Bedded at the Billionaire's Convenience(58)

The solution…Georgie dabbed a little blush on her cheeks…was simple…she added just a hint of lip gloss so that her mouth looked even plumper and more inviting…she would make herself indispensable. She had until the new year, but in that period she would do her damnedest to ingratiate herself and then when he returned to London…who knew? Hadn’t he already told her that he had missed her once before? He could miss her again and this time as his lover.#p#分页标题#e##p#分页标题#e#

All dark thoughts dealt with, Georgie went downstairs to find a pot of freshly brewed coffee and hot croissants waiting on the kitchen table.

Didi was fussing around the turkey, which she had insisted was a traditional Christmas dish and on no accounts to be replaced by any upstart, such as fish, which had been Pierre and Georgie’s suggestion. That one turkey, however modestly sized, would be far too big for three people, had met with a tart, ‘I’m a dab hand at dealing with leftovers.’

Pierre gave her one of those secret half-smiles that made her toes curl and when she sat down he dropped a kiss lightly on the top of her head.

Then, as the day unfolded, there was precious little time to do anything but go with the flow. With the snow still pelting down, making it a magical Christmas Day, and the Christmas carol CD humming in the background, they cooked together and opened their presents. Pierre claimed that he loved the book and in return he gave her an antique clock, which she had seen on one of their trips together and had wistfully been tempted to buy but lacked the necessary funds.

‘I had been hoping for a ring of some sort,’ Didi said ruefully. ‘One of those with a diamond somewhere.’

But then the moment was lost as the reality of turkey and mince pies and roast potatoes took over. By the time they sat to eat it was already after three, and as the snow stopped various of the neighbours dropped in for evening drinks.

Pierre, who usually abhorred these sorts of things, found himself rather enjoying it all. The previous years, bar one when he had been abroad on business, he had taken his mother out for Christmas lunch and they had enjoyed civilised, polite conversation in a variety of expensive restaurants or hotels.

But really, he now thought, this had been what she had truly wanted. Too much home-cooked food eaten with the pine smell of the Christmas tree mingling with the aroma of gravy and stuffing and far too many mince pies to be strictly healthy. She had wanted the neighbours over for drinks and village gossip and had probably warned them off in previous years suspecting that he would have hated it all.

In the corner of the room, Georgie was chatting vivaciously with the local vicar who, oddly, was wearing a Panama hat and looked ever so slightly like a member of the Mafia. Pierre caught her eye and raised his quickly skywards, up to the bedroom that awaited them, which made her blush madly and lose her thread of conversation.

He realised that he would return to his normal existence with a certain amount of regret. Understandable, he expected. Holidays for him were a rare occurrence and this one had certainly been out of the ordinary.

He glanced across to Georgie and as she met his eyes through the ten or so people gathered in the room, all talking animatedly about everything and nothing, Pierre’s eyes narrowed and, like a man awakening from a dream, he saw what he should have seen some time ago.

For him, Georgie had first been a nuisance and then a novelty and finally a challenge and, while he had enjoyed every minute of her, he was sharp enough to know that he wanted his life to remain exactly how it was, uncluttered by emotion. He had kidded himself into thinking that she felt exactly the same way, but no. That expression on her face, which he now recognized, was not simply the complicit smile of a woman who wanted a man purely because they were good together in bed. That was the smile of a woman who was beginning to invest feelings in a relationship.

It wasn’t going to do. Beyond the fact that he wasn’t prepared for a committed relationship, he knew for certain that if he was, it wouldn’t be with Georgie. Lovely and sweet as she was, she was also a country lass who could never make the leap into his world.

He felt a little shaken and quickly downed the remainder of his drink and then he disappeared into his mother’s study, which was crammed full of gardening books, recipe books and her favourite, crime thrillers. The desk was an old-fashioned one and naturally there was no computer, which was a modern gadget of which Didi heartily disapproved. ‘Life worked perfectly well before they came along,’ was her final word on the subject.#p#分页标题#e##p#分页标题#e#

But it was perfectly adequate for thinking and Pierre didn’t much care for the direction of his thoughts.