angry.’
She didn’t know where that had come from, but it was as if at that moment a dam had burst and all the pent- up emotion of the last twenty years burst out.
‘I hate it,’ she said, banging on his chest with her bunched fists. ‘Hate the carols…’ Bang…‘Hate the lights…’ Bang…‘The falseness…’ He caught her wrists.
‘Is that what you’re really running away from, Annie?’ he asked, holding her off.
‘Yes.’ She pulled back, shaking her head as she crumpled against the stove and slid to the floor. ‘No…’
George didn’t try to coax her up, but kept hold of her hands, going down with her, encouraging her to lean against him so that her cheek was against the hard fabric of his overalls.
‘No,’ he agreed.
He smelled of engine oil, spruce, some warmer scent that was George himself that mingled to make something new, something that held no bad memories for her, and she let her head fall against his chest.
‘You can run away from Christmas, Annie, but you can’t escape what it is you hate about it. The bad memories.’
‘I thought if I could just get away for a while, see things from a different perspective,’ she said after a while, ‘I might find a way to deal with it. But you’re right. It’s nothing to do with the season. It simply shines a light on everything that’s wrong in our lives.’
George held her, her hair against his cheek, thinking about an unhappy little girl who had spent year after year being brave for the adults who clearly hadn’t a clue how to cope with her grief. And he wondered whether his daughter’s desperate need to decorate every surface for the holiday exposed the emptiness at the heart of her life too.
‘We are what circumstances make us,’ he said, leaning back. ‘My father used to make me work in the garage. Every day, after school, he set me a task that I had to finish before I was allowed to go and get on with my homework.’
He knew she’d turned to look up at him, but he kept staring ahead, remembering how it had been.
Remembering the weeks, months, years when anger had kept him going.
‘I learned fast.’ He’d had to if he was to defeat his father. ‘He set me ever more complex, time-consuming tasks, reasoning that if I failed at school I would have no choice but to stay here, so that he could be George Saxon and not just the “and Son”.’
By the time he’d been old enough to work that out, pity him, the battle lines were drawn and there was no going back.
‘If I inherited one thing from my old man it was obstinacy. I got up early, worked late. Learned to manage on the minimum of sleep. And when I left for university I was the best mechanic in the garage, including my father. He never forgave me for that.’
Finally he looked down at her, not quite believing that he was sharing his most painful memories with a woman he’d picked up on the side of the road the evening before.
Could scarcely believe that sitting here, on the floor of his mother’s kitchen with his arm around her, was the nearest he’d come to peace for as long as he could remember.
‘And you still found time for girls?’
‘That last summer, before I went up to university, I found time for a lot of things that I’d missed out on.’ Life at home might have been unbearable, but there had been compensations. ‘The minute I turned eighteen, I got a job at a garage that paid me what I was actually worth.’
‘Your poor mother. It must have been as restful as living with two big cats walking stiff-legged around one another, hackles raised.’
He smiled. ‘Don’t tell me, you were the fly on the wall?’
‘I’ve spent a lot of my life watching people. I can read body language as well as I read English.’
He must have shown a flicker of dismay because she laughed. ‘Most body language. There are gaps in my knowledge.’
‘What kind of gaps?’
She shook her head. ‘Tell me what you did. After you’d turned your back on the “and Son”. What paid for the California beach house? The fees for Dower House?’
‘I knew two things-software engineering and cars-so I put them together and developed a software application for the motor industry. My father disapproves of computers on principle. Driving, for him, is a question of man and machine-nothing in between. So he never forgave me for that, either.’
‘Maybe you have to forgive yourself first,’ she said.
Forgive himself?
For a moment his brain floundered with the concept, but only for a moment. Annie was looking up at him, smiling a little as if she knew something he didn’t. The tears she’d shed had added a sparkle to her eyes and as her lips parted to reveal a glimpse of perfect teeth he forgot what she’d said, knew only that he wanted to kiss her, was trembling with the need to kiss her in a way he hadn’t since he was eighteen years old and Penny Lomax had made a man of him.
‘Who are you?’ he demanded, but as she opened her mouth to answer him he covered it with his hand.
‘No. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.’
He didn’t want her to tell him anything that would stop him from kissing her, from doing what he’d wanted to do ever since she’d stumbled into him and her scent had taken up residence in his head.
Fluent in body language, she knew exactly what he was thinking and didn’t wait, but reached up and pulled him down to her, coming up to meet him with a raw to-hell-and-back kiss that said only one thing.
I want you. I need you.
Her other hand, clutching at his shoulder, her nails digging through the heavy material of his overalls, proclaimed the urgency of that need.
The heat of it shuddered through him, igniting a flame that would have taken an ice-cold shower to cool. Sitting by a solid-fuel stove, they didn’t stand a chance, even if he’d wanted one, he thought, tugging her shirt free of her jeans and reaching inside it to unhook the fastening of her bra. He half expected a bundle of twenty-pound notes to cascade out of it but, as he slid his hand inside it, it was filled with nothing more than a small, firm breast.
She moaned into his mouth, tearing at the studs on his overalls, her touch electric as she pushed up the T-shirt he was wearing beneath it before drawing back a little to look up at him, her eyes shining like hot sapphires, silently asking permission to touch him.
He shrugged his arms out of his overalls, pulled off the T-shirt he was wearing beneath it and fell back against the thick rag rug that had lain in that spot for as long as he could remember.
‘Help yourself,’ he said, grinning as he offered himself up to her.
Her fingers stopped a tantalising hair’s breadth from his skin.
‘What can I do?’
‘Anything…’ he began, then caught his breath as her fingertips made contact with his chest. ‘Anything that feels good,’ he managed, through a throat apparently stuffed with cobwebs. ‘Good for you,’ he added and he nearly lost it as they trailed down his chest, her long nails grazing the hollow of his stomach.
For a moment, as she straightened, he thought she’d changed her mind, but she caught the hem of her sweater and pulled it, shirt and bra over her head and discarded them impatiently. Her long body was taut, strong, her breasts were high, firm, beautiful and her eyes widened in shock and a shiver ran through her body as he touched a nipple.
‘You like that?’ he asked.
She made an unintelligible sound that was pure delight and, seizing her around the waist, he lifted her so that she straddled his body, wanting her to know that he liked it too. To feel his heat, know what she was doing to him. Had been doing to him since the moment she’d pitched into his arms.
For a moment she didn’t move, then, with the tiniest of sighs, she bent to lay her lips against his stomach and this time the moan came from him.
‘You like that?’ she asked mischievously, looking up with the smile of a child who’d just been given the freedom of a sweet shop. Then he was the one catching his breath as she leaned forward to touch her lips to his, her breasts brushing his chest. He wanted to crush her to him, overwhelm her, cut short the teasing foreplay, but some
