One Winter's Sunrise: Gift-Wrapped in Her Wedding Dress

‘You...you did?’

‘I could see the whole thing backfiring and me no better off in terms of reputation. Possibly worse.’

If she didn’t stop twisting her necklace it would break and scatter her beads all over the marble floor. ‘So—help me out here. We’re back to you not wanting a party?’

She’d talked him out of the big, glitzy event Party Queens really needed. Andie cringed at the prospect of the combined wrath of Gemma and Eliza when she went back to their headquarters with the contract that was sitting in her satchel waiting for his signature still unsigned.

‘You know I don’t.’ Thank heaven. ‘But maybe a different kind of event,’ he said.

‘Like...handing over a giant facsimile cheque to a charity?’ Which would be doing her right out of a job.

‘Where’s the good PR in that?’

‘In fact it could look even more cynical than the party.’

‘Correct.’

He paced a few long strides away from her and then back. ‘I’m good at turning one dollar into lots of dollars. That’s my skill. Not planning parties. But surely I can get the kind of publicity my marketing department wants, impress my prospective business partner and actually help some less advantaged people along the way?’

She resisted the urge to high-five him. ‘To tell you the truth, I couldn’t sleep last night for thinking that exact same thing.’ Was it wise to have admitted that?

‘Me too,’ he said. ‘I tossed and turned all night.’

A sudden vision of him in a huge billionaire’s bed, all tangled in the sheets wearing nothing but...well nothing but a billionaire’s birthday suit, flashed through her mind and sizzled through her body. Not my type. Not my type. She had to repeat it like a mantra.

She willed her heartbeat to slow and hoped he took the flush on her cheekbones for enthusiasm. ‘So we’re singing from the same hymn sheet. Did you have any thoughts on solving your dilemma?’

‘That’s where you come in; you’re the party expert.’

She hesitated. ‘During my sleepless night, I did think of something. But you might not like it.’

‘Try me,’ he said, eyes narrowed.

‘It’s out of the ball park,’ she warned.

‘I’m all for that,’ he said.

She flung up her hands in front of her face to act as a shield. ‘It...it involves Christmas.’

He blanched under the smooth olive of his tan. ‘I told you—’

His mouth set in a grim line, his hands balled into fists by his sides. Should she leave well enough alone? After all, he had said the festive season had difficult associations for him. ‘What is it that you hate so much about Christmas?’ she asked. She’d always been one to dive straight into the deep end.

‘I don’t hate Christmas.’ He cursed under his breath. ‘I’m misquoted once and the media repeat it over and over.’

‘But—’

He put up his hand to halt her. ‘I don’t have to justify anything to you. But let me give you three good reasons why I don’t choose to celebrate Christmas and all the razzmatazz that goes with it.’

‘Fire away,’ she said, thinking it wasn’t appropriate for her to counter with three things she adored about the festive season. This wasn’t a debate. It was a business brainstorming.

‘First—the weather is all wrong,’ he said. ‘It’s hot when it should be cold. A proper Christmas is a northern hemisphere Christmas—snow, not sand.’

Not true, she thought. For a born-and-bred Australian like her, Christmas was all about the long, hot sticky days of summer. Cicadas chirruping in the warm air as the family walked to a midnight church service. Lunch outdoors, preferably around a pool or at the beach. Then it struck her—Dominic had a distinct trace of an English accent. That might explain his aversion to festivities Down Under style. But something still didn’t seem quite right. His words sounded...too practised, as if he’d recited them a hundred times before.

He continued, warming to his point as she wondered about the subtext to his spiel. ‘Then there’s the fact that the whole thing is over-commercialised to the point of being ludicrous. I saw Christmas stuff festooning the shops in September.’

She almost expected him to snarl a Scrooge-like Bah! Humbug! but he obviously restrained himself.

‘You have a point,’ she said. ‘And carols piped through shopping malls in October? So annoying.’

‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘This whole obsession with extended Christmas celebrations, it...it...makes people who don’t celebrate it—for one reason or another—feel...feel excluded.’

His words faltered and he looked away in the direction of the pool but not before she’d seen the bleakness in his eyes. She realised those last words hadn’t been rehearsed. That he might be regretting them. Again she had that inane urge to comfort him—without knowing why he needed comforting.

She knew she had to take this carefully. ‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘I know what you mean.’ That first Christmas without Anthony had been the bleakest imaginable. And each year after she had thought about him and the emptiness in her heart he had left behind him. But she would not share that with this man; it was far too personal. And nothing to do with the general discussion about Christmas.

His mouth twisted. ‘Do you?’

She forced her voice to sound cheerful and impersonal. Her ongoing sadness over Anthony was deeply private. ‘Not me personally. I love Christmas. I’m lucky enough to come from a big family—one of five kids. I have two older brothers and a sister and a younger sister. Christmas with our extended family was always—still is—a special time of the year. But my parents knew that wasn’t the case for everyone. Every year we shared our celebration with children who weren’t as fortunate as we were.’

‘Charity cases, you mean,’ he said, his voice hard-edged with something she couldn’t identify.

‘In the truest sense of the word,’ she said. ‘We didn’t query them being there. It meant more kids to play with on Christmas Day. It didn’t even enter our heads that there would be fewer presents for us so they could have presents too. Two of them moved in with us as long-term foster kids. When I say I’m from five, I really mean from seven. Only that’s too confusing to explain.’

He gave a sound that seemed a cross between a grunt and a cynical snort.

She shrugged, inexplicably hurt by his reaction. ‘You might think it goody-two-shoes-ish but that’s the way my family are, and I love them for it,’ she said, her voice stiff and more than a touch defensive.

‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘I think it...it sounds wonderful. You were very lucky to grow up in a family like that.’ With the implication being he hadn’t?

‘I know, and I’m thankful. And my parents’ strong sense of community didn’t do us any harm. In fact those Christmas Days my family shared with others got me thinking. It was what kept me up last night. I had an idea.’

‘Fire away,’ he said.

She channelled all her optimism and enthusiasm to make her voice sound convincing to Sydney’s most notorious Scrooge. ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you opened this beautiful home on Christmas Day for a big lunch party for children and families who do it hard on Christmas Day? Not as a gimmick. Not as a stunt. As a genuine act of hospitality and sharing the true spirit of Christmas.’

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_48e7ab7d-f839-5e60-a21a-4c92bb000e06)

DOMINIC STARED AT Andie in disbelief. Hadn’t she heard a word he’d said about his views on Christmas? She looked up at him, her eyes bright with enthusiasm but backlit by wariness. ‘Please, just consider my proposal,’ she said. ‘That’s all I ask.’ He could easily fire her for straying so far from the brief and she must know it—yet that didn’t stop her. Her tenacity was to be admired.

Maybe she had a point. No matter what she or anyone else thought, he was not a Scrooge or a hypocrite. To make a holiday that could never be happy for him happy for others had genuine appeal. He was aware Christmas was a special time for a huge percentage of the population. It was just too painful for him to want to do anything but lock himself away with a bottle of bourbon from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day.

Deep from within, he dredged memories of his first Christmas away from home. Aged seventeen, he’d been living in an underground car park beneath an abandoned shopping centre project. His companions had been a ragtag collection of other runaways, addicts, criminals and people who’d lost all hope of a better life. Someone had stolen a branch of a pine tree from somewhere and decorated it with scavenged scraps of glittery paper. They’d all stood around it and sung carols with varying degrees of sobriety. Only he had stood aloof.

Now, he reached out to where Andie was twisting her necklace so tightly it was in danger of snapping. Gently, he disengaged her hand and freed the string of beads. Fought the temptation to hold her hand for any longer than was necessary—slender and warm in his own much bigger hand. Today her nails were painted turquoise. And, as he’d noticed the day before, her fingers were free of any rings.

‘Your idea could have merit,’ he said, stepping back from her. Back from her beautiful interesting face, her intelligent eyes, the subtle spicy-sweet scent of her. ‘Come and sit outside by the pool and we can talk it over.’