Christmas Passions

Almost. Thankfully, she wasn’t entirely bereft of common sense or decency. “If you think I’m going to strip for your entertainment, think again,” she said flatly.

“You might have lived in Africa for the last three years, but you’re still a nurse, Ava, and as such ought to know better than anyone the dangers of hypothermia.” He steered her firmly toward a door at the far end of the barn, thrust it open and shoved her into a room lined with horsey equipment. “I’m not suggesting you take off everything, but at least get rid of the wet shoes and stockings, and the coat. They’re not doing you any good, anyway, and you aren’t going to be much help to Deenie if you wind up in bed with pneumonia.”

“Why on earth does Deenie need my help? She’s the most self-reliant person I know.”

“Deenie,” he said succinctly, “is a mess right now and everyone is counting on you to deal with her. Whatever it is that’s bugging her isn’t something she’s prepared to talk about.”

He sounded more like an exasperated father than a besotted lover. “It could be simply a matter of adjusting,” Ava said. “Exchanging the world of international ballet for small-town life can’t be easy for someone who always swore she’d never settle for the kind of domestic bliss the rest of us thrive on.”

Oh, great! She came across more like an aging aunt who’d buried four husbands, rather than a twenty-eight-year old who’d yet to exchange the single life for matrimony.

Not that he cared, one way or the other. Apparently tired of the subject, he shrugged and made for the door. “Whatever! Right now, I’m more interested in grabbing a couple of hours sleep. Why don’t you get rid of the wet clothes while I round up some hay for a mattress?”

What the devil was wrong with him, that he’d complain to Ava Sorensen of all people? There were no secrets between her and Deenie. From what he could tell, they’d been joined at the hip practically from birth and shared everything. Everything!

He hefted a bale of hay and grimaced at the painful twinge which shot through his lower back. For Pete’s sake, the stuff couldn’t weigh more than thirty pounds, and six months ago he could press nearly two hundred without breaking a sweat. Could run five miles and swing a golf club, too. Now, thanks to an out-of-control snowboarder using him as a braking device, he was limited to brisk walks, strengthening exercises, and spending too much time with Deenie who was cute and amusing. Yet despite plenty of opportunity and a certain amount of flirtatious bantering, they hadn’t come close to any sort of intimacy.

“A fine pair we’d make!” he’d said, making light of it the one time she’d told him she wouldn’t mind a little sex on the side to relieve the tedium. “Between my back spasms and your sore shoulder and ankle, we’d both likely wind up back in physiotherapy. We’re better off sticking to gin rummy and cribbage.”

He’d been relieved when she’d let the idea drop without further comment. Mightily so, in fact—which made him wonder if more than just his spine had been cracked in the accident. What if he’d suffered other injuries which had gone undetected? What if he’d lost interest in sex forever?

Cripes, talk about a guy’s life spinning out of control! He needed to put a halt to things, and fast, beginning with the insane hints flying around that he and Deenie were an ideal couple and should be making what her mother so unsubtly referred to as “plans.” There were no long-term plans for him and Deenie. They were friends, and that was all.

Shouldering the hay, he trudged back to the tack room and rapped on the door. “Are you decent in there, Ava?”

“As much as can be expected.”

He found her perched on a stool with her knees drawn up under her chin and her bare feet poking out from under the poncho she’d fashioned from a horse blanket. Her toes were straight and unscarred, with perfect nails painted the colour of cranberries, and he thought how much prettier they were than Deenie’s which had become almost deformed from years of dancing en pointe.

“You’re looking better already,” he said, spreading the hay on the floor and tossing a couple of blankets on top. “You want to hop down from there on your own, or do you want me to give you a hand?”

“I can manage,” she said hastily, which was just as well. If he couldn’t have lifted Deenie at five foot two, he didn’t have a prayer of playing hero to Ava who stood at least seven inches taller.

Clutching the poncho around her, she scurried across the cement floor and dropped down on the makeshift mattress, but not so swiftly that he didn’t get an eyeful of her legs. Long and tanned, they were as elegant as her narrow feet, with sweetly curved calves and finely turned ankles. She might have been too tall for ballet, as Deenie had said, but she’d be a knockout in a Las Vegas chorus line.

“Why didn’t Deenie come with you to meet me?” she said, glaring at him as if she’d caught him peeking up her skirt.

“She was planning to, but she begged off when we heard your flight had been delayed. Claims she’s had too many late nights recently. But she wants you to give her a call as soon as you’re up and about in the morning. She said something about getting together with you for lunch.”

He removed his jacket and pulled off his boots, which sent her scooting to the far corner of the mattress with fire in her eyes. What did she think—that he planned to get buck naked and flaunt himself at her? “Relax, Ava,” he said, choking back a laugh. “This is as far as it goes. I’ll even keep my socks on, just to make sure our feet don’t get too intimate.”

She bit her lip and blushed a little, and he wondered if she had any idea how charmed he was by everything about her. Comparisons were odious, he knew, but he couldn’t help thinking that if Deenie had been the one forced to bunk down in a stable for the night, especially after being in transit for over eighteen hours, she’d have raised hell and put a lid on it. Could be that’s why she and Ava had remained such close friends all these years: the old “opposites attract” syndrome.

“You’re nothing like Deenie, you know,” he said, crouching next to her.

“I’ve always known that, Leo,” she replied coolly. “And I stopped trying to be, years ago.”

“Good.” He spread another blanket over her, took a couple for himself, and stretched out. “The world’s not big enough for two like her.”

“She is special. I’ve always known that, as well.”

Her eyes, big and beautiful and grey as summer thunderclouds, all at once had such a bereft look to them that he knew a crazy urge to fold her in his arms and tell her she was special, too, and that she shouldn’t assume what he’d said about Deenie was necessarily a compliment.

Leaping up to turn off the overhead light before he did or said something really stupid, he felt his way back to the makeshift bed and made a point of stuffing a wad of blanket between him and her. “I think anyone who meets her recognizes she’s different and always has been. According to her mother, she was still in diapers when she decided she was going to be a prima ballerina, and she’s never once deviated from the path of that ambition which, by itself, makes her something of a rarity.”

“Exactly,” Ava said, her voice flowing over him in the dark like sweet, heavy ice wine. “So tell me, Leo, how is it that two months around you was enough to persuade her to give up the adulation of sold-out audiences in Europe and settle down in sleepy old Owen’s Lake?”

CHAPTER TWO

SNOW batting against the paned window marked the silence ticking by as he tried to come up with an answer. “I guess,” he finally said, “it began with our both being sidelined by injuries that kept us away from our regular routines. We were housebound former neighbors who met at the physiotherapy clinic one morning, gravitated towards each other by mutual sympathy and boredom, and…one thing led to another.”

“You make it sound as if you drifted together by default,” Ava accused.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he said, wishing she hadn’t managed to pinpoint matters quite so accurately. “Deenie’s a lovely, intelligent woman and I’d have gone stir crazy if she hadn’t been around to keep me entertained. But I’d be lying if I said our…relationship left me deafened by violins or dazzled by stars. I’m not programmed to react like that. I don’t know any lawyers who are.”

The hay rustled softly as she shifted to a more comfortable position. Or was it her silky underwear sighing against her skin—a possibility which sent heat prickling down his torso to threaten areas best left undisturbed.

“You might not be a romantic, Leo,” Ava said, “but Deenie is, which brings me back to my original question. What made her decide to stay in Owen’s Lake?”

“I think,” he said, striving to maintain a lofty perspective despite the lecherous urgings of his body, “her injuries made her face up to the fact that her performing career isn’t going to last indefinitely. You were a dancer yourself when you were younger, Ava, albeit an amateur. You know how much punishment your body took. Multiply that a thousand times and you get a pretty good idea of the wear and tear on Deenie, both physically and emotionally. She knows that although she’ll probably make a full recovery this time, she’ll be forced into retirement much sooner than most women—probably within the next five years. So she’s trying to compromise.”

“That doesn’t sound like the Deenie I know.”

“What can I say? People change. Maybe being a prima ballerina isn’t enough to satisfy her anymore. Maybe she wants to have something else to turn to when her dancing days are over.”

“And she’s convinced she’ll find that ‘something’ with you?”

Cripes, the question suggested the notion that he and Deenie were on the brink of marriage had spread farther than he feared! “I certainly wouldn’t go that far,” he said neutrally, “even though her family does seem to think we’re a match made in heaven.”

Ava turned toward him. He could tell because her breath sifted over his face, fragrant as sun-warmed peaches. It brought to mind the lush, smooth texture of her lips and left him wondering if she’d taste as sweet as she smelled. Even as a teenager, she’d had a mouth that begged to be kissed and from the little he’d seen, time had only added to its appeal.

“From everything she’s told me, Deenie seems to think so, too.”

“Don’t read too much into what she’s told you, then,” he replied, irritated as much by his reaction to her proximity as by her probing questions. “I’m a thirty-seven-year-old lawyer who’s handled enough divorce cases to know that if people were more realistic about what makes a relationship work, and less prone to fantasizing, I might not have quite such a fat bank account but I’d have a hell of a lot more free time to devote to other pursuits.”

Ava, dogged to a fault, wasn’t about to get sidetracked. “I’m not interested in a run-down of your financial assets, Leo. Deenie and I are as close as sisters and I don’t want to see her hurt. So what I’m waiting to hear you say is that you’re not leading her on, and that you share a clear understanding of how things really stand between you. Can you give me those assurances?”

A hollow gloom descended on him, one with which he’d become all too familiar in recent weeks. Usually it attacked first thing in the morning, filling him with a sense of foreboding before he was awake enough to wrestle it into submission with pragmatic reason.

It stemmed, he’d told himself, from the frustration of enforced idleness; to the knowledge that while he followed doctor’s orders, his partners in the Skellington law firm were doing double duty picking up the slack created by his putting in half days only at the office. But Ava’s continued cross-examination bared a truth he’d been unwilling to face. The real cause of his discontent sprang not from professional frustration, but from the uneasy suspicion that he’d somehow lost control of his private life.

“Well, Leo? That wasn’t such a difficult question surely, so what’s taking you so long to answer?”

“If you must know,” he snapped, feeling like the cornered rat he undoubtedly was, “I’m tired of other people assuming they have the right to poke their noses into matters which are none of their concern.”

“I see. Well now that you’ve got that off your chest, let me ask you this. What do you want from the immediate future, Leo?”

“To get back to work full time. To be on top of my case load. To return to normal, for Pete’s sake!”