A Dream Christmas

Morgan’s mobile went to voicemail and Riley left a message. ‘Answer your phone, dammit! Your brother is the biggest jerk this side of the Atlantic. You will not believe what he’s just said to me—’

Beeeeeeeeeepppppppp.

Riley cursed and pushed redial. She’d been eight when she’d first met him; as he was five years older than her she’d had a lifetime of watching women fall at his feet. He’d play with them, get bored and then move on. Pretty girls, smart girls, outgoing girls—he never stuck to any of them. Okay, in fairness, he’d kept Liz around for a while, and no one knew why they’d broken up, but afterwards James had just thrown himself back into his ‘bag ‘em, tag ‘em and toss ‘em’ routine.

‘As I was saying, James drives me freakin’ insane. Do you know that he called my art “fiddling”? Fiddling, Morgs? I nearly ripped his head off that strong, muscly neck …’

Beeeeeeeep.

Riley considered throwing her mobile against the wall; instead, she stepped into a blessedly empty lift and pushed the green phone icon again and waited as it dialled. James’s lack of commitment had always made her wary of him, scared of allowing herself to fall all the way in love with him.

‘This is Morgan. Please leave a message and I’ll get back to you.’

It took Riley a moment to realise why the lift wasn’t going up and she furiously jabbed a finger on the button for the top floor. ‘He has no respect for what I do, my work or my art,’ she continued into the phone. ‘And I hate the fact that I just see him and I want to get him naked…. I’m sorry, I know you don’t think your brother is sexy, but he is. Gorgeous but such a jerk!’

In hindsight, that had been the main reason why she’d walked away at nineteen. There were other reasons but mainly she’d been terrified to become too involved with him—to run the risk of him becoming bored with her. She’d always known that loving and losing James would be the emotional equivalent of being disembowelled with a butter knife and she doubted she would ever recover. Anyway, that was beside the point, seeing that he no longer had any interest in a relationship with her.

He had once and she’d let him slip away. Right man, but too young and too dumb to realise that you didn’t get second chances.

Message finally received, Universe.

‘This is Morgan. Please leave a message …’

Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!

‘I am on my way up to see you and you’d better be there! I’m having a meltdown here!’

Riley rested her head against the cool metal of the lift panel and stared at her feet. It would be okay, she told herself. She had years of savings behind her and those dollars allowed her the freedom of options. When she returned to Cape Town she would go back to designing windows, do some graphic design, teach art and pottery, maybe run something similar to the inner city art programme she’d been helping with recently as a way to fill up her time.

She’d do something different to feel a little less lost, not so alone.

When she stepped out of the lift at the top floor, Morgan stood there waiting for her, a cup of coffee and a chocolate bar in her hand.

Riley reached for both with vigour. ‘Did you listen to my messages?’

Morgan shook her head. ‘Four calls in two minutes signalled a crisis; I knew you were on your way up.’ She gestured to her studio. ‘Come in and tell me what my idiot brother has done now.’

CHAPTER TWO

SHE’D DONE IT …

Riley watched her guests step into the lift of her apartment building and smiled in relief at Hannah and Jedd’s loving faces. Morgan winked at her as she dropped her head onto Noah’s broad shoulder and she blew her a kiss just before the lift doors closed.

With Morgan’s encouragement, she’d had the Moreaus over for dinner in her loft apartment, had served them calamari risotto and explained that she was in a rut, that she needed to leave Moreau’s and explore her options.

As if she were their child, and she was in so many ways, they’d prodded and poked, interrogated her motivations, discussed her reasoning and then given her their blessing. As Morgan had predicted, they just wanted her to be happy. If leaving meant her being happy then they could live with losing their window designer.

Riley turned to walk down the landing back to her apartment. She was almost at her door when she heard footsteps on the flight of stairs just around the corner from her front door. She peeked around the corner to see James jogging up the stairs—he rarely used a lift—and instantly clocked his furious face, his tense shoulders and the muscle ticking in his jaw.

Riley winced as she noticed his flashing green eyes. He stopped at the top of the stairs and slapped his hand on his hips, lifting his head at her open front door. ‘Can I come in?’

‘Nope, you’re not bringing all that angry energy into my home. We’ll stay outside,’ she ordered. Not that she really believed in all that stuff, but if he came across her doorway she knew that she would strip him naked and do him on her couch, her yellow wingback chair, on her wooden floor …

She was nuts. Horny and nuts. A dangerous combination.

‘Inside, Riley.’

‘Not going to happen.’ Riley shook her head a couple of times and folded her arms.

James hauled in a breath, looked at the ceiling and sighed. ‘Okay, let’s do it the hard way then.’

Using his superior strength against her, he looped an arm around her waist and picked her up and walked her into the apartment as easily as if he were carrying a sack of potatoes. Dammit! He was seriously starting to annoy her with this carrying her around kick he was on.

‘Stop lugging me around!’

‘Stop being a brat.’ James dumped Riley on her purple-and-white-checked couch and loomed over her, his hands back on his hips. ‘Why did you tell my family that you were resigning when we hadn’t finished discussing it?’

Discussing it? Really? That was stretching the truth …

Riley blew her fringe out of her eyes and silently cursed James’s mum. Just after she’d told the Moreaus and Noah that she was leaving, Hannah had excused herself to go to the bathroom, AKA rat on Riley. She loved her second mum but right now she could strangle her.

‘I don’t need to discuss it; you’re the one who is harping on about it!’ Riley retorted, scuttling past him to head for her kitchen. ‘I’m going to make coffee; do you want one?’

‘I’ll have some of that whisky you keep on hand for Noah,’ James replied, following her across the room. Leaning a shoulder into the wall, he took the glass of whisky Riley handed him. She could feel his eyes on her back while she fiddled with the coffee machine.

‘What did you tell my parents, Riley?’

‘That I needed a change, to do something different.’

‘Is that the truth?’

‘It’s as good as any,’ Riley retorted. She hadn’t told them that she missed Morgan’s companionship now that she was engaged and in love. That without her, and without having any contact with him, her life was duller, lonelier, that she felt distant and separated from this family who she no longer felt a part of.

That she felt compelled to move the heck on.

‘So, not the full truth. Riley, we’ve always been honest with each other; you’re the one person in my life who has always been unflinchingly truthful.’

‘Stop badgering me, James. I’m just trying to … redesign my life.’

‘What are you talking about? You don’t need a new life!’

Did he actually hear the words that came out of his mouth? Riley wondered. And how dare he say that when all he could give her was a one-night stand three times?

‘I won’t understand if you don’t explain your crazy impulse to me!’ James snapped and she heard the frustration in his voice. Riley opened her mouth to speak and abruptly closed it again. What could she say to him? Would he even understand any of what she wanted to say?

Will you listen, James—really listen? If I say that I have always adored you but I can’t be in the same city as you and not talk to you? That I am so damn scared I’ll fall in love with you, even though I know that a part of me loves you anyway? That walking away from this half-life is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life? That I am terrified to go but even more scared to stay?

Riley sighed, pushed the coffee cup away and took the easy option, swallowing the words she’d been thinking. ‘Just let me go, James.’

James shook his stubborn head. ‘No. You’re staying until the end of the year and I’d keep you longer but you’ll probably have me arrested on kidnapping charges.’

‘Damn right I will.’

James ignored her. ‘I expect you to be at work every day until then.’

‘What am I going to do?’ Riley wailed. ‘My staff are all on holiday and it’s a deadly quiet time—’ James tossed back his whisky and smiled his bad-ass CEO smile. ‘Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ll find something to keep you occupied and out of trouble.’

‘Yeah, right.’ Riley narrowed her eyes at him. ‘I suppose that if I don’t agree you’ll set those sharks in Legal on me for breaching my contract?’

‘Damn right I will,’ James repeated her earlier phrase.

Riley looked from her kitchen window, where the occasional drop of icy drizzle hit the windowpane, as she tried to ignore the whoosh in her stomach, the thump of her accelerated heartbeat. They were old companions—something she was so accustomed to feeling whenever James was in the same room as her. How could she be so annoyed with him yet still want to rip his clothes off? Her glance flicked over him—dark grey suit trousers, white shirt with the sleeves rolled up past his wrists, red tie pulled down from his open collar. His warm blond hair held furrows that suggested that he had spent the day shoving his fingers through it and there were blue shadows under his eyes, suggesting stress and no sleep.

Situation normal, then.

James returned her stare and Riley watched as his green eyes turned hard and cold. ‘Are you leaving because of a man?’

Yes, you, you jerk-nugget!

‘What?’

‘Have you met someone new—are you following him somewhere, acting impulsively again?’

Riley tipped her head and she couldn’t help her self-satisfied smile. ‘Are you jealous?’

James slowly stood up, walked around the counter and placed his hands on either side of her hips, effectively caging her in. ‘Answer the question, Riley.’

To hell with that. ‘Maybe.’

James dropped his mouth to hers, his lips brushing hers in a kiss that immediately dissolved her body and sent a wet warmth straight to that pulsing spot between her legs.

‘Wrong answer,’ he said against her lips before sucking her lower lip between his. He knew she loved it when he did that, the sod! She kept her arms folded across her chest in an effort to keep them from looping around his neck and climbing up and over him. With James she went from irritated to turned-on in ten seconds flat.

‘Get rid of him,’ James ordered, his lips touching her jaw, moving up to feather kisses along the high arch of her cheekbone, her temple.

That’s what I’m trying to do, she mentally wailed. But when you kiss me like this it’s impossible!

‘This is crazy, Ri. We can work this out,’ James quietly said, resting his chin on top of her head.

No, they couldn’t. History had taught them that. She wasn’t enough—exciting enough, novel enough, pretty enough—to pull him out of playboy mode and she wasn’t prepared to risk handing her heart over, knowing that he could stomp on it. Like she had on his.

No, he could continue to play with his bunnies and maybe in time, and halfway across the continent, she could find a man who she could love and who could love her.

‘We can renegotiate your contract, talk about your hours, find out how to make this work for both of us—’

And didn’t that say it all? He was talking about work and she was thinking about them, their relationship. They weren’t on the same page—hell, they weren’t even reading the same book!

‘I have to go,’ she quietly replied. ‘It’s time.’

James immediately pulled away from her and when his eyes slammed into her grey ones Riley had to fight the urge to take a step back. He had his don’t-mess-with-me CEO look on, his expression inscrutable, his eyes stony and deliberately veiled.

‘If that’s the way you want to do this. Tomorrow is Saturday so I’m working from my apartment. Be there at eight and I’ll give you a rundown of what I expect from you over the next couple of weeks before and after Christmas.’

And, on that cryptic statement, he headed towards her door, snatching up his jacket as he walked into her tiny hall. Then her front door slammed and Riley sank to her haunches and rested her arms on her bent knees.

Well, okay, then. James was obviously not going to make this easy for her.

Then again, nothing between them had ever been easy so why had she thought this would be?

HEADING HOME FROM the gym the next morning, James jogged up the flights of stairs to his penthouse home. He wished he had time for a swim in his lap pool, which was in his conservatory on the top floor of his very exclusive apartment block overlooking Central Park. The pool had been his pet project and he loved the idea that it formed the ceiling of his apartment’s hallway. He had a recurring daydream about watching his lover swim naked in the pool from below, but since he never brought a woman back to his place it remained only a fantasy. And since there was only one woman he fantasised about lately, he could easily imagine Riley, who was a strong swimmer, naked above him, her shapely body easing through the water, her breasts swaying and her perfectly waxed pubic strip …

James scrubbed a hand over his face as he stepped through the door into the hall of his expansive home. He had to get a grip and, after such a strenuous gym session trying to excise Riley from his mind, a shower.

James 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, Taylor.’

‘I never asked you to drink mine and I am not doing this!’ Riley shouted, waving the list in his face.

‘Then withdraw your resignation,’ James stated patiently. Over the years he’d learned that the way to defuse her temper was to keep his.

‘You can’t do this!’

‘Riley, honey, darling, sweetheart … I am doing this.’

Temper had her eyes flashing and her small chest heaving. ‘I could report you to Hannah, to Jedd. They’d be horrified at you doing this!’

She spat the words out like bullets and pushed every button he had.

He gripped her chin and made her look at him. Keeping a very firm grip on his now bubbling temper, he made certain that his words were very clear and very pointed. ‘Ten years ago, I asked you not to go travelling, to see if we had a chance at something and you allowed your father to talk you out of that idea. Now you want to involve my parents in another of our fights? Not happening, honey. This is between you and me. We’ll deal with each other like adults this time.’

He saw the embarrassment in her eyes, the humiliation in her wobbling chin and knew that she had been mouthing off in temper.

‘The problem is that you have me over a barrel, James. I have no options here.’

‘I gave you an option, Riley,’ James reminded her. ‘At the beginning of this process I asked you to talk to me, to explain why you were really going, but you won’t.’

‘We don’t talk well, James.’

‘Try.’

There was that obstinate shake of her head that he was expecting and he saw her mental retreat and knew that he’d lost the moment, lost her. Her words just confirmed it. ‘Look, I’ve got to go. I’m expecting a delivery of some last-minute goodies for my Christmas windows.’

Her eyes softened as she mentioned her windows and he immediately realised that she still loved her work, the art of creating. So whatever was going on with her wasn’t work-related. And it shouldn’t be since she had all the creative licence she required … hell, she had all the creative licence of every artist in the city. Riley didn’t answer to anyone, not even him. Riley worked the way Riley worked; she was innately in tune with what was hip and happening and her windows were always stunning and ahead of the trends. She might never ask for approval for her designs, which raised his control issues, but she’d yet to let them down so he couldn’t complain.