Chapter One

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"Did you come to spit on your father's grave, the way you always said you would?"

There was movement next to him to go along with that voice Ren Townsend still heard in
his dreams, a rustle of dark clothes and that faint hint of coconut lotion he knew better
than his own name, and he didn't have to swing his head around to confirm what his
senses told him.

That it was her. Charlotte Park. The only womanhell, the only personhe'd ever loved.

Right up until the day she'd taken his despised father's money and walked straight out of
Ren's life, the grasping, manipulative, lying gold digger everyoneespecially his father,
who thought the entire world wanted a piece of Townsend Consulting, and with reason, it
turned outhad warned him she was from the start.

"I was thinking more of a dance, actually," Ren said. That wasn't what he'd planned to say
to Charlotte when he saw her againand he'd planned how and when he'd see her again
many, many times in the past three years. There were times it had consumed him whole.
"He'd expect spitting."

"I could certainly do with a dance," Charlotte murmured, low and confiding, as if it had
been only hours since she'd last seen him.As if she'd never taken his father's payoff and
divorced him. "No doubt we all could."

No one was dancing outside the Townsend family crypt in the atmospherically foggy
Yorkshire cemetery on this frigid morning two days before Christmas, but Ren imagined
it was only a matter of time. He'd had to restrain himself from starting his own merry jig
several times already, as the vicar droned on about the late and unlamented Malcolm
Townsend as if the man Ren had had the misfortune to be related to had been anything
but mean, cruel, and occasionally vicious, for sport.

Ren's six stepmothers were lined up on the vicar's other side, all of them wearing
expensive black "mourning" clothes offset by near-identical expressions of satisfaction.
That it was over. That Malcolm could haunt them and hurt them no longer. Marrying
Malcolm, Ren knew only too well, was only slightly less horrible than having been
"raised" by the man, with his savage approach to parenting.

And that was only because marriages could be ended, while bad fathers were foreveror
in Ren's case, thirty-seven very long years.

He was happy the old man was gone. So Ren couldn't understand why there was
something hollow behind his ribs, something dark.
And Charlotte's presence only made it worse.

"He would have particularly hated the idea of you dancing on his grave," Ren said. He
couldn't seem to help himself.

"That factored in my thinking."

"Charlotte."

He turned to look down at her then, and it was worse than he expected. She was still so
beautiful. Those dark-rimmed green eyes that had made him believe in magic. That
glossy auburn hair, pulled back today into something severe and still too attractive. And
that soft mouth of hers that lied so easily. She was his weakness in human form and he
hated her for what she'd done to him.

Ren didn't understand why he couldn't summon that hate the way he should. "Why are
you here?"

His voice was gritty and he didn't understand the shadows in those wonderful eyes of
hers, or the way she looked away from him and toward the crypt as if it hurt her. Or he
did.

"Because," she said, fierce and hot, surprising him with all that emotion in this cold and
gloomy place. "I wanted to make absolutely certain he was gone."

Chapter Two
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"Yes," Ren said coolly, his dark eyes harsh on hers, making the wet day around them
seem that much more ominous. "My father is well and truly dead. May the trumpets
sound. But I imagine you're here for the will."

This was so much harder than she'd expected it to be. Charlotte Park ordered herself to
stand still, to keep from fidgetingfrom betraying herself any more than her presence
here already did.

"Ah, yes, the will," she said now, impressed with the breezy tone of voice she'd
summoned up from somewhere, as if she was completely unaffected by the fact her ex-
husband was even better-looking than she'd recalled. "I remember hearing something
about that, now that you mention it."

Ren was right there. She couldn't process it. He was so close beside her that she needed
only to shift position and she'd be touching him again. So close that she was sure she
could feel him anyway, that white hot burn he generated all around him without even
trying that made her feel hot and flushed, so red and obvious that the slap of the harsh
December weather this far north felt like a kindness.

She didn't understand how she could hate someone as much as she told herself she hated
Ren, and yet still be this susceptible to him. Even after what he'd done.

But the fact he was still the most beautiful man she'd ever seen, with that intelligent poet's
face and that ruggedly handsome chin, wasn't why she was here. This was closure. She'd
spent three years trying to move on with her life, and Malcolm Townsend's death
reported so widely in all the British papers and yet so sparsely attended, which was only
what the evil old bastard deservedhad hit her. Hard.

Charlotte told herself that she would have dealt with all her dredged-up old feelings the
way she'd dealt with everything involving the Townsends and those lost, terrible years
she'd wasted on Ren if the Townsend family solicitor hadn't rung her directly.

She would have buried herself in her work the way she usually did. The small charity she
worked for down in London had only recently landed the world-famous Korovin
Foundation for their latest and best celebrity partnership so far, and that would have
required most of her attention even if one of the women she supervised hadn't become
involved with the brooding, formidable CEO of that foundation, Nikolai Korovin.
Charlotte had a thousand things to do to manage the press, the paparazzi who swarmed
around Nikolai Korovin, and the campaign itself. Enough to keep her busy all through the
Christmas holidays, if she'd wanted. She certainly didn't have time to travel all the way
up north into the wilds of Yorkshire to attend her ex-father-in-law's funeral and the
reading of his will, which was what she'd told the solicitor.

And yet here she was. As surely as if she had a thick rope wrapped around her neck that
Ren could simply reach out and tug upon, bringing her to heel that easily. The way he'd
always done.

The service ended, and the collection of women on the far side of the vicaronly one of
whom Charlotte recognized as one of Malcolm's many angry ex-wiveswasted no time
legging it toward the cemetery gates. Charlotte turned to follow, hating herself for the
shiver of awareness that shot through her when Ren laid a hand on her arm.

"The will won't be read until tomorrow," he said.

Charlotte wasn't sure she could trust herself to speak. She stepped back and Ren dropped
his hand, but that considering gleam in his coffee-colored eyes told her he knew he'd got
under her skin.

He always knew. It was one more reason to hate him.

Sex and longing and all of that brackish, murky water under their very own bridge hung
between them like the Yorkshire fog then, thick and very nearly choking. Charlotte set
her teeth to keep from saying all the things she knew she shouldn't.

Ren, of course, smiled as if he could hear them anyway.

"We can have a drink, surely," he said. "Catch up. Isn't that what old friends do?"

Chapter Three
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Ren regretted saying it the moment it left his mouth.

Old friends? Hardly. Enemies was a better word, he supposed, and even that failed to
capture how very deeply he wanted all manner of things he shouldn't when he looked at
her. How deeply she'd betrayed him, and how much more he betrayed himself by finding
her such a temptation today.

Charlotte looked up at him, suspicion and something far darker in those impossible eyes
of hers, and the moment stretched out between them.

"Were we ever friends?" she asked, and there was a certain set to her soft mouth that
hinted at a vulnerability he knew was a lie.

"We were friends," he said, because he'd used the word and thought he ought to defend it.
"Townsend Consulting helped put that charity of yours on the map."

"That's not the word I would have chosen to describe our relationship back then."

He hadn't heard that dry tone of hers in a very long time, and he couldn't tell if it hurt him
or simply stirred him now.

"The appropriate words are hardly seemly, given the circumstances," he agreed. He
indicated the cemetery all around them and the evening closing in fast on all sides, and
tried not the think about the blistering heat of those first days. Or the earthy way they'd
handled it.

"I don't know," she said, thrusting her hands deep into her pockets. "There was a certain
overwrought Bronte-ish tempestuousness to the whole thing, if memory serves."

Ren had to school himself not to laugh at thatmuch less the notion of himself as any
kind of Heathcliff, moaning and shouting down the moorsbut she smiled slightly, as if
she could read him the way she once had, and started walking toward the gates and the
village clustered below.
What the hell are you doing? an irate voice that sounded far too much like his father's
demanded inside of him as he followed her.

This woman was like all his stepmothersand even his own mother, if he was brutally
honest. And who would it hurt, now that his mother was dead anyway, to admit the truth?
Magdalena had come from a tiny village in the mountains of the Cadiz Province in Spain,
with nothing but her beauty. She'd met Malcolm at some party in Barcelona, had latched
on to him the way Malcolm had claimed all women did, and had fallen pregnant with Ren
almost immediately.

"Gold diggers," Malcolm had said in disgust. "They're all gold diggers, boy, but after
your mother I learned my lesson. One brat is more than enough."

Ren hadn't believed him. But then he'd met Charlotte and learned his own lesson, the
painful way.

He couldn't help but watch her as she walked with that innate grace that he'd been
fascinated by from the moment he'd met her in that office building in Fulham. Back then
she'd smiled at him with more warmth than he'd known existed in the whole of rainy
England, and had changed everything. Just like that.

It was only later, he thought darkly now as he followed her into the nearest pub, that he'd
come to understand that all of thatall of Charlottewas a calculated act. A
performance.

Charlotte settled herself near the happily crackling fire, pulling her gloves off and
shrugging out of her heavy coat. Ren ordered her a glass of white wine without asking
and himself a whiskey, then threw himself into the seat opposite.

She eyed the drinks between them and then picked up the whiskey, tossing it back and
slapping the glass back down on the scarred wooden table.

"Cheers," she murmured.

"I'm delighted to wait on you, Charlotte. It brings back all kinds of memories."

"Of what?" Her green eyes were cool, unreadable. "Some fantasy girlfriend you treated
well?"

Ren smiled, not sure what that hollow thing was that seemed to be growing inside of him,
making him edgy and restless.

"I treated you well." His voice was too raw. It gave too much away. "Better than I should
have."
She picked up the wine then, but only held the glass between her palms. When her gaze
met his, it burned.

"I want to know something," she said softly. "Were you always so much like your
father?"

Chapter Four
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Ren stiffened, his dark gaze turning as frigid as the outside weather, but Charlotte didn't
blink. She couldn't.

"I'm nothing like my father," he growled.

Charlotte shrugged. She shouldn't have been sitting here, pretending to share a quiet drink
with this man as if he wasn't the architect of her deepest despair. But if she was doing
such a foolish thing anyway, she reasoned she might as well ask him all the questions that
had haunted her these past three years.

It wasn't as if she had anything left to lose.

"I didn't think you were," she said. "But you proved me wrong, didn't you? Like a chip
off"

"I think I've heard enough." Ren's voice was icy. His gaze was a weapon and it was
hacking her into pieces. "I can do without your attempts to insult me." He shook his head.
"It's a bit childish, don't you think?"

"That wasn't an insult. It was an observation." She shrugged, and sipped at the wine she
didn't want."But then, I suppose we all become what we hate sooner or later, don't we?"

"And who have you become, I wonder?"

"You." She hardly recognized her own voice.

He laughed, though it bore no resemblance to his real laughter, which could make the air
around him seem to shimmer in exultation at the sound.

"Why on earth would you hate me, Charlotte? You got every single thing you ever
wanted from me."

Charlotte told herself she wasn't shaking. That it was nothing more than a gust of winter
air from the pub door as it slammed shut behind a frozen-looking local that made her feel
so cold. That there was nothing the least bit intimidating about Ren sitting there, his long
legs stretched out in front of him in a show of indolence and his lean, chiseled body clad
in one of those bespoke suits of his that did unhealthy things to her blood pressure,
glaring at her like she was prey.

She was perfectly fine.

"Save my self-respect and the second half of my twenties," Charlotte said, because the
rest of the things he'd taken from her were too painful to enumerate here, in public. "You
did a terrific job of taking those from me."

"I'm unaware of any evidence that you ever possessed self-respect," he said, horribly, as
she should have anticipated he would.

Charlotte smiled, wryly.

"Now this feels like old times." She lifted a mocking toast with her glass. "To old
friends."

His lips twitched, but he looked away, signaling the bartender for another drink. Or his
first, she supposed, glaring at the empty glass where his whiskey had been.

"I don't want to fight with you, Charlotte."

"Are you certain? You always have before."

"I genuinely wanted to catch up with you." But his voice was stilted, and they weren't
looking at each other. Charlotte felt their tortured past like a fist in her gut, inescapable
and agonizing, and still, she couldn't help but want him. "My father may have made a
second career out of loathing his ex-wives, but I" He broke off, and shoved a hand
through that dark hair of his that was still too thick to control. "I don't see the point in it."

She pulled her professional disguise out and plastered it across her face, impenetrably
calm in an instant.

"I'm very well," she said politely. "Life is good. Divorce suits me."

His mouth crooked up in one corner and his dark gaze flashed to hers, lighting her up,
making her pull in a startled breath. There was torment there, and a gleam of challenge
she recognized all too well.

She remembered it. She felt it, deep within, like a touch of his clever hands.

He laughed then, like he knew exactly what she was thinking, and it was a dark, tempting
rasp, as commanding against her flesh as if he'd used his mouth against her bare skin.

He leaned forward, never taking his dark eyes from hers. "Liar."
Chapter Five
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Ren knew he shouldn't have said it, but the word hung there between them anyway,
shifting this entire conversation onto unsteady ground. Liar.

Charlotte went terribly still. Then she set her wineglass down in front of her with
exaggerated precision, like that could keep the storm that was building between them at
bay.

"Do you want to discuss lies, Ren?" she asked, in that deceptively soft voice that he knew
was Charlotte at her most furious.

And Ren thought for a moment that he might break apart with all these things he wanted.
They all seemed to bend and sway in the air before him, until he couldn't distinguish
them. Until he could see nothing at all but Charlotte.

The way he always had.

"I want any number of things," he said, and he could tell how rough he must have
sounded from the way she jerked against her seat. "A different father, for a start. A
different marriage to a different woman."

"A pity, then, that you're stuck with being the sole heir to the vast wealth your father
accrued and the next CEO of Townsend Consulting. Pardon me while I dig out my violin
and play a soulful dirge for the things you want that you can't have, you poor thing."

"I'm selling it."

She regarded him for a long moment, and he opted not to examine the fact that this was
the first time he'd said that out loud. Here, in this deserted pub on a winter's evening in
the lonely little village where his father had been born and laid to rest. To his ex-wife,
who had left him and now claimed to hate him.

It was very nearly poetic.

"Have you ever heard of Cayo Vila?" he asked before Charlotte could ask him the
questions he could see brewing in her gaze. She blinked.

"Of course. He owns the Vila Group and half the known world."

"He's a machine. He's the perfect person to take over Townsend Consulting. He'll run it
the way the old man only wished he could."
"Meaning, with absolutely no regard for his employees? With the assumption that their
role in life is to serve at his whim?"

"Something like that." He laughed, and he didn't have to see it in her expression to know
that the sound was far too hollow. "My mother grew up in Cayo Vila's village,
somewhere off in the hills of Spain. She said he was the only person from that place who
ever made something of himself, and also that she would have dated him if she'd been
younger." He could feel his smile was much too brittle. "I can't tell you how moved I've
always been by that story."

"Ren." His name on her mouth felt like a kiss, and he hated how much he wanted that.
How much he wanted her, despite everything. "I think perhaps you're grieving."

"What could there possibly be to grieve? Malcolm Townsend was very possibly the worst
man I knew."

"He was your father," she said simply. She pressed her lips together for a moment, as if
struggling with something, but then sighed slightly. "Sometimes I think it's harder, in
some ways, when someone dies while things are still so bad. There's no hope, then, is
there? It can never be fixed."

"He could have been immortal, Charlotte, and there would still be no fixing anything
with him."

"I know that," she said quietly. "You know that. But that has nothing at all to do with how
it feels."

And Ren didn't know what was worse. To remember how much he'd always wanted her,
or this: remembering why he'd loved her so much, he'd been blind with it. He didn't want
this, he thought wildly. He didn't want this

"I can think of an excellent way to work off all this excess emotion," he said in a low
drawl that he knew would make her flush. When it did, he smiled. "Want to help?"

Chapter Six
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If she was a better woman, Charlotte knew, like the sensible one she played at work, she'd
never consider it.

But she had been a thousand things where Ren Townsend was concerned and sensible
had never been one of them.
That was the only reason she could come up with for why she simply sat there, her gaze
locked to his, a thousand bright and searing lights making her body seem to explode from
the inside out.

"What are you suggesting?" she asked.

"Don't pretend you don't know." Ren was still lounging in his chair like the wealthy, self-
assured man he was, and Charlotte could only hope that her unsteadiness wasn't stamped
across her face. "It's the one thing we ever did right."

"I'm not sure that's the smartest way to deal with your grief, such as it is."

Was that her voice? Prissy and near-to-lecturing? She tore her gaze away from his dark
and knowing one, and studied the scratched wood surface of the table in front of her.

"I don't want to grieve," Ren said, smooth like the night. "I want to be inside you again.
So deep I forget you left me. So deep I forget everything."

Charlotte couldn't breathe. The world flashed red, deep and crimson, and her lungs hurt.
Her traitorous body thrilled to his words, goose bumps prickling from the back of her
neck to her wrists, her breasts feeling much too full against the bodice of her dress, and
that ache in her belly, low and molten and yearning.

She missed him. She missed this. And that, she understood with the part of her brain that
still functioned when she was this close to him, was unforgivable. This man had treated
her like a disposable, interchangeable blow-up doll. Worse, he had smashed her heart to
pieces. He'd even unleashed his terrible father on her, letting snide, horrid Malcolm do his
dirty work for him.

The fact that she was considering simply tossing off her clothes and leaping into the
nearest bed with himas if none of that happened and none of it matteredshould have
appalled her. She told herself it did.

"I'm going to pretend you didn't say that," she said, when she was absolutely certain she
could speak calmly.

"I can say it again," he offered, his tone lazy but his dark eyes fierce.

And Charlotte knew that if she didn't walk away from him then, she wouldn't. And even
knowing that, it took her one long beat, then another, to push up and onto her feet.

"Goodnight, Ren," she said with as much dignity as she could summon. "I'll see you at
the reading of the will tomorrow."

But the elegant retreat she had planned as she swept up her coat and looked toward the
pub's entrance died a quiet death when Ren rose to his feet.
"Are you staying in the hotel near the train station?" he asked.

Charlotte frowned at him, and yanked her coat on over her shoulders. "You mean the only
hotel in this tiny little village?"

"There are rooms here if you fancy," he said. "Cheap if not clean, though I doubt you'll
care for the noise."

"I'm staying at the train station," she gritted out. "Not that you need that information."

"So am I," he murmured, and he even smiled. "What a fortunate coincidence. I'll walk
you there."

And Charlotte told herself she was too flustered to do anything but acquiesce when he
took her elbow in his strong hand and led her out the door and into the wet, cold night.

Chapter Seven
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She let him hold on to her for all of three steps out the door and then she pulled her arm
away, and even though Ren hadn't been able to feel a thing through the thick wool of her
coatnone of her soft, coconut-scented skin, none of her mesmerizing heathe felt it
like a loss.

And then they were walking down the narrow hill toward the train station at its bottom,
and he felt as if they were on some kind of awkward first date.

Which was all the evidence he required: he'd obviously lost his mind.

"Why are you staying at the hotel?" Charlotte asked, though her head was bent into the
wind and she didn't look at him. "Surely there's a room for you in that rambling
monstrosity your father called a house."

Malcolm had enjoyed flaunting his wealth, it was true. The gaudier and more horrifying
to the neighbors, the better.

"I thought about staying there," Ren lied. He'd vowed never to set foot beneath his
father's roof again, and with the exception of the reading of the will tomorrow, he never
would. Whether the old man was dead or alive hardly signified. The taint of Malcolm's
brand of nastiness hung like a shroud over the whole nouveau riche estate. "But the
widow Townsend, in the depths of her mourning process, invited her lover to stay
instead."
Tabitha was all of twenty-two and had extended more than one salacious invitation to
Ren during her short tenure as Malcolm's wife, but he didn't imagine that was information
Charlotte needed to hear.

"Was that the teenager I saw at the cemetery?" Charlotte asked.

"That description could apply to at least three of my father's exes," Ren said, and he
couldn't keep himself from smirking.

"What a terrible disappointment you must have been for him," Charlotte murmured, and
he could hear the rich current of her laughter, threading through her voice and making the
dark night seem brighter all around him.

Or perhaps that was nothing more than the Christmas lights, fanning out over the High
Street, his cynical side pointed out.

But he was smiling when he answered her.

"He despaired of me. Only one ex-wife in thirty-seven years. And you were so
unappealing to him, Charlotte. You insisted on having all your own thoughts."

"He was never a great fan of that," she agreed, and he thought she was smiling, too.
"Though he did offer to let me pleasure him, as a way to make up for my numerous
deficiencies in the trophy-wife department."

Ren didn't know why that surprised him. Why it rolled through him like some kind of
silent, lethal force, stealing his breath and his voice for long moments. It was hard to
make himself keep walking. Harder still to rein in his temper, and he wasn't at all sure he
succeeded.

"And did you accept his kind offer?" he asked, and it was only when he heard his own
voice, slapped back against him by the cutting wind, that he realized how furious he
sounded.

Charlotte laughed then. "Oh, of course I did. And then I paraded naked down the length
of the country, whoring myself out along the way." She stopped walking and scowled at
him. "Is that what you think of me?"

"How am I to know what to think?" he demanded, swinging around to face her, quite as if
they weren't standing on a public street. All he could see was Charlotte, her green eyes so
fierce and furious on his.

"I don't know what that means," she snapped. "I have no idea what happened to you, Ren.
And as of this moment, I officially don't care. You can go to hell."

But that was the problem, Ren thought savagely. He was already there.
He didn't mean to move. He meant to dismiss that accusing tone of hers and walk away,
the way he should have done the moment she'd appeared at the funeral service. He meant
to remind himself who and what Charlotte Park was.

Instead, he leaned across the chilly space between them, the winter night and all the
things they'd done to each other, and kissed her.

Chapter Eight
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For a stunned moment, Charlotte did nothing.

She could only feel.

Ren's mouth, hard and hot and perfect. The taste of him, igniting her blood, singing
through her body, making her dizzy and wild the way he'd always done before.

She stopped thinking, stopped worrying. She simply leaned in closer, let her hands come
up to brace against his powerful chest, and surrendered to this simmering heat that had
been between them from the start.

He had always tasted like this, like fire and like fate.

Ren hauled her closer to him and she went, gladly. She could feel the masterful slant of
his lips over hers in every part of her. She could taste him, whiskey and more, that dark
thing beneath that was only Ren.

And she was his.

That easily, that irrevocably. As if she'd never been anything else.

He kissed her the way he always had, like kissing was as carnal and fulfilling an act as
any. Like he was content to drive them both crazy with only this. Like he could do it
forever.

But there was a burst of sound from behind them, pouring out of the windows of a
passing car. Charlotte pulled away, gasping for breath as the High Street quieted all over
againwhilst everything inside of her seemed to boil over into shouting.

Even so, she didn't let go, and when Ren ducked his head down to rest his forehead
against hers, she didn't push him away.

On some level, she understood that was a more serious betrayal of herselfof these last,
hard yearsthan anything else. But she ignored it.
He didn't say anything. He didn't have to say anything. His invitation was a living thing
between them, from the places where their foreheads touched to the slow, drugging
sweep of his thumbs against the sides of her jaw.

"This," she said softly, "is not at all wise."

"Perhaps not." She could hear the need in his voice, making it rough. The hungerand it
made her shiver. "But what does that matter?"

"It might not matter tonight, but it will."

"Who cares?" He moved closer, and she didn't realize it until her back was against the
wall outside a florist's. "We have the rest of our lives to tally up our mistakes, Charlotte.
Might as well make them big ones."

She wished she could hate him the way she knew she should. Wished she felt something
other than the bittersweet tang of sorrow at that sound in his voice, that bleakness that
was so unlike the Ren she'd known.

"I'm not that cynical," she told him.

She felt more than heard him snort, an ugly, derisive soundand what she felt shiver
through her then was that same kind of sorrow, more pointed and more intense.

"I beg your pardon?" she asked, her voice still light, and that cost her.

He pulled away, and Charlotte imagined the night was that much more frigid in the space
between them. In the way he drew his hands away, and left her there against that wall, her
face flushed and that belligerent tilt to her chin.

"Do you really want to do this?" His tone was curt. "Because I don't. God help me,
Charlotte, but I've never wanted anyone the way I want you. Nothing seems to change
that. Time, space. The truth. What does any of it matter tonight?"

"I think it matters more tonight," she started, determinedand ignoring the sheen of what
she refused to admit could be tears that blurred her vision.

"No," he bit out." It doesn't. There's only one thing I want from you, and it isn't your pity.
It isn't grief counseling and it isn't friendly. But Charlotte." And he looked so remote then.
So broken that it made her heart thud painfully inside of her. "I want that almost more
than I can bear."

Chapter Nine
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Charlotte stared back at him in the shadows of the High Street, her green eyes steady,
until Ren thought he might burst apart at the seams. That the howling inside of him might
drown out the sound of the wind bustling down the hill that comprised the main part of
the village, then out into the dark Yorkshire moors beyond.

She didn't say anything, but she pushed away from the wall and started walking, heading
down the street toward the train station and the village's only hotel that stood watch there,
brightly lit against the night.

He felt ravaged and undone, as if he'd burst already, but he couldn't seem to keep himself
from following her. Like she was the only salvation he'd ever known

But he couldn't let himself surrender to that level of sentimentality. He'd vowed that, too,
in the desperate days after Charlotte had left him. After his father had informed him that
she'd cashed that check for five hundred thousand pounds.

"You always were soft and weak," Malcolm had told him, his typical sneer distorting that
famous face of his so many people had still claimed to find attractive. Ren had been
thankfulagainthat he'd taken after his Spanish mother in looks as well as
temperament. Dark where Malcolm had been fair. Alive while Malcolm had been little
more than a vampire, feeding off whoever was foolish enough to venture near him.
"Maybe now you'll listen to reason when it's presented to you. That woman was nothing
more than a"

"Enough," Ren had said, cold and crisp and no sign of the wild turmoil within, or all that
shattering inside of him. "There's no need to mention her name again."

He'd promised himself he wouldn't, and he hadn't. More, he'd vowed that he would never
again let himself soften, no matter what. That he would never again bend, because he
knew where that led and he knew too well that there'd been nothing left inside him to
break.

But tonight wasn't about any of those things, he told himself sternly as they walked into
the gleaming heat of the hotel lobby, shining with evergreen garlands and cheery
needlepoint Nativity scenes, while syrupy carols poured from hidden speakers. That kiss
had been about need, he assured himself. Hunger. Nothing more.

He wouldn't allow it to be anything more.

Charlotte hadn't spoken a word since she'd started walking. Ren told himself that
mattered as little as the rest of this strange day. Soon he would return to his life in
London, where everything was smooth and controlled, just as he liked it. He would take
over Townsend Consulting and he would sell the whole of his father's ambitions to a man
so cold and calculating he'd no doubt strip the place down and make it unrecognizable.
That was what Cayo Vila did, and as an added bonus? Malcolm had despised the man.
Ren hadn't mentioned that part to Charlotte, and as he slanted a look at her, rosy-cheeked
from the cold and yet still as lovely and perfect as ever, he knew why. He hadn't wanted
to seem petty.

The irony was almost too much to bear.

"What floor?" he asked with what he felt was admirable calm when they stepped into the
red and wood elevator.

When she didn't answer, he glanced at her, and Charlotte smiled.

That gorgeous smile of hers. Her real smile. The one that reminded him of the long, lazy
summer they'd spent in Antibes one year. The one that sizzled through him as if she'd put
her hands on his skin, her mouth against his neck. The one that made him long for things
he refused to let himself name.

"What floor, Charlotte?" he gritted out, all pretense of calm gone. He felt like a wild
thing, unmoored and without shape. Like a stranger to himself.

He thought he might frighten her with all that intensity he couldn't control, but she only
smiled deeper.

"Yours," Charlotte said.

Chapter Ten
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Ren had taken the finest suite in the small hotel, which took up the whole of the top floor.
Charlotte walked ahead of him into the dark room, her gaze fixed ahead of her and out
the windows. The village beckoned, lit up with Christmas lights that hung from every
lamppost and looking somehow soft and approachable from this high up.

Unlike the man who prowled up behind her, not bothering to turn on any lights.

But then, Charlotte didn't need light. Not where Ren was concerned.

He turned her around to face him and she slid her hands up to hold him around his neck.
He leaned in close, breathing in deep.

"You still smell of coconut," he murmured, his voice little more than a darker current in
the shadowed room.

And he still feltperfect.

There was no part of him that wasn't lean and hard, finely honed and all male. She moved
her palms over the flat planes of his chest as if she needed to relearn him, when the truth
was, she'd never forgot him.

She'd never forgot a thing.

Charlotte had fallen head over heels for this man almost ten years ago now, and nothing,
she understood in a dark hotel room in this sleepy little Yorkshire village, could change
that. Not what he'd done to her. Not what he'd let his vile father do. Not the whole sad,
drawn-out misery of their abrupt divorce and these grey years since. She'd loved him
from that very first moment. It was a fact. As much a part of her as her bones.

She didn't have it in her to do anything now but bask in him.

"I never thought this would happen again," she said before she could think better of it. "I
thought"

Ren didn't let her finish. He leaned down and captured her mouth with his, pouring all of
the need and hunger and torment she'd sensed in him into her with that glorious slide of
his mouth over hers.

And Charlotte delighted in it. In him.

Tomorrow would be soon enough to regret whatever happened here. Tomorrow would be
the time to sort out all the smashed pieces he'd leave behind and try, once again, to paste
them back together. Tomorrow could be a brand-new start of a whole new slew of grey
and lonely days.

But here, now, there was only this fire that had always roared like this between them.
That had never died, even when she'd loathed him.

That seemed even brighter and wilder than before.

And so Charlotte did the only thing she could do.

She dove straight into itinto himand let herself burn.

***

It was so early that dawn was only a hint of blue in the sky outside the windows when
Ren woke in a rush, amazed to discover that he'd slept at all in unfamiliar surroundings.
He'd given up on a good night's sleep years ago.

But then he felt the soft weight curled up against his back, and he understood.

Charlotte.
She had been the only cure he'd ever known for the insomnia that had plagued him all his
life. He'd tried to forget that, like so many other things.

The way their bodies moved together. The way he could take her again and again and
never tire, as if they'd been created solely to please each other. The way she fit so
perfectly in his arms, as if she truly belonged there.

He could never show her this, Ren understood. She would only use it against him the way
she had before.

This was only sex. A long, dark, beautiful night of it, but only sex all the same.

If he had to chant that to himself as he moved closer to her and nuzzled into the warm
skin at her neck, if there were any of those far more complicated feelings lurking in the
heart he refused to admit he still had, it all disappeared when she woke up and they
started their white-hot dance all over again.

And when Ren woke up the second time that morning, she was gone.

Chapter Eleven
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The reading of Malcolm Townsend's will was far more tedious than Charlotte had
expected. Then again, she couldn't say her attention was really on the solicitor. It was on
Ren, who sat off to the side in the gaudy parlor, managing to somehow still exude all that
dark male charisma while surrounded by animal print and chintz.

He didn't so much as glance at her.

Charlotte knew that because she'd found herself completely incapable of looking at
anything but him. Not at the collection of Malcolm's ex-wives, who had given up on
yesterday's black clothes and were drooping about the gaudy furniture in clothing
Charlotte thought more appropriate for a pub crawl.

She told herself she didn't mind that Ren had ignored her since they'd both arrived at
Malcolm's brash, ugly houseseparately. She told herself she had used him, thank you!

She kept telling herself these things, but they didn't seem to sink in.

"Now we come to the crux of it," the solicitor said. He was a slight man and he smiled
nervously as the tension in the room skyrocketed. "I did plead with Mr. Townsend to
rethink many of his bequests, but he could not be moved."

"He never could," one of the ex-wives snarled.

"To my disappointing heir,'" and the solicitor frowned at Ren. "This is not my language,
Mr. Townsend. I want to make sure you know that."

Ren didn't look up.

"Understood," he said, and Charlotte would have given everything she had to see his face
then. To try to figure out what he could be thinking as Malcolm slapped at him from
beyond the grave.

That soulless, evil old man, she thought furiously, and only then realized her hands were
in fists.

"I leave all of my business assets and personal fortune, to do with as he sees fit, little
as he deserves this courtesy. But the Townsend name must march on, even with so
unworthy a successor.'"

Every eye in the room was on Ren, who didn't react. Not a single flicker of an eyelash,
Charlotte saw.

The solicitor cleared his throat.

"To my cabal of ex-wives, I leave what each is worthone pound sterling, apiece.'"

"You must be having a laugh," one of the cabal seethed.

But Charlotte could only stare across the drafty room at Ren, who seemed turned to
stone. Her hands itched to smooth over his shoulders, to touch him, to somehow lift
whatever he felt directly from him

As if you have such power, she scoffed at herself. The man hates you. He was grieving,
you were there, he scratched an itch. The end.

But her silly heart didn't get that message. It never had.

"To my adulterous and rather dim widow, Tabitha, I leave only this piece of advice: your
youth is your only asset. Use it wisely.'"

That Tabitha was in fact as dim as Malcolm had suggested was impressed upon everyone
when she only blinked.

"How much is that, then?" she asked.

"And to my son's ex-wife, the trollop'"

"Charlotte' is fine, really," Charlotte murmured.

The solicitor aimed that apologetic smile at herit was really more of a grimace,
Charlotte thought, and who could blame himand kept reading.

"I leave nothing. Let her presence here, as grasping and as mercenary as she was when
she took five hundred thousand pounds to leave my lovesick fool of a son, speak as
eloquently now as her abandonment did then.'"

And with that little bomb, the harried solicitor rustled the papers in front of him and
exhaled.

"Well," Charlotte said brightly into the coiled fury that spiraled in the room, pressing in
on all sides. "That was delightful. It's like Malcolm was right here with us."

Chapter Twelve
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The room erupted into chaos and shouting, which, Ren thought darkly, was giving the old
man exactly what he'd wanted. It was much too easy to imagine him cackling with his
usual, vicious glee as he envisioned the reading of this will and the outrage it would
cause.

Ren was so busy picturing exactly that he almost missed it when Charlotte got to her feet
in the midst of the caterwauling from his assorted stepmothers and slipped out into the
hall.

He didn't think twice. He left the solicitor in the midst of the madness and followed her.

She was fast. She was halfway down the hall when he caught up to her, and she looked
suspiciously devoid of any reaction when he took her elbow and turned her back around
to face him.

This was harder than it should have been, because he remembered everything now.
Everything he'd reacquainted himself with last night. Every soft sigh, every wild gasp.
The clutch of her body around him. The silken heat.

He didn't want to let go of her, but he did.

"You must be pleased," she said briskly. "I assumed he would have stuck a knife or two in
your ribs, but he left you everything."

"The knife was you," Ren gritted out.

Her smile slipped then, and he thought he saw a storm in those green eyes of hers before
she blinked and it was gone. And they were nothing more than two strangers with a
tangled history standing in a hallway while snow fell outside.
It was then he remembered that it was Christmas Eve.

He didn't know why that seemed to pierce him straight through.

"A rather dull knife," Charlotte said mildly. "I can't imagine why he'd think you'd care
whether he insulted me or not."

"I don't understand how you can do this." Ren no longer sounded like himself. Maybe
she'd been right yesterday. Maybe this was grief.

But it had nothing to do with Malcolm.

Charlotte tilted her head slightly to one side as she studied him, and was that anger he
saw move across her face? It didn't make any sense.

"If you mean come back to this grim place, then neither do I," she said coolly. "It was a
regrettable impulse. I knew there was nothing for me here."

There was absolutely no reason on earth that he should want to howl at that, as if she'd
ripped him in two.

"Not that." He shook his head. "You left me. You took a payoff. And yet you stand here
and look at me as if I betrayed you."

Charlotte looked stunned for a moment, but then, impossibly, she laughed.

And she didn't say a word. She simply turned on her heel and marched off down the hall,
away from him.

Ren didn't think. He drew up next to her and walked beside her, not caring where she was
heading. She was dressed in one of those sleek suits he'd always loved to peel off of her,
black and elegant, the trousers making her bottom look edible and the jacket tailored
lovingly over her perfect breasts.

She was still the most beautiful creature he'd ever beheld, no matter how treacherous
she'd proven herself to be.

It wasn't until she came to an abrupt stop and stared at him in outrage that he realized he'd
said that last part out loud.

"How dare you?" It was a whisper, but it held all the force of a shout. "Do you get some
kind of sick enjoyment out of this? And yet you keep telling yourself you're nothing like
him."

She leaned forward, her gaze hard, and he knew what was coming. He knew what she
was about to say and he still did nothing to stop it.
"Guess what? You're the same, Ren. You've always been exactly the same."

Chapter Thirteen
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"You have exactly three seconds to explain yourself," Ren grated at her, his face gone
frigid.

But Charlotte didn't care how lethal he looked. She didn't care how he sounded. That
great wave of agony and outrage that she'd fought against for all these years simply rose
up and swept her away.

"Or what?" she demanded. "Will you throw me out of your life and divorce me? Too late,
Ren. You did that three years ago."

"If you think divorce is the worst thing I can do to you, you really don't know me at all."

"I know I don't know you." Her voice didn't shake, which was curious, since all she felt
inside was terrible, racking tremors, one after the next. "The man I fell in love with, the
man I marriedwhere is he? What happened to him?"

"You ripped out his heart."

Another time, that might have killed her where she stood. It might have taken her down.
But she was a different Charlotte Park than she'd been when she'd arrived in Yorkshire
yesterday. Today, she was the foolish woman who had let her body call the shots last
night and look what that had wrought?

More bitterness. More regret.

Charlotte was full up.

"That's funny," she said. "I wasn't aware you had one."

"Enough." A cold, dark slap of command, and she couldn't help reacting to it. The innate
power he wielded so offhandedly. That fulminating glare. "Acting offended and betrayed
doesn't suit you, Charlotte. We both know what you did. You've never bothered to deny
it."

She laughed again. "Are you truly asking me to defend myself?"

"My father offered you a check and you took it. "He shook his head, looking darker and
more drawn than she'd ever seen himand that little traitor who crouched in her heart
and made all of these terrible decisions ached for him, even now. "I agree with you. What
defense could there possibly be?"
She opened her mouth to throw somethinganythingat him, but stopped herself. There
was something about the way he was looking at her in that moment. Furious, yes, but
something far more raw besides.

"Yes," she said. "I suffered your father's hideous accusations, I declined his advances, and
I took his filthy money."

"You admit that so readily," he said after a moment, his voice sounding ragged. "And yet
you look at me like I'm the villain."

"How would you describe your role, then?" she asked, and though that wave of old
heartbreak still swelled inside of her, it was somehow an honest question. "An innocent
bystander? The aggrieved party?"

"There are a roomful of vipers and calculated deceivers just down the hall," he said, so
softly she knew he was close to losing his temper entirely. "The only difference between
you and all of them is that my father left them a pound each."

Charlotte told herself that it was bracing to hear something like that from him, that was
all. Bracing, not debilitating.

And anyway, it was best to put it all on the table, after all this time. Maybe if she did, it
would finally allow her to move on.

"Your father summoned me here," she said matter-of-factly. "He told me that you had
gone on a trip to Asia and you wanted me gone by the time you returned. And that as a
gift for my services, you'd directed him to present me with that check. I took it. And then
I donated the lot to my charity, because I never wanted your damned money, but that
doesn't mean there aren't people who could benefit from it."

He looked at her as if he'd never seen her before. "This is the most egregious set of lies
self-serving liesthat I've ever heard."

"And then, like a fool, I waited for you to call," she bit out. "To tell me it had all been a
mistake. But you never did. I never laid eyes on you again, until yesterday." She jutted
out her chin and wasn't surprised to find her hands in fists again. "So if anyone belongs
with the vipers down the hall, Ren, it's you."

Chapter Fourteen
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Ren let her go.

She turned in a controlled rush and stormed down the hall, and then she was gone.
He couldn't breathe. He felt icy all the way through, frozen solid, and he feared he truly
might have turned to stone.

There was no way that what she'd said was truebut then again, a dark voice insisted it
was a classic move on Malcolm's part. He'd always meddled in Ren's life. He'd always
propositioned Ren's girlfriends and then told hideous lies about them.

The question wasn't whether or not Malcolm had done this. The old man had loved
nothing better than turning people against each other and sowing whatever discord he
could. The question waswhy had Ren believed him?

He'd come back from that trip to Asia to find his wife gone. Her things moved out of their
London town house with no forwarding address. It was as if no one had ever lived there
but him.

"I offered her five hundred thousand pounds," Malcolm had said in his oily way that
following morning, when Ren had staggered into work at Townsend Consulting like a
dead man.

He remembered it so clearly. He'd been unshaven and bleary-eyed, having rung her
mobile to find it out of service, then all of her friends, none of whom seemed to know
where she'd gone.

And Malcolm had come out of nowhere, leaning into Ren's glass-walled office and
smirking in that smug way of his. "More to the point, she took it."

"I'm not following you." But there had been that icy thing inside of him then, its claws
digging in deep. "You gave my wife a test?"

"What matters is that she failed it," Malcolm had said, his flat blue eyes gleaming. "You
always were a fool when it came to women. But why am I surprised? Your mother was an
idiot and a whore. And you know what I always say."

Ren knew all too well what Malcolm always said, but he'd been incapable of movement
then. He'd been unable to speak.

"If you must be a whore, then at least be a smart one," Malcolm had finished, almost
merrily. "I guess your Charlotte had that going for her. Always had something going on
upstairs, didn't she? I have no idea why you found that attractive."

"She wouldn't simply leave," Ren had said.

"She didn't," Malcolm had agreed. "She took half a million pounds. There's nothing
particularly simple about that, is there?"
Now, back in Malcolm's hideous house that still reeked of his brand of calculated malice,
Ren found himself still again.

Because he understood why Malcolm had done it. Malcolm had never liked Charlotte.
She'd been unimpressed with his money and wholly immune to what passed for his
"charm." Both qualities that Ren had loved in her.

No, what he didn't understand was what he had done.

Why had he listened to Malcolm? Why hadn't he ignored Malcolm the way he always
had before? Why had he so easily believed the worst about his own wife?

Before he realized he meant to do anything, he was moving. He ran down into the grand
foyer and then flung open the front door, letting the quiet snowflakes dance in on the
wind and swirl around him, like a bleak embrace.

For a moment he saw nothing but the grey, snowy landscape spreading out before him,
Malcolm's estate buried beneath the weight of winter. Then he found her. She was bent
slightly into the wind and still marching with all of the determination and force she'd used
when she'd left him in that hall.

As if she could storm back to London and damn the weather.

Ren didn't question what he was doing. He simply charged out into the gloomy morning.

And when he caught up with her, when he ran around in front of her and she was forced
to stop or slam straight into him, Ren had absolutely no idea what he wanted to say. What
that great weight was that sat on him, crushing him, even though he was standing upright.

"Please, Ren." Her eyes were too bright, her tone deceptively soft. "Leave me alone."

"Tell me one thing." He didn't know what he was doing. He'd never felt so out of control.
"Did you ever really love me, Charlotte? The way you said you did?"

Chapter Fifteen
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"None of it matters now," Charlotte said, trying to sound strong. Trying to feel it.

But he'd chased her out into the snow and the world seemed to disappear all around them.
There was the sprawling eyesore of a house in the distance and nothing else but the
silence of winter. This far outside the village, there was nothing but wind.

"Indulge me." Ren gritted at her.

"I've already indulged you." Her voice was a low throb, and worse, it hurt. "All I ever did
was indulge you."

"Then what can one more indulgence hurt?"

She couldn't look at him. She was sure he'd see the misery in her gaze. Or the hint of
tears.

"I don't want to indulge you, Ren. I want to forget you. I want to move on from this. I
want it all to be a dim memory."

"Why did you come here?" he demanded. "You must have known what sort of thing he'd
put in that will. You knew what he was like."

Charlotte pressed her lips together and shook her head.

"I loved you," he rasped out, raw and broken against the night. "I loved you more than I
knew it was possible to love anything."

"Stop it." But it was if she hadn't spoken and the wind stole her words away.

"You were my obsession. I spent five years so lost in you I didn't care if the world fell
down all around me. And then you left me."

"I didn't leave you." It was important he hear that, so she looked at him again and
immediately wished she hadn't. His eyes were so dark it made her ache to look at him.
And he was so taut, so menacing, like he burned too hot and too deadly to notice the cold.
"I never would have left you."

"And why is that?"

She shook her head, but she'd made the mistake of getting lost in his gaze again and she
couldn't tear herself away.

"Of course I loved you," she whispered. "And look what came of it."

"I believed every word he said," Ren told her in that harsh, awful way. "Every single
word, and I'd never listened to him before. I believed you took that money because you
were the gold digger he'd always told me you were. I believed you left me without so
much as a note because you loved the money, not the man. Even though you'd never
given me the slightest reason to think such a thing of you."

Charlotte couldn't pretend she wasn't shaking then, much less that it had anything to do
with the cold.
"Is this an apology?" she asked, not caring any longer how she sounded. Not sure he
could even see her any longer through the darkness that swirled around him, consuming
him whole, right there in the long drive that led to his father's house.

"You were the only person I ever loved," he told her, and it broke her heart all over again.
"And I let him tell me who you were. I let him come between us. I've hated you for years
and yet you were right all along, Charlotte. I'm exactly like him after all."

She made some kind of inarticulate noise, and she had to shove her hands deep into the
pockets of her coat to keep from reaching out to him, and she didn't know how she did it
when all she wanted was to wrap herself around him. Bury her face against his chest.
Hold him until this terrible thing in him left him.

But she couldn't do it. She couldn't let herself.

This required her backbone, not her heart. Charlotte didn't know how she knew that, how
she was so certainbut she was.

"In fact," Ren continued, all ice and sorrow, "I'm worse than him. He was simply twisted
and evil. But I knew that, and I listened to him anyway."

Chapter Sixteen
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Ren didn't know what he expected. His confession hung in the air like wood smoke,
scratchy and dark, and Charlotte's bright green eyes were the only thing he could see.

She studied him for a long moment and he realized he hadn't the slightest idea what she
was thinking.

"Say something." His voice was nothing but a rasp.

He didn't know quite what to do with the way she shrugged then, or that cool light in her
eyes.

"What can I possibly say?"

Ren blinked. "I don't understand."

"You've decided you're as terrible as your father," she said, and her mild tone made him
grit his teeth. "You've certainly acted that way, but it's hardly an inescapable curse, is it?
It's a choice, Ren. One you keep making."

"You've missed my point."

"You mean the depths of your self-pity?" she asked, and while her tone was certainly less
cool then, it wasn't an improvement. "I assure you, I haven't."

Ren felt as if he'd been catapulted into some kind of free fall, even further out of control
and hurtling toward the cold, hard ground.

"I only wanted to explain." It felt inadequate as he said it and she stared at him as if he'd
slapped her.

"Do you remember when we met?" she demanded.

"Of course I do."

"You promised me you'd never fall off into the dark the way he wanted you to do. You
swore you'd never follow his lead." She swallowed hard, like she was gulping back tears,
and Ren wanted nothing more than to hold her. To soothe her. But her green eyes spit fire,
and he didn't dare reach out. "And then, at the first opportunity, you did exactly that."

"I'm trying to tell you I don't know how that happened," Ren said, low and urgent. "I
don't know why I let him do that to us. I swear to you, Charlotte."

But she was shaking her head, and she made a loud, frustrated noise as she wheeled away
from him and started that determined march of hers again. Ren tipped his head back into
the falling snow and tried to let the pinpricks of ice against his face cool him down.

It didn't work.

"Charlotte." He caught up to her easily, but knew better, somehow, than to touch her. He
fell in beside her as she stormed out through the gates at the bottom of Malcolm's drive
and started the long walk back toward the village. "Tell me how to fix this."

"Fix this?" she echoed him in a cutting sort of amazement, but at least she slowed down
and looked at him again. " Fix this?"

"I want that."

"I know why you listened to your father, Ren. And so do you."

"I promise you, I don't."

She scowled at him. "We'd started talking about a family. Babies. Little Townsends that
we'd raise in a world where your father still existed, in all of his viciousness and evil. And
you couldn't handle it."

Ren opened his mouth to argue that, but closed it again, as a kind of tight fist seemed to
wrap around his ribs and squeeze. And she wasn't finished.
"What happened to us isn't a mystery, Ren," she threw at him. "It was a self-fulfilling
prophecy. He told you that you were just like him and you decided he was right. And
this?" She flung her arms out as if to embrace the whole of the village. Him. Even
herself. "This is history repeating itself and we both know it will end the same way." She
let her arms fall to her sides and glared at him. "I don't want to play these games. I'm
going home."

Chapter Seventeen
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Charlotte meant it. She was finished.

She wanted this to be over. She'd been mourning her broken marriage for three long
years, and she was ready at last to put it behind her.

"Where are you going?" Ren asked when she only stood there in the snowy lane, as if her
feet were fighting off her head. "It's Christmas Eve."

She shook her head at him, feeling the sleepless night then. It hung on her like an anchor.
There was some part of her that wanted nothing more than to curl up in a ball and sleep
until the new year. To pretend none of this had happened.

"Do you remember our first Christmas together?" Ren asked, and everything in her
yearned for himas if longing was a physical thing, bending her toward him, making her
very nearly reach out for his hands.

"No," she lied.

"You do." He moved closer then, his dark coffee gaze intent on hers. "We stayed up late
and decorated that tree in my flat until well after midnight. And then we spent the whole
of Christmas day before the fire."

Naked, Charlotte remembered, and so fizzy with joy and lust and the certainty that they'd
be with each other forever that she'd felt something like drunk.

"That was a long time ago," she said now. "It's been drowned out by other, far darker
things."

"Charlotte. Listen to me."

And she still loved the way he said her name. She loved him. She'd never stopped in all
this time, and she couldn't imagine that she ever would.

But that didn't change a thing.

"I want you back," he said, as he'd said so many times in her dreams. As she'd imagined
he would a thousand times before. "I want to try again."

Charlotte couldn't speak for a long moment, and her heart was like a kettle drum in her
chest, pounding into her, hard and hot and low.

"And how will that go?" she asked after what felt like a very long time, when she felt
nothing but the snow and the cold and the bitter wind from the moors. "It was hard
enough when he was alive. Now we'll have his ghost, malicious and evil, winding its way
through your head."

"Malcolm is gone," Ren said, his voice clipped. "His last act was that will. There's
nothing left that he can possibly do to us."

Charlotte shook her head, and she no longer cared if he saw the tears that spilled from her
eyes and froze along her cheeks. She no longer cared if he heard the raggedness in her
voice, or saw too many truths in her gaze. Or even if she was showing him that giant,
painful lump in her throat that she was terribly afraid was her heart.

"Don't you understand?" she asked. "He's already poisoned you. That was his final act.
That was why he brought me here. So later, long after he's gone, you'll look at me and
wonder. And he'll win."

"He's already lost."

"He's inside you," Charlotte said. "Isn't that what you told me?"

"And you told me that was a self-fulfilling prophecy." Ren shook his head and moved
closer, taking her shoulders in his hands. "I don't want to do his dirty work any longer. I
want you."

It was the culmination of three long years. It was what she'd prayed for so fervently the
last time she'd been in this lonely place, clutching that damned check in her hand. This
was everything she'd ever wanted to hear.

But she knew that there was every chance this was about the father he'd lost, not the wife
he'd cast aside. Ren couldn't repair his relationship with Malcolm now. But he could try
to transfer all of that grief and longing to her.

And Charlotte would love this man until the day she died, but she thought they both
deserved better than that.

"I want to believe you," she whispered. "I want that more than anything, Ren. But I don't.
I can't."

Chapter Eighteen
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They sat in the same first-class compartment of the high-speed train that hurtled them
back down south toward London. They didn't speak.

Ren pretended that it was entirely coincidental that he'd caught the same train from pretty,
medieval York, but the look on Charlotte's face told him she wasn't fooled.

But he was a desperate man. He was willing to do anything.

Charlotte maintained her frosty distance all the way into King's Cross Station, which
didn't surprise Ren in the least.

"Let me take you home," he said as they walked from the train. She glared at him. "It's
the least I can do."

And there was misery in her lovely eyes then, if no further trace of those tears that had
fallen in that snowy lane up north, and maybe that was why she breathed out a long, slow
sigh. Then nodded.

It wasn't a surrender, necessarily, he reminded himself. It was merely a first step.

He ushered her into his car and then ordered himself not to touch her as she sat there on
the same backseat with him. Not to close the distance between them. Not to bury himself
in her the way he longed to do.

She gave the driver precise directions to her flat in Shepherd's Bush, while Ren sat next
to her and tried to figure out what he could say to keep her from leaving him. Because
this time, he didn't think he'd survive the loss.

But when the car slid to a stop in the road outside her building, she didn't move.

"Have you any plans for Christmas?" he asked.

Charlotte laughed. "Have we descended into small-talk, then?"

Ren decided to concentrate on the laughter.

"Please," he said urgently. "Listen to me. I don't blame you for not believing me. But I
want to prove it to you. I want to be the man you thought I was."

"Ren" But she didn't finish her sentence.

He didn't know why he should take that as some kind of encouragement.

"You always made me believe in magic, Charlotte. Why should this be any different?"
"Because I never believed in magic. I believed in you."

He threw caution to the wind and moved closer, pulling her into his arms, and he couldn't
help noticing that she didn't attempt to evade him. Her lovely eyes were solemn and wide,
and he wanted to fall into them, so deep he'd never come back.

He did the next best thing.

He kissed her.

The winter evening was a burst of color then, hot and vivid. She tasted of the cold and of
Charlotte, perfect in every way and still, not enough. Ren held her face in his hands and
poured everything he had, everything he was, into each slide of his tongue against hers.

Apology. Love. Yearning.

Loss. Magic.

Hope.

Until they were both gasping for breath and much too hot, and he could see the red flash
of desire like a stain against her cheeks.

"I love you," he whispered. "I'm not going to fail you again."

Charlotte pulled in a deep breath, then another. She pulled away from him and he felt it
like a kick in the gut. She gathered herself together, smoothing her palms over her hair
and tugging her coat tighter around her. And then she reached for the car door and paused
with her fingers on the silver handle.

"It's Christmas Eve," she whispered, and there was a certain resolute tone in her voice as
she looked back at him. "And I've spent a long time feeling sad and broken. I don't want
to feel that way anymore."

"Charlotte" he began, urgently. But, impossibly, she shushed him.

"Ren," she said, and smiled slightly. "You don't have to convince me. I don't want to talk.
Just come in."

Chapter Nineteen
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Charlotte didn't know when she'd forgiven him, or how she'd decided she should do such
a thing in the first place. She only knew that having reconnected with Ren, however
painful that might have been, she couldn't bring herself to say goodbye. Not yet.
Up in the cheerful little flat she'd lived in these past three years, Ren made love to her
slowly, with all the lights on and then with only candles to track the way he worshipped
every part of her. The night seemed to turn into spun gold, time stretching out as sweet as
honey.

They didn't talk.

Maybe, she thought as the night wore on and they lay together with only a flickering
candle and the heat of Ren's body to warm them, talking had been the problem all this
time.

Because with every touch, every kiss, every white-hot flare of that endless fire that still
burned so bright in both of them, she knew.

It didn't matter what he'd done, what she'd felt.

What mattered was this. Here. Now.

There were only the two of them in her bed. There was no room for ghosts.

"I love you," she whispered, thinking he was asleep, but he turned toward her instead,
propping himself up on one elbow to look down at her. She frowned, but there was no
heat behind it. "Don't gloat. It's unattractive."

He smiled then, and it made her breath hitch.

"I wouldn't dream of it," he murmured.

She reached up and traced the bold lines of that face of his she knew far better than her
own. The face that she'd carried with her all this time, unable to let him go. Unable to
move on.

Maybe she hadn't been meant to move on.

"You can trust me this time," he whispered, as if he could read her mind.

Was it pathetic that she wished he could?

"I want to," she told him. "I really do."

And it didn't feel like forgiveness when she wrapped herself around him again. It didn't
feel like surrender.

It felt right.

***
This time, when Ren watched her sleep, he could admit to himself that it was more than
only sex.

It always had been.

He kissed her softly on her cheek and smiled as she frowned and buried her face into her
pillow. Always thinking, his Charlotte. Even as she dreamed.

Ren moved over to the graceful window that managed to make the small bedroom seem
twice its size, and peered out over the London street below. It was still snowing, like
something straight out of a Christmas card, and even as he thought that he discovered that
he didn't have it in him to be cynical. He'd spent the past three years mired in itacting
like the father he hated.

Charlotte had set him free. Again.

He leaned against the glass of the window, letting the cold soak into him. Ren still didn't
know why he'd been so quick to listen to Malcolm's poison. The fact that he had called
into question all the other things Ren had believed too readilylike all the horrible things
Malcolm had said about Ren's own mother over the years. Had she truly been the
manipulative whore Malcolm had claimed she was? Or had she left Ren with Malcolm
because she was a poor girl from a remote Spanish village, and the life Malcolm could
provide Ren was unquestionably superior?

Ren still didn't know. But he knew this: Malcolm was the past. All of that poison, all of
that pain.

And Charlotte was the future. The bright, gleaming future he hadn't dared to dream of in
three long years.

If she'd have him.

Chapter Twenty
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Charlotte woke up to find herself alone in her bed.

She told herselfsternlythat what she felt, that hollow place that yawned open inside
of her, was nothing like regret. Nothing like sadness.

That it was better that Ren had gone. Safer for both of them.

This was all about his father's funeral, she thought as briskly as she could as she climbed
out of the bed that still held his delicious, masculine scent. And now it's done.
Her feet hit the chilly floorboards and she told herself that was why she shivered. She
pulled on the nearest warm and comfortable things she could find, and refused to allow
herself to analyze the fact that she was wrapped in flannel and soft cashmere when she
was donelike she planned to hibernate.

Maybe she did. It was Christmas morning, and perhaps her gift was that these long years
of turmoil and grief were finished. It was time for a new chapter.

"Ren is the past, and the past is gone," she said out loud, her voice a whisper in the empty
room, and then she walked out into her lounge.

And Ren was there. Waiting for her.

Charlotte thought she was hallucinating. He was dressed in nothing but the trousers he'd
worn the night before, leaving the chiseled perfection of his torso on display.

As hallucinations went, it was a good one.

"I thought you'd gone," she managed to say, when the moment dragged on far too long
and she saw that gleam of amused heat in his dark eyes.

"I'll go," he said. "If you want to me to go."

She decided he was real and this was happening, and she frowned at him.

"I forgave you, Ren. Maybe we need to accept that this was simply a way to tie up the
loose ends of our marriage and move on, once and for all."

"No."

He bit that out, short and final, and Charlotte's heart kicked in her chest. Hard. She
blinked at him as he prowled toward her, that poet's face of his particularly beautiful in
the winter morning light.

"I don't want to move on," he said, his voice harsh and quiet at once, and she stamped
down on the thread of hope that bloomed into something much more vivid when she saw
the look in his eyes. "I don't want to tie up loose ends."

"What do you want, then?"

The Christmas lights were on across the way in her neighbors house and they twinkled
merrily as Ren held her gaze, then sank down onto his knees in front of her. Charlotte
stopped trying to control the wild beating of her heart. She stopped trying. She clapped
her hands over her mouth and stared down at him.

"It won't work," she said, and though she'd muffled her own voice, he heard her.
"There's no Malcolm to whisper lies in my ear anymore," he said. "There's only you and
me."

Charlotte dropped her hands. "Then it will be something else. The problem isn't the
whispering. It's that you listened."

He reached over and took her hands in his, and she longed for himfor thisso
intensely it flirted with pain. He searched her face, his dark eyes serious.

"I learn from my mistakes, Charlotte. Let me prove it to you."

A hundred objections raced through her head then. A hundred reasons to be cautious, to
hold him at arm's length, to wait and see what happened

But she had never wanted anything the way she wanted Ren.

And it was Christmas and he was, truly, the only gift she'd ever dared hoped for.

"Do you love me?" he asked softly.

"I do," she whispered, and his hands tightened around hers, the way they had once before,
when they'd stood at an altar and exchanged vows.

"Then marry me, Charlotte," he said, and it rang in her like Christmas bells, joyful and
solemn at once. "Because I've never loved anyone in all my life but you. And this time, I
promise you, it will be forever."

The truth was, she'd never been very good at saying no to Ren Townsend.

"It was always forever," she said fervently, leaning down to take his beautiful face in her
hands. Like they'd never been apart. "It always will be."

And this time, it was.

THE END