His Christmas Captive Read Online Free PDF Page B

moment—in the sense of rightness that moved through her.
    She regretted
the words immediately.
    He stiffened
behind her, then set her away from him. She closed her eyes as all the pain and
hurt she'd been ignoring came rushing back, full force.
    "I do,
too," he said in a low, bitter voice. "But I am not the one who made
this impossible."
    Her hands
curled into fists, and she turned to look at him. His gray eyes were so
troubled, his mouth so grim. And he still glared at her as if he had every
reason to hate her. And did.
    It was too
much.
    Everything
she'd been through, everything she'd struggled to survive—all of it rolled
through her, incinerating her, scalding her.
    "No. You did this, Rafi." She threw the words at him, letting her anger show,
letting him see what he'd done to her. "You destroyed this
marriage, not me!"
    "I'm not
going to play your games," Rafi said roughly, but he was shaken by what he
saw in her eyes. The condemnation. The deep, abiding pain, as if he'd wounded
her. But how was that possible? She was the one who'd betrayed him…hadn't she?
    He should
never have touched her again. He should have crawled through the snow to stay
away from her.
    "Listen
to me," she said in a low, serious voice. Her eyes locked on his. "I
am only going to say it once. I was pregnant. I never lied about that—why would
I? Did you think it was my life's ambition to marry a man I hardly knew? To
move to the other side of the world to a place where I'd be scrutinized, judged
and found wanting every time? But I did it because I loved you and I thought it
was the right thing to do for our child."
    "Our
child," he repeated, hearing the fury in his own voice, feeling it surge
through him. "How dare you pretend—"
    "I lost
the baby," she hissed at him, her brown eyes filling with tears. She
jabbed a finger in the direction of the vast bathroom. "In that room. On
that floor. It was horrible, and do you know what was worse, Rafi? Being told
that you believed I'd made the whole thing up."
    "You
said it yourself!" he snapped, his temper blazing as his mind reeled. But
he remembered it vividly. "I was in Sydney. I'd had back-to-back meetings
for weeks on end in Singapore, New Zealand, Australia. But I called you the
second I could get away. I asked after your pregnancy and you said, as clear as
day, ' There is no baby. ' You admitted it."
    "I was grieving! "
she protested. "There was no baby because I'd lost it!"
    The tears
were moving down her cheeks now and she did nothing to check them. She reached
for the blanket they'd kicked aside in their last round of passion, and Rafi
noticed that her delicate hands were shaking.
    "Lucy—"
he began, but she made a slashing gesture through the air, cutting him off.
    "You
made it plain from the start that I was marrying far above my station,"
she said, each word like a bullet, each one slamming into him. "You made
no secret of the fact that I was beneath you—that sleeping with me was all
right for an illicit week in Paris, but should never have gone beyond that.
That I should be grateful that you were so honorable, so good, that you
would condescend to do the right thing by a trashy little nobody like me."
    "I never
said that," he bit out, as a deep shame moved through him. "Not any
of it."
    "You
didn't need to say it." Lucy gathered the blanket around her and
rose to her feet, looking down at him as if she were some kind of goddess.
"Everything you did made your position perfectly, painfully obvious."
She waved her hand at the room around them, encompassing the gleaming lights in
the ancient sconces on the walls, the historic tapestries.
    "You hid
me away in your family's country house where I could gaze out at the capital
city from afar but never embarrass you by setting foot near your exalted social
circles. But I didn't care, because I was in love with you and I was having
your baby."
    There was
something in her voice that was making the fine hairs on the back of his neck
stand at