A Dream Christmas. Кэрол Мортимер

stepped into his open-plan living area and abruptly stopped when he saw Riley sitting at the kitchen counter. His heart stuttered. She’d pulled that long fall of deep red hair into a ponytail that hung halfway down her back and her Saturday face held the lightest of make-up, freckles he rarely saw splattering across her nose and cheeks. She was engrossed in the morning paper, a cup of coffee at her elbow.

      Seeing her sitting there felt so damned right …

      Except that it wasn’t. He’d tried the relationship thing. It had led to the engagement thing. That hadn’t worked out too well. When he’d found out his fiancée had lied to him and stolen his money, he’d decided never to put himself in the position of being at the mercy of any woman ever again.

      Especially one who had kicked him into touch once before. Lesson learnt and all that.

      ‘How did you get in here?’ he demanded, conscious that he looked hot, sweaty and, possibly, unhinged.

      Riley didn’t bother looking up. ‘Your lift code is 9562. Morgan told me.’

      ‘Of course she did.’ James sighed. She was so pretty. Small, tight, perfect. He only had to look at her and he wanted to nail her, every single time. He’d be meeting with investors and the image of her would pop into his head and he’d stop breathing. And he’d go stone-hard.

      ‘I need to shower—are you going to be here when I get back?’

      Riley very deliberately looked at her watch. ‘Maybe. It’s Saturday morning and I have things to do.’

      Why did everything have to be a battle?

      ‘Stay there,’ he ordered before walking down the passage, through his bedroom and to the shower.

      Slapping his hands against the glass of his huge power shower, he dropped his head and closed his eyes as hot water pummelled his tired muscles. He had a woman in his apartment for the first time in for … well, for ever—liaisons, okay, one-night stands, always took place where he could leave—and she was already giving him grief.

      Situation very normal, then. It didn’t escape his notice that the two women he’d let all the way into his life, his heart, his home had both wreaked havoc. Riley—he’d laid his heart at her feet and she’d stomped on it in her haste to go backpacking around south-east Asia—granted, she’d only been nineteen, but still—and Liz, who, after he’d proposed, changed from the sweet girl he’d fallen in love with into a money-grabbing monster.

      Not only had Liz burned through his credit cards, she’d also refused to sign a pre-nup and had transferred money out of the credit card he’d given her into her personal bank account. When he’d confronted her, she’d explained that she was not going to leave their marriage with nothing.

      They were still months off tying the knot and she was already contemplating divorce? That had been a big ‘maybe this won’t work out’ moment for James. She went to the press; he went to his lawyers and it had been such a spectacular, messy, humiliating failure.

      He’d been raised to succeed and failure was never an option. That his failure of an engagement had been so public, a very ugly airing of their dirty laundry, still had the ability to coat his throat with acid.

      It still stung that he’d been so comprehensively fooled … And because James had a talent for factual analysis, unbiased by prejudice and emotion—one of the reasons he was the youngest mining magnate in the world and the CEO of Moreau International at the age of thirty-four—he now had issues with that fuzzy concept called love. Since he’d failed so spectacularly at it, once privately, once very publicly, somewhere along the line he’d decided that it was best to be avoided.

      He couldn’t analyse it, didn’t understand it so he’d rather steer clear of it. But, if he believed that sex had nothing to do with love, why couldn’t he go out and find some?

      Until he had the time and inclination to work through that dilemma he’d remain horny, dammit.

       Dammit.

      James rushed through the rest of his shower, deciding not to shave. He pulled on a pair of comfortable jeans and the closest T-shirt he could grab from his walk-in closet, an old grey one with the words Instant Human, just add coffee in faded letters on the front, and left his bedroom.

      ‘You live in a hospital, Moreau,’ Riley said, her attention still on the paper. She had yet to look at him and her flat voice and snippy attitude amused him. So she wasn’t happy with his order to be here … Well, tough. He wasn’t happy about her leaving.

      He looked around his home and shrugged. ‘It’s not so bad.’

      It was a penthouse in the most exclusive apartment building in NYC, with superb views, lots of space and incredible facilities.

      ‘It’s very white and hardly has any furniture. There’s minimalistic and then there’s ass-cold empty.’

      ‘Says the woman who lives in an apartment that looks like a kaleidoscope.’ He reached for a mug and jammed it under the spout of the coffee machine, hit the button and waited for it to dispense its magic juice.

      ‘I have a degree in art and a diploma in interior design and you have the taste of a polar bear,’ Riley retorted after taking a sip of her cup of coffee.

      James took a notepad and pen out of the ceramic bowl—white—that held keys and coins and quickly added to a list he had running. And, talking of coffee, where the hell was his? He looked at the screen on the machine where it flashed the only words that, along with I’m pregnant with your child and Moreau stock is falling, had the ability to freeze his blood.

       Replace coffee beans.

      Especially when he had no damned coffee beans.

      Despite his wealth and like the rest of his family, he tried to keep his life as normal as possible and that meant not having people pandering to his every whim. He had a cleaner come in on a regular basis, someone to do his laundry and his housekeeper kept the place stocked with cleaning materials, but he did his own food shopping. He enjoyed cooking and he liked to choose his own produce, liked exploring the food markets of NYC, the delis, the bakeries. Lately he’d been so busy that shopping for food was way down on his list of priorities.

      But forgetting to buy coffee? That was unacceptable!

      James snatched Riley’s cup out of her hands, ignored her protests and swallowed gratefully. Keeping the cup to his lips, he jotted another bullet point on the list before ripping it off and handing it over.

      ‘Give me back my coffee, Moreau.’ When he didn’t answer or comply, she glared at him before looking at the list in her hand. ‘What is this?’ ‘Read it.’

      ‘Christmas shopping … organise Christmas cocktail party … find Morgan and Noah’s wedding present … find your replacement … paint out your office … redesign my apartment … buy more coffee beans … What is this?’

      ‘Your to-do list. The reason you are here this morning. You said that you had nothing to do while you were working out your notice,’ James said mildly, enjoying the slow burn of anger pinking her cheeks as she read the list again. ‘I said that I would find you stuff to do.’

      ‘You have got to be kidding me.’

      ‘Nope. That’s what you are going to be doing after you get the Christmas windows up.’

      Riley looked as if she wanted to bop him on the nose. He glanced down and noticed that her fists were clenched so he took a cautionary step backwards. Not that she would reach him, but why take the chance?

      ‘James, I am a professional artist, not a … a … a whatever who does this is!’

      ‘Then withdraw your resignation and sit on your pretty butt or take a holiday like you normally do.’ James emptied her coffee cup and pulled a face. ‘Coffee that costs over a hundred dollars a pound should be drunk black,