Christmas Child

It was out of the question and she should do herself a favour and stop even thinking of the possibility.

At least he wouldn’t find her even remotely sexy in this thing. A grey suit. It fitted but it didn’t flatter. Everything she’d bought today had been grey, with the exception of a couple of unexciting tops in beige. Nothing startling. Startling was out.

A comb through her gleaming hair and she was ready. She kept her reading glasses on because they made her look even more staid and sensible.

She’d do.

Spot on time, she clumped downstairs to keep her theatre date with her husband.

‘Do you really need to wear your glasses?’ James enquired mildly as he shot out a hand to save her from blundering into a large woman wearing a fake fur stole over a shiny emerald dress.

‘Of course. I do intend to read the programme.’ She repressed a shiver. The warm strength of his hand made her breathing rapid and shallow.

‘The stage will be a blur,’ he warned. ‘You won’t see a thing.’ Amusement enriched his voice and his fingers closed more tightly around her arm.

‘You can let me go,’ she snipped because she had to. Any more physical contact and she’d be wriggling into the side of his lean, hard body, melting closer and closer. She just knew she would. She wasn’t made of stone. ‘I’m not about to fall over my feet.’

‘Looking at those shoes, I’m not so sure.’

She ignored the amused dig at her choice of foot-wear and wrenched her arm away. She knew he’d been silently laughing at her ever since she’d stumped into the drawing room and found him engrossed in his light reading—the financial pages of the evening newspaper. She’d seen it glittering in his eyes, heard it in his voice. Well, laughing was better than lusting. Wasn’t it?

‘I think we’d better find our seats,’ she reminded him, peering round the thronged theatre foyer. It was years since s

he’d been to see a play, and that had only been in the village hall, the local school children doing The Importance of Being Earnest. Badly.

In an odd way she was looking forward to it. To broaden her social horizons? Or because she’d be sitting close to James, close enough to touch, close enough to revel in the spicy male scent of him, to feel his warmth?

Not a real question because she knew the answer. She despaired of herself!

She had refused to remove her reading glasses, but had perched them on the end of her nose so she could watch the stage over the top of them. Uninterested in the performance, James watched her profile, the curling sweep of her thick, long lashes, made smudgy by the dim lighting, the clear line of her neat little nose, the pout of soft lips and firm line of her jaw where the sleek fall of her hair caressed it, the poetic length of her throat.

Her obvious attempt to hide the delectable attractions of the ultra feminine body she’d only just discovered she possessed beneath the matronly grey suit, clumping shoes and steel-rimmed glasses had amused him. Now it made his heart lurch with a fierce, elemental tenderness that he had never experienced before.

Matts had certainly taken his warning about jumping on her to heart, despite the reassurances he’d given her this morning. Was she really afraid of him? Didn’t she know he would never do anything to hurt her?

Silently, vehemently, he cursed his lack of control the night before. A lack of control that shamed him in more ways than one. He, who justifiably prided himself on his ability to control every aspect of his life, had lost it. The way she had looked had turned him horny. Had made him issue those crazed stipulations.

He didn’t know what the hell had come over him—dammit all, it was a scant six weeks since his broken engagement had supposedly turned him off women and the messy complications of sex for the rest of his life!

Lying awake far into the night, he’d thought about it. Come to the inevitable and perfectly correct conclusion that it would be wrong—a positive crime—to force her, through the fear of the consequences, to fail to live up to her potential as a beautiful, desirable woman.

That she’d failed to listen to his countermanded instructions was evident. He would have to try harder in the reassurance department. Convince her that she had nothing to fear from him.

But—the thought hit him like an angry sledgehammer. If she could be persuaded to discard the frump additions to her wardrobe and go back to the provocative, then it was inevitable that some man would come along, fall head over heels in lust with her and take her away from him.

And she’d go—as sure as hens had feathers she’d go. Realising her full female potential went deeper than artfully applied make-up, flirty dresses, new hairstyles. It would make her want what she’d never seemed remotely interested in before—a man in her bed.

Rage possessed him, it seemed to be burning a hole in his chest, and moments before the final curtain he hussled her out of the theatre and stood on the pavement dragging the cold night air into his lungs. He needed to get her to himself, talk to her, decide whether the idea that was gripping his brain in a vice was viable or not.

Crassly, he’d believed he could handle his sexual attraction to her; he’d even rescinded his order that she stopped dressing provocatively. But, dammit, he couldn’t handle it.

So he could seduce her himself, make sure no other man took his wife from him.

It would be no hardship where he was concerned. Despite his weary distaste for all women, Mattie wasn’t ‘all women’. Mattie was different.

But would it be a betrayal of her? The essential her?

He took her elbow, his fingers biting into the soft flesh beneath the thick grey cloth, the muscles of his hand tense. ‘The restaurant’s a five-minute walk away. So let’s get our circulation moving.’