A Baby For Christmas

‘You’re out,’ she said. Of course maybe that was why it was dangerous, she thought a little wildly.

‘It’s not dangerous for me.’

‘How’s that for the double standard?’ Carly said bitterly.

‘I don’t make the rules, Carlota. But I can tell you what they are.’

‘I’m sure you can,’ she said. ‘It’s not fair,’ she complained after a moment.

‘Tell me about it,’ Piran muttered under his breath. Then he said, ‘No one ever promised that life would be fair.’

‘Save me the time-worn platitudes.’

He reached for her arm. ‘Come on, Carly. Let’s go.’ She tried to shake him off. ‘I said, I’m going for a walk.’

‘No, you’re not.’

‘Yes, I am.’ It was sheer stubbornness on her part and she knew it. But she was determined not to let him have the last word, not to allow him to tell her what to do.

She wrenched away from him and started down the path toward the beach at a run.

She’d got perhaps five steps when he caught her. With one hand he spun her round, then grasped her around the waist with both hands and flung her over his shoulder.

‘Piran!’ she shrieked as she pitched head-first, then stopped abruptly as her midriff lodged against his shoulder and she hung flailing upside down. ‘Piran! Damn you! Put me down!’

But Piran only turned and strode back up the path with Carly slung over his shoulder like some bag of old clothes.

‘Piran!’

She twisted and smacked him, her fists coming into contact with hard wet flesh. She opened her eyes and found herself staring down at a pair of lean, hair-roughened thighs and bare, muscular buttocks. She hit them. Hard.

‘Damn!’ He twisted and tried to catch her hands.

Carly kicked her feet, kneed him in the chest, then slapped him again, hoping the blows stung his wet skin.

‘Stop it! Damn it, Carly!’ He made it to the veranda, but he stumbled on the steps, and they both went down, a tangle of arms and legs, cool droplets of water and heated flesh. Carly landed face down between the backs of his thighs. It took only an instant’s exposure to the hard warmth of his body to have her scrambling to her feet.

‘I can’t believe you did that!’ she railed at him. ‘Talk about cavemen!’

He was slower getting up. He winced as he pulled himself up and Carly noticed for the first time the angry scar on his leg. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked him.

‘What do you care?’ He snapped a towel off one of the lounges and knotted it around his waist, but not before she’d had a chance to glimpse definite signs of masculine arousal.

She swallowed and averted her eyes. ‘I—I don’t, actually.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

They stared at each other. Piran’s gaze was hard and angry, and any arousal that he might feel, Carly knew all too well, was unwanted.

So what else was new? He’d wanted her nine years ago, and he’d hated himself for it.

She glanced back at him and saw a muscle in his jaw tick in the moonlight. She thought he looked very pale. She felt a fleeting stab of guilt, then squelched it immediately. He hadn’t had to carry her! He hadn’t had to interfere at all.

She said as much.

‘Just my chivalric nature, I guess,’ he said through his teeth.

Carly remembered when he really had been chivalrous. That memory, sweet as it was, somehow hurt more than all the other painful memories did.

‘Don’t bother,’ she said shortly.

Their eyes met and clashed once more. Piran ran his tongue over his lips.

‘Fine,’ he said harshly after a long moment. ‘Go for a bloody walk if you want. Drown yourself if you want. I don’t care what you do. I don’t know why I bothered.’

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_6857dfce-b850-5407-8469-46369715d284)

TO SAY that she slept badly was no exaggeration. It was close to dawn before Carly did more than toss and turn fitfully in her bed, her mind still playing with the image of Piran’s naked body and the press of his flesh against hers. When at last she did sleep, her dreams were no less alluring and no more restful.

She was reminded all too much of the night of her eighteenth birthday—the last time she’d been held in Piran St Just’s arms—the time she’d found out what he really thought of her.

For years she’d turned away from that memory every time it surfaced. She’d blotted it out as soon as she could because it had hurt so much.

But now she forced herself to remember. She had no choice. She needed to remember if only to protect herself from being drawn once more into the fanciful dreams that once upon a time had brought her down.

She’d certainly had her share of dreams about Piran in the days just before her birthday. She’d been living with her mother and Arthur in his home in the hills above

Santa Barbara—the low, Spanish-style house she’d pointed out to Piran the day she’d first met him.

It was indeed a lovely house, built to blend in with the surrounding hillside, its gardens half wild. The latter weren’t as wonderful as the wild areas surrounding Blue Moon on Conch Cay, but Carly had loved to ramble through them just the same. She’d loved to sit on the bench beside the bougainvillaea and look out over the city lights and the boats in the harbor at night.

Every night she would go there and sit, dreaming of Piran sitting next to her, of Piran touching her, holding her, kissing her.

She’d never really stopped dreaming of him after their first meeting. Perhaps she’d been foolish—no, there was no perhaps about it. She had been foolish. But in those days Carly had been as big an optimist, as big a dreamer as her mother.

And Piran, even though he clearly disapproved of his father’s marriage, still fascinated her.

She knew there was more to him than his silent, brooding disapproval. She remembered his gentleness. She remembered his touch. And, even though he was silent and stern whenever he was around her afterwards, she wasn’t unaware of the way he watched her.

Carly might not have been sophisticated in those days, but even she knew when a man was interested. And Piran’s smoldering gaze was a sure sign that he was. Whenever he came home, or whenever he joined them at Blue Moon or in New York, he watched her with an intensity that tantalized her at the same time as it unnerved her.

Carly watched him too, avidly trying to understand him, to attract him. Even at eighteen and hopelessly naive in the ways of love, she sensed a connection between them. It was tenuous, but it was very real. It had been from the first moment.

At least it was to Carly. She wanted Piran to see that, too.

When Piran came home for Thanksgiving he watched her. At dinner she caught him studying her out of the corner of his eye. On Friday, when Arthur took them to the botanical gardens, Carly noticed Piran keeping an eye on her.

And Sunday morning, before his plane left for Boston, he even went for a walk on the beach with her. He didn’t say anything. They just walked. Every now and then Carly ventured a comment, which was met with a monosyllabic response, as if he was as tongue-tied as she was.