Snowed In For Christmas

Her towel had slipped.

Not far enough. Just enough to taunt him, not enough to see anything. He’d gone back into his room, found Josh under the bed giggling and got dressed before Georgie had time to come looking for him again and caused another incident.

And Josh was more than happy to come downstairs and play with his trains. So was Sebastian. Only too happy, because it reminded him of all the reasons why getting involved with Georgie again would be such a mistake.

She’d walked out on him once, but they’d been the only ones who could get hurt in that situation, and he knew he’d been at least partly responsible. OK, maybe largely responsible, but not solely. He wasn’t taking all the blame for her lack of sticking power.

But this time, Josh would be involved. And he was so open, so trusting, so vulnerable. Two was a bad time for your world to fall apart. He knew that, in some deep, inaccessible but intrinsic part of him that still ached with loss.

Wounds that deep never really healed. And that was another reason to keep his distance.

So he played with Josh until she came down, and then he went into the kitchen and started putting the lunch together.

She followed him, Josh in tow. ‘You said I could hook up with my parents,’ she reminded him, and he nodded, put the timer on for the potatoes and took her to the study, connected her up and left them to it. Five minutes later they were back.

‘I thought I was supposed to be cooking?’ she said, but he shook his head.

‘Don’t worry about it. It actually looks pretty straightforward and the instructions are idiot-proof.’

‘Are you sure? I thought that was the deal?’

‘There’s no deal,’ he said shortly. ‘Go and play with your son. It’s Christmas. He needs you, not me. I’ll do this.’

In fact there wasn’t that much to do, to his regret. He parboiled the potatoes and parsnips, put them in a roasting pan with some of the goose fat and put them in the oven, moving the goose to the bottom oven to continue cooking slowly.

And then there was nothing to do for an hour.

Well, he had two choices. He could spend his Christmas Day sitting alone in the kitchen, or he could go back into the sitting room with Georgie and Josh and try not to remember what he’d seen under her towel...

The sitting room won, hands down.

CHAPTER SEVEN

GEORGIE SAT BACK and sighed happily.

‘Sebastian, for someone who claims not to know how to cook a goose, that was an amazing lunch. Thank you so much.’

His shoulders twitched in that little shrug of his that she was getting so used to. ‘Good ingredients. I can’t take any credit.’

That was rubbish and they both knew it, but he’d always been modest about his achievements. For such a high achiever, it was a strange trait, and rather endearing. She smiled at him.

‘Nevertheless, it was delicious and I’m washing up.’

‘No. The dishwasher’s washing up. And the sun’s out and it’s warmer, so let’s not waste the day in here. Has Josh got anything he can wear outside?’

‘Yes. Wellies and overalls, in the car, and I brought my wellies, too—hey, we could make snow angels!’

He chuckled. ‘I think you’ll find if we put him down in the snow, he’ll vanish without trace, unless we can find a bit where it’s not so deep. Right, let’s go!’

So they abandoned the devastated kitchen, wrapped themselves up and headed out into the garden. Sebastian hoisted Josh up onto his shoulders and the little boy anchored his chubby fingers into Sebastian’s hair, his happy grin almost splitting his face in half.

‘Wait, let me take a photo,’ she said, and pulled out her phone. They posed dutifully, and she carried on, snapping off several shots of them as he turned and walked through the archway into the sunlit garden.

And it was glorious. He was right, it would have been criminal to miss it. The wind had died away completely and the sun shone with real warmth, sparkling on the snow and blinding them with its brilliance.

She scooped up a handful of snow and let Josh touch it, probing it with his finger. He was wary, but fascinated, and Sebastian lifted him down on the grass in the little orchard where the snow wasn’t so deep and lowered him carefully into it, and Josh watched his feet disappear and giggled.

Then Sebastian turned and looked at her, and she knew what was coming.

She saw it in his eyes, saw the way he carefully gathered up a great big handful of snow and showed Josh how to squash it into a snowball.

‘No. Sebastian, no! I mean it—!’

It got her right in the middle of the chest.

‘Oh, you rat!’ she squealed indignantly, and he just picked up her giggling son and laughed, his head tilted back, his mouth open, his face tipped up to the sun as Josh laughed with him, and if she could have bottled it, she would.

Instead she whipped out her phone and took a photo, the instant before he set Josh back in the snow.

Then she filed her phone safely in her pocket, because this was war and she wasn’t taking any prisoners.

Sebastian’s eyes were alight with mischief, and she scraped up a handful and hurled it back, missing him by miles. The next one got him, though, but not before his got her, and they ended up chasing each other through the snow, Sebastian carrying Josh in his arms, until he cornered her in one of the recesses of the crinkle-crankle wall and trapped her.

‘Got that snowball, Josh?’ he asked, advancing on her with a wicked smile that made her heart race for a whole lot of reasons, and he held her still, pinning her against the wall with his body while Josh put snow down her neck and made her shriek.

‘Oh, that was so mean! Just you wait, Corder!’

‘Oh, I’m so scared.’ He grinned cockily, turning away, and she took her chance and pelted him right on the back of his neck.

‘Like that, is it?’ he said softly, and she felt her heart flip against her ribs.

But he did nothing, because they found a clear bit of snow where it wasn’t too deep, and one by one they fell over backwards and made snow angels.

Josh’s angel was a bit crooked, but Sebastian’s was brilliant, huge and crisp and clean. How he stood up without damaging it she had no idea, but he did, and she looked down at it next to Josh’s little angel and then hers, and felt something huge swelling in her chest.

And then she got a handful of snow shoved down the back of her neck, which would teach her to turn her back on Sebastian, and it jerked her out of her sentimental daze.

‘Thought you’d got away with it, didn’t you?’ he teased, his mischievous grin taunting her, and she chased him through the orchard, dodging round the trees with Josh running after them and giggling hysterically.

Then he stopped, and she cannoned into him just as he turned so that she ended up plastered against him, his arms locking reflexively round her to steady her.

And then he glanced up. She followed his gaze and saw the mistletoe, but it was too late. Too late to move or object or do anything except stand there transfixed, her heart pounding, while he smiled slowly and cupped her chilly, glowing face in his frozen hands and kissed her.

His lips were warm, their touch gentle, and the years seemed to melt away until she was eighteen again, and he was just twenty, and they were in love.

She’d forgotten.

She, who remembered everything about everything, had forgotten that all those Christmases ago he’d brought her here, to the orchard where that summer they’d made love in the dappled shade under the gnarled old apple trees, and kissed her.

Under this very mistletoe?

Possibly. It seemed very familiar, although the kiss was completely different.

That kiss had been wonderfully romantic and passionate. This one was utterly spontaneous and playful; tender, filled with nostalgia, it rocked her composure as passion never would have done. Passion she could have dismissed. This...

She backed away, her hand over her mouth, and spun round in the snow to look for Josh.

He was busy squashing more snow up, pressing his hands into it and laughing, and she waded over to him and picked him up, holding him against her like a shield.

‘Oh, Josh, your hands are freezing! Come on, darling, time to go back inside.’ And without waiting to see what Sebastian was doing, she carried Josh back to the relative safety of the house.

As she pulled off their snowy clothes in the boot room, she noticed the little heap of mistletoe on the floor. It was still lying in the corner where he’d left it yesterday, and she’d forgotten all about it. Had he? Or had he taken her to the orchard deliberately, so he could kiss her right there underneath the tree where it had been growing for all these years? Where he’d kissed her all those Christmases ago?

If so, it had been a mistake. No kisses, she’d said, and he’d promised. They both had. And it had lasted a whole twenty-four hours.

Great. Fantastic. What a result...

* * *

Sebastian watched her go, kicking himself for that crazy, unnecessary lapse in common sense.

He hadn’t even put up the mistletoe in the house because in the end it had seemed like such a bad idea, and then he’d brought her out here and they’d played in the snow just as they had eleven years ago, right under that great hanging bunch of mistletoe.

And he’d kissed her under it.

In front of Josh.

Of all the stupid, stupid things...

‘Oh, you idiot.’

Shaking his head in disbelief, he made his way back inside and found she’d hung up their wet coats in front of the Aga to dry. Josh was playing on the floor with one of the cars out of his stocking, and she was pulling up her sleeves and getting stuck into the clearing up.

‘I’ve put the kettle on,’ she said. ‘I thought we could do with a hot drink.’

‘Good idea,’ he said, but he noticed that she didn’t look at him, and he only noticed that out of the corner of his eye because he was so busy not looking at her.

No repeats.

That had been the deal. He’d give Josh Christmas, and there’d be no recriminations, no harking back to their breakup, and no repeats of that kiss.

So far, it seemed, they were failing on all fronts.

Idiot! he repeated in his head, and pushing up his own sleeves, he tackled what was left.

* * *

‘I’m sorry.’

The words were weary, and Georgie searched his eyes.

She’d put Josh to bed, waited until he was asleep and then forced herself to come downstairs. She’d hoped he’d be in the study, but he wasn’t, he was in the kitchen making sandwiches with the left-over goose and cranberry sauce, and now she was here, too. Having walked in, there was no way of walking out without appearing appallingly rude, and then he’d turned to her and apologised.

And it had really only been a lighthearted, playful little kiss, she told herself, but she knew that she was lying.

‘It’s OK,’ she said, although it wasn’t, because it had affected her much more than she was letting on. She gave a little shrug. ‘It was nothing really.’

‘Well, I’ll have to do better next time, then,’ he said softly, and her eyes flew back to his.

‘There won’t be a next time. You promised.’

‘I know. It was a joke.’

‘Well, it wasn’t funny.’

He sighed and rammed his hand through his hair, the smile leaving his eyes. ‘We’re not doing well, are we?’

‘You’re not. It was you that raised the walking out issue, you that kissed me. So far I think I’ve pretty much stuck to my side of the bargain.’

‘Apart from running around in a scanty little towel that didn’t quite meet.’

She felt hot colour run up her cheeks, and turned away. ‘That was an accident. I was worried about Josh. And you didn’t have a lot on, either.’

‘No.’ He sighed again. ‘I have to say, as apologies go, this isn’t going very well, is it?’

She gave a soft, exasperated laugh and turned back to him, meeting the wry smile in his eyes and relenting.

‘Not really. Why don’t we just draw a line under it and start again? As you said, it was warmer today. It’ll thaw soon. We just have to get through the next day or two. I’m sure we can manage that.’

‘I’m sure we can. I thought you might be hungry, so I threw something together.’ He cut the sandwiches in quarters as he spoke, stacked them on a plate and put them on a tray. Glasses, side plates, cheese, a slab of fruit cake and the remains of lunchtime’s bottle of Rioja followed, and he picked the tray up and walked towards her. ‘Open the door?’

She opened it, followed him to the sitting room and sat down. This was so awkward. All of it, everything, was so awkward, pretending that it was all OK and being civilised when all they really wanted to do was yell at each other.

Or make love.

‘George, don’t.’

‘Don’t what?’

He sat down on the other sofa, opposite her, and held her eyes with his. ‘Don’t look like that. I know it’s difficult. I’m sorry, I’m an idiot, I’ve just made it more uncomfortable, but—we were good friends once, Georgie—’

‘We were lovers,’ she said bluntly, and he smiled sadly.

‘We were friends, too. We should be able to talk to each other in a civilised manner. We managed last night.’

‘That was before you kissed me again.’

He sighed and rammed his hand through his hair, and she began to feel sorry for it.

‘The kiss was nothing,’ he said shortly, ‘you know that, you said so yourself. And I’m sorry it upset you. It just seemed—right. Natural. The obvious thing to do. We were playing, and then there you were, right under the mistletoe, and—well, I just acted on impulse. It really, really won’t happen again. I promise.’

She didn’t challenge him on that. He’d promised to love her forever, and he’d driven her away. She knew about his promises. And hers weren’t a lot better, because she’d promised to love him, too, and she’d left him.

What a mess. Please, please thaw so we can get away from him...

She reached for a sandwich and bit into it, and he sat forward, pouring the wine and sliding a glass towards her.

‘You didn’t tell me what you thought of this wine at lunch.’

‘Is it important?’

He shrugged. ‘In a way. I’ve got shares in the bodega. It’s a good vintage. I just wondered if you liked it.’

‘Yes, it’s lovely.’ She sipped, giving it thought. ‘It goes well with the goose and the cranberries. It is nice—really nice, although if it’s fiendishly expensive it’s wasted on me. I could talk a lot of rubbish about it being packed with plump, luscious fruit and dark chocolate with a long, slow finish because I watch the television, but I wouldn’t really know what I was talking about. But it is nice. I like it.’

He laughed. ‘You don’t need to know anything else. You just need to know what you like and what you don’t like, and I like my wines soft. Rounded. Full of plump, luscious fruit,’ he said, and there was something in his eyes that made her catch her breath and remember the gaping towel.

She looked hastily away, grabbing another sandwich and making a production of eating it, and he sat back and worked his way down a little pile of them, and for a while there was silence.

‘So,’ he said, breaking it at last, ‘what’s the plan for your house? You say you can’t sell it at the moment, but what will you do when you have? Buy another? Rent?’

‘Move back home.’

‘Home? As in, come back and live with your parents?’

‘Yes. I’ll have childcare on tap, they’ll get to see lots of Josh and I can work for my boss as easily here as I can in Huntingdon.’

He nodded, but there was a little crease between his eyebrows, the beginnings of a frown. ‘Wouldn’t you rather have your independence?’

She put down the shredded crusts of her sandwich and sighed. ‘Well, of course, and I’ve tried that, but it doesn’t feel like independence, really, not with Josh. It’s just difficult. Every day’s an uphill struggle to get everything done, hence watching the television when I’m too tired to work any more. There’s no adult to talk to, I’m alone all day and all night except for the company of a two-year-old, and after he’s in bed it’s just lonely.’

The frown was back. ‘He’s very good company though when he is around. He’s a great little kid.’

‘He is, but his conversation is a wee bit lacking.’

Sebastian chuckled and reached for his wine. ‘We don’t seem to be doing so well, either.’

‘So what do you want to talk about? Politics? The economy? Biogenetics? I can tell you all about that.’

‘Is that what you do?’

‘A bit. I don’t really do anything any more. I just collate stuff for them and check for research trials and see if I can validate them. Some are a bit sketchy. It’s an interesting field, genetic engineering, and it’s going to be increasingly useful in medicine and agriculture in the future.’

‘Tell me.’

So she talked about her work, about what her professor was doing at the moment, what they’d done, and what she’d been studying for her PhD before she’d had to abandon it.

‘Would you like to finish it?’ he asked, and she rolled her eyes.

‘Of course! But I can’t. I’ve got Josh now. I have other priorities.’

‘But later?’

She shrugged. ‘Later might be too late. Things move on, and what I was researching won’t be relevant any longer. Things move so fast in genetics, so that what wasn’t possible yesterday will be commonplace tomorrow. Take the use of DNA tests, for example. It’s got all sorts of forensic and familial implications that simply couldn’t have been imagined not that long ago, and now it’s just accepted.’

His heart thumped.

‘Familial implications? Things like tracing members of your family?’ he suggested, keeping his voice carefully neutral.

‘Yes. Yes, absolutely. It can be used to prove that people are or aren’t related, it can tell you where in the world you’ve come from, where your distant ancestors came from—using mitochondrial DNA, which our bodies are absolutely rammed with, most Europeans can be traced back down the female line to one of a handful of women if you go back enough thousands of years. It’s incredible.’

But not infallible. Not if you didn’t know enough to start with. And not clever enough to give a match to someone who’d never been tested or had their DNA stored on a relevant database. He knew all about that and its frustrations.

Tell her.

‘So, tell me about this bodega,’ she said, settling back with a slab of fruitcake and a chunk of cheese, and he let the tension ease out of him at the change of subject.

‘The bodega?’

‘Mmm. I’ve decided it’s a rather nice wine. I might have some more when I’ve finished eating. I’m not sure it’d go with cake and cheese.’

‘I’m not sure cake and cheese go together in the first place.’

‘You are joking?’ She stared at him, her mouth slightly open. ‘You’re not joking. Try it.’

She held out the piece of cake with the cheese perched on top, the marks made by her even teeth clear at the edge of the bite, and he leant in and bit off the part her mouth had touched.

He felt something kick in his gut, but then the flavour burst through and he sat back and tried to concentrate on the cake and cheese combo and not the fact that he felt as if he’d indirectly kissed her.

‘Wow. That is actually rather nice.’

She rolled her eyes again. ‘You are so sceptical. It’s like ham and pineapple, and lamb and redcurrant jelly.’

‘Chalk and cheese.’

‘Now you’re just being silly. I thought you liked it?’

‘I do.’ He cut himself a chunk of both and put them together, mostly so he didn’t have to watch her bite off the bit his own teeth had touched.

Hell. How could it be so ridiculously erotic?

‘So—the bodega?’

‘Um. Yeah.’ He groped for his brain and got it into gear again, more or less, and told her all about it—about how he’d been driving along a quiet country road and he’d broken down and a man had stopped to help him.

‘He turned out to be the owner of the bodega. He took me back there and contacted the local garage, and while we waited we got talking, and to cut a long story short I ended up bailing them out.’

‘That was a good day’s business for them.’

He chuckled. ‘It wasn’t a bad one for me. I stumbled on it by accident, I now own thirty per cent, and they’re doing well. They’ve had three good vintages on the trot, I get a regular supply of wine I can trust, and we’re all happy.’

‘And if it’s a bad year?’

‘Then we’ve got the financial resilience to weather it.’

Or he had, she thought. They’d been lucky to find him.

‘Where is it?’ she asked. ‘Does Rioja have to come from a very specific region?’

‘Yes. It’s in northern Spain. They grow a variety of grapes—it’s a region rather than a grape variety, and they use mostly Tempranillo which gives it that lovely softness.’

He opened another bottle, a different vintage, and as he told her about it, about how they made it, the barrels they used, the effect of the climate, he stopped thinking about her mouth and what it would be like to kiss her again, and began to relax and just enjoy her company.

He didn’t normally spend much time like this, and certainly not with anyone as interesting and restful to be with as Georgie. Not nearly enough, he realised. He was too busy, too harassed, too driven by the workload to take time out. And that was a mistake.

Hence why he’d turned off his mobile phone and ignored it for the last twenty-four hours. It was Christmas. He was allowed a day off, and he intended to take advantage of every minute of it. Tomorrow would come soon enough.

He peeled a satsuma from the bowl and threw it to her, and peeled himself another one, then they cracked some nuts and threw the shells in the fire and watched it die down slowly.

It seemed as if neither of them wanted to move, to call it a night, to do anything to disturb the fragile truce, and so they sat there, staring into the fire and talking about safe subjects.

Uncontroversial ones, with no bones of contention, no trigger points, no sore spots, as if by mutual agreement. They talked about his mother’s heart attack, her father’s retirement plans, his plans for the restoration of the walled garden, and gradually the fire died away to ash and it grew chilly in the room.

‘I ought to go up and make sure Josh is all right,’ she said, although the baby monitor was there on the table and hadn’t done more than blink a couple of times, just enough so they knew it was working.

But he didn’t argue, because they were running out of safe topics and it was better to quit while they were winning and before he did something stupid like kiss her.

He got to his feet, gathered up their glasses and put them on the tray with the plates, made sure the fire guard was secure and carried the tray through to the kitchen.

She was getting herself a glass of water, and he put the tray down beside the sink and turned towards her.

‘Got everything you need?’

No, she thought. She needed him, but he wasn’t good for her, and she certainly hadn’t been good for him. Not in the long term. ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ she said, and then hesitated.

His eyes were unreadable, but the air was thick with tension. It would have been so natural, so easy to lean in and kiss him goodnight.

So dangerous.

So tempting...

She paused in the doorway and looked back, and he was watching her, his face shuttered.

‘Thank you for today,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s been really lovely. Really lovely. Josh has had a brilliant time, and so’ve I.’

‘Even the kiss?’

She laughed softly. ‘There was never any doubt about your kisses, Sebastian. None at all.’

‘Wrong place, wrong time?’ he suggested, and she shook her head.

‘Wrong time.’

‘And the place?’

‘You can never go back,’ she said simply, and with a sad smile, she closed the door and left him standing there in what should have been their kitchen, gazing after the woman he still loved but knew he’d lost forever.