Kate Walker - The Christmas Baby's Gift

Passion was what had pushed them into the marriage of convenience that had suited them, and pleased both their families. The sort of passion that had consumed the two of them in its fires earlier, so wild, so all-powerful that even now she could still feel her blood heat and her skin tingle just to think of it. The sort of passion that was so overwhelming that it couldn’t be denied. It had brought them together, held them in thrall for the past year, and had seemed so overpowering that, in the absence of any other, stronger feeling, it had seemed enough to hold them together for as long as they wanted.

Passion and the longing for children.

The smile left her mouth abruptly, leaving her face looking bleak and pale. All her life she had dreamed of becoming a mother She had enjoyed her work as a PA, knew she’d been good at it, but a child—children—of her own had always been at the centre of her thoughts. So it had come as something of a shock to her to find that, at twenty-six, almost twenty-seven, she was not only not yet a mother but also still single, without even a fiancé, or yet a boyfriend on the horizon. The fact that her brother, three years younger, was already the father of a two-year-old boy, with another child on the way, had only added to her feeling of emptiness, the yearning to have a family of her own.

And it had to be a family. She didn’t want to be a single mother. A child had the right to two parents who loved and cared for it, and she was determined that her baby would have the best she could give it. So when Liam had told her how much he wanted children too, it had seemed like the perfect answer.

But then she had had to go and ruin things completely by falling in love.

Her hands closed over the long skirts of her midnight-blue dress, crushing the fine velvet dreadfully. This hadn’t been on the cards. Hadn’t been part of the bargain they had agreed between them.

‘But what happens if this isn’t enough?’ she remembered asking Liam when he had first made the suggestion that they marry for lust rather than for love. ‘What if one of us meets someone else? Falls for them…?’

‘Falls in love?’ Liam had finished for her, when she’d hesitated. ‘You said you didn’t believe in it.’

‘I said I didn’t know what it meant! And I don’t. I’ve never known that sort of devastating, irresistible feeling for anyone. Never felt that without a certain someone in my life I would want to die, that my existence wouldn’t be worth having. I’ve never experienced it and I’m not sure that I ever will.’

She had now, Peta thought wretchedly as her clouded blue eyes followed Liam around the dance floor, hungrily absorbing the lean, powerful lines of his body in the superbly cut dinner jacket and gleaming white shirt. She knew that feeling all too well, and didn’t know how to handle it.

She couldn’t drag her gaze away from this man who had been her husband for the past twelve months, and yet, in many ways, was still a total stranger to her. The subdued elegance of the classic black and white suited his tall frame to perfection. The fit of his jacket emphasised the broad, straight shoulders, the width of his chest and long, long legs under the fine fabric of his trousers.

In the light of the huge glittering chandeliers that hung from the high ceilings of the ballroom, the rich chestnut of his hair gleamed and shone, the copper lights in it seeming to catch fire and burn spectacularly. And the dark green of his eyes had the glimmer of polished jade, deep and impenetrable.

Those stunning eyes had looked just that way when she had asked him that question on the night before their wedding. When she had raised the possibility of one of them falling for someone else.

At the time she had felt that she had to broach it, just so that there was no possibility of a problem cropping up later, one that they couldn’t handle. And it had been Liam that she had foreseen might find himself in love with someone else. After all, out of the two of them he was the one who had had some experience, however brief and unhappy, of the feeling that the world called love. The woman he had adored had walked out on him when he was twenty-three, and since then there had been no one, no single person that he’d felt more than a passing fancy for. Nothing that came anywhere close to love.

She had never expected that she would fall a prey to that elusive emotion herself. And least of all that she would feel it for the man she was married to.

‘We’ll tackle that when we come to it—if we come to it,’ Liam had said. ‘But I don’t think it’s likely—do you? After all, it’s not as if we’re both naïve adolescents who don’t have enough experience of life to know what we’re doing.’

She felt like a naïve adolescent right now, Peta reflected wryly. Like some newly sexually awakened teenager, launched on her first major crush on the opposite sex. Thoughts of Liam crowded every second of her waking day. Dreams of him filled her nights. Heated, erotic, sensual dreams that had her waking restlessly, her heart throbbing, her breath ragged, and her skin so damp with perspiration that she felt sure that Liam, sleeping peacefully at her side, would sense it and, waking, want to know the reason for it.

In the beginning, in the days when passion had been all that held them together, she wouldn’t have had any trouble in telling him how she was feeling. She’d done it more times than she could count, reaching for him and entwining her arms around him to draw him closer. She had pressed her mouth to his, tangled her fingers in his hair, holding her body against the hard length of his, coiling long smooth limbs around his equally naked, hair-roughened ones.

‘I want you,’ she had been able to whisper to him then. ‘I want you more than I can say. I want you to make love to me—want you inside me—and I want it now!’

Then, passion had made her brave, need had made her forthright. She had been totally direct about her feelings because they had been that basic, that uncomplicated. But as her emotions had changed, so had her approach to this husband of hers.

I love you was just three little words—no more, no less than I want you, but so much harder to say. Impossible to say when she knew that they were the words Liam didn’t want to hear. The last thing that he wanted to hear from her. The last thing that he could offer her in return.

And so she had kept silent, and that silence had grown wider and deeper as the days and the weeks had passed. If it would have been difficult to speak at the beginning, it would be impossible to break her silence now. She had grown so accustomed to hugging her secret to herself that she knew the words would shrivel on her tongue if she so much as tried to express them. It was easier to keep silent. But keeping silent had also meant keeping her distance, and she knew that Liam had noticed her withdrawal. How long would it be, she wondered, before he started to question the reasons for it?

‘Penny for them?’

The softly spoken question jolted her from her memories with a start, dragging her back to awareness of the fact that the music had stopped. The dance had ended, and her husband and friend had come to where she was standing at the side of the room, Liam’s arms snaking round her waist and pulling her close with a casual possessiveness that made her heart thud high up in her throat.

‘For—for my thoughts?’ she hedged awkwardly, playing for time. It was a struggle to speak, to ignore the warm weight at her back, the knowing hand that rested on her hip, blunt fingers splayed out over the curve of her buttock. ‘They’re not worth much. Not even a penny, really.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

It was Stephanie, her friend, who spoke, laughter warming her voice.

‘I saw the way you were looking at us just now, watching every move we made out there on the dance floor. And I don’t kid myself that it was admiration for my dancing that held you spellbound in that way. Or that you were envying my dress—not considering that lovely creation you’re wearing!’

‘Well, thank you.’

Peta bobbed a laughing curtsey, hoping against hope to distract her friend from the path her thoughts were following. She knew that that narrow cut of the deep blue velvet dress suited the slender lines of her figure, and that the sleeveless, tight-laced bodice revealed the creamy skin of her shoulders and arms, the beginnings of the curves of her breasts, the shadowy suggestion of the fullness of her cleavage.

‘So I suspect it was the person who gave you that spectacular necklace who was really in your thoughts. I take it that was an anniversary present from Liam?’

Peta’s fingers went instinctively to touch the brilliant diamond necklace that her husband had fastened around her neck just before they’d left for the party at Hewland Hall, his grandfather’s home. She had swept her dark hair up at the back of her head, exposing the full length of her throat and neck, so displaying its beauty more effectively, while at her ears sparkled matching earrings which he had given to her only that morning.

‘Yes, Liam gave it to me.’

‘I must say that this husband of yours has excellent taste.’

‘But of course.’

Liam’s arm tightened possessively around Peta’s waist, tucking her up against the warmth and strength of his body.

‘I chose Peta as my wife, didn’t I? We’re the perfect combination of breeding and money.’

He made it sound like a joke, and clearly Stephanie took it that he meant it flippantly, but deep inside Peta felt something twist sharply at the thought that in fact he had spoken nothing but the truth. The Hewland family, whose only daughter Liam’s mother had been, were long-established landowners in the county. But by the standards of her own family, they were newly wealthy. The Lassiters could trace their ancestry back to the Norman Conquest, but as a result of too many death duties and some desperately unwise speculation on the Stock Exchange they were cash poor.

That was why her parents and Liam’s grandfather, who had been friends for years, had come up with the idea of a marriage that united their two families. That way, they’d reckoned, they would have the best of both worlds.

‘Breeding?’

A new masculine voice took up the conversation. Tony, Stephanie’s husband, had joined them, catching the tail-end of Liam’s remark.

‘Who’s talking about breeding? Liam—Peta—have you got some news we should know? Or has my wife been letting you in on our little secret?’

‘News? No.’

Peta answered hastily, looking anywhere but into Liam’s face. She could feel the colour ebbing from her own cheeks as her conscience stabbed at her painfully, reminding her of the deception she was practising on her husband. It didn’t matter that she had very good reasons for doing so. Liam would never see it that way. He wouldn’t understand her motives; the way things had changed so much since she had realised just how she really felt.

‘N-no—no news.’

‘But we have!’

Stephanie didn’t have to explain just what her news was. It shone out of her eyes, was there in the glow in her face, her smile. Peta’s stomach lurched painfully. Her friend had been married only half as long as she had. Just six months ago she and Liam had been guests at Stephanie and Tony’s wedding, and now her friend was announcing the fact that she was pregnant.

‘Congratulations, Steph!’

She made herself say it, praying that her hurried movement forwards to hug her friend, the way that her face was muffled in Stephanie’s tumbling blonde hair, would explain the catch in her voice, the jerky unevenness of the words.