A Christmas Night to Remember

For a moment it was as though her grandmother was right there with her and Melody blinked, mentally shaking herself. Zeke had said her grandmother’s jaundiced view of life and love had affected her, and she hadn’t liked it at the time, but could there be some truth in it? Had it affected her adversely?

The idea felt like a betrayal of the woman who had raised her and sacrificed much to give her the dancing lessons she’d craved, and Melody immediately repudiated it. Men did obsess on a woman’s body and looks. The number of middle-aged women who were dumped during their husbands’ ‘mid-life crisis’ was proof of that. Men simply weren’t naturally monogamous.

She came out of her reverie to find she’d inadvertently finished her glass of champagne and that Zeke’s gaze was tight on her face. Silently he refilled her glass. ‘What were you thinking just now?’ he asked quietly. ‘It was about me, wasn’t it?’

There was no way she was going to tell him, but she had to say something to satisfy that razor-sharp mind. She made herself glance across the restaurant, which was gradually filling up, her stance studiously offhand, before she said, ‘Just that today hasn’

t gone the way I’d planned, I suppose.’

‘Did you really think after three months or so of being incarcerated I’d let you do this on your own?’

‘I am more than capable of taking care of myself,’ she said tersely. ‘I’m not a child.’

His voice carried more than a touch of self-deprecation when he drawled, ‘Believe me, Dee, I’ve never seen you as a child. Exasperating, unfathomable on occasion, but never a child.’

She flushed at the sensual desire in the ebony eyes. She’d walked right into that one. Flustered, she sipped at her champagne, before realising what she was doing and putting the glass down so abruptly it almost toppled over.

‘Relax.’ He took her hand, as if he had the perfect right to touch her whenever he wanted to and her talk of separation and divorce had never happened. ‘You’re like a cat on a hot tin roof. This is me, remember? Your husband.’

He slid his thumb into her curved palm, softly stroking her silky skin before turning her hand over and raising it to his lips. A bolt of electricity shot up her arm and she gasped before she could stifle her reaction to his mouth on her sensitive flesh. Jerking her hand away, she glared at him. ‘Don’t do that,’ she said, a mite too fiercely.

‘Another don’t.’ His mouth curved wryly. ‘But you like me touching you. Don’t deny it. And I like touching you, Dee. Remember how it used to be?’ His gaze drifted to her lips and she felt them tingle, the tips of her breasts hardening as a flood of sexual need raced through her. ‘We’d make love anywhere, any time, remember? And that’s what we did, Dee. We made love. We didn’t just have sex, great though that was.’

She wanted to say Don’t again, and stopped herself just in time, but his voice was evoking memories she could have done without—memories that persisted in surfacing in dreams at night that rent her in two when she awoke and he wasn’t there.

‘Like that time in Madeira when you were cooking us pancakes for breakfast and we found another use for the maple syrup,’ he murmured throatily. ‘I swear I’ve never tasted anything so good. We never did have the pancakes, did we…?’

They had ravished each other right there on the sun-warmed wood of the kitchen floor, and later, when they’d showered away the stickiness of the syrup together, washing each other with silky-soft suds, they had made love again, slowly and languorously, making it last. Heady days. Magical days.

Aware that she was in a public place, and couldn’t give way to the anguish the terrible enchantment of his words had induced, Melody grappled for self-control. It didn’t matter how good they had been together. That was then and this was now. The girl who had revelled in winding her smooth, honey-coloured limbs round his, who had delighted in the pleasure he got from her perfect body, was no more. Never again would she feel so uninhibited, so full of joy, so his. She didn’t expect him to understand—she barely understood herself—but self-survival dictated she had to leave him before she withered and died trying to be the person he’d fallen in love with. She couldn’t face the prospect of kindness and pity replacing the desire and passion he’d had for her.

‘You want me, Dee. Every bit as much as I want you.’ He refused to accept her transparent self-denial. ‘You need to feel me inside you as much as I need to be there. I want to make love to you for hours again. Nothing hasty or rushed, because we have all the time in the world now you’re with me once more. Every doubt you have, every concern, I can make it better. I can sweep them all away and make you believe we’re okay.’

‘No, you can’t, and I’m not with you again—not in the way you mean,’ Melody said feverishly, trying to fight the ache of sexual need his words had called forth.

‘You’re mine, you’ll always be mine, and you know it.’ He leant closer, not touching her yet enveloping her with his body warmth. ‘Our home is waiting for you and it’s killing me to live there alone. I can’t be there without imagining you in my arms, making love in every room like we did the first week we moved in.’ His ebony gaze watched the way the memories he’d called up were sinking in, and his voice was husky as he continued softly, ‘This is the first day of the rest of our lives together—’

‘Stop it.’ Her tone was sharp enough to check anything further he might have said. ‘Stop it or I’m leaving right now.’

He stared into her eyes, large and tragic against her pale features, and then swore under his breath. Leaning back in his seat, he drained his glass of champagne.

The waiter brought their first course to the table in the next few moments, and it was another minute or two, after they had begun to eat, that he said, his voice conversational, ‘I don’t know whether I want to kiss you or strangle you right now.’ His voice was low, but she knew he meant every word.

‘You don’t need to worry about it because I wouldn’t let you do either.’ She deliberately kept her voice light and her face expressionless. ‘This is wonderful pâté, by the way.’

Zeke’s eyes were hard black stones as he tried to assimilate the change in her. She could see she had thrown him, and because he was always perfectly in control he wouldn’t like that. She didn’t think a woman had ever said no to him before either; until he had met her he had always been the one to end his relationships, and they had invariably been conducted exactly the way he decreed. Having said that, most of his exes seemed to have a soft spot for him still.

‘So you are determined to continue with this ridiculous farce?’ he said mildly, after he had finished his salmon.

Melody looked at him squarely, blessing the strength that had come from somewhere and was keeping her trembling inside under wraps. ‘You mean the separation? Of course.’

‘Of course?’ he drawled lazily, his mood having taken a lightning change of direction. ‘I wouldn’t have said there was any “of course” about it. But what am I? A mere man.’

Melody eyed him warily. No one could accuse Zeke James of being a mere anything.

He stared back at her, his uneven mouth lifted in the appealing curve she knew so well. Why did he have to be so—so everything? she asked herself with silent despair. Why couldn’t she have fallen in love with a nice Mr Average—someone she found attractive but who didn’t have the rest of the female race champing at the bit? Someone she could have felt was truly hers?

But she hadn’t. Bottom line. And maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference to how she was feeling if she had. Maybe she would still feel she had to go it alone even if her man had been a nondescript nine-to-fiver with as much sex appeal as the average gnat. But she didn’t think so.