‘I don’t want him to do that,’ Jenna muttered miserably, and was rewarded with a smile.
‘Good! Tell him you’re going to spend the day with me and he can go off and enjoy himself without feeling guilty.’ He eased her off his lap and stood up, reaching for his jacket.
‘You don’t have to go just yet,’ Jenna murmured, aware that she was blushing as she cast pride aside and made it plain that she hoped he would stay. He gave her a gentle smile.
‘Yes, I do. Don’t get me wrong. I want to make love to you quite desperately. But, as you said earlier, sex isn’t a proper basis for a relationship. I need to know exactly what you want from me, and I’m not sure you even know that yourself yet. But I can wait. I want to prove that there is more than just physical desire between us, and to do that sex needs to go on the back burner for a while.’
He’d picked a fine time to be honourable, Jenna thought irritably as she tossed beneath the sheets later that night, her body burning up with sexual frustration that made sleep impossible. She loved him, but right now she hated him too—hated the ease with which he could arouse her senses to fever-pitch and then just walk away, spouting some nonsense about a platonic relationship.
She vented her frustration on her unsuspecting pillow until it was pummelled into submission and eventually fell asleep, unaware that across town Alex was taking a long, cold shower.
CHAPTER TEN
THE LOVE NEST was a mock-Georgian house at the end of a sweeping drive, and Jenna viewed the marble pillars and the stone lions that guarded the front steps with dismay.
‘I wonder if Louise Henry has ever heard the expression, “less is more”,’ Alex murmured, and she bit back a smile.
‘It looks very nice,’ Jenna lied, turning to Maisie and determinedly blinking back her tears. ‘There’s Daddy and Auntie Louise, darling. You’re going to have a wonderful time with them, and Father Christmas is going to make a special trip to leave your presents under the tree when you come home.’
Maisie looked unconvinced, but went to Lee quite readily, and Jenna told herself she was glad—she wanted Maisie to have a good relationship with her father.
Louise Henry looked slightly older than she had imagined. She seemed rather shy and gentle, not the hard-nosed businesswoman Jenna had pictured, and for Maisie’s sake she was glad. Lee might not win full custody of their daughter, but if they came to an arrangement of shared care then Louise would be an important person in Maisie’s life, and it would be necessary to put any feelings of jealousy aside and try to get on.
‘She’ll be fine,’ Alex assured her softly as they drove away, and Jenna nodded.
‘I know, Louise actually seems quite nice. But it’s Christmas Eve, and Maisie should be at home hanging up her stocking.’ She swallowed hard and stared unseeingly out of the window as the car sped along the motorway.
Alex’s parents lived in a tiny village in Kent, and as he swung through the gates leading to their house she dredged up a smile, determined not to spoil Christmas for everyone else.
She need not have been so worried about meeting Alex’s parents, she mused later that night as she prepared for bed. Katharine and Lionel Morrell could not have been more welcoming, and any fears Jenna had harboured that they would be disappointed Alex had brought her rather than Selina had quickly been dispelled. It had been a lovely evening, she thought as she slid into her bed in the pretty guest room she had been allocated.
‘My room’s next door,’ Alex had informed her, and as she snuggled under the duvet she forced her mind to dwell on anything but the image of him getting undressed on the other side of the wall.
Lucky him to be able to put passion ‘on the back burner’, as he had so poetically put it, while she seemed to be a cauldron of seething emotions that were in danger of boiling over. He had accused her of not knowing what she wanted from him, but she knew only too well. She wanted his heart as well as his body; she wanted his eyes to light up every time he looked at her, his stern face to soften. Put bluntly, she wanted him to love her as she loved him. But he seemed as out of her reach as he had done the first day she had fallen into his arms.
Then she had considered him to be urbane, sophisticated and way out of her league, and now, meeting his parents, being a guest at their elegant Christmas Eve dinner party, only reinforced her belief that he would be better off with Selina.
Perhaps it was her own lack of self-confidence that made her feel so inadequate, she brooded. She’d come a long way since the days when she had been under Lee’s spell. His mental cruelty had been a deliberate form of abuse, but even now that she was able to recognise it as such it had only taken a couple of meetings with him to shake her hard-won confidence.