12 Gifts for Christmas. Джулия Кеннер

over her treasonous body, but she didn’t. She couldn’t.

      She loved him.

      She stared down at his beautiful face, so male and arrogant and uniquely Rafi, and she could not even manage to berate herself for that weakness as she had over these last months.

      He had treated her terribly, there was no denying it. The parts of her he’d hurt still ached with it, and she thought sometimes they always would. But that didn’t change the man she knew was there, beneath all that, beyond what had happened between them. She still believed in that man. The honorable person who had vowed to protect her—and he had done so. Just not from himself.

      “Lucy …” The way he said her name, with the faintest touch of his Alakkulian accent and that fire in his eyes, still undid her. Just as it always had.

      She had lost so much and been so alone. She loved him. Tonight he was her husband. He would no doubt leave again as if he had never been, and she would return to England and reality—so what harm was there in treating this like all those dreams she’d had in all the lonely months she’d languished here, by herself?

      She didn’t want to think anymore. She didn’t want to wonder and worry and rip herself to pieces trying to understand what had happened to this marriage, what had stolen this very connection away from them. Here, now, she just wanted to feel.

      No matter how much she might live to regret it.

      She bent her head and kissed him.

      The fire between them blazed white hot. He pulled her closer, angling his mouth for a deeper fit, and then rolled her over, his hands moving to learn her curves anew.

      And Lucy could do nothing but delight in it. In him. At last.

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      THE snow fell all through the night, and into the next day. It cocooned them, Lucy thought sometime the next morning, gazing out at the drifts of white. It softened the reality of their fractured marriage, let them concentrate instead on what they had at that moment.

      This connection. This fire. The insatiable wildness of their passion that nothing seemed to dim.

      She shut off her mind and pushed away all the darkness of the past months, choosing to bask in Rafi as she had so long ago on that trip to Paris.

      Through the day, they fed each other in the great four-poster bed. They tasted each other again and again. And they talked. About the world, about the small, inconsequential things that made up their lives. He was funny, intriguing. And so impossibly sensual.

      If she had not already been in love with him, Lucy knew, this little interlude would have sent her head over heels.

      But there was so much left unsaid, so much pain and heartbreak, that even a stolen day or two surrounded by the snow could not keep it all at bay. Perhaps it was her knowledge that this bliss could not—would not—last that made the idyll that much sweeter.

      It was Christmas Eve, though Lucy had not dared mention it, aware of Rafi’s dislike of all things Christmas.

      That evening, they sat before the great fireplace that dominated one wall in the master suite, both of them exhausted in the most delicious way. She leaned back against his bare chest as he toyed with her curls, twining them around his fingers.

      I will always remember this instant, this feeling, she thought. No matter what happens.

      “I wish we could be like this forever,” she said on a happy sigh, caught up in the joy of the moment—in the sense of rightness that moved through her.

      She regretted the words immediately.

      He stiffened behind her, then set her away from him. She closed her eyes as all the pain and hurt she’d been ignoring came rushing back, full force.

      “I do, too,” he said in a low, bitter voice. “But I am not the one who made this impossible.”

      Her hands curled into fists, and she turned to look at him. His gray eyes were so troubled, his mouth so grim. And he still glared at her as if he had every reason to hate her. And did.

      It was too much.

      Everything she’d been through, everything she’d struggled to survive—all of it rolled through her, incinerating her, scalding her.

      “No. You did this, Rafi.” She threw the words at him, letting her anger show, letting him see what he’d done to her. “You destroyed this marriage, not me!”

      “I’m not going to play your games,” Rafi said roughly, but he was shaken by what he saw in her eyes. The condemnation. The deep, abiding pain, as if he’d wounded her. But how was that possible? She was the one who’d betrayed him … hadn’t she?

      He should never have touched her again. He should have crawled through the snow to stay away from her.

      “Listen to me,” she said in a low, serious voice. Her eyes locked on his. “I am only going to say it once. I was pregnant.

      I never lied about that—why would I? Did you think it was my life’s ambition to marry a man I hardly knew? To move to the other side of the world to a place where I’d be scrutinized, judged and found wanting every time? But I did it because I loved you and I thought it was the right thing to do for our child.”

      “Our child,” he repeated, hearing the fury in his own voice, feeling it surge through him. “How dare you pretend—”

      “I lost the baby,” she hissed at him, her brown eyes filling with tears. She jabbed a finger in the direction of the vast bathroom. “In that room. On that floor. It was horrible, and do you know what was worse, Rafi? Being told that you believed I’d made the whole thing up.”

      “You said it yourself!” he snapped, his temper blazing as his mind reeled. But he remembered it vividly. “I was in Sydney. I’d had back-to-back meetings for weeks on end in Singapore, New Zealand, Australia. But I called you the second I could get away. I asked after your pregnancy and you said, as clear as day, ‘There is no baby.’ You admitted it.”

      “I was grieving!” she protested. “There was no baby because I’d lost it!”

      The tears were moving down her cheeks now and she did nothing to check them. She reached for the blanket they’d kicked aside in their last round of passion, and Rafi noticed that her delicate hands were shaking.

      “Lucy—” he began, but she made a slashing gesture through the air, cutting him off.

      “You made it plain from the start that I was marrying far above my station,” she said, each word like a bullet, each one slamming into him. “You made no secret of the fact that I was beneath you—that sleeping with me was all right for an illicit week in Paris, but should never have gone beyond that. That I should be grateful that you were so honorable, so good, that you would condescend to do the right thing by a trashy little nobody like me.”

      “I never said that,” he bit out, as a deep shame moved through him. “Not any of it.”

      “You didn’t need to say it.” Lucy gathered the blanket around her and rose to her feet, looking down at him as if she were some kind of goddess. “Everything you did made your position perfectly, painfully obvious.” She waved her hand at the room around them, encompassing the gleaming lights in the ancient sconces on the walls, the historic tapestries. “You hid me away in your family’s country house where I could gaze out at the capital city from afar but never embarrass you by setting foot near your exalted social circles. But I didn’t care, because I was in love with you and I was having your baby.”

      There was something in her voice that was making the fine hairs on the back of his neck stand at attention. He was all too afraid that it was the ring of truth.

      “Lucy,” he said again. “Please …”

      But she ignored him.

      “You