Page 17 of Christmas Baby with Her Ultra-Rich Boss

He could not believe how close he’d come to kissing her.

Close?Their lips had connected before her phone saved him. He’d come within a whisker of pulling her back into his arms so he could devour her properly before he’d come fully to his senses.

He could still feel the mark that brush of her lips had made against his.

Unwilling to dissect what the hell had gotten into him, he focused his attention on the video conversation being played out before him. He couldn’t understand a word of what either woman was saying. He’d known Lena spoke good Swedish but had been unaware she had such fluency. One of the requirements of working at the Siopis Ice Hotel was competence in Swedish and English. Basic proficiency tests in both languages were conducted before candidates were invited to interview. Lena’s Swedish... There was something sexy in her fluency. To Konstantinos’s ears, it was a musical language and the way her lips moved as she spoke and her tongue wrapped around the cadences...

He shot to his feet.

Damn this cabin for being so small. Damn this country for being so cold. If they were in one of the warmer countries he favoured he’d take himself outside and when she ended her call insist she join him out there. Then he wouldn’t be stuck in a space hardly bigger than his childhood bedroom breathing in all the scents of Lena. This might be a different cabin to the one they’d conceived their baby in but she’d adorned it with the same soft furnishings. She even had the same battered old teddy bear in the centre of the two pillows and the same pictures hanging on the walls. He remembered being surprised that she’d chosen artwork more suited to a small child, simple watercolour paintings of two little girls, one of them paddling in the sea, one of them making a sandcastle, and one of them playing in the snow. There was something very familiar about the snow picture that he couldn’t place, and he had no idea why he should look at paintings that only the hardest-hearted person wouldn’t consider ‘cute’ and feel nausea roiling in his guts.

Gritting his teeth, he yanked open the two cupboards above the tiny area Lena used to fix herself hot drinks and heat food. No sign of coffee, not even that instant muck... What the hell wascamomiletea? A method of torture? His Tuscan hotel had a camomile lawn. He loathed the smell of it, only kept it because it had become a feature of the hotel.

Another voice came onto the call, interrupting his attempts to distract himself. This one caught his attention because the new voice was so different and the way Lena was conversing had changed, too, and not just because she’d switched to English. He couldn’t place just how Lena’s voice was different but just as looking at the pictures hanging on her pine walls made his guts roil, the way she was speaking had the same effect. There was something laboured in the voice of the new woman speaking that added to the roiling, as if every carefully chosen word was an effort to make and so the words chosen were sparse and considered.

‘We have a party of Americans booked in for tomorrow’s opening night,’ Lena was now telling her. ‘They’re celebrating a fortieth birthday and birthday boy’s paying for them all to freeze for the night.’

‘Think...they...will...last...night?’

‘I’ll place my bet once I’ve met them.’

‘Who’s...that...man?’ the woman in the wheelchair asked. Konstantinos only knew she was in a wheelchair because a dread-like curiosity had made his legs take him to stand at the corner of the sofa to gaze over Lena’s shoulder. Next to the wheelchair was what even Konstantinos’s nonmedical knowledge knew was an oxygen tank.

Lena whipped her head around at him and beseeched him with her eyes to back off. He stepped back out of view of her camera lens.

‘Just a friend,’ she said, giving her attention back to the woman who looked so much like Lena that she had to be her sister.

Even though the angle Konstantinos had put himself at to keep out of the camera’s range meant he didn’t have a clear view, he could see the woman in the wheelchair’s eyes light up.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Lena scolded indignantly.

‘About...time...you...had...friend.’ The woman’s speech might be laboured but Konstantinos heard the inverted quote marks she laced around the wordfriend, and, judging by Lena’s splutter of laughter, she heard it, too.

‘Your mind is filthy.’

The woman simply smiled beatifically.

‘On that note, I’m going.’

The knowing smile broadened. The woman waved goodbye and then pursed her lips together.

‘Love you, too,’ Lena said, blowing her a kiss in return. ‘Now, shoo.’

The screen on her phone went blank.

‘Sorry about that,’ she muttered after an awkward pause of silence, then added, ‘That was my sister.’

‘I guessed. She looks like you.’ But a decade older than Lena’s twenty-five years. ‘What is wrong with her?’

Even though Lena’s back was to him, he saw her tuck a lock of hair behind an ear. ‘She was paralysed in a car accident six years ago.’

He said something in Greek Lena would put money on being a swear word. ‘How old is she?’

‘Twenty-six.’

He swore again.

The knock on the cabin door cut short a conversation Lena didn’t want to have.

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