice.

‘I’m not great in the kitchen. If it had only been for me I would have cooked one of the ready meals,’ he admitted.

‘It was very thoughtful of you.’ Holly was registering how very lucky she was not to be facing roast meat for breakfast and she gratefully drank her orange juice, which was so cold it froze her teeth. As she drained the glass she pushed the tray away and he swept it up and put it on the floor.

He came back to the bed and moved towards her with the sinuous grace of a stalking cat and her mouth ran dry, her heartbeat racing. ‘I was going to get up, organise lunch,’ she framed shakily.

‘Way too early for that, bellezza mia,’ Vito husked, up close, his breath fanning her cheek and his luxuriant black hair brushing her chin as he bent his head to press his mouth to the pulse point below her ear.

And her whole body went into free fall as though he had hit a button. Breath fled her parted lips as she sank back into the pillows and gazed up at him with luminous blue eyes. ‘Vito—’

He closed her mouth with the onslaught of his own. ‘No, we don’t talk,’ he told her after kissing her breathless. ‘We already know all we need to know about each other.’

‘I don’t even know what you do,’ she began.

‘I’m in business...and you?’

‘Waitress...well, waitress with aspirations,’ she adjusted jerkily when he tensed against her. ‘I want to be an interior designer but it’s more a dream than reality.’

‘It takes work to turn dreams into reality.’

Holly smiled up at him. ‘Vito...I’ve had to work hard for everything in life but sometimes getting a break relates more to resources and luck than slaving away.’

‘This is getting way too serious,’ Vito objected when he found himself on the brink of offering her advice.

Holly let her fingers drift up to brush his black hair off his brow, her attention locked to his lean, darkly handsome features even as her heart had sunk because she was scarily well attuned to his body language. ‘Agreed. Let’s stay away from the real world.’

His long, lean body relaxed against hers again and tears stung her eyes as she blinked against his shoulder. The news that she was a waitress had been too sharp a stab of reality for Vito, highlighting as it did the difference in their statuses. His clothing, even the variety and expense of the food in the refrigerator, not to mention the stylish opulence of her surroundings all told Holly that Vito inhabited a rather more privileged place in society than she did. And while here at the cottage without other people around, that difference didn’t really matter. She knew it would matter very much outside these walls.

‘I still want you,’ Vito confided thickly, running the tip of his tongue along her collarbone.

Her tummy flipped, her feminine core clenched and she stiffened. Reality was intruding whether she wanted it to or not because she was too tender to engage again in the kind of intimacy he was probably envisaging. ‘I can’t,’ she whispered tightly, a small hand smoothing down a denim-clad thigh, feeling the ripple of his muscles tightening in response.

‘Maybe later,’ Vito murmured sibilantly, fingers spearing into her hair to lift her mouth to his. ‘But in the short term there are other things we can do, gioia mia.’

Holly laughed and buried her face in his shoulder. ‘You’re so shameless.’

‘Why wouldn’t I be? You’ve been brilliant. I can’t understand why you were still untouched.’

‘It was a promise I made to myself when I was very young...to wait. It just seemed sensible to wait until I was an adult and then...’ Holly sighed. ‘Somewhere along the line it became a burden, a tripwire in relationships that held me back from who I could be.’

Vito gazed down at her with a frown of incomprehension. ‘But why me? Why did you choose me?’

‘Maybe it was because you let me put my Christmas tree up,’ she teased, because there were all too many reasons why she had chosen him and very few she was prepared to share. There was no safe way to tell a man that he had been her fantasy without him getting the wrong idea and assuming that she was feeling more than she was supposed to feel in terms of attachment.

Her fingers slid up caressingly to the firm bulge at his crotch and exerted gentle pressure and he groaned, dark head falling back, wide sensual mouth tightening, his broad chest vibrating against her. Holly leant over him, staring down into lustrous eyes that glittered like precious gold. ‘Maybe it’s because you act as though I’m the most ravishing female you’ve ever met, even though I’m perfectly ordinary. But perhaps that’s your true talent. Maybe you treat all women the same way.’

‘No. I’ve never been with any woman the way I’ve been with you...’ Vito surveyed her with frowning force, probing that statement, worrying about it because it was true. He had never felt so comfortable with a woman or so relaxed. He hadn’t once thought about work or about the shocking scandal he had left behind him in Italy. Furthermore Holly was completely unique on his terms because for the first time ever he was with a woman who didn’t know who he was, cherished no financial expectations and in truth attached no undue importance to him. He was Mr Anonymous with Holly and he liked the freedom of that one hell of a lot.

Holly unzipped his jeans with a sense of adventure. Her most driving need was to give him pleasure and she didn’t understand it. Shouldn’t she be more selfish? The catch in his breathing was followed by a long, unrestrained sound of rising hunger. She had distracted him with sex, she thought guiltily. She didn’t want to talk about being a waitress, about any of the things that separated them as people in the outside world, and his unashamed sexual response to her gave her a shocking sense of power.

Heaven for Vito was the gentle friction of her mouth and the teasing, erotic stroke of her tiny fingers. His hand knotted in her hair and he trembled on the edge of release, gruffly warning her, but she didn’t pull away. Then the sheer liberating wash of pleasure engulfed him and wiped him out.

Holly watched Vito sleep with a rueful grin. She went for another shower, donned the dress she had packed and dried her hair. Downstairs, she switched on the television and tuned it to a channel playing Christmas carols before going into the kitchen and beginning to organise the lunch she had prepared with such care. It shook her to acknowledge that she hadn’t even known Vito Sorrentino existed the day before.

The shame and embarrassment she had fought off at dawn began to creep up again through the cracks in her composure. She had broken all her rules and for what? A one-night stand with a male she would probably never hear from or see again? How could she be proud of that? But would it have been any better to lose her virginity with a sleazy, cheating liar like Ritchie, who had pretended that she meant much more to him than she did?

She thought not. Anyway, it was too late for regrets, she reminded herself unhappily. What was done was done and it made more sense to move on from that point than to torture herself over what could not be changed. How much, though, had all the wine she had imbibed contributed to her recklessness? Her loss of inhibition? Stop it, stop it, she urged herself fiercely, stop dwelling on it.

Vito came down the stairs when she was setting the table. ‘You should have wakened me.’

‘You were up much earlier than I was,’ she pointed out as she retrieved the starters from the kitchen. ‘Hungry?’

Vito reached for her instead of a chair. ‘Only for you.’

Her bright blue eyes danced with merriment. ‘Now, where did you get that old chestnut from?’

In answer Vito bent his tousled dark head and kissed her and it was like an arrow of fire shooting through her body to the heart of her. She quivered, taken aback all over again by the explosive effect he had on her. His sensual mouth played with hers and tiny ripples of arousal coursed through her. Her breasts swelled, their buds tightening while heat and dampness gathered between her legs. It took enormous willpower but she made herself step back from him, almost careening into the table in her haste to break their connection. Suddenly feeling out of control with him seemed dangerous and it was dangerous, she told herself, if it made her act out of character. And whether she liked it or not, everything she had done with Vito was out of character for her.

‘We should eat before the food gets cold,’ she said prosaically.

‘I’ll open a bottle of wine.’

‘This is an incredibly well-equipped house,’ Holly remarked as he poured the wine he had fetched from the temperature-controlled cabinet in the kitchen.

‘The owner enjoys his comforts.’

‘And he’s your friend?’

‘We went to school together.’ A breathtaking smile of amused recollection curled Vito’s mouth. ‘He was a rebel and although he often got me into trouble he also taught me how to enjoy myself.’

‘Pixie’s like that. We’re very close.’ Holly lifted the plates and set out the main course.

‘You’re a good cook,’ Vito commented.

‘My foster mother, Sylvia, was a great teacher. Cooking relaxes me.’

‘I eat out a lot. It saves time.’

‘There’s more to life than saving time. Life is there to be savoured,’ Holly told him.

‘I savour it at high speed.’

The meal was finished and Holly was clearing up when Vito stood up. ‘I feel like some fresh air,’ he told her. ‘I’m going out for a walk.’

From the window, Holly watched him trudge down the lane in the snow. There was an odd tightness in her chest and a lump in her constricted throat. Vito had just rebelled against their enforced togetherness to embrace his own company. He hadn’t invited her to join him on his walk, but why should he have? Out of politeness? They weren’t a couple in the traditional sense and he didn’t have to include her in everything. They were two people who had shared a bed for the night, two very different people. Maybe she talked too much, maybe he was tired of her company and looking forward to the prospect of some silence. It was not a confidence-boosting train of thought.

Vito ploughed up the steep gradient, his breath steaming on the icy air. He had needed a break, had been relieved when Holly hadn’t asked if she could accompany him. A loner long accustomed to his own company, he had felt the walls closing in while he’d sat surrounded by all that cosy Christmas spirit.

And that really wasn’t Holly’s fault, Vito conceded wryly. Even her cheerful optimism could not combat the many years of bad Christmas memories that Vito harboured. Sadly the stresses and strains of the festive season were more likely to expose the cracks in an unhappy marriage. His mother’s resolute enthusiasm had never contrived to melt his father’s boredom and animosity at being forced into spending time with his family.

They had never been a family, Vito acknowledged heavily, not in the truest sense of the word. His father had never loved him, had never taken the smallest interest in him. In fact, if he was honest with himself, his father sincerely disliked him. From an early age Vito had been treated like the enemy, twinned in his father’s mind with the autocratic father-in-law he fiercely resented.

‘He’s like a bloody calculator!’ Ciccio had condemned with distaste when his five-year-old son’s brilliance at maths was remarked on. ‘He’ll be as efficient as a cash machine—just like his grandfather.’

Only days earlier, Vito’s relationship with his father had sunk to an all-time low when Ciccio had questioned his son’s visit to the hospital where he was recovering from his heart attack. ‘Are you here to crow over my downfall?’ his father had asked nastily while his mother had tried to intervene. ‘My sins have deservedly caught up with me? Is that what you think?’

And Vito had finally recognised that there was no relationship left to rescue with his father. Ciccio bitterly resented his son’s freedom from all financial constraints yet the older man’s wild extravagance and greed had forced Vito’s grandfather to keep his son-in-law on a tight leash. There was nothing Vito could do to change those hard facts. Even worse, after his grandfather had died it had become Vito’s duty to protect his mother’s fortune from Ciccio’s demands, scarcely a reality likely to improve a father and son relationship.

For the first time Vito wondered what sort of relationship he would have with his son if he ever had one. Momentarily he was chilled by the prospect because his family history offered no encouragement.

Holly had just finished clearing up the dishes when the knocker on the front door sounded loudly. She was stunned when she opened the door and found Bill, who ran the breakdown service, standing smiling on the doorstep.

‘I need the keys for Clementine to get her loaded up.’

‘But it’s Christmas Day... I mean, I wasn’t expecting—’

‘I didn’t want to raise your hopes last night but I knew I’d be coming up this way some time this afternoon. My uncle joins us for lunch and he owns a smallholding a few fields away. He has to get back to feed his stock, so I brought the truck when I left him at home.’

‘Thank you so much,’ Holly breathed, fighting her consternation with all her might while turning away to reach into the pocket of her coat where she had left the car keys. She passed the older man the keys. ‘Do you need any help?’

He shook his head. ‘I’ll come back up for you when I’m done.’

‘I’ll get my stuff together.’ With a weak smile and with every sensitive nerve twanging, Holly shut the door again and sped straight upstairs to gather her belongings. She dug her feet into her cowboy boots and thrust her toiletries and make-up bag back into her rucksack.

And throughout that exercise she wouldn’t let herself even think that she could be foolish enough to be disappointed at being picked up and taken home. Clearly, it was time to leave. She had assumed that she would have one more night with Vito but fate had decreed otherwise. Possibly a quick, unexpected exit was the best way to part after such a night, she thought unhappily. There would be neither the time nor the opportunity for awkward exchanges. She closed her rucksack and checked the room one last time. Reminding herself that she still had to pack the Christmas tree, she went back down wondering anxiously if Vito would make it back before she had to leave.

She flipped open her cardboard box and stripped the tree of ornaments and lights, deftly packing it all away while refusing to think beyond the practical. She raced into the kitchen to dump the foil containers she had used to transport the meal, pausing only to lift a china jug and quickly wash it before placing it in the box. That was that then, all the evidence of her brief stopover removed, she conceded numbly.

She didn’t want to go home, she didn’t want to leave Vito, and the awareness of that stupid, hopeless sense of attachment to him crushed and panicked her. He would probably be relieved to find her gone and he would have cringed if he saw tears in her eyes. Men didn’t like messy and there could be nothing more messy or embarrassing than a woman who got too involved and tried to cling after one night. This one-night-and-walk-away stuff is what you signed up for, Holly scolded herself angrily. There had been no promises and no mention of a future of any kind. She would leave with her head held high and no backward glances.

All the same, she thought hesitantly, if Vito wasn’t coming back in time to see her leave, shouldn’t she leave a note? She dug into her rucksack and tore a piece of paper out of a notebook and leant on the table. She thanked him for his hospitality and then hit a brick wall in the creative department. What else was there to say? What else could she reasonably say?

After much reflection she printed her mobile-phone number at the foot of the note. Why not? It wasn’t as if she was asking him to phone her. She was simply giving him the opportunity to phone if he wanted to. Nothing wrong with that, was there? She left the note propped against the clock on the shelf inside the inglenook.

Holly wore a determined smile when Bill’s truck backed into the drive. She had her box and her rucksack on the step beside her in a clear face-saving statement that she was eager to get going but there was still no sign of Vito. She climbed into the truck with a sense of regret but gradually reached the conclusion that possibly it was preferable to have parted from Vito without any awkward or embarrassing final conversation. This way, nobody had to pretend or say anything they didn’t mean.

* * *

Vito strode into the cottage and grimaced at the silence. He strode up the stairs, calling Holly’s name while wondering if she had gone for a bath. He studied the empty bathroom with a frown, noting that she had removed her possessions. Only when he went downstairs again did he notice that the Christmas decorations had disappeared along with her. The table was clear, the kitchen immaculate.

Vito was incredulous. Holly had done a runner and he had no idea how. He walked out onto the doorstep and belatedly registered that the old car no longer lay at the foot of the lane in the ditch. So much for his observation powers! He had been so deep in his thoughts that he hadn’t even noticed that the car had gone. Holly had walked out on him. Well, that hadn’t happened to him before, he acknowledged grimly, his ego stung by her sudden departure. All his life women had chased after Vito, attaching strings at the smallest excuse.

But would he have wanted her to cling? Vito winced, driven to reluctantly admit that perhaps in the circumstances her unannounced disappearance was for the best. After all, what would he have said to her in parting? Holly had distracted him from more important issues and disrupted his self-control. Now he had his own space back and the chance to get his head clear. And that was exactly what he should want...

* * *

‘When you’re finished throwing up you can do the test,’ Pixie said drily from the bathroom doorway.

‘I’m not doing the test,’ Holly argued. ‘I’m on the pill. I can’t be pregnant—’

‘You missed a couple of pills and you had a course of antibiotics when you had tonsillitis,’ her friend and flatmate reminded her. ‘You know that antibiotics can interfere with contraception—’

‘Well, actually I didn’t know.’ Holly groaned as she freshened up at the sink, frowning at her pale face and dark-circled eyes. She looked absolutely awful and she felt awful both inside and out.

‘Even the pill has a failure rating. I don’t know... I leave you alone for a few weeks and you go completely off the rails,’ the tiny blonde lamented, studying Holly with deeply concerned eyes.

‘I can’t be pregnant,’ Holly said again as she lifted the pregnancy testing kit and extracted the instructions.

‘Well, you’ve missed two periods, you’re throwing up like there’s no tomorrow and you have sore boobs,’ Pixie recounted ruefully. ‘Maybe it’s chickenpox or something.’

‘All right, I’ll do it!’ Holly exclaimed in frustration. ‘But there is no way, just no way on earth that I could be pregnant!’

Some minutes later she slumped down on the side of the bath. Pixie was right and she was wrong. The test showed a positive. The door opened slowly and she looked wordlessly up at her friend and burst into floods of tears.

‘Remember how we used to say that the babies we had would be precious gifts?’ Pixie breathed as she hugged her sobbing friend. ‘Well, this baby is a gift and we will manage. We don’t need a man to survive.’

‘I can’t even knit!’ Holly wailed, unable to concentrate, unable to think beyond the sheer immensity of the challenges she was about to face.

‘That’s OK. You won’t have time to knit,’ her friend told her, deadpan.

Holly was remembering when she and Pixie had talked innocently about their ideal of motherhood. Both of them had been born unwanted and had suffered at the hands of neglectful mothers. They had sworn that they would love and protect their own babies no matter what.

And the vague circumstances suggested by ‘no matter what’ had actually happened now, Holly reflected heavily, her sense of regret at that truth all-encompassing. Her baby would not be entering the perfect world as she had dreamt. Her baby was unplanned, however, but not unwanted. She would love her child, fight to keep him or her safe and if she had to do it alone, and it looked as though she would, she would manage.

‘If only Vito had phoned...’ The lament escaped Holly’s lips before she could bite it back and she flushed in embarrassment.

‘He’s long gone. In fact, the more I think about him,’ Pixie mused tight-mouthed, ‘the more suspicious I get about the father of your child. For all you know he could be a married man.’

‘No!’ Holly broke in, aghast at that suggestion.

‘Well, what was Vito doing spending Christmas alone out in the middle of nowhere?’ Pixie demanded. ‘Maybe the wife or girlfriend threw him out and he had nowhere better to go?’

‘Don’t make me feel worse than I already do,’ Holly pleaded. ‘You’re such a pessimist, Pixie. Just because he didn’t want to see me again doesn’t make him a bad person.’

‘He got you drunk and somehow persuaded you into bed. Don’t expect me to think nice things about him. He was a user.’

‘I wasn’t drunk.’

‘Let’s not rehash it again.’ Her flatmate sighed, her piquant face thoughtful. ‘Let’s see if we can trace him online.’

And while Pixie did internet searches on several potential spellings of Vito’s surname and came up with precisely nothing, Holly sat on the sofa hugging her still-flat stomach and fretting about the future. She had already secretly carried out all those searches weeks earlier on Vito and was too proud to admit to the fact, even to her friend.

‘I can’t find even a trace of a man in the right age group. The name could be a fake,’ her friend opined.

‘Why would he give me a fake name? That doesn’t make sense.’

‘Maybe he didn’t want to be identified. I don’t know...you tell me,’ Pixie said very drily. ‘Do you think that’s a possibility?’

Holly reddened. Of course it was a possibility that Vito had not wanted to be identified. As to why, how could she know? The only thing she knew with certainty was that Vito had decided he didn’t want to see her again. Had he felt otherwise, he would have used the phone number she had left him and called her. In the weeks of silence that had followed her departure from the cottage, she had often felt low. But that was foolish, wasn’t it? Vito had clearly made the decision that he had no desire to see her again.

And why should she feel hurt by that? Yes, he had said that night with her was amazing but wasn’t that par for the course? The sort of thing a man thought a woman expected him to say after sex? How could she have been naive enough to actually believe that Vito had truly believed they were something special together? And now that little bit of excitement was over. What was done was done and what was gone, like her innocence, was gone. Much as her tidy, organised life had gone along with it, she conceded unhappily, because, although she would embrace motherhood wholeheartedly, she knew it would be incredibly tough to raise a baby alone without falling into the poverty trap.