by Lynne Graham
Typical, she thought angrily. Rafael Ransome thinks he’s too damned special to wait his turn. As she watched he began to speak in a low voice to the befuddled guy who had been holding everyone up. There was nothing threatening about his body language and the conversation, considering the older man’s loud hostility, seemed to be perfectly amicable. Possibly too amicable for Rafe, she thought as the drunk suddenly threw his arms about the younger man’s neck and announced to everyone that this was a good guy!
Natalie watched in disbelief as the man let Rafe lead him back to a seat in the waiting area and bring him a drink from the vending machine. It would seem that nobody was immune to Rafe’s charm and persuasiveness.
By the time the overtaxed security team arrived the queue was moving smoothly and Rafe had, much to Natalie’s discomfort, joined her.
‘Did you have to interfere? What if he’d got nasty? You could have made things worse.’ She heard her voice rise to an unattractive, shrill accusing note. ‘You should have left it for the people who are paid to deal with that sort of thing,’ she gritted. ‘The ones who know what they’re doing.’
One of that number chose that precise moment to approach them. ‘Cheers, mate,’ he said, slapping Rafe on the shoulder. ‘Understand we owe you one. Old Charlie’s a regular,’ he explained, nodding in the direction of the old man who was now snoring happily away. ‘But he can get nasty. Last time he took a swing at a nurse.’
‘See, you shouldn’t have interfered,’ Natalie insisted, glaring up at the modest hero. ‘Have-a-go heroes usually get themselves or someone else hurt.’
‘Well, I didn’t.’
Natalie, who was feeling physically ill visualising a scenario where he had got injured, didn’t reply.
‘I just need to find out which ward they’ve taken Rose to,’ she explained hoarsely. ‘You don’t need to hang around,’ she added pointedly.
Rafe smiled down into her face but didn’t budge.
To Natalie’s intense annoyance, when it was her turn and she enquired about Rose from the pretty girl behind the desk it was to Rafe the young woman replied.
‘Your little girl has been taken up to Ward Six. If you and your wife—’
‘She’s not his little girl and I am not his wife!’ Natalie snarled before she stamped away. ‘That should make you happy,’ she added under her breath. It just made her sick that some women were so obvious, and some men just lapped it up.
‘You think I’m in with a chance there, then?’
He must have incredibly acute hearing. ‘Listen, I’m grateful you got me here,’ she said, sounding anything but, ‘but, like I said, there’s absolutely no need for you to stay.’ As she spoke they came to another intersection; Natalie took the right turn without looking at the direction sign overhead.
‘I take it you’ve been here before,’ Rafe observed drily.
‘Why are you still here?’ she puffed, genuinely puzzled by his continued presence.
‘It would be like walking out before the end of a film if I left now…I’d be wondering all night what happened.’
They had reached the door to the ward. Natalie pressed the buzzer and waited. Still slightly breathless from the brisk jogging pace he’d set, she tilted up her head to the man beside her—it went without saying that he wasn’t out of breath. Just looking at him standing there in his designer suit with not a hair out of place made her bristle with antagonism. How had she ever imagined they could be friends…?
‘I’m so glad we are providing some entertainment for you!’ she exclaimed bitterly. ‘Better than interactive telly.’
A muscle clenched in his lean cheek. ‘For God’s sake, woman, it was a joke. I know you think I’m some sort of heartless creep…’ It was pretty hard to miss the fact—she didn’t fall over herself to deny this estimation. ‘What is it with you? Why can’t you accept people want to help? Why do you throw their concern back in their faces?’
The anger faded from his face as he looked into her pale, upturned features—too-bright eyes looked back at him. He judged that she was keeping going on nervous tension alone. Take that away and she would shatter like a piece of the fragile porcelain she reminded him of.
Natalie blinked. ‘You want to help…?’
‘I’d like to stay until you find out how your daughter is.’ Rafe’s frustrated urge to protect her from dead-beat ex-husbands and her own stubborn independence found release in a fresh burst of anger. ‘You’ll drive yourself into the ground with this I-don’t-need-anyone stuff,’ he predicted grimly. ‘Who’s going to look after your daughter then?’ Natalie winced at this brutal observation. ‘Your loser ex…?’
Her eyes filled with tears. Nice one, you always have to go too far, don’t you, Rafe…?
‘If you want me to go, just say so and I will,’ he grunted.
Gold-shot green locked with electric-blue and Natalie’s mind went a blank, then from out of nowhere she heard herself say, ‘No! No, I don’t want you to go.’
Natalie saw some emotion, strong but unidentifiable, flicker in the back of his eyes and she went pink. Her no hadn’t been a laid-back, if-you-like sort of no, more a raw, you’ll-leave-over-my-dead-body sort of no. Another of those silences filled with dangerous currents began to stretch between them. It was broken when a crackly voice emerged from the speaker on the wall.
With a sigh of relief Natalie identified herself and the door clicked open.
She turned to Rafe and gave an offhand shrug. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude but I’m used to doing this alone.’
‘And do you like it that way?’
‘I haven’t had much choice. Someone has to make the decisions and I’m the one on the spot,’ she explained matter-of-factly. ‘You can stay if you like, but you’ll have to wait here.’ She nodded towards some seats and left him. She had no expectation that he would still be there when she returned.
He was.
CHAPTER SIX
NATALIE stopped mid-yawn and stared. ‘You’re still here!’ The clock on the wall behind him read half-past midnight.
Rafe languidly uncurled his long, lean length from the uncomfortable-looking chair that was far too small to accommodate him and stretched. The action caused his shirt to pull tight, revealing the definition of his well-developed chest muscles shadowed by dark body hair and his washboard-flat belly.
She knew she was staring but tiredness made Natalie less able to adequately disguise the effect this disturbing spectacle was having on her—if not from him, certainly from herself. Finally in a position where she couldn’t hide from the truth, she could hardly believe that she’d been walking around for weeks acting as if the facts her blood pressure went rocketing and she couldn’t think straight when he was around were simply a coincidence.
Talk about fooling yourself!
‘Why…?’ she asked, closing her eyes briefly while she regained a degree of composure. Now she had accepted how attracted to him she was, she could guard against it. If she’d been more honest sooner that kiss might not have happened.
When she opened her eyes again Rafe had fastened a button on his loose-fitting jacket. She watched, her expression carefully neutral, as he smoothed back his thick hair, which to her eyes seemed perfectly ordered. She found herself considering how it might feel to mess it up again…to run her fingers deep into that lush— Stop that, Natalie!
‘I had nowhere else to be.’
Natalie could not allow a lie this blatant to pass unchallenged. ‘I find that difficult to believe.’
‘So now you’re wondering what my ulterior motives are. Actually, Natalie…I fell asleep,’ he ruefully revealed in the manner of someone making a clean breast of it. ‘I had a long session with Magnus Macfaden today…the usual battle of attrition.’
He seemed genuine enough and she supposed the explanation was just about plausible.
‘No wonder you’re tired, then.’ Natalie had never met the head of the famous electronics firm but she had heard about him. ‘I’m
just surprised you managed to sleep through the noise.’ Everyone entering and leaving the ward would have passed by him and it had been a busy evening.
‘Oh, I can sleep anywhere, any time.’
‘And with whoever you want, but then you already know that. Everyone who reads a tabloid knows that.’ Please tell me I didn’t just say that out loud.
‘Are your objections moral or personal?’ he enquired with interest.
‘Neither!’ she squeaked. ‘Your personal life is your own business.’
‘It’s not nearly as…active, as the papers would have you believe.’
‘Whatever,’ she said, evincing disinterest.
‘How is your daughter?’
‘Rose is much better, thanks. She’s finally asleep and off the nebuliser. I just thought I’d stretch my legs; if you fall asleep in one of those chairs you can’t move in the morning.’
Rafe let his head fall back and flexed his shoulders. ‘That I can believe,’ he grimaced.
‘What you need is a massage,’ she observed without thinking—at least, she was thinking, but of things she had no business to be thinking about.
A half-smile played around his lips. ‘Are you offering…?’
Natalie went as red as it was possible to go without spontaneously combusting. ‘Most certainly not!’
His suggestive sigh of pity combined with the lingering image in her head of her hands sliding over oiled golden flesh made her stomach muscles flutter madly. Their eyes touched and the liquid heat pooled shockingly between her thighs.
‘Have you done many all-night stints in the chairs?’
Natalie couldn’t look at him.
‘One or two. You know, about that kiss earlier…I don’t want you to get the wrong idea…’ she said awkwardly.
‘What idea would that be?’
‘I don’t…well, I don’t have casual relationships. It wouldn’t be fair to Rose for her to get fond of a man only to have him disappear from her life. She’s already had that happen once. I’m not saying this because I think you want to…’
‘Yes, you do, and you’re right.’
‘You w…want me…?’ Her cheeks burned. ‘I mean you…’
‘Right first time.’ Natalie’s jaw dropped. ‘Listen, I hear what you’re saying about your daughter, but what are you going to do, remain celibate?’
‘It’s worked for me so far.’ She saw the flicker of shock in his eyes and hurried on. ‘People put far too great an emphasis on sex.’
‘It’s a very basic need. Sex is like any other appetite…’
‘For men maybe.’
‘For women, too, trust me…’ he drawled.
‘Do I look that stupid?’
‘A lot of women don’t want a deep and meaningful relationship. A hotel room and a long lunch hour,’ he elaborated crudely. ‘Functional sex is more to their taste. Maybe you should try and develop a taste for that if you don’t want any involvement.’
Was he trying to insult her? She found the idea of the sort of cold-blooded clinical encounter he described appalling. ‘Is that what you’re offering me?’
‘I thought it was the other way around.’ He didn’t have the faintest idea why the idea of sex without the complications should outrage him so much.
‘How do you figure that one?’
‘Well, you do want to keep your home a male-free zone…’
‘How does that put me in a hotel room with you?’ Natalie tried to sound amused and failed.
‘You don’t seriously expect the attraction between us to simply go away, do you? Pretending it’s not there doesn’t work—we’ve tried that! It’s inevitable that we’ll end up in bed at some point.’
‘How dare you talk to me like that?’ she gasped.
‘I dare because I’m the man who wants to go home with you,’ he reminded her softly.
Natalie’s eyes widened; this was news to her and, maybe from his expression, Rafe, too.
She bit her lip. ‘We can’t talk about this here.’
‘Then I hope for the sake of my sanity that you’re not going to be here long?’
‘I think they’re going to let us out in the morning this time,’ she revealed, half of her wishing it were longer if it meant she didn’t have to confront the issues he had raised. ‘Which is a big relief. If Rose hadn’t got to go to the wedding I don’t like to think what sort of fuss she’d have kicked up.’
‘Wedding?’
‘Yes, the one that Luke was going to come to with me. Rose is going to be bridesmaid at her dad’s wedding—on Valentine’s Day,’ she explained with a wry smile. Mike had not been such a romantic when he’d been married to her.
‘You’re going to your ex’s wedding?’
Natalie grimaced at the incredulity in his voice; she’d seen that response before. ‘Before you ask, I’m not actually a masochist, or that forgiving, it’s just Rose wants me to come and see her in her bridesmaid dress, and Mike might not be my husband any more but he’ll always be her father,’ she explained gravely.
The last thing she wanted to become was one of those mothers who bad-mouthed their ex-partners to the kid caught in the middle.
Despite her apparent composure when she mentioned her ex, Rafael couldn’t help but wonder if she had come to terms with the situation quite as well as she liked people to think. Inexplicably any number of women nurtured passions for men who treated them appallingly. He frowned as he scanned her face for signs of the secret passion he had half convinced himself she was nursing. It was quite possible Natalie still carried a torch for the pathetic jerk.
‘And Luke was going with you?’
‘He was,’ she confided with a sleepy yawn.
‘Then you two are…?’
‘Just good friends. This is so strange…’ she mused.
‘What’s so strange, Natalie?’
‘Talking to a real person…as in one who is over ten,’ she elaborated, ‘here.’ Her gesture took in the walls, which were covered in brightly coloured childish paintings. ‘The nurses are lovely but they’re always so busy.’ She was totally unaware of the wistful note in her voice. ‘And sometimes you just want to talk to someone who doesn’t consider tomato ketchup on chips the height of sophistication.’
‘I will try and do my best to supply some adult conversation.’
‘So long as you remember that’s all I want.’
‘How could I forget? Why was Luke going with you?’
‘If you must know, I didn’t want to turn up alone looking like a sad loser.’
‘Why would you look like a sad loser?’
Natalie threw him a pitying look—this man knew nothing about being a single female approaching thirty or, for that matter, looking like a sad loser. She was dimly aware that a combination of exhaustion and relief was making her not just light-headed, but dangerously garrulous, too.
‘Think about it,’ she suggested. ‘I’m a woman whose husband left her for a gorgeous blonde and everyone knows a female is unfulfilled unless she is half of a partnership.’
‘I hesitate as a mere man to disagree, but isn’t that a slightly old-fashioned attitude?’
‘It’s the way it is. I suppose I should have the guts to be single and proud; asking Luke to pretend to be my lover is even more pathetic than being dumped. Poor Luke.’
‘And I sent Luke away.’
Natalie nodded and took the cup of coffee he handed her from the vending machine. Nursing it, she sat down on one of the nasty, shiny fake leather seats. ‘You could say you owe me a pretend lover.’ She took a sip and winced as the scalding liquid burnt her tongue.
‘Then I suppose I’m obligated to provide you with a substitute.’
‘Know a good escort agency, do you? Mind you, even if you did I doubt if I could afford the rates of the sort of place you would use.’ She chuckled weakly at her joke.
Rafe blinked. ‘I can’t say anyone has ever accused me of being au fait with high-class escort services before.’
>
‘Gracious, I didn’t mean…I don’t think that you…’ She gave a gusty sigh of relief. ‘You were winding me up? I thought you were about to sack me for sure, or have you already done that? I forget,’ she admitted with a yawn.
‘No, and I have a suggestion to put to you. I have this idea about starting up a facility to offer advice to small businesses…’ He stopped. ‘Well, like you said, this isn’t the place and you are dead on your feet.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Sure you are,’ Rafe murmured as he took the seat beside hers.
‘I’ll just rest my eyes for a minute.’
‘Good idea.’
The periods her lashes lay against her waxily pale cheek before she forced her eyes open got gradually longer. For some time after her head had fallen against his shoulder Rafe stayed still, afraid to wake her. When it became obvious nothing was going to do that he shifted so that he could look at her sleeping face. It was the sort of face a man could look at for a long time without growing tired—maybe never!
Natalie woke in a strange bed. It took a few panicky moments before she recognised her spartan surroundings. She wished she weren’t so familiar with the small room reserved for parents who wanted to stay overnight with their children.
Yawning, she threw back the covers. She was still fully dressed. Her frown deepened as she saw her shoes neatly placed at the bedside. She couldn’t recall putting them there or, for that matter, taking them off. In fact she had no recollection of getting into bed at all—the last thing she remembered was in fact… Good God!
She hadn’t forgotten because she hadn’t done any of those things, which meant that someone had done them for her. That meant…
The nurse at the desk looked up as Natalie approached.
‘Oh, you’re awake.’ She smiled. ‘I was just going to take your boyfriend a cup of tea. Would you like one?’
‘My boyfriend?’ Natalie echoed warily.
‘He’s in with Rose. He’s got quite a way with her, hasn’t he?’ she observed. ‘Until he turned up I thought we were going to have to wake you. She was really cranky when she woke.’
