Christmas Alpha Read online

  Eva had felt guilty the moment she heard Finn go outside into the blizzard, and had immediately started to worry that he might get lost in the snow, become disorientated, and somehow wander off in the wrong direction.

  She had no idea what she would have done if he hadn’t come back.

  Gone out into the snow looking for him, probably, and no doubt become lost herself!

  “It’s as I thought, there’s no one out there,” Finn dismissed, head bent as he continued to warm his hands on the stove, his cheeks ruddy from the cold outside.

  “Oh.” Eva instantly felt foolish for having made such a fuss earlier. “Here,” she handed him a mug of the tea she had poured for them both the moment she had heard the front door slam closed as he returned.

  “Thanks.” He cradled the warmth in his hands as he took a grateful sip. “What did you decide to make for dinner?”

  “You have a freezer full of food.” She smiled approvingly. “I chose pizzas as something I couldn’t ruin. They’re in the oven now.”

  He raised dark eyebrows as he looked at her over the rim of his mug. “Have you ever cooked in one of these stoves before?”

  She gave him a puzzled glance. “No.”

  “Oh.”

  “What are you doing?” she demanded as Finn put down his mug of tea and picked up the oven cloth before going down on his haunches to open the oven door, the kitchen instantly filled with the smell of burning. “I only put them in ten minutes ago!” Eva wailed as he brought out two pizzas that were more than a little black around the edges.

  And she had thought that even she couldn’t spoil pizza!

  Finn placed the hot baking tray on the trivet. “These stoves cook in half the time a normal oven does. I found that out myself the hard way too!” He grinned.

  Eva found herself fascinated by the grooves that had appeared in both Finn’s cheeks as he smiled. Not quite dimples. His face was far too hard and chiseled to have anything as tame as dimples. But those twin grooves were definitely interesting. So much so that Eva’s fingers itched to touch them.

  She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. “I’m sorry I sent you outside for nothing.” Had it suddenly gotten hot in here again, or was it her imagination?

  “It wasn’t a completely wasted trip,” Finn assured briskly. “I brought some more wood over to the house and stored it in the garage.”

  “And then came in to burnt pizza for dinner!” Yes, it was most definitely hotter in here! Had become so the moment Finn came into the kitchen...

  He shrugged those broad shoulders. “Win some, lose some. We needed more wood anyway.”

  Eva moved away awkwardly, attempting to cover her discomfort by busying herself cutting the blackened edges off the pizzas. “Did you have anything nice in your parcel earlier?”

  “What?”

  Was it her imagination or had Finn’s voice sharpened and that blue gaze narrowed?

  She shrugged. “Most parcels I deliver this time of year have presents in them.”

  “Oh. Yes. No.” He turned away to get some plates down from one of the cupboards. “Just some photographic equipment I ordered and my agent sent on to me.”

  Why didn’t Eva believe him...?

  The sudden sharpness of Finn’s voice?

  The narrow-eyed glance he had just given her?

  Or his sudden tension?

  Whatever the reason, Eva was sure that Finn had just lied to her.

  She just had no idea why he had...

  Chapter 7

  “Chess?” Eva eyed the board dubiously.

  Finn shrugged. “Do you play?”

  “Yes. Are these pieces real jade?” They had eaten dinner, such as it was, and moved into the sitting-room, which was when Finn had challenged her to a game of chess.

  It seemed a little tame after what had happened between the two of them earlier.

  “I expect so.” Finn turned from pulling the curtains carefully and completely across the windows. He had already switched on a couple of lamps, and put a match to the fire, the logs crackling away merrily in the hearth, in order to make the room feel even cozier.

  Lucien may be obsessive in his need for maintaining his privacy, but that didn’t mean the man didn’t surround himself with beautiful things. Everything about this house, secluded away in the woods, was as elegant as the man himself. Including the jade chess set on the table in front of one of the windows.

  “Loser pays a forfeit,” Finn added challengingly as a way of preventing Eva from questioning the careful way he had ensured the curtains were pulled fully across the windows.

  Eva looked across the table at him with suspicious moss-green eyes. “What sort of forfeit did you have in mind?”

  He shrugged. “The winner gets to decide that.”

  “Really?”

  Finn wasn’t sure he altogether trusted that light of battle in her eyes. “How long since you last played?”

  “Oh not since I left school. Heads,” she called as he flipped a coin for who was to start.

  “And that was what, all of three years ago?” Finn taunted before looking down at the coin. “Heads it is.” He nodded as she took her seat opposite him.

  “Almost four,” she answered him dismissively, already studying the chessboard.

  She looked far too businesslike for Finn’s liking. Almost like a gladiator facing off against another. Lesser.

  Not that Finn was about to complain. He would quite happily lose the damned game on purpose, if it kept Eva from asking him any more questions about the contents of the parcel she’d delivered this morning.

  And the person she had thought she’d seen standing outside earlier...

  He didn’t want Eva to know that the parcel she had delivered had contained the receipts from every restaurant he and Moira had ever gone to, as well as a couple of hotel bills, several sets of her sexy lingerie, and a pair of shoes which had been all she’d worn to bed one particular night—and Finn still had the scars on his back to prove it.

  To say Finn had been shaken when he had opened the parcel and seen what was inside would be an understatement. He hadn’t even realized Moira had taken the restaurant and hotel receipts, let alone kept them. As for the underwear and shoes…

  There was also the lengths Moira had gone to in order to get them here.

  Who did things like that?

  Someone who was mentally unbalanced would be Finn’s guess. Someone who was obsessed...

  The other thing he didn’t want to tell Eva was that although he hadn’t found anyone outside in the snow, he had found evidence that someone had been standing under the trees. The snow there had been flattened in quite a large area, as if that someone had been standing outside for some time.

  He had also found what looked like footsteps leading directly to the studio window.

  Quite possibly allowing the person to have watched through that window the whole time he had been taking photographs of Eva in those scraps of black lace.

  And afterwards, when he had taken off her bra and feasted on her breasts.

  “How were the photographs when you checked them earlier?”

  Finn’s fingers fumbled on the smooth jade of the piece he had been about to move, almost overbalancing it before he quickly caught and righted it.

  “Fast reflexes,” Eva mused.

  More like jumpy as the proverbial cat, Finn acknowledged with a grimace as he took his move.

  Eva had insisted on clearing away after their meal earlier, to make up for burning it, and Finn had excused himself on the pretext of looking at the photographs he had taken of her earlier.

  What he had actually done was go through the whole house, checking that all the windows and doors were locked and that Lucien’s state of the art security system was switched on. He had also made a phone call to the man himself, explaining the situation and requesting assistance; if anyone knew anything about security it was the obsessively reclusive Lucien Wynter!

  Finn probably
should have called the local police too, just in case, but if he had to take a bet on who was going to come through for him, he would opt for Lucien every time. The man had a level of personal security to rival most heads of state.

  If it had just been Finn here on his own, then he wouldn’t have bothered even calling Lucien; he was quite capable of looking after himself if he had to. It was Eva he was worried about. If Moira was out there—which he sincerely hoped she wasn’t—then Eva could be in danger. For the simple reason that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  And because Finn had almost made love to her earlier.

  The thought of Moira, of anyone, watching him and Eva intimately together, made him feel sick.

  As for the photographs he had taken of Eva this afternoon...

  He had intended ‘The Mistress’ photographs to be purely of a woman’s body, displaying carnal seduction and lust in every pose. A siren, luring men in, and then holding them captive with her voracity for debauchery and sex.

  That was exactly what Moira had done to her married lover Ian Jackson, Finn was sure of it, and what she had tried to do to him too.

  Eva’s photographs, after the first half a dozen, when she was obviously self-conscious about posing in only her underwear, were of a woman sleek and sensual as a feline, every perfect line of her body full of grace and beauty, and at the same time so damned sexy that any man looking at her would instantly harden with desire.

  The same painful state Finn had been in most of the afternoon.

  He had almost come in his denims when he instructed Eva to face away from him, up on her hands and knees, and then turn to look over her shoulder at him through the silky curtain of her lashes and hair.

  If Moira had been lust and debauchery, then Eva was sensuality and desire, the two types of emotions as different from each other as the two women were.

  It wasn’t what Finn had been looking for at all for his mistress photographs.

  It was better.

  So much better.

  So much more...

  “Hah, told you I would make an awful model!” Eva grinned across from him triumphantly at his continued silence.

  Finn gave a non-committal shrug. “We’ll do better tomorrow.”

  Her grin faded. “Tomorrow...?”

  “Time for the bra to come off tomorrow, Eva. Oh come on,” he reasoned as her eyes widened. “I’ve already seen what’s under that scrap of lace.”

  “That was completely different.” Eva lowered her lashes so that her emotions were now shielded behind that curtain of black silk.

  Finn leaned back in his chair and studied her. Her cheeks were flushed, a pulse beating rapidly in that delicate dip in her throat he had explored with his lips earlier, and her breasts were pressed against her t-shirt as she breathed raggedly.

  His gaze returned to the blush in her cheeks. “How was it different, Eva?” he prompted huskily.

  “You were… We were… I think you’re just trying to distract me so that you win at chess!” she accused irritably.

  “Oh I’d done that by the time you made your third move.” He made his final move. “Checkmate.”

  Eva stared down at the board incredulously, shoulders slumping as she saw Finn was right. She’d thought she had a good chance at winning too.

  Did this man have to be good at everything?

  And she did mean everything.

  “And the forfeit is?” She eyed him warily.

  He smiled slowly. “You just heard it.”

  “I pose topless?” Eva heard her voice raise a couple of octaves.

  “Topless,” Finn confirmed with a satisfied nod. “That way I get to at least look at your breasts all day. And if I’m very, very good, maybe you’ll let me play with them again later too. Did you like having your breasts stroked and pulled, Eva?” His eyes gleamed darkly. “You have such beautiful nipples. I could suck on them all day—”

  “Stop it, Finn.” Eva put her hands over her ears as if that could block out the way her body had warmed at his words, those nipples he liked so much hardening to twin pebbles beneath her t-shirt. “Just stop it!”

  Pebbles Finn must surely be able to see pressing against her t-shirt, her arousal obvious.

  “You never did tell me whether or not you have a boyfriend,” he pressed. “Someone who gets to regularly suck on those delicious nipples.”

  “I told you to stop it!” Eva glared at him as she stood up abruptly, almost upsetting the chess table as she did so. “I don’t like playing these sorts of games.”

  “I don’t play games, Eva.” Finn stood up too, heat radiating off him as he stood just inches away from her. “So just answer the fucking question!”

  “Finn...” Eva felt weak at the knees just from his proximity.

  His jaw clenched. “Answer me, damn it!”

  “Why?”

  He smiled humorlessly. “Because I don’t fuck women who belong to other men, even as a way of passing the time during a blizzard.”

  Whatever sexual haze had been weakening Eva’s knees and causing her blood to thrum hotly through her veins, it immediately evaporated at the crudeness of Finn’s words. “I have news for you—you aren’t ‘fucking’ me, whether I have a boyfriend or not!” she assured him with a look of disgust.

  Mission accomplished, Finn acknowledged heavily, knowing he had now thoroughly pissed Eva off.

  But knowing that he had done the right thing didn’t lessen the gnawing disappointment in his gut.

  Problem was, the later the evening had become the more Finn had sensed Eva’s sexual tension, as if she fully expected him to suggest they share a bed tonight. And she hadn’t decided yet whether or not she was going to say yes.

  Finn would have liked nothing better than to share a bed with Eva. For many nights. Unfortunately his life was fucked up enough already, without dragging Eva into the mess.

  Anymore than she already was, just by being here with him...

  The last woman Moira had seen him with had ended up at the hospital having stitches put in her temple.

  The last thing he wanted was for Moira to make Eva her next target. And if that meant he had to keep Eva at arms’ length, then so be it.

  With Moira on the loose and knowing exactly where he was, he had to keep his wits about him.

  He wouldn’t have any wits left at all if he gave in to the increasing hunger he felt to make love to Eva, kissing and suckling those breasts until she came, before burying himself to the balls in her slick, wet heat!

  Many more remarks like his last one and Eva was more likely to stab him with a fork than let him make love to her!

  “Pity,” he drawled, turning away as if uninterested. “I’d better take you upstairs then and show you which bedroom you’ll be sleeping in tonight.”

  “At the other end of the house from your own bedroom will suit me just fine.”

  Finn gave her a mocking glance over his shoulder. “You’re safe enough from me, Eva.”

  “Oh I don’t need you to tell me that!” Eva glared at the broad width of Finn’s back as she followed him from the room.

  How long had she known this man? It seemed more like a lifetime than just hours.

  He was just so much larger than life, so...imposing, it was impossible for her not to be aware of him. To want him.

  Minutes ago her nipples had ached, and between her thighs had felt hot and slick again with the need to have Finn touch her.

  He had certainly thrown a bucket of ice-cold water on that need.

  Eva wasn’t a prude by any means, and she had cared about the two men she had slept with, but she drew the line at being any man’s ‘fuck to pass the time away during a blizzard’!

  It was bloody insulting—

  Eva froze as all the lights in the house went out.

  Chapter 8

  “What happened?” Eva didn’t dare to move, could only continue to stand frozen partway up the stairs, having absolutely no sense of her bearings, without th
e lights to see by, in this unfamiliar house.

  “I would have thought that was perfectly obvious,” Finn muttered distractedly.

  “Do you think it’s because of the storm?”

  Finn certainly hoped it wasn’t anything more sinister than that. The problem was he didn’t know. Not for certain. Not until he’d had a chance to check the fuse box, and if necessary, call the electric company.

  If it was a power outage then all was well and good.

  But if it was something else...

  He frowned grimly as he thought of the footprints he had seen outside earlier, and the fact that Moira knew where he was. “Wait here while I go and get the flashlight from the kitchen.”

  “I’m coming with you!” Eva reached out to grab hold of him. “Oops! Sorry.” She quickly released him as she realized exactly where she had grabbed him.

  “You certainly choose your moments, Miss Shaw.” Finn was deliberately flippant; there was still no point in alarming Eva until, or unless, he absolutely had to. And he was hoping he wouldn’t have to.

  “It was an accident,” Eva defended indignantly.

  “Of course it was.”

  She gave an audible sigh of impatience. “Could you just get over yourself long enough for us to do something about this situation?”

  “Such as one of us going downstairs for a flashlight?”

  “Ha ha, you are such a comedian!”

  “I aim to please.” Complete silence followed this last, even more flippant remark, and without visibility to aid him, Finn had absolutely no idea what Eva was thinking or feeling at that moment. “Eva...?” he finally prompted sharply.

  “It’s so quiet when everything electrical just all goes off at once,” she spoke in hushed tones. “Spooky.”

  Just what Finn needed to hear, when he still had no idea if this was a general power cut or if someone, Moira, had somehow physically turned the power off.

  It all seemed a bit coincidental after Eva’s claim of having seen someone outside, along with those footprints Finn had seen in the snow, confirming that someone was watching the two of them.