Page 28 of Christmas Baby with Her Ultra-Rich Boss

Alone, Konstantinos blew out air that would likely be one of his last warm breaths of the night, clenched his hands into fists, and rolled his neck and shoulders.

It was only one night and all they were sharing was a mattress, he reminded himself. After three nights of terrible, broken sleep, he was due a good one. The odds were he would fall asleep in minutes and when he woke, the blizzard would be over and so would the night. It would pass in a blink.

But even as he stripped his layers off as Lena had suggested—wasshe trying to induce hypothermia in him?—and repeated his mental pep talk, his thrumming body took delight in contradicting his thoughts, and when the handle of the bathroom turned ten minutes after she’d disappeared into it, the thick, heavy beats of his heart rippled.

She emerged smelling distinctly of toothpaste. Her gaze barely glanced him. She still wore her snowsuit but carried a neatly folded bundle of clothing, which she stashed in the locker. Maybe she wasn’t trying to instigate hypothermia in him after all.

Once he’d finished in the bathroom and locked away anything that could freeze, Konstantinos gathered their sleeping bags and pillows and together they navigated the frozen tunnels decorated with tiny spheres of ice suspended from the ceiling to their designated room. The silence between them that had once again turned into a living entity was broken by Christmas carols playing out through cleverly concealed speakers and raucous voices and bursts of laughter that rang out as they neared the ice bar. Another tunnel and the door with their number on it greeted them.

The brightly lit ice vault they entered had clearly been inspired by Japanese culture. The perfectly curved walls were intricately carved into an arcade of cascading cherry blossom leading to a temple carved into the wall at the far end behind the king-sized ice bed, the mattress of which had already been laid with a thick insulating under-sheet and reindeer hides.

When the door closed, the silence was exactly as Lena had described it. Absolute. In an instant the frozen room shrank.

She pressed a switch by the door. The lights coming from the overhanging ice cherry blossom extinguished, leaving only the dim blue lights at the base of the tree trunks as faint illumination.

He looked at her sharply. ‘Not too dark for you?’

She huddled her arms around herself, her gaze darting everywhere but at him as she shook her head. ‘Neither of us will get any sleep if we keep the main light on.’ Her voice barely rose above a whisper.

‘If it gets too much, you tell me,’ he ordered roughly; rough because he’d looked again at the bed and his insides had lurched and then bloomed like the carved blossom surrounding them to know that shortly they would lie side by side on it. ‘Okay?’

He had to strain his ears to hear her whispered, ‘Okay.’

He sucked in a frigid breath and decided to take the sticking plaster approach, stepping to the bed and laying the sleeping bags and pillows out. His heart thumped so hard his ribs were in danger of bruising.

Turning her back on him, she unzipped her snowsuit, then sat on the bed to remove her boots.

Konstantinos did the same, doing his best to tune out Lena’s snowsuit sliding down her legs and off her feet, those same feet quickly slipping back into the boots, keeping his gaze averted when she hurried to the door to hang the snowsuit on a peg. Unfortunately, he wasn’t quick enough to stop his eyes from darting to her when she hurried back to the bed. This time his heart thumped so hard he wouldn’t have been surprised if it burst from his rib cage entirely.

She was rubbing her arms against the icy air. There was nothing sexy at all about what she was wearing. The cream thermal top and bottoms she wore covered her from neck to sock-covered foot. Under the blue glow of the barely there lights, though, her silhouette could have been sculpted from the same ice encasing them, and suddenly a memory flashed in his mind of when that same silhouette—with one obvious difference—had taken his breath away without any warning.

When Thom had recommended Lena as his replacement, Konstantinos had struggled to picture whom he was talking about. He employed thousands of staff worldwide. It was impossible to know each individual face. He went through the staff files to put a face to Lena’s name and was surprised to discover that yes, she must have made an impression on some base level as he did vaguely recognise her, but then thought no more about it. A week later he’d flown in to conduct the interviews.

When Lena had entered the meeting room for her interview, the clouds that had been hiding the sun suddenly parted. Its rays had shone through the window and landed straight on her. Whatever trickery had taken place, for one brief moment his mind had interpreted Lena’s silhouette as being cast in gold.

But it was when she’d smiled at him that his breath had been truly stolen, he now remembered, remembering, too, the way his blood had pumped when she’d slid into the chair across from his. Of course, he’d gotten those strange bodily happenings under firm control. So firm that he’d cast them from his memory. Cast from it, too, how his interview with Lena had gone on for three times as long as all the other interviews for no discernible reason whatsoever, and the extra special care he’d taken when shaving before their celebratory meal, and the strange way he’d reacted when he’d seen her for the first time dressed in something other than her staff uniform. The red blouse she’d worn and tight black trousers had not been in the least revealing but,Theos, they had made his blood pump hard.

All that had happened before they’d shared three bottles of wine and his subconscious had finally forced to the forefront of his mind that Lena Weir was the most beautiful woman he’d ever set eyes on.

How had he forgotten all that?

And now he had to fight to draw breath, unable to drag his stare away from the feminine beauty coming towards him. The generous swell of her unbound breasts jutted...he almost groaned as the memory of their taste danced on his tongue...beneath the fabric, hips gently swaying... And then her boots were off and she was on the bed and quickly lining her sleeping bag with the insulating sheet they’d each been provided with and sliding her legs into it, reaching for the zip at the bottom and—

Her eyes suddenly locked on to his.

A pulse of desire shot through him, so strong it stole whatever breath he had left.

Even under the dim lighting he could see the colour crawl over her cheeks, see the way her lips pulled in together before she whispered with a shiver, ‘You’re going to freeze if you don’t get into your sleeping bag.’

Freeze? Even with the cloud of vapour that came with the exhale of the breath he’d finally managed to make, the last thing he felt right then was cold. One look at his groin and Lena would see for herself the heat of his arousal for her.

Somehow, he managed to pull himself upright and carry his snowsuit to hang beside hers.

When he turned back to face her, she was cocooned in her sleeping bag, only her cute nose and cheeks showing through.

Lena knew it was dangerous to peek at Konstantinos as his long legs carried him back to the bed, especially after she’d just caught him staring at her with that glint in his eyes that shot straight into her pelvis, but she was helpless to resist. One look was too much and she squeezed them tightly shut and quickly rolled over so her back would be to him, and tried desperately hard to get air into her lungs.

How could just looking at him cause such internal devastation? How could she explain the painful wrench of her heart and the aching throbs deep between her legs just to catch a glimpse of the soft black hair poking out at the neck of the black thermal top he wore?

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