His Christmas Acquisition

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Boxed in, Jamie had no choice but to concede defeat.

‘Hey, we could even have a party!’ She looked sideways at Ryan and shot him a half-smile. ‘I’m great at organising parties. What are you up to at Christmas, anyway?’

‘Jessica!’

‘Oh, don’t be such a bore, Jamie.’

‘I’m in the country,’ Ryan murmured. ‘Why?’ He had already received so many invitations to join people for Christmas lunch that he was seriously considering ignoring them all and locking himself away in his apartment until the fuss was over.

‘You could join us here.’

Adjacent to Jamie, he was aware of her look of pure horror at the suggestion. He nearly burst out laughing, but he managed to keep a straight face as he appeared to give the offer considerable thought.

‘Well …’ He hesitated. ‘I am in the unique position of spending Christmas day without my family.’

‘Where are they?’ Jessica strolled towards him, her thumbs hooked lightly into the elasticated waistband of the culottes so that they were dragged slightly down, exposing a flat, brown belly and the twinkling glitter of her pierced navel.

No wonder Jamie worried about her sister, Ryan thought. The woman was clearly a walking, talking liability to anybody’s peace of mind.

‘They’re in the Caribbean.’

Jessica’s eyes rounded into impressed saucers and her mouth fell open. ‘You’re kidding.’

‘I have a house there and this year they’ve all decided to spend Christmas and New Year in it.’

‘I don’t know why we’re having this silly conversation,’ Jamie interrupted crisply. ‘Ryan already has his own plans for Christmas.’ She rose to her feet and pulled open the dishwasher, which was her way of announcing that it was time for the impromptu evening to come to an end. But Jessica was in full flow, quizzing Ryan about his house in the Caribbean, asking him what it looked like, while he answered with just the sort of indulgent amusement that she was accustomed to getting. It had never mattered what boundaries Jessica had over-stepped; the world had always smiled and allowed her to get away with it. Whoever said that beautiful people didn’t lead charmed lives?

‘I’m open to persuasion,’ Ryan finished, leaning back and watching Jamie bang pans into cupboards, frustration stamped on her face, her mouth downturned and scowling. ‘What were you going to do, Jamie? Bit boring if you had been planning to stay in on your own.’

‘I would rather call it peaceful,’ she snapped. ‘And, besides, I had plans to go out for drinks on Christmas morning with some friends and I would probably have hung around for their alternative Christmas lunch.’

‘I want traditional,’ Jessica stated flatly.

‘What’s Greg going to do?’ Jamie spun round to look at her sister. ‘Does he know that you’re planning on abandoning him for Christmas day?’

‘He won’t mind. He’s on call, and anyway, his parents can’t wait to have him all to themselves so that they can tell him what a rotten wife I am. So …’ That technicality concluded, Jessica turned her attention back to Ryan, who looked as comfortable and settled in the kitchen as though he had been there a million times. ‘Will you come? Jamie’s never been into Christmas, but I’ll make her stick up a tree, and it’ll be festive with a turkey and all the trimmings!’

‘I’m sure he’ll think about it. Just stop nagging him, Jess!’ Jamie was pretty sure that she could convince Ryan to ignore her sister’s rantings. He was a guy who was in great demand. The last thing he would want to do would be to sit around a small pine table in a kitchen and dine on a turkey reluctantly cooked by his secretary. Just the thought of it made her shiver in nervous apprehension.

‘It’s wonderful the way you can answer on my behalf.’ Ryan grinned at Jamie, who scowled back at him. ‘It’s probably why we work so well together. You know just when to read my mind.’

‘Ha-ha. Very funny.’

‘But she’s right.’ He stood up and glanced at Jessica. ‘I’ll think about it and let Jamie know.’

‘Or you could let me know. I’ll give you my mobile number and you can get in touch any time at all. No need to go through Jamie.’

He left five minutes later and Jamie sagged. The peace of having her sister upstairs safely in bed was greatly diminished by the nasty tangle of thoughts playing in her mind.

Not only had Ryan found out more about her in the space of an hour than he had in eighteen months, but she was now facing the alarming prospect that, having wedged his foot through the door, it would be impossible to get him to remove it.

Everything that had always been so straightforward had now been turned on its head.

And what if the man decided to descend on them for Christmas lunch?

Apprehension sizzled in her and, alongside that very natural apprehension, something else, something even more worrying, something that closely resembled … anticipation.

CHAPTER THREE

CHRISTMAS’S rapid approach brought a temporary lull in the usual relentless work-ethic. Ryan Sheppard made a very good Christmas boss. He entered into the spirit of things by personally supervising the decorations and cracking open champagne at six every evening for whoever happened to be around in the countdown to the big day. Extra-long lunch hours shopping were tactfully overlooked. On Christmas Eve, work was due to stop at twelve and the rest of the day given over to the Secret Santa gift exchanges and an elaborate buffet lunch which would be prepared by Ryan’s caterers.

On the home front, Jamie was stoically putting up with a sister who had decided to throw herself into the party season with gay abandon. She tagged along to all the Christmas parties to which Jamie had been invited, flirted outrageously with every halfway decent-looking bachelor, and in the space of a week and a half collected more phone numbers than Jamie had in her address book. There was, ominously, no mention of Greg. If they were in contact, it certainly wasn’t via the landline. Jamie had stopped asking because the response of tear-filled eyes, followed by an angry sermon about the valuable space for which she was still searching, was just too much of a headache.

A tree had been erected and Jessica had enthusiastically begun helping with the lights, but like a child, had become bored after fifteen minutes, leaving Jamie to complete the task. Clothes were left strewn in unlikely places and were retrieved with an air of self-sacrifice whenever Jamie happened to mention the state of the house. The consequence of this was that Jamie’s peaceful existence was now a round-the-clock chore of tidying up behind her sister and nagging.

Of course, Jamie knew that she would have to sit her sister down and insist on knowing when she intended to return to Scotland, but like a coward she hid behind the Christmas chaos and decided to shelve all delicate discussions until Boxing Day at the very least.

There was also the hurdle of Christmas day to get through. Ryan had, totally unexpectedly, accepted Jessica’s foolish invitation to lunch and, with the prospect of three people cutting into a turkey that would be way too big, Jamie had invited several other members of staff to come along if they weren’t doing anything.

Three guys from the software department had taken her up on the invitation, as well as a couple of her girlfriends whom she had met at the gym when she had first arrived in London.

Jamie anticipated an awkward lunch, but when she mentioned that to her sister, Jessica had smiled brightly and assured her that there was no need to worry.

‘I’m a party animal!’ she had announced. ‘I can make any gathering go with a bang, and I’ve got loads of party hats and crackers and stuff. It’ll be a blast! So much better than last year, which was a deadly meal round at the in-laws’. I can’t wait to fill Greg in when the last guest leaves.’

‘I’m surprised you even care what he thinks,’ Jamie had said and was vaguely reassured when her sister had gone bright red.

Not that she had dwelled on that for any length of time. Most of her mind for the past week had been taken up with the prospect of Ryan descending on her house for Christmas lunch.

And now the day had finally arrived. It came with dark, leaden skies and a general feeling of anticlimax; although some snow had been forecast, it appeared to be in the process of falling everywhere else but in London.

From downstairs came the thud of music, a compilation of songs which Jessica had prepared during her spare time. Peace seemed a distant dream. At eight-thirty, Jamie had thoroughly cleaned the bathroom, which had been taken over by her sister in a series of undercover assaults, so that each day slightly more appeared on the shelf and in the cabinet.

Now, sitting and staring at her reflection in the mirror, Jamie wondered how much longer she would be able to cope with a very hyper Jessica.

Then she thought about her outfit: a long-sleeved black dress that, she knew, would look drab against the peacock-blue of Jessica’s mini skirt and her high wedges that would escalate her height to six feet.

By the time the first guest arrived, Jamie was already settling into her role of background assistant to her life-and-soul-of-the-party sister.

Every nerve in her body was tuned to the sound of the doorbell, but when Ryan eventually appeared, she was in the kitchen, as it happened, doing various things with the meal. Outside alcohol was steadily being consumed and Jessica was flirting, dancing and enjoying the limelight, even though the guys concerned were the sort of highly intelligent eccentrics she would ordinarily have dismissed as complete nerds.

The sound of his voice behind her, lazy and amused, zapped her like a bolt of live electricity and she leapt to her feet and spun around, having been peering worriedly into the oven.

‘Well,’ he drawled, walking into the kitchen and peering underneath lids at the food sitting on the counter, ‘looks like the party’s going with a swing.’

‘You’re here.’

‘Did you think that I wasn’t going to turn up?’ Since the last time he had seen her in jeans and a tee-shirt, he had found himself doing quite a bit of thinking about her. As expected, she had mentioned nothing about her sister when she had been at work, which didn’t mean that their working relationship had remained the same. It hadn’t. Something subtle had altered, although he had a feeling that that just applied to him. She had been as efficient, as distant and as perfectly polite as ever.

‘I’m nothing if not one-hundred-percent reliable.’ He held out a carrier bag. ‘Champagne.’

Flustered, she kept her eyes firmly on his face, deliberately avoiding the muscular legs encased in pair of black trousers and the way those top two undone buttons of his cream shirt exposed the shadow of fine, dark hair.

‘Thanks.’ She reached out for the carrier bag and was startled when from behind his back he produced a small gift-wrapped box. ‘What’s this?’

‘A present.’

‘I’m still working my way through the bottle of perfume you gave me last year.’ She wiped her hands and then began opening the present.

Her mouth went dry. She had been privy to quite a few of his gifts to women. They ranged from extravagant bouquets of flowers to jewellery to trips to health spas. This, however, was nothing like that. In the small box was an antique butterfly brooch and she picked it up, held it up to the light and then set it back down in its bed of tissue paper before raising her eyes to his.

‘You bought me a butterfly,’ she whispered.

‘I noticed that you had a few on your mantelpiece in the sitting room. I guessed you collect them. I found this one at an antique shop in Spitalfields.’

‘It’s beautiful, but I can’t accept it.’ She thrust it at him and turned away, her face burning.

‘Why not?’

‘Because … because …’

‘Because you don’t collect them?’

‘I do, but …’

‘But it’s yet another of those secrets of yours that you’d rather I knew nothing about?’

‘It just isn’t appropriate,’ Jamie told him stiffly. In her head, she pictured him roaming through a market, chancing upon the one thing he knew would appeal to her, handing over not a great deal of cash for it, but it never took much to win someone over. Except, she wasn’t on the market to be won over. Nor was he on the market for doing anything but what came naturally to him—thinking outside the box. It was why he was such a tremendous success in his field.

‘Okay, but you know that it’s an insult to return a gift.’ Ryan shrugged. ‘I’m in your house. Consider it a small token of gratitude for rescuing a lonely soul from wandering the streets of London on Christmas day.’