his bad days, it wouldn’t have done any good to go to school, because I wouldn’t have been able to concentrate anyway.’
Ben reached over and simply took her hand. That one gesture was enough to roughen her voice and moisten her eyes again. She ought to stop, but she couldn’t. She’d needed to say all of this for such a long time.
‘In my last year of school, when I should have been taking my GCSEs, he deteriorated even further. I’d missed so much by then that I didn’t even want to go in. And some of the girls were horrible…you know how girls can be. But Dad was in so much pain, he became angry and difficult sometimes and took his frustration out on me-not physically-just verbally. But I understood, really I did.’
Ben’s thumb gently stroked the back of her hand and she felt something hard inside herself crumple. More tears flowed and she pulled her hand away to mop them up with a tissue. Things were getting far too maudlin. It was time to brighten the story up.
‘Anyway, Cinderella got her happy ending,’ she said brightly. ‘Just before my seventeenth birthday I was spotted by a scout from a modelling agency and the rest, as they say, is history.’
He held a box of tissues out to her and she took another one. ‘What happened to the rest of your family?’
The noise she made using the tissue was truly disgusting. ‘Well, my wages helped buy a new house, pay for university fees and things like that. Sarah, the next eldest after me, is a lawyer now and she emigrated to Australia five years ago. The rest have all gone out to visit her this year, but I didn’t want to be away from Jack for that long. Billy and Charlotte still live in London-he manages a restaurant, she’s a hairdresser. And Charlie, the youngest, is just finishing university. He wants to be an actor.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘There’s no telling some people.’
Somehow, her hand was back in Ben’s and he was stroking it again.
‘What about your dad?’
Drat! Why did this man have to be so good at reading between the lines?
‘He died less than a year after I started modelling.’ She looked into Ben’s eyes, desperate in this moment for someone else to understand what she’d done. ‘I let him down,’ she whispered. ‘I should have been there.’
And then she started crying, really crying. None of that sniffing nonsense she’d been doing up until now. Big, fat tears rolled down her cheeks. She tried to talk, but her vocal cords had gone on strike.
Gently, slowly, so she wasn’t even sure how they’d got there, a pair of strong arms wrapped around her. Time seemed to slow as she sobbed against his chest, but it could only have been a few minutes.
‘I’ve kind of blown your plan for a Merry Christmas right out of the water, haven’t I?’ she said, thinking she should pull away but doing nothing about it. ‘But thank you for trying. I’m not sure there was ever much hope for a woman who doesn’t know who to be any more.’
Ben shifted beneath her. His hands came up to cradle her face and he made her look at him.
No one had ever looked at her that way before, as if she were delicate, precious. Her heart, which had been shrivelled like one of the dates her Auntie June used to serve up on Boxing Day, swelled.
His voice was low and scratchy. ‘Louise, you are…I…’
For a man who always knew what to say, he was a little short on words at the moment. That couldn’t be a good thing. Ben’s features clouded and she could tell he was struggling.
He was no longer looking at her, but was staring at a piece of blank wall behind her, his mind whirring and, when he looked back at her, her heart stood still for a beat. In his eyes was a renewed sense of purpose and she knew he had something to say. She waited. And Ben just looked at her as if there weren’t adequate words to communicate what he was thinking. Oh, how she wished he would try.
His gaze dropped to her lips and she felt them part slightly and her breath catch.
He was going to kiss her. The world started to somersault.
Slowly, he bent his head to meet hers, giving her ample time to move away if she wanted to. But, despite all her ground rules about keeping things ‘safe’, about keeping things locked away in her daydreams, Louise found she didn’t want to move. She wanted him to come towards her. She wanted to taste him, an experience her daydreams had never been able to provide.
The touch of his mouth on hers was exquisitely tender, soft as a whisper. She closed her eyes and gave up all hope of keeping fantasy and reality separate.
Oh, this was better than she’d ever imagined. As Ben kissed her again, still with the same soul-wrenching gentleness, the nerve-endings in her lips burst into life. He moved his hands from her face, ran them through her hair and pulled her closer to him as he fell back against the pile of cushions.
Louise followed him gladly, relishing the fact that she was in total control. Now, instead of
They kissed each other sweetly, slowly, as if time had stopped for them and all that existed was this moment. After a while, the intensity of their kisses deepened. His lips sought her neck, her jaw line, her earlobe, and Louise began to tingle all over.
She wanted to lose herself in this feeling. Of being desired. Of being feminine. And of being powerful. It was as if she’d entered a realm where she was who she’d always wanted to be, and she wasn’t prepared to relinquish that feeling easily.
Rolling over, she pulled him on top of her, giving her hands access to the strong, broad muscles of his back. Ben responded by running a hand down the side of her torso, skimming the curve of her waist. The air between them crackled and popped like the logs on the fire.
Hadn’t she said something tonight along the lines of not knowing what she wanted? Well, she had no problem pinpointing that now-it was all blazingly clear. She wanted Ben. All of him. Right here. Right now.
Taking a deep breath, she wiggled her hands between their bodies and fiddled with the top button of his shirt. A shiver of nerves ran through her.
There had been nobody else but Toby-and he’d grazed in other pastures. What if she wasn’t any good? What if she disappointed him? What if this all didn’t live up to the fairy tale in her head? For years, Toby had looked at her with a familiar apathy, and she couldn’t bear the thought of seeing the same deadness in Ben’s eyes in the morning. She was just going to have to pull out all the stops.
Ben, who had been trailing kisses from her collarbone to just below her ear, went still. Her heart began to pound. Ben looked as if he wanted to stop and say something but just couldn’t control himself. He kissed her again-hot and sweet and deep enough to make her toes burn.
She trembled as she tried to find a second button on his shirt, her fingers clumsy in the haze of her desire. Ben dragged his lips from hers and his hand closed over her fingers, which were still fiddling fruitlessly with the button.
‘We don’t need to rush into this,’ he whispered.
She knew what he was trying to do. He was trying to be the perfect gentleman, to give her an out. Her gaze locked with his. ‘Perhaps we do.’
Once again, he held her face in his hands and, this time, he delivered the sweetest kiss yet. She wiggled her fingers under his and succeeded in popping the button out of its hole. He gripped her hands more tightly.
‘Really, Louise. You don’t need someone taking advantage of you when you’re feeling vulnerable. Maybe this isn’t the right time to make this kind of decision.’
He traced the line of her jaw with his thumb and, although his eyes dropped to look at her mouth once again, he didn’t kiss her.
‘Why can’t I decide what I need?’ Even in her own ears her voice didn’t sound one hundred per cent convincing. But she didn’t want to give up yet. Moments like this were like Christmas itself-fleeting, magical. The day after tomorrow the glitter and the wonder would be gone and life would return to being grey and cold and ever so slightly emptier than before.
A slow, gentle smile crept across Ben’s face and she couldn’t help but smile back as his eyes glittered with fierce intensity.
‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘We don’t need to rush. I’m not going anywhere.’
Louise let out a shaky breath. It was very hard to believe that any of this could survive the night and live beyond the dawn. Her eyes must have betrayed her, because he lowered his head and kissed her again.
Carefully, he shifted until he was lying behind her and she was spooned up against him, her head resting on his
