His Christmas Captive Read Free

for a moment, her expression unreadable, and then she turned and
left the room.
     
    Chapter
Three
    Lucy settled
herself in the small sitting room off the master suite later that evening,
fighting to get her riotous emotions under control. She only had to make it
through this one night, she reminded herself, and in the morning she would get
on that flight and put all of this—this painful, impossible chapter of her
life—behind her. She couldn't wait. She curled up on her favorite settee, and
let her thoughts run wild as she looked out at the thick, dark night that had
fallen outside.
    Rafi was her
husband, and there was no denying that he was a powerful man—but he was not the
god she'd believed him to be once upon a time, not by a long shot. If she
wanted to leave him, to divorce him—and she did, she told herself fiercely, of
course she did—then she would do so. He could not control her. He could not—
    "What is
this?" His voice was dry, amused. "A strategic retreat?"
    Lucy
stiffened. She turned to look at Rafi as he moved into the room in that low,
confident way of his. He had changed and showered; he smelled of the scented
soap he preferred and his dark black hair gleamed. He'd traded his perfect suit
for dark trousers and a simple long-sleeved shirt that showcased his impossibly
breathtaking physique. He was, quite simply, the most beautiful man she had
ever known.
    Lucy
remembered, suddenly, the first time she'd seen him. She'd been covering a
friend's shift at the Manchester nightclub where she worked, and she'd been
dead on her feet. Oh, she'd smiled and flirted with the punters by rote, but
she'd been counting down the minutes to closing time. She hadn't seen him come
in; she'd only noted the new group of men at one of her tables. Corporate
swells, from the look of them, she'd judged, and she'd plastered on her
best smile.
    Rafi had been
sprawled across the banquette, careless and nearly regal in his indolence.
She'd noticed that confidence first. And then he'd glanced up at her, and
everything had stopped. The noise of the crowd, the music, the boisterous
sounds of his friends. All gone. There had only been that arrested look in his
thundercloud gaze, and that faintly dazed expression on his harshly masculine,
impossibly beautiful face as they'd locked eyes. And that sweet, addictive
pulse, long and low and insistent, in her blood. Her throat. Between her legs.
    She'd asked
for his drink order and lost herself, then and there.
    It was no
different now, Lucy realized helplessly. She jerked her gaze away from his
body, wishing her own did not ready itself for him so quickly, so
thoughtlessly. As if nothing had happened between them at all. As if none of it
mattered.
    "It's
almost Christmas," she said instead of responding to him. She pulled the
wrap she wore tighter around herself, and looked out the window instead of at
him. "Only a few days to go now."
    "That
generally happens around this time of year," he agreed, though she told
herself his voice was not as cold as it had been before. "It is
unavoidable, apparently."
    Lucy heard
the derision in his voice, and thought, not for the first time, how little she
knew this man who had changed the whole of her life. That should not have made
her feel too big for her own skin, and yet it did.
    "I love
Christmas," she said softly. She sensed more than saw him drop into the
chair closest to her, and then he stretched out his long legs and she could
scarcely avoid them. Even so, she kept her eyes trained on her own lap.
"Growing up, there wasn't any money for gifts, so on Christmas morning Mum
would tell us stories instead. About how we would be princesses when we were
older, how we'd never be cold again and how we would eat whatever we liked in
golden palaces, bathed in sun and laughter." She smiled. "That was my
favorite part. Even when there were gifts, I preferred the stories. I used to
lie by the fire and imagine they all came true."
    She didn't
know why she'd told