His Christmas Acquisition by Cathy Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

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 herfeet 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 lightand 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.’
    ‘Oh, please.’ Her breathing was shallow and she was painfully conscious of the fact that whilst outside the music was blaring, probably getting on the neighbours’ nerves, inside the kitchen it was just the two of them locked in a strange intimacy that terrified her.
    This was not what she wanted. She urgently reminded herself of Greg and her foolish love-sick infatuation withhim before Jessica had arrived on the scene and stolen his heart.
    But to insist on returning the brooch would risk making just too big a deal of it. It would alert him to the fact that