The Millionaire's Christmas Wife. HELEN BROOKS

equilibrium. Or perhaps it wasn’t so much her mental or emotional equanimity, she admitted with hot shame, as a throbbing warmth spread throughout her lower stomach. How she could still physically want him after what he had done she didn’t know, but it appeared her body was working independently to the rest of her. ‘Let me see…’ She allowed a moment or two to pass, more to gain control over her voice than anything else. A breathless stammer just wasn’t an option.

      Today was Tuesday. ‘Friday?’ she said as steadily as she could, considering her whole body was quivering with something she labelled lust.

      ‘Yep, Friday’s good for me.’

      He sounded insultingly relaxed about the wait, she noted with a mixture of hurt and bitterness. But then she had no doubt at all Jay could fill his evenings without any trouble whatsoever. From the first day she had met him she had known women found him totally irresistible. ‘Fine, Friday it is.’

      ‘I’ll pick you up at eight.’

      Now he had got his own way he sounded almost uninterested, but then that was the nature of the beast, Miriam told herself silently. Jay was the ultimate alpha male, the leader, the hunter. How she could have been so incredibly stupid as to get mixed up with him in the first place she still didn’t know, but she had further compounded that mistake by believing him when he’d said he loved her and wanted her to marry him, that the two of them would be a forever witness to the power of true love. Her thoughts prompted her to say, ‘Wouldn’t it be better to communicate through our solicitors? I mean, we’ve said all we can say, surely?’

      ‘Perhaps.’ It was cold. Chilling. ‘But I’ll pick you up at eight.’

      The kicked-in-the-stomach feeling she was experiencing didn’t give her any strength to argue. Suddenly a sense of fatalism was there. Maybe she had to go through the final death throes to emerge whole again, she thought a trifle hysterically. ‘You—you’ve got my address?’

      ‘I know where you live, Miriam.’

      ‘Oh, right.’

      ‘Goodnight.’

      When the phone went dead she continued to stare at it blankly for a moment or two. That was it. End of conversation. He had got what he wanted and so there was no need to prolong what had probably been to him a tedious exchange. ‘I hate you,’ she whispered into the silent room. She did, she really hated him.

      But did she hate him enough? a separate part of her mind asked disturbingly. Enough to remain strong when they met, enough to refuse to let him walk all over her, enough to show him that she was finished with him for good?

      Reaching for the last of the hot chocolate, she drained the mug and rose to her feet. She wasn’t going to do this—the endless soul-searching that she’d indulged in for so long in the caustic aftermath of their separation. It got her nowhere. Facts were what mattered. Jay had slept with another woman just six months after he had stood at the altar and promised to love, honour and cherish her. End of story.

      Her mouth pulled tight with pain, Miriam placed the empty mug in the tiny sink in the kitchen area and walked over to the sofa. The beginnings of a headache drummed a persistent tattoo at the backs of her eyes and she pressed her fingers into the side of her forehead.

      Perhaps it was as well Jay had phoned tonight, she told herself as she swiftly converted the sofa into a snug bed and got undressed. Once in her nightie she padded along to the bathroom at the end of the landing which she shared with the other occupant of that floor, a young student called Caroline, who was rarely at home since she’d found a boyfriend with his own flat. After a perfunctory wash she brushed her teeth and went back to her room, her mind still gnawing over the events of the last half-hour. Yes, all things considered, Jay contacting her wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. He was right, they couldn’t go on as they were, in a state of limbo. Their marriage was over and the sooner it was made legally so, the better. He had never been right for her; from the beginning she had known she was out of his league. He was far more suited to a woman like Belinda Poppins.

      Poppins. She made a sound in the back of her throat. If ever a woman had been misnamed, Belinda had. She was as unlike a magical nanny who made everything all right for everyone she came into contact with as it was possible to be. Tall and elegant, with a perfect figure that looked sensational in anything and everything, Belinda was the sort of private secretary that was every wife’s worst nightmare. The original man-eater.

      Miriam stood for a moment in front of the full-length mirror in the bedsit, surveying her reflection critically. Soft brown eyes set in an oval face liberally sprinkled with freckles stared back at her, her shoulder-length chestnut hair and creamy skin completing a picture of gentle benevolence. She was the sort of person babies and animals liked instinctively, her aura of innocent non-aggression drawing any waif and stray within a fifty-mile radius to her side. Most of her boyfriends before she’d met Jay had had something of the lame duck about them once she’d got to know them; she seemed to attract such types. And then Jay Carter had blazed into her life.

      She jerked away from the mirror, telling herself to stop thinking about him, but her mind was set on a certain course now and the memories were flooding in.

      She’d met him on a wild, windy March afternoon in the middle of a torrential downpour when her umbrella had chosen to turn itself inside out. She’d cannoned straight into him, the force of his hard, unyielding male body almost knocking her over but for his arms coming out to grab her. Corny, but it had been love at first sight. At least for her, she thought miserably, climbing into bed and pulling the duvet up to her chin. With hindsight she now saw, whatever he’d felt for her, it hadn’t been the love she’d believed it was.

      They had married three months later after a whirlwind romance during which she’d lived on cloud nine, unable to believe a man like Jay—a wealthy, successful, handsome and charismatic entrepreneur with the Midas touch—wanted her, Miriam Brown. They had honeymooned for a month in Italy at the beautiful villa set in the hills that Jay had bought some years before, before returning home to his palatial apartment in Westminster which overlooked the river.

      She had continued at her job in the law firm, not because she had to—Jay was rich enough for her never to work again—but because she wanted to. The thought of sitting at home all day twiddling her thumbs or becoming one of the ‘lunch’ crowd who drank g & ts, nibbled on lettuce leaves and then shopped all afternoon filled her with horror. Once she was expecting a baby she’d consider giving in her notice, she’d decided, but until then she’d carry on as before. Although now, instead of going home to the flat she had shared with three other girls she’d been at university with, she had Jay.

      She had been so looking forward to their first Christmas together. Much to Jay’s amusement she’d spent a fortune on Christmas decorations in November and on the first weekend in December had turned the apartment into a vision of gold and red, transforming its rather masculine decor of coffee and dark browns mixed with off-white.

      As a child her Christmases had, of necessity, been frugal affairs, her father having walked out on her mother and herself when she was six years old, leaving behind a mass of debt. He had disappeared off to some foreign destination with the woman he’d been seeing on the quiet, leaving her mother to pick up the pieces of their shattered life as best she could. They hadn’t seen him from that day to the time, ten years later, her mother had been notified of his death in a car accident. Her mother had remarried a year later.

      Miriam turned over in bed, irritable and annoyed with herself for the trip down memory lane. She didn’t want to think about her father or Jay—they were two of a kind, she told herself bitterly. Egotistical and selfcentred, the sort of men who would never be satisfied with one woman for long. She had always been amazed at her mother’s lack of bitterness where her father was concerned; she’d never spoken ill of him, not even through the years when they’d lived in one flea-bitten dump after another, struggling to get by on what her mother earned as a dental nurse. She’d known, deep inside, that her mother still loved him, even though they’d never spoken of it. It was only after her mother knew he was dead that she ceased to give up hoping he’d come back.