A Baby For Christmas

Carly.

Carly, whose laughter and smiles and serious silvery eyes had tempted him increasingly each time he’d seen her, until at last, on her eighteenth birthday, he hadn’t been able to resist what she was offering.

Or what he thought she’d been offering.

To his everlasting shame he could still remember how ready he’d been for her. God, yes, he’d been ready! More than ready, he recalled with chagrin even now.

In another few moments he would have fallen completely under her spell. But then she’d opened her mouth and he’d found out that she hadn’t really been offering at all. She’d been trading—just like her mother.

Sex for marriage.

Piran might be one kind of fool, but he was never going to be the fool that his father had been. Marriage to Carlota O’Reilly had never been on the cards.

‘Marry you? You must be kidding!’ he’d said, incredulous. And he’d turned away from her stricken look.

He’d never seen her again after that night. Not even at his father’s funeral. He’d missed it, made up an excuse, hating her because he felt he had to, because he knew she would be there.

After that he’d put her—and her mother—out of his mind. He hadn’t thought of her in years. And yet the moment he’d seen her this afternoon he’d recognized her at once.

And wanted her just as much as ever, God help him.

‘What do you mean, there’s no room at the inn?’ Piran glowered at her from the doorway. The passage of four hours hadn’t improved his mood any, that was certain.

‘I was speaking metaphorically,’ Carly said. She drooped on to one of the wicker chairs on the veranda, feeling as if she’d been dragged backwards through the mangrove swamp. ‘There are no rooms available in Conch Cay.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Of course there are.’ Piran shoved a hand through sleep-tousled hair.

To say that he’d been unhappy to see her come back would be something of an understatement.

He’d said, ‘You!’ in a horrid voice and fumbled to fasten the top button of his trousers.

Carly had watched with undisguised interest. ‘Perhaps you were expecting someone else?’ she’d suggested, and fluttered her lashes at him, irritated that he would disbelieve her about a thing like this.

‘I was taking a nap,’ he’d retorted stiffly.

‘Oh. Right. Sorry to disturb you.’

‘You’re not,’ he’d said, which was the absolute truth.

He said now, ‘What about Maisie Cash’s house?’

‘The Potters are there from Phoenix for the holidays,’ Carly recited from memory.

‘It’s not the holidays yet.’

‘Tell that to the Potters.’

‘Well, what about the Kellys?’ he said impatiently. ‘They take in visitors.’

‘Lots of people take in visitors, Piran. Tourism is the prime industry on the island.’

‘I know that. So—’

‘So Conch Cay has a bumper crop. It might not look like Christmas out here, but everyone is here to celebrate it. I stopped at the grocery. Old Bill gave me a list.’

‘And?’

‘And they were all full.’

‘You can’t have looked everywhere!’

Carly unfolded the list and shoved it at him. ‘Then you look. I’ve looked until I’m ready to drop.’ She lay back on the floor of the veranda and closed her eyes.

Piran muttered under his breath. He prowled up and down the veranda, then stood glowering down at her.

Carly opened one eye. ‘And don’t tell me to go over to Eleuthera and take the launch back every day, because I won’t.’

He muttered again and paced the length of the veranda once more. ‘I suppose that means you expect to stay here?’

‘Unless you have a better idea, I don’t see any other option.’

‘Go home.’

‘We’ve been through that already.’

Piran made a furious sound deep in his throat.

‘What’s the matter really, Piran? Are you afraid I’ll take advantage of your virtue?’

He let out an explosive breath. ‘Maybe I’m afraid I’ll take advantage of yours?’

‘I didn’t think you thought I had any virtue.’

His teeth came together with a snap. ‘Don’t bait me, Carlota. If you want to stay here, don’t bait me.’

‘I have no intention of baiting you,’ Carly said hastily.

‘Good. Remember that. This is work. That’s all.’

‘You’re damn right it is,’ Carly said, incensed, sitting up and glaring at him. ‘And you’re a jerk if you think I want it to be any more than that!’

He met her gaze. ‘Just so we understand each other.’

‘We do.’

The look went on…and on. Finally he nodded curtly. ‘Use your old bedroom. But leave me alone. We can start work in the morning.’

She was surprised Piran remembered which bedroom had been hers.

Or maybe he didn’t, she thought when she finally got up and made her way toward the small bedroom next to the kitchen. Maybe he just assumed that she would remember and didn’t care as long as it wasn’t anywhere near his.

It wasn’t. It faced away from the ocean, bordering the narrow drive up which she’d come. The room Piran was using had been her mother’s and his father’s the last time they’d come here. It was on the other side of the house with access to the deck and the stairs to the path leading to the beach.

Bigger and airier than hers, it also had a lovely view across the treetops toward the ocean. But the small back bedroom with the narrow wicker bed and freestanding cupboard in which to hang her clothes suited Carly just fine.

She opened the windows and got a cross-breeze almost at once. But to aid its movement she turned on the overhead fan. Then she put her things away, slipped off her sandals and lay down on the bed.

She only intended to rest her eyes for a moment. Then she would go out and walk on the beach in the waning summer light. She would dig her toes in the sand and wade in the warm Caribbean water. She would savor the moment and appreciate the parts of Conch Cay she had no trouble enjoying. In just a few minutes she would do that…

It was pitch-dark when she woke up.

It took her a moment to remember where she was. Then it came back in a rush.

Des. Diana. The book. Piran. Christmas. The long trip by taxi, plane, taxi, and boat to Conch Cay. Piran’s less than enthusiastic welcome. Her fruitless search for a room. Her return to Blue Moon Cottage. Piran’s reluctant agreement to her staying with him. Piran. Always Piran.

Carly rolled over and tried to forget him, tried to go back to sleep because it was obviously quite late now. But she wasn’t tired enough to go back to sleep, and trying not to think about Piran only insured that she would.

Finally, after she’d tossed and turned for half an hour, she got up and put her sandals on, then padded through the silent house.

The lights were all shut off and the door to Piran’s room was closed. She didn’t know the time, but figured that it must be sometime after midnight.

Quietly she slid open the door to the veranda and padded out. A swath of silvery moonlight spilled across the ocean, lighting her way as she went down the steps. At the bottom she found the narrow path that led through the trees down the hill to the beach.

Before she was more than twenty yards along the path, she heard a rustling sound in the brush and saw a dark, slithering shape. Swallowing a scream, she stopped dead right where she was.

There were snakes on Conch Cay. She remembered Des showing her the marks they made in the sand which had looked to Carly like the imprints from bicycle tires. But she didn’t know what kind they were and she didn’t know if any of them were poisonous.

It wouldn’t do to get herself bitten by a snake the first night she was here. Piran wouldn’t be in the least bit understanding.

The rustling noise stopped and eventually Carly went on. She moved on carefully now, watching her every step, doing her best to make sure she didn’t step on anything alive and capable of objecting.

She didn’t notice when the path curved and the beach came into view. She didn’t see the lean masculine form that slowly rose out of the water and made its way across the narrow sand beach toward the trail.

She didn’t see Piran at all until it was too late, until she ran right into his bare wet chest.

‘Ooof!’

‘Bloody hell!’ Hard fingers came out and grabbed her arms.

‘P-Piran?’

‘Who’d you think it was? The Loch Ness monster?’ His fingers were still biting into her flesh as he snarled at her.

Carly looked up into hard eyes, then down at a shadowed but all too evident masculine nakedness, and finally, desperately, away into the jungle brush.

Snakes seemed suddenly far preferable.

‘What the hell are you doing out here?’ he demanded.

‘G-going for a walk.’

‘In the middle of the night?’

‘I couldn’t sleep.’ She tried twisting away from him. ‘Let me go.’ Finally she managed to pry his fingers off her arms. Then she wrapped her arms against her chest, keeping her eyes firmly averted the whole time. ‘I certainly wasn’t looking for you, if that’s what you think!’

Piran made a sound that could have been a snort of disgust or disbelief. ‘You shouldn’t be out walking now. It’s almost two. It’s dangerous.’

‘You’re out,’ she said. Of course maybe that was why it was dangerous, she thought a little wildly.

‘It’s not dangerous for me.’

‘How’s that for the double standard?’ Carly said bitterly.

‘I don’t make the rules, Carlota. But I can tell you what they are.’

‘I’m sure you can,’ she said. ‘It’s not fair,’ she complained after a moment.

‘Tell me about it,’ Piran muttered under his breath. Then he said, ‘No one ever promised that life would be fair.’

‘Save me the time-worn platitudes.’

He reached for her arm. ‘Come on, Carly. Let’s go.’ She tried to shake him off. ‘I said, I’m going for a walk.’

‘No, you’re not.’

‘Yes, I am.’ It was sheer stubbornness on her part and she knew it. But she was determined not to let him have the last word, not to allow him to tell her what to do.

She wrenched away from him and started down the path toward the beach at a run.

She’d got perhaps five steps when he caught her. With one hand he spun her round, then grasped her around the waist with both hands and flung her over his shoulder.

‘Piran!’ she shrieked as she pitched head-first, then stopped abruptly as her midriff lodged against his shoulder and she hung flailing upside down. ‘Piran! Damn you! Put me down!’

But Piran only turned and strode back up the path with Carly slung over his shoulder like some bag of old clothes.

‘Piran!’

She twisted and smacked him, her fists coming into contact with hard wet flesh. She opened her eyes and found herself staring down at a pair of lean, hair-roughened thighs and bare, muscular buttocks. She hit them. Hard.

‘Damn!’ He twisted and tried to catch her hands.

Carly kicked her feet, kneed him in the chest, then slapped him again, hoping the blows stung his wet skin.

‘Stop it! Damn it, Carly!’ He made it to the veranda, but he stumbled on the steps, and they both went down, a tangle of arms and legs, cool droplets of water and heated flesh. Carly landed face down between the backs of his thighs. It took only an instant’s exposure to the hard warmth of his body to have her scrambling to her feet.

‘I can’t believe you did that!’ she railed at him. ‘Talk about cavemen!’

He was slower getting up. He winced as he pulled himself up and Carly noticed for the first time the angry scar on his leg. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked him.

‘What do you care?’ He snapped a towel off one of the lounges and knotted it around his waist, but not before she’d had a chance to glimpse definite signs of masculine arousal.

She swallowed and averted her eyes. ‘I—I don’t, actually.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

They stared at each other. Piran’s gaze was hard and angry, and any arousal that he might feel, Carly knew all too well, was unwanted.

So what else was new? He’d wanted her nine years ago, and he’d hated himself for it.

She glanced back at him and saw a muscle in his jaw tick in the moonlight. She thought he looked very pale. She felt a fleeting stab of guilt, then squelched it immediately. He hadn’t had to carry her! He hadn’t had to interfere at all.

She said as much.

‘Just my chivalric nature, I guess,’ he said through his teeth.

Carly remembered when he really had been chivalrous. That memory, sweet as it was, somehow hurt more than all the other painful memories did.

‘Don’t bother,’ she said shortly.

Their eyes met and clashed once more. Piran ran his tongue over his lips.

‘Fine,’ he said harshly after a long moment. ‘Go for a bloody walk if you want. Drown yourself if you want. I don’t care what you do. I don’t know why I bothered.’

CHAPTER THREE

TO SAY that she slept badly was no exaggeration. It was close to dawn before Carly did more than toss and turn fitfully in her bed, her mind still playing with the image of Piran’s naked body and the press of his flesh against hers. When at last she did sleep, her dreams were no less alluring and no more restful.

She was reminded all too much of the night of her eighteenth birthday—the last time she’d been held in Piran St Just’s arms—the time she’d found out what he really thought of her.

For years she’d turned away from that memory every time it surfaced. She’d blotted it out as soon as she could because it had hurt so much.

But now she forced herself to remember. She had no choice. She needed to remember if only to protect herself from being drawn once more into the fanciful dreams that once upon a time had brought her down.

She’d certainly had her share of dreams about Piran in the days just before her birthday. She’d been living with her mother and Arthur in his home in the hills above

Santa Barbara—the low, Spanish-style house she’d pointed out to Piran the day she’d first met him.

It was indeed a lovely house, built to blend in with the surrounding hillside, its gardens half wild. The latter weren’t as wonderful as the wild areas surrounding Blue Moon on Conch Cay, but Carly had loved to ramble through them just the same. She’d loved to sit on the bench beside the bougainvillaea and look out over the city lights and the boats in the harbor at night.

Every night she would go there and sit, dreaming of Piran sitting next to her, of Piran touching her, holding her, kissing her.

She’d never really stopped dreaming of him after their first meeting. Perhaps she’d been foolish—no, there was no perhaps about it. She had been foolish. But in those days Carly had been as big an optimist, as big a dreamer as her mother.

And Piran, even though he clearly disapproved of his father’s marriage, still fascinated her.

She knew there was more to him than his silent, brooding disapproval. She remembered his gentleness. She remembered his touch. And, even though he was silent and stern whenever he was around her afterwards, she wasn’t unaware of the way he watched her.

Carly might not have been sophisticated in those days, but even she knew when a man was interested. And Piran’s smoldering gaze was a sure sign that he was. Whenever he came home, or whenever he joined them at Blue Moon or in New York, he watched her with an intensity that tantalized her at the same time as it unnerved her.

Carly watched him too, avidly trying to understand him, to attract him. Even at eighteen and hopelessly naive in the ways of love, she sensed a connection between them. It was tenuous, but it was very real. It had been from the first moment.

At least it was to Carly. She wanted Piran to see that, too.

When Piran came home for Thanksgiving he watched her. At dinner she caught him studying her out of the corner of his eye. On Friday, when Arthur took them to the botanical gardens, Carly noticed Piran keeping an eye on her.

And Sunday morning, before his plane left for Boston, he even went for a walk on the beach with her. He didn’t say anything. They just walked. Every now and then Carly ventured a comment, which was met with a monosyllabic response, as if he was as tongue-tied as she was.

He loves me, she thought, and tucked the words away in the depths of her heart to take out and savor again and again.

They tided her over until Christmas, when she and Sue and Arthur and Des flew down to the Bahamas and met Piran at Conch Cay.

She watched Piran closely to see if he was still interested in her. It didn’t take long to decide that he was.

There were more discreet glances. More tense, tongue-tied encounters. Another walk on a different beach.

She wanted to know about the cannons on the headland, and Arthur said, ‘Piran knows. He’ll tell you. Take her down there and explain to her, Piran.’

So Piran did. He didn’t say much all the way down the beach. It was a cool, blustery day and he jammed his hands in his pockets and walked steadily, barely glancing her way. But he was as aware of her as she was of him. She knew it because when the sleeve of his jacket brushed her arm he sucked in his breath and flinched away.

As they walked, she picked up shells, asking if he knew what they were. He did, and Carly saved them. She asked him everything she could think of about the cannons, making their excursion last as long as possible. And finally she got him talking about his courses and his field work in archaeology.

She was fascinated, hanging on every word, wishing that someday she might get to go on a dig or underwater expedition with him. She didn’t dare say so. Not yet. But she began to dream.

On the way back he stopped and picked up a piece of something shiny and red. She’d never seen anything like it before. He told her it was sea glass, smoothed now by years of being tossed about in the waves.

‘Can I hold it?’ she asked.

‘You can have it if you want.’

Carly wanted. She put it in her pocket with the shells, rubbing it between her thumb and her forefinger all the way home. She knew that whenever she looked at it she would remember this day with Piran.

She must have daydreamed more than a hundred happy scenarios between them after he went back to school. In every one of them Piran came back and saw at last that she had become a woman. He cast aside the cool indifference or faintly disdainful tolerance with which he’d habitually treated her. He started treating her as the woman he loved.

Carly wanted it to happen so badly that she came to believe in it. It would happen, she decided, on her eighteenth birthday.

And when Arthur got a letter from Piran in March saying that, yes, he would be coming for the Easter vacation, she was certain it was true.

He came. She went with Des to meet him at the airport and for a moment she thought his eyes lit with pleasure when he spotted her there. But if they had the fires were banked by the time he was close enough to shake his brother’s hand.

He didn’t shake hers. He did, however, look at her mouth with a hungry, almost desperate gaze.

He loves me, she thought again. And she hugged the knowledge to herself, happy beyond belief.

From the moment they met at the airport, he didn’t take his eyes off her. Everywhere she went, he watched her. Every time she looked up, he was there.

On the night of her birthday she barely ate her dinner, so aware was she of the dark, brooding young man directly sitting across the table from her. Arthur and her mother spoke to her frequently, encouraging her to talk about her plans for the summer, about the classes she would take at university in the fall. But Carly could barely form words.

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