The Baby Made at Christmas. Lilian Darcy

swore, or groaned, or something. He was still angry, despite the stirring she could feel in his body. She could see it in his eyes and the set of his mouth. He pulled her closer, so that her breasts grazed against him, then pressed hard. She was wearing only the robe, and it was working loose, the tie at the waist slipping its granny knot and the gap between the fluffy blue lapels widening more and more.

      He looked down and saw her cleavage, apparently as if it was something new. The sight seemed to make him pause, and she looked down, too. Yes, okay, they were bigger, and they’d been a pretty decent size to begin with. He liked them. He’d lavished them with endless attention in the past.

      She looked up into his face and reached to cup his jaw lightly with her hand. This was one of the things she liked, knowing how much he wanted her, and playing to it, making him wait or jumping right in, varying their mood together, teasing him terribly, sometimes, and loving it when he teased her back just as much.

      She stretched up and planted a soft, questing kiss on that angry mouth. It didn’t soften. She kept going, pressing against his stubborn lips, darting out her tongue, deliberately softening and opening, tilting her head, touching his jaw with feathery fingertips.

      Still that mouth didn’t soften, but at least it kissed back. Oh, boy, did it kiss back! A rough, angry sort of kiss that came with hard arms around her and muscles tense with frustration and need. She guessed a kiss like this was trying to tell her something, but she didn’t buy it...even though she liked it, a lot.

      You want a kiss, Lee, you’ll get a kiss, he seemed to be saying. You’ll get my hands on your butt and my tongue in your mouth and the taste and smell of me, and, yes, it’s damned good and we both know it.

      He hadn’t shaved since he left Colorado, it felt like. The three-day growth of beard rasped at her skin as his mouth moved against hers, and of course it felt good. It felt fantastic. He smelled good, too—a mix of car freshener and salted nuts and snow. She put her whole heart into kissing him, threading her fingers through his hair, tilted her face to one side, letting her tongue sweep his mouth deeper and deeper, tangling with his. Any minute now, she’d start undressing him, and he’d get rid of her robe in about four seconds—it was already wide-open, and the belt was on the floor—and this would end the way it always did.

      But no.

      He kept on punishing her with his body, and she couldn’t get her hands down to start unfastening his shirt. Still, that didn’t matter for now. He pulled her naked hips against the soft rasp of his jeans and tightened his arm muscles until their strength almost hurt, and as far as she was concerned, all he was doing was proving her point, not his.

      Admit it, Mac....

      Admit what?

      “No, Lee, hell!” he growled suddenly. “I won’t do this.” He removed the rough mouth with a last rasp of unshaved jaw across her cheek, grabbed her wrist and pulled her hand away from its sneaky caress of his face, then bracketed her hips and pushed.

      He took the two front sections of her robe and lapped them across each other, his knuckles bumping her breasts. For a fraction of a second she thought he was going to let those knuckles soften and slow, brush them over her darkened nipples, push the robe open again and cup her, but no. Maybe that was just her hungry imagination, or maybe he’d simply taken hold of his willpower and changed his mind.

      He bent and picked up the belt of the robe, passed it behind her, then knotted it in front, tight. “We’ve never had angry sex before, and now’s not the time to start.”

      She stepped back. “Doesn’t have to be angry.” He looked so good, her heart was pounding, confusing her.

      How happy am I that he’s here? Too happy. Scary happy. Don’t like it.

      “Does when I am,” he said.

      “So what’s going to get you to stop being angry?” She took a breath. “And what’s going to get you to leave?”

      So I feel safe again. Safe from my heart.

      The breath went out of him at this, a big whoosh of it, as if she’d punched him in the gut. He pivoted away from her and leaned on the bench. He looked very, very tired, suddenly, and she wondered how long the two thousand miles of driving had taken him. Nonstop it would have to be at least thirty hours. More. Two days, or three? Had he driven at night, or stopped at a motel?

      “You want me to leave?” he growled.

      She lifted her chin. “If you’re angry, yes. If we can’t talk, because all that happens is accusations flying back and forth, then yes, it’s best if you leave. Don’t you think?”

      “I’m not leaving.”

      “So you want us to talk things through?”

      “What I want—” He stopped.

      She waited.

      “I’ve had some time to think, now. You didn’t give me that before.”

      “You never asked for it, or showed the slightest indication that you needed it.”

      “Because I was in shock. I was... This is huge, all of it. You don’t know—you can’t know... You were four or five days ahead of me with what was happening, and it was completely unfair of you to expect me to catch up right away. Maybe I didn’t say the right things, but I don’t think you did, either.” His eyes blazed darkly.

      “I tried.”

      “So did I.”

      They glared at each other and he pulled at the collar of his shirt as if it was uncomfortable. His hair feathered against the blue fabric, and before she’d even thought about what she was doing, she reached up and tidied it for him so that it sat in neat waves, overlapping his collar by a good two inches. She loved his hair. She loved that he’d forgotten to fight her off, when really she had no right to touch him like this.

      “So tell me about your thinking,” she said.

      He took a big breath. “I want us to try and make a go of this, Lee.”

      She didn’t even know what that meant. Make a go of what? Having sex? Hadn’t they done that already? Wasn’t that the whole problem?

      They’d been far too stunningly successful at the whole point of having sex, and now her idea about what to do next didn’t remotely mesh with his. “What do you mean?” she said eventually. Pathetically.

      “I’m moving east. Correction, I have moved.”

      “You’ve—”

      “Brought everything. Wasn’t much I really needed. I’ll unpack after we’ve had that coffee.”

      “Unpack?”

      He turned to her again. His mood had—how could you describe it?—changed color, or something. The black obsidian of anger held a gleam of wicked white light. He almost smiled, but not quite. “Didn’t you say this place had four bedrooms?”

      Chapter Two

      Three months earlier, Colorado

      Maybe I should have gone home for Christmas.

      The Narman family was in residence at their luxurious Aspen vacation home, which meant that caretaker Lee didn’t have the run of the house as she always did when they weren’t here. They were generous with this. “Of course you must use the whole place. That’s exactly what we want. For it to look lived in.”

      She tried to be generous in return, going above and beyond what they expected of her, airing the huge rooms out whenever she could, and keeping everything scrupulously clean, preparing the house with fresh flowers and freshly made beds and handpicked groceries when they were due to arrive.

      It was a cushy arrangement that she had at this place, with its ski-in ski-out access to the Aspen Highlands slopes, and she didn’t want it to change. The family usually stayed here only a few