by Dani Collins
“You have a son.”
“So do you! And you have a family relying on you, same as me.” She flung her hand toward the open doors to the terrace and his small kingdom beyond. “Tell me, as someone who had to make hard choices in order to support his family, do you really expect me to give up my ability to help mine? To put that duty in your hands? You refused Niko’s offer when he finally said he wanted to give you a piece of his fortune again. What’s different about me refusing your offer to do the same thing?”
His shoulders bunched, and then he threw up his hands in frustration. “Fine. Work,” he snarled. “But you’ll set proper hours and you will sleep here.” He pointed at the bed again.
“Why? Because you don’t trust me?”
“No. I don’t. And you don’t trust me, obviously. Which annoys the hell out of me because the one thing I pride myself on is how well I take care of my family. So you and I will share a room and a bed along with a son, and we’ll work on trusting each other.”
Scarlett experienced a sudden, crushing insecurity that he would discover all the other little flaws that would make him truly hate her. She couldn’t stand his doubts and cynicism as it was, but she didn’t know how to break down the barriers between them.
Her fingertips found the grinding knot of tension between her brows and tried to smooth it away. It wasn’t like her to have all this insecurity and angst. She used to feel confident in herself, but lately she felt like an awful fraud. She was blaming it on lack of sleep and all the changes around her. She doubted she would magically recover her confidence by sharing a bed with Javiero, but part of her wanted to believe that being around him in a more intimate setting would help them communicate better.
And maybe she was trying to orchestrate something that looked a lot like them going back to that torrid afternoon when they had conceived Locke. She wanted to see how far their relationship might have taken them if she’d allowed it to play out. Would they have fallen in love and married?
Oh, no, Scarlett. She closed her eyes. Don’t start dreaming about castles in the sky.
The sound of a crying baby approached. It hadn’t even been thirty minutes since she had put Locke down. That cry was starting to make her feel like such a failure.
Javiero moved to the door, but kept his hand on the latch without opening it.
“We both had parents who let us down, Scarlett. We have to at least try to do better than they did.”
She couldn’t argue that. She desperately wanted to feel like a good mum.
He opened the door and she moved to get Locke, bringing him into their room.
“I’m still awake,” Javiero said as Scarlett slid carefully in beside him. His entire body was taut with futile anticipation.
“So is your mother,” she said with a heavy sigh, sinking onto the mattress.
“She went in there?” He picked up his head and looked toward the connecting doors to the sitting room. Over dinner, he had announced that Locke would be using the small lounge as a night nursery and his mother had not been impressed. “I didn’t hear her.”
“She stayed in her room, but I heard her phone down for one of her headache pills and some tea to help her sleep. I should have stayed in the other wing. She already hates me. I don’t want anything to impact her feelings toward Locke.”
“How she reacts is up to her,” he said with a stab of impatience. “If she wants to continue her war of passive aggression toward my dead father and resent our doing what’s best for her grandson, that’s her choice. I gave up trying to make her see reason years ago.”
Did he hear the irony of his own years of stonewalling Scarlett and pulling dirty moves against Niko? Sure. He had even taken pleasure in sending Scarlett back to his father without so much as an inch of give on his part.
He was through with squeezing her in that power struggle, though. He might not agree with her methods, but he understood the bleak fear that had driven her. He was intimately familiar with the gnawing, intractable need to know that his family was secure.
He was still unsettled by the fact her father had been abusive, double-dealing his own wife and putting his entire family in an untenable position.
Niko had taken advantage of Scarlett’s desperation, which was yet another reason Javiero would never forgive him, but he couldn’t continue punishing Scarlett for her association with his father. He couldn’t in good conscience become yet another hurdle she had to overcome in order to look after people she felt a duty toward.
She was still wriggling and rolling and pulling at the blankets.
While she had fed Locke, he had been lying there wondering who had come up with the brainless idea they should sleep together. Between taking turns brushing their teeth, he had put on pajama bottoms—something he’d started wearing so he could get up with the baby. She had put on a practical nightgown. With the way her figure was bouncing back from pregnancy, she could have worn a burlap sack and still looked like a fertility goddess. Her breasts were spectacular, and her hips and backside round and enticing beneath the soft drape of cotton. She’d always had amazing legs. All the pale skin he could see was smooth and—he recalled vividly—soft and warm and intoxicating.
Her shifting was further stimulating him, making him more aware of her weight pressing down that side of the mattress. She smelled like vanilla and pineapple, and her shaken sigh bore a resemblance to the hot breath she had released against his ear when they’d made love.
“What’s wrong?” he asked with the gruffness of increasing sexual frustration. “Why can’t you get comfortable?”
“I don’t know. Colic? I’ve never slept with anyone. It’s weird. I’m worried I’ll kick you in my sleep. Or that you’ll stretch out an arm and scare me in the night. Do you steal blankets? I don’t know the protocol.”
“You’ve never slept with anyone?”
“Just my sister when we were little.” She rolled onto her stomach and pushed her arms under her pillow. Sighed again.
“But you’ve had relationships. Lovers.” If she told him she’d been a virgin that day—
“I was a kid then, too,” she grumbled, flipping her pillow. “Not underage. I was at university, but I was messing around just to feel like someone loved me. Childish reasons. I learned quickly that going all the way wasn’t the beginning of a relationship. The boy in question invariably saw it as the end. Once I started working for your father...” Her pause seemed significant for a reason he couldn’t identify, and he wished he could see her face. “There wasn’t time for dating,” she finished quietly. “I didn’t miss it, so it was no real loss.”
Her hair drew silver tracks against the dark pillowcase. He wanted to touch it. Fold it around his finger and rub his lips against it.
Unhelpful. The muscle between his thighs twitched with a strong pulse of desire.
“How many women have slept here?” she asked hesitantly, turning her head to peer at him through the dark.
“In this bed? None. As far as I know, the only woman who ever slept in this room was my grandmother. She died before I was born.”
“Really?” She rolled onto her side, still facing him. “You and Regina didn’t—”
“No.”
“Why not?”
She wasn’t you. “We were still getting to know one another.”
“According to you, that happens here by sharing a bed.” In the glow of the night-light, her pale face grew stiff with concentration. He felt her gaze like an infrared scanner heating his brow and cheekbones. “You don’t wear your eye patch to bed.”
Damn. He’d taken it off out of habit, not even thinking. His hand twitched as he debated reaching toward the nightstand for it. “It’s more comfortable without.”
“Then don’t wear it. Listen, about surgery...” She came up on her elbow to hover over him. “Don’t put yourself through that unless it’s
something you really want. Locke will never care how you look, not if we raise him right. And the only thing I feel about your injuries is upset that you were hurt.”
She looked like an angel, hair in a loose golden halo, voice laden with so much concern it disturbed him. His heart pounded an ancient drumbeat, calling to her. He wanted to pull her across him, feel whether she was telling the truth.
“I keep thinking how terrifying it must have been,” she said in a solemn undertone. “You could have been killed. It would have been a horrific loss for Locke.”
Only for Locke?
Where the hell had that thought come from?
“How did it even happen? Wasn’t it caged—? Oh!” She gasped as he rolled her beneath him in one agile twist of his body.
“Exactly like that,” he said, careful to hold himself off her while he trapped her, not squashing her flat the way the caveman in him wanted to. Desire had been soaking through him like gasoline when he’d been attacked. Desire for Scarlett, damn her, distracting him from the cat circling below. That hammer of need in his blood hadn’t abated one bit. “I loosened my tie and it was flicking in the breeze. The animal shouldn’t have been able to jump that high, but I guess it was my lucky day.”
“Oh, my G—Ooh!”
Unable to resist, he opened his mouth against her soft neck, scraping his teeth before stealing one small taste of her skin with a damp swipe of his tongue against the pulse racing in the hollow at the base of her throat.
She quivered, her body taut beneath his.
“Scared?” He yanked a firm leash around his basest urges.
“N-no?” she squeaked.
“You don’t sound sure.” His breath on her sensitive nape made her flutter in his hold like a caught bird.
After a moment, she nervously settled as though she had decided to submit to her captor. “I’m sure.” She still sounded tentative. “You won’t hurt me. You wouldn’t do that to Locke.”
“I won’t do that to you,” he contradicted, shifting so they were nose to nose. “No matter how contentious things ever become between us, our conflicts will play out in words. Understand? You’re always safe with me.”
Another quake went through her, something so elemental and electric he could feel the individual hairs on his scalp standing up in response.
“Do you believe me?”
“Yes.” It was barely above a whisper, but delivered without hesitation. Her hands against his chest weren’t pushing him away. They shifted to offer the smallest of caresses.
“Good.” Was it? Thoughts of her had stayed with him for months, nearly getting him killed. He needed as many walls as possible between them, but the idea of her fearing him made him sick.
He rolled her so she was spooned into his front, her warm butt snuggled firmly against his aching erection, her breasts a soft press beneath his forearm.
“Feel that?” he asked with a subtle thrust of his hips.
“Yes.” A different type of tremble went through her, one that left her soft and pliant, and incited in him an urge to howl.
“I’m not going to do anything about it. Go to sleep. I’ll get up with Locke next time and we’ll hope he doesn’t need the milkmaid.”
“Is that what I am?” Her gurgled laugh was filled with discomfiture and a note of yearning that provoked as much satisfaction in him as it did sexual frustration.
“You’re my future wife.” Pure arrogance fueled his words.
“Fast asleep and dreaming already?”
He wasn’t surprised by her swift reply. Or disappointed. He rather liked her quick wit. She had always been a worthy adversary, but he nipped her earlobe in punishment, liking the sob of pleasure-pain that sounded in her throat.
“Go to sleep,” he repeated.
She gave one retaliatory wiggle of her behind in his lap and exhaled, relaxing into slumber.
While he lay awake, aching.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SCARLETT STRUGGLED TO find a routine over the next while. Locke developed full-blown colic, which had her feeling incompetent as a mother. Paloma seemed to agree, making judgmental asides every chance she got. Scarlett rode that out, too tired to fight back and having enough trouble concentrating on work. When she did lie down for a nap, her mind raced with everything she ought to be doing and she couldn’t sleep.
Her doctor thought she had a case of baby blues and recommended she let the nanny do more, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave her son with anyone, not even Javiero. Locke sounded too distressed for her to do anything other than hold him, even though she felt helpless when she did.
She would have talked it out with Kiara, but her friend was in the throes of her Paris show. All Scarlett could do was send a hideously expensive gift, express her regret that she couldn’t celebrate with her and wistfully read about Kiara’s explosive success in the days afterward.
Scarlett was so proud of her she wound up crying over it, which flummoxed Javiero.
“You’re still upset you couldn’t attend?”
“I’m just really happy for her.” She laughed off her overreaction, but melancholy had taken hold of her lately, swamping her at different times. She didn’t understand how she could feel as though a rain cloud hung over her when things with Javiero had improved. She ought to feel happier, but she was so afraid that this tentative truce between them could end at the least wrong word, she was filtering everything she said.
Her tension was off the scale and when a package turned up a week after Kiara’s show, she had no choice but to talk about her friend.
She clasped her hot cheeks when Javiero called her to his study, and she recognized the shape. “I completely forgot about that.”
“What is it?” Javiero asked.
“A painting. Of me.”
“By Kiara?” The light went out of his eye and even though he didn’t move, he retreated.
“Yes.” She shrugged self-consciously and would have opened it in private, but he used his pocketknife to release the bands of tape, starting the process.
She carefully worked the rest of the packaging off the framed oil, revealing herself in a summer dress, pregnant, reading a book.
“It’s one of the last ones she finished before Niko passed. She promised it to me, but wanted to display it at her show. It turned out well, don’t you think?”
She peered up at him, anxious for approval on her friend’s behalf. Don’t hate me for loving her.
“It’s beautiful,” Javiero said with surprised appreciation as he studied the expression of concentration Kiara had caught on her face, one that conveyed both the excitement and angst of becoming a new mother. The fact the book was a self-help on motherhood injected a poignant irony to the composition, but Kiara’s deep affection toward her and the affinity all mothers felt toward one another imbued the image as well.
“She’s very talented,” Javiero said after a long minute.
“So talented.” Scarlett hid her gush of fresh tears by plucking the envelope from where it was attached to the back of the frame and swiping her sleeve under her eyes to read it. “Oh, gosh.” She blushed again. “I wouldn’t think anyone would want a pregnant stranger on their wall, but she had several offers. This is a list of collectors to contact if I ever want to sell it.” She showed him the extremely healthy bids.
Javiero gave a low whistle. “That’s a very generous gift. I’ll arrange to have it insured.”
“She is generous. So warm and funny. I miss her a lot,” she said before she thought better of it.
Just as she feared, Javiero seemed to take that as a nudge for him to mend fences with Val. His mood slid into the tundra of the subarctic. He offered her a tissue, but his compassion stopped there. “You’re texting and calling her, aren’t you?”
She tried not to, knowing he barely tolerated their friendship. “We’r
e both busy.” She blew her nose, embarrassed. “I don’t mean to cry. I think I’m grieving a little.”
“For Dad?” He withdrew even more.
“For the way things were. Life wasn’t perfect in Greece, but those problems were familiar. I knew how to surmount them. I...” She hesitated, not sure how he would take this. “I feel lonely here. Which isn’t rational,” she rushed to add. “I was lonely on the island, too. At first. Working for Niko didn’t leave time for any sort of personal life. The staff kept a polite distance because I gave them orders on his behalf. If I accompanied him anywhere, I was there to work. Then Kiara joined us and she was caught in this strange middle ground, too. She wasn’t family, but she wasn’t an employee. We became very close.”
His cheek ticked. After a moment, he said, “My cousin invited us for dinner. I put her off because you’re spread so thin, but maybe an evening out would be welcome?”
A few members of Javiero’s extended family had dropped by to meet Locke. They had offered Scarlett a variety of cool, curious and cautious welcomes. That particular cousin had a baby a few months older than Locke and had seemed genuine in her offer to make tea if Scarlett wanted to visit and swap war stories, but Scarlett wasn’t anxious to admit to a stranger that she was struggling.
She could tell Javiero was trying to help, though. She forced a smile. “That sounds nice.”
Accepting that dinner seemed to open a floodgate. Invitations poured in and they were out every other night for the next while, throwing off what little routine Scarlett had established. Most were intimate soirees, but that still meant she was tied up in the evening and had to make time midday for trying on dresses and finding a hostess gift.
