His Christmas Acquisition (19 page)

It seemed like the next step forward and she was doodling on a piece of paper, working out what she would write, how she would explain her defection from a highly paid job which she had always loved, when the doorbell rang.

Jamie could only think that it might be Richard, at nearly one-thirty in the morning.

Still in her small red dress, but with her shoes kicked off in favour of some fluffy bedroom slippers, she wearily pulled open the door to find Ryan lounging outside, hands in his pockets.

‘Do you usually open your door at this hour of the morning to anyone who comes calling?’ He looked past her, compelled to see whether there was evidence of her date lurking around. ‘It’s dangerous.’ He placed the flat of his hand on the door. ‘You’re going to ask me what I’m doing here and then you’re going to tell me to leave. I’m not leaving. I want to talk to you. No—I
need
to talk to you. Where is your date?’

‘He dropped me home and then left.’ She hesitated, then took a deep breath. ‘Which is just as well, because I need to talk to you too.’ In that moment, Jamie made her mind up. She would have to hand in her resignation. She couldn’t have Ryan taking time out from his hectic love life to deliver unwanted, uninvited advice to her. She didn’t want him preaching to her about things she should or shouldn’t do because they had been lovers and therefore he felt a misplaced sense of obligation. She certainly didn’t want him thinking that he had a right to show up at her house whenever he felt like it to sermonise about her choices.

She led the way towards the kitchen and made him a mug of black coffee. Then she swivelled the draft copy of her resignation letter towards him.

Ryan stared down at it for a few seconds, during which his brain seemed to grind to a standstill. He picked up the piece of paper and reread her few polite lines but nothing appeared to be sinking in. ‘What’s this?’

‘What does it look like, Ryan? It’s my letter of resignation.’ She wrapped her hands around the mug and stared at him, her heart racing like someone caught up in a panic attack. ‘It’s just a draft. I intend to type it out properly and it’ll be on your desk first thing on Monday morning.’

‘Over my dead body.’ He crumpled the letter and tossed it on the table. ‘Resignation not accepted!’ He stood up, walked across to her, leaned down and shot her a look of savage fury. ‘You’re not resigning, and you’re definitely not going to waste your time with that loser you’re dating.’

‘D
ON’T
you dare tell me what to do, Ryan Sheppard!’ Jamie cringed back in the chair.

‘Somebody’s got to. For your own good.’

‘Is that why you dashed over here? To give me a long lecture on being careful, because I’m obviously too naive and simple-minded to actually know how to live my own life?’

‘You can’t be serious about that guy after a couple of dates.’ He pushed himself away from her and prowled angrily through the small kitchen, his movements jerky and restless. ‘Did you tell him about us? Did he ask you to leave your job because of it? Because if that’s the case then I’m warning you that the man is no good for you. Can you really see yourself in a position of subservience for the rest of your life?’

Jamie looked at him in complete bewilderment.

‘Have you been drinking?’ she asked eventually, which earned her a glowering look.

‘You would drive any sane man to drink,’ Ryan muttered under his breath. ‘You told me that marriage wasn’t on the cards!’

‘Are you
jealous
?’

‘Should I be?’

The silence stretched between them. ‘Have you done anything that I should be jealous about?’ Ryan shook his head
and dealt her an accusing look. ‘I don’t do jealousy. I never have.’ Suddenly those standard words which had once been true were exposed for the lie that they were. He was jealous as hell. Wasn’t that why he had rushed over to her house? The thought of her being touched by anyone else had galvanised him into frantic action. She was still in her clubbing clothes. Had her date touched her underneath the skimpy little red dress?

Had he just missed the man by a whisker? Suddenly Ryan felt as though he needed something a lot stronger than a mug of black coffee.

‘You can’t resign,’ he said finally. ‘I won’t let you.’

‘Is that because I’m so indispensable? No one’s indispensable. I think I’m quoting you when I say that. I can work out my month’s notice and I’ll make sure that I find someone equally dedicated to replace me.’

‘You’re irreplaceable.’

Jamie ignored the flush of pleasure those words gave her. Of course, Ryan would think her irreplaceable. Not only was he accustomed to the way she worked, but now that he had slept with her he must truly have entered his comfort zone. The physical side of their relationship might be over, but at the back of his mind he would always have how submissive and responsive she had been with him. It would have been easy for him to assume that that responsiveness would have been lasting, that she would have been even more obliging when it came to working overtime and putting herself out to suit him. Hence his horror now, faced with her resignation.

‘Oh, please,’ Jamie retorted with biting sarcasm.

‘I didn’t like seeing you with that guy.’

Jamie was so busy stoking herself into self-righteous anger, that Ryan had had the nerve to invade her privacy so
that he could lecture her, that it took a few seconds for those words to sink in.

‘What do you mean?’

‘It seems that I do get jealous after all,’ Ryan muttered in such a low voice that Jamie had to strain her ears to hear what he had said.

He returned to sit at the kitchen table, where he proceeded to frown at the floor before leaning forward, elbows on his thighs, rubbing his eyes with his fingers then looking up at her.

‘You’re jealous …’ Jamie’s heart sang.

‘You’ve disappeared every evening on the dot of five-thirty ever since we got back to London.’ Ryan glared at her accusingly. ‘And then suddenly I discover the reason why. You’ve been going to clubs and seeing men behind my back.’

‘I haven’t been
seeing men
, and anyway you’ve been seeing women as well,’ Jamie countered, without letting on that she had been torn apart with her own little green monsters. And had he told her anything about his latest blonde? No, he had been spectacularly silent on that matter, so how dare he start criticising her for trying to have a life?

‘Abigail was a mistake. I have no idea what I was thinking.’

‘Did you … did you sleep with her? Not that I care. I’m just curious.’

‘You
should
care. You should care about everything I say and do and think because that’s how I feel about you. And, no, I didn’t sleep with her. I wasn’t even tempted.’

Jamie breathed in sharply, almost not wanting to exhale just in case she broke the spell. Had he just said what she thought he had, or was she just imagining it?

‘You didn’t even tell me about your sister.’

‘I … I was scared to carry on confiding in you, Ryan. I felt that we had been down that road and that if we were to continue
working together then things would have to go back to where they had once been. I would have to start learning how to keep my private life to myself.’

‘I was cut out of the loop and I didn’t like it,’ Ryan told her heavily.

Jamie felt giddy when their eyes met. Her mouth was dry and suddenly the kitchen just wasn’t the right place to be having this kind of conversation. Her thoughts were in a muddle and she was beginning to ache from the hard kitchen chair. She needed to sink into something soft and yielding that would mould her trembling body.

‘Perhaps we should go into the sitting room,’ she suggested in a shaky voice. ‘And if you’re finished with that coffee I can make you another.’

‘Because you think I need to sober up? I’ve had a bit to drink, but I’m by no means drunk.’

Jamie didn’t say anything. She walked into the sitting room, very conscious of him following behind her. She had no idea what to make of what he had said to her. He was jealous; he
cared
about what she thought. He stridently, aggressively and possessively wanted her to care about what he thought. And he hadn’t slept with the blonde bombshell.

Every instinct in her was nourishing the fragile shoot of hope that had begun to grow, but experience was still holding fast. She had made mistakes in the past. She forced herself to remember Greg. In retrospect, he had been nothing, but at the time she had happily built castles in the air and started hoping.

And then, with Ryan, she had fallen for him and had kidded herself that hopping into bed with him had been a moment of complete recklessness that she had long deserved. She had blinded herself to the obvious, which was that she had more than wanted him. She had needed him, was dependent and addicted to him. Then, once they had slept together,
she had immersed herself in the pretence of being involved for Vivian’s benefit, and those important lines between reality and fantasy had become blurred. She had started hoping for things. She seemed to make a habit of it.

So now, although she was badly tempted to take everything he said at face value and put the best possible interpretation on it, she resisted. Where would it get her? Was he just after a few more weeks or months with her because the leggy blondes were not quite doing it for him at this point in time? Or was he interested in having her around because he had chickened out of telling his mother the truth and he wanted to buy a little more time before he broke the news to her?

‘I don’t understand why you’re telling me all of this now,’ she said as soon as she was on the sofa. ‘If you cared so much about being out of the loop, then it’s funny that you didn’t show any interest for the past couple of weeks.’ She looked at him levelly. He had taken up position on one of the squashy chairs. It allowed her important breathing space. Still, she knew that her body was alive with emotion. Like an illness, the symptoms of which were branded in her brain, she could recognise all the familiar responses he evoked in her.

‘You dumped me, Jamie.’

‘I had to.’ She looked away quickly, her face colouring. ‘I’m not casual enough for a prolonged fling. I told you that at the time and I meant it.’

‘Which brings us back to the date. Has he made you promises you think he’ll keep?’

Jamie sighed and shook her head. ‘It was nothing serious,’ she confessed. ‘Richard is a really nice guy, but …’
But he’s not you
. ‘But maybe I don’t go for vets after all.’

‘And I don’t go for leggy blondes, now that we’re on the confession bandwagon. It doesn’t matter what glossy magazine they’ve stepped out of.’

Jamie held her breath, then exhaled slowly. ‘What do you mean?’ She watched cautiously as he stood up and walked towards her, hesitating before sitting down on the sofa.

‘I used to, once. A hundred years ago. I thought it was what I wanted—a rich, rewarding work life and fun on the side with women who didn’t make demands. I don’t know when things started to change,’ Ryan admitted with painful honesty. ‘You came to work for me, Jamie, and you spoilt everything I had always taken for granted.’

‘What do you mean?’ But the open vulnerability on his face made her heart swell. When he reached out to stroke her wrist, she didn’t pull her hand away.

‘I got accustomed to having a relationship with a woman on my own level.’

‘We didn’t
have
a relationship.’

‘I’m not talking about a sexual relationship. I’m talking about an emotional and intellectual relationship. Those are the strongest building blocks on the face of the earth, only I didn’t realise it at the time. I just knew that I was increasingly frustrated with the women I dated. They were empty and shallow and they bored me. And then we went away, and we didn’t just sleep together. We … we talked.

‘For the first time this week, it finally dawned on me just how much time we spent together, how much I enjoyed that and just how far down the road I’d gone when it came to really having a conversation with a woman. When it was gone, it was like something I should have appreciated and valued had disappeared from my life and I didn’t know how to reclaim it. We got back to London and you were never around. I missed you. I miss you.’

‘You miss me?’ Jamie stretched those three words out for as long as she could, so that she could savour every syllable.

‘When you kissed me at that Christmas party, it was as if a light had suddenly started shining from nowhere. I told
myself that you had only kissed me to make the vet jealous. I figured that you were still emotionally wrapped up with him.’

‘I stopped being wrapped up with Greg a long time ago. He started going out with my sister, and I can’t even remember being terribly upset about it, although I thought that I
should
be.’ That episode was like a dream she had had a million years ago. It was something that was no longer relevant in her life at all. ‘I kissed you because my sister was going to. She’d had too much to drink. I wasn’t about to let Greg see his wife kissing some other guy under a sprig of mistletoe. That would have been the end of their marriage and there was no way I was going to allow that to happen.’

‘And that’s the only reason why?’

Jamie went bright red.

‘I’ve bared my soul,’ Ryan murmured. ‘Are you going to shoot me down in flames now by not being truthful with me? I can take it.’

‘I kissed you because I wanted to.’ She met his eyes, held them. ‘I didn’t think so at the time but, looking back on it afterwards, yes, I wanted to kiss you because I’d been attracted to you practically from the first time I set eyes on you, Ryan Sheppard.’

‘But you once told me that attraction wasn’t enough.’

Her breath caught in her throat. They had both said a lot to each other, but the word ‘love’ had never entered the conversation. She had never allowed herself to wear her heart on her sleeve and even now it floated unspoken around them, challenging either one to pluck it out of the silence and give it a name. When Jamie thought about doing that, her throat went dry and she felt as though she suddenly had cotton wool stuffed in her mouth.

‘I remember,’ she croaked shakily.

‘You were right.’ He fiddled with her fingers but Jamie
could hardly concentrate on that. ‘I fell in love with you and I don’t even know when it happened. When we finally made love, I never stopped to ask myself why it just felt so damned
right.
’

‘You fell in love with me?’

‘You look shocked,’ he said wryly. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t put two and two together already. I said goodbye to Abigail and couldn’t wait to get over here. I was going mad wondering what you were getting up to with your date. He looked like the kind of sensitive, tree-hugging guy who wouldn’t hesitate to pour out his feelings after five seconds. I felt like I’d left things too late.’

‘I can’t believe you love me.’ Jamie reached out one tremulous hand to stroke his cheek. ‘I love you too. I feel like I’ve waited all my life for you. When we made love and got involved in that pretend relationship for your mother, I knew that I couldn’t carry on with it when we got back here because I would want much more. I knew you were into flings, and I knew that if you tossed me aside I would never recover. I thought that I had to be proactive.’

Ryan pulled her into him. After two weeks, the feel of her body against his was like a taste of coming home.

They fell back onto the sofa and she wriggled on top of him. It was unbelievably good. When he began kissing her, she was completely lost.

Later, she struggled to remember how they had made it up to her bedroom. She had a fuzzy recollection of clothes being discarded along the way.

She gave herself to him with a blissful sense of completion. There was no other way of describing it—Ryan Sheppard
completed
her. Without him, she was lacking.

Afterwards, with his arms around her, he murmured softly into her hair, ‘Now, my darling, I never want to go through the torture I’ve been through over the past few
weeks. I’m afraid your brief taste of clubbing is at an end, unless I’m there, keeping a watchful eye on you. And the only way I can think of doing that is to marry you. So … will you marry me, Jamie?’

‘Yes!’

‘As soon as possible?’

‘Absolutely!’

‘I’m a happy man.’ He lay back, one arm flung over the side of the bed, and smiled with contentment as Jamie covered him with little kisses.

Left to his own devices, Ryan would have married Jamie within the week. His mother, however, was having nothing of the sort. She wanted a full-blown affair, and in spite of his low-level grumbling—for he couldn’t understand why on earth she hadn’t already had her fill of full-blown weddings with his three sisters—Jamie was thrilled to accommodate her.