by Kim Lawrence
‘The day I settle for second best is the day I…’ She shrugged and shook her head. ‘It’s just not going to happen. I think my child deserves better.’ The heat died from her face as she lifted her eyes to his and asked simply. ‘Can you offer me better, Luiz?’
‘I can offer you a home where our child will be brought up with parents who are committed to one another.’
Nell’s eyes fell from his. She supposed she ought to be grateful he wasn’t pretending to feel things for her he clearly didn’t, but at that moment being thankful that even after she had virtually begged he was unable to say he loved her was beyond her ability.
‘If I agreed to this I would have to be committed—it’s madness, Luiz. Look, I know you’re trying to be noble and everything,’ she admitted.
‘And you think you should be punished or something…’ That was coming across strongly. ‘Well, I can’t help that. Go jump in an icy lake, give your money to charity if it salves your conscience, but I have to tell you,’ she added in a shaky voice, ‘that the idea of marriage to me being a penance is not all that flattering.’
He regarded her with deep frustration and resisted the childish impulse to tell her that there were women out there who would not consider themselves certifiable if they were to accept his proposal of marriage. That there were women out there who had worked very hard to make him say the words marry me.
But he realised that telling Nell she didn’t know how lucky she was might not be a wise move. It would also give her the ammunition to call him vain, self-satisfied and any other insults that came to mind.
She might also be right.
‘Why do you purposely misinterpret everything I say and do?’
Nell, who translated this complaint as ‘why don’t I agree with everything you say?’ shrugged. ‘What can I say? It’s a gift.’ She anchored her hair behind her ears and, leaning across, took the glass from the coffee table. She wasn’t thirsty, but she needed the breathing and thinking space.
He watched her, his expression brooding as she raised it to her lips and gulped.
‘I could point out the impracticalities of your bringing up a child alone.’
Nell returned his direct look. ‘You could,’ she agreed in a voice that gave no clue to her racing pulse.
‘Or I could fight you for custody?’
He watched the colour fade from her face and regretted his taunt. His eyes fell from hers. ‘Though I don’t think that will be necessary.’
‘Or wise,’ she tacked on seamlessly.
His glance swept upwards and connected with the challenging glitter of her eyes. Holding his gaze, Nell got to her feet and stood there, her hands on her hips, looking, he thought, as proud as a queen for all her baggy sweat pants, tee shirt and that ridiculous cardigan that swamped her.
Through his extreme annoyance a surge of admiration surfaced. Nell Frost was the most obstinate woman he had ever met, but she had guts and an inner toughness that were at variance with the air of extreme fragility more pronounced since her recent weight loss. A frown twitched his eyebrows above his hawkish nose when he recalled how light she had felt in his arms, her bones like a bird. He struggled to make sense of the mixture of lust and protective tenderness that accompanied the recollection.
He didn’t love her. A man could only have one love in his life and he had had his, he reminded himself bleakly, yet the tenderness, the fierce, inexplicable protectiveness, the constant nagging ache of desire in his loins… How could he analyse his feelings for this woman? His thoughts were interrupted by a constant static buzz of emotional interference.
Nell regarded him with cold contempt and warned, ‘If you try to take my baby you’ll have a fight on your hands. I don’t care if you have all the money in the world!’
The determination in her voice made Luiz want to applaud. This woman was irrational, totally unreasonable, but she was a fighter.
He spread his hands in a pacifying gesture. ‘I am a lover, not a fighter, querida.’
‘Yes, I’m sure Sarah would agree.’
‘You’re jealous.’
The accusation brought an angry flush to her cheeks. It was a nasty taunt made totally unforgivable because it was true.
‘Not of Sarah!’ She saw the flicker of puzzlement in his eyes and rushed on before he could ask for an explanation. ‘Could you be more smug and self-satisfied if you tried? Or is this you trying? I’m not going to cry, if that’s what you want.’
Luiz stiffened, a look of frigid affront spreading across his face as he inhaled through flared nostrils. ‘You really think I am that sick and sadistic.’
She suddenly saw that the best way to get him to leave was to offend him, hit him directly on his male pride. God knew nothing else was working and there was only so long she could maintain her shaky pose of indifference before her real feelings came tumbling out.
‘The fact is what happened was a mistake and I wish I could just have a shower and wash you off my skin and forget about you…’
The expression on his face made her voice fade but she took a deep breath, fixed her eyes on a point over his left shoulder and plunged on, finishing in a rapid, slightly defensive tone.
‘I wish I could, but because of the baby I can’t. Obviously you can have access to the baby, but I’m not about to make a stupid mistake worse by marrying you.’
‘You think us sleeping together was a mistake.’
His outrage struck her as slightly hypocritical.
‘Well, if it wasn’t a mistake, Luiz, what was it? In my book there is only one reason to get married and that is love.’ Short of begging him to say it she couldn’t make her request any more obvious and from the flicker in his eyes she knew that he was aware of what she wanted to hear.
Overcome with mortification, she walked over to the door and held it open for him. Please do not go through, do not leave, love me…
‘I think you should leave.’
He picked up his jacket and coat, slung them over his shoulder.
At the door he turned his head. ‘You are being totally irrational.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s not negotiable. As far as I’m concerned the only reason to get married is love, not duty or financial security.’
He dashed a hand across his face, the gesture intensely weary. ‘We will speak when you are being more realistic.’
‘I don’t want your kind of realism, Luiz.’ I want love—your love. ‘You married for love once—why shouldn’t I have the same thing?’
In the act of shrugging on his damp jacket he stopped. ‘I will not speak of Rosa with you.’
‘What makes you think I want to?’ she exclaimed as her feelings burst through her barrier of outward indifference with a rush. ‘Your perfect paradise marriage…who could compete? Polish your memories and take them to bed with you. I hope they keep you warm, because I won’t! What makes you think any woman wants the man she is in bed with, the man she has just given…’ Her voice broke and she took a step back, fending off the hand he extended to her with an angry shake of her head. ‘I really don’t want to marry a man who reaches for me in the night and calls me by his dead wife’s name.’
A look of stark shock froze on Luiz’s face. ‘I did that?’
‘You did.’
‘That’s why you left without a word?’
‘I don’t much warm to the idea of a man making love to me while he’s thinking of someone else. You would grow to resent this baby.’ She pressed a hand to her stomach and ignored his harsh protest. ‘Because he’ll never be Rosa’s baby any more than I’ll ever be Rosa.’
‘That would never happen, Nell. It has never happened. When I am with you I can think of nothing else but you. When I am not with you,’ he added with a hard laugh, ‘the world seems empty. You are under my skin, in my blood—you are so enmeshed with me nothing short of surgery could remove you. And the baby I will love for himself.’
Nell turned her head, refusing to recognise the urgent note of harsh, anguished sincer
ity in his voice—she couldn’t. ‘You have issues, Luiz—face it and them, then we might have something to discuss.’
She opened the door and he walked through.
Luiz walked down the path listening to the sounds of her wild sobbing inside. They cut like a knife.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
IN A previous reincarnation the small-town library had been a chapel and the acoustics were still excellent. A pencil dropped on the mezzanine level that housed the computer terminals could be heard at the librarian’s desk tucked away at the back of the ground-floor library proper.
Nell, who was sitting in an alcove beneath the balcony, a book on her knee, wide-eyed toddlers sitting around her on cushions, heard the sound of footsteps as someone walked up the aisle between the high shelves, but she didn’t turn around as she closed the book. She did, however, tilt her head towards a group of teenage girls who were hanging over the balcony, their shrill girlish giggles drawing a few glances from people below. Some were less tolerant than others.
She caught their eyes and shook her head, miming a zipping motion across her lips. They lowered the levels of their giggles while one mimed back a swooning action and stabbed her finger towards a figure walking up the aisle between the rows of tall shelves.
Nell closed the book on her lap with an air of finality and explained to the toddlers with genuine regret—the innocence and enthusiasm of the pre-schoolers always made story time a favourite part of Nell’s day—that they could have another story on Friday but right now she had a lot of work to do.
She frowned a little as the teenagers’ volume rose again and turned her head, idly curious to see what young man had got the group so animated.
The world swam slightly out of focus and she forgot how to breathe as she put an identity to the tall figure who was approaching the spot where she sat, her face bathed in the gold light that filtered through the arched ecclesiastical window behind her.
For several seconds her brain froze. It refused to accept the information it was being given.
He couldn’t be here, not here, not now…not ever. This was her safe workaday world. The only place this could happen, and it did, several times a day, was in the privacy of Nell’s own wilful imagination. Had things gone one step further in the week since she’d given him his marching orders? Was she hallucinating…?
A quick furtive glance around the place revealed that if she was so was every other female under ninety in the place!
They were all staring.
Nell’s relief was short-lived. Luiz was here and she had lost the ability to move, she was chained to the ground with a combination of sheer longing and lust.
The emotions crowded in on her. She had told herself the next time this happened she would be in control. If she had been capable Nell would have laughed—control? What a joke!
Her eyes ate him up hungrily… God, but she had missed him, how much she hadn’t allowed herself to acknowledge until now. She blinked, hard unshed tears blurring her vision. Damn him, no wonder all eyes were on him, no wonder her heart was being squeezed in a vice—he was beautiful, the epitome of masculinity.
In a sack he would make heads turn, but dressed like this in a dark designer suit that emphasised his lean, athletic, Greek-god frame he had a face that surpassed Olympian or Hollywood heartthrob standards.
As she watched him a wave of despondency swept over Nell. The fact they lived in different worlds had never been more apparent.
Here in her world the qualities that made Luiz stand out in the most glamorous and exotic locations were even more marked. Even from fifty feet away you could feel the self-assurance, authority, and electric sex appeal he projected like an invisible aura.
As he drew closer Nell could see other things, like the tension that drew the golden skin taut across the incredible bones of his face and the gleam of steely determination that glowed in his eyes that gave him an air of gorgeous menace—he was a man on a mission.
The question was what mission?
She gave her head a little shake and said in a hard little voice, ‘Get real, Nell!’ You were in big trouble when you allowed your fantasies to intrude into real life. If he was a man in love he was hiding it well—unless love made him as mad as hell!
Luiz thrust his hand in his pocket and pulled out the contents of the parcel that had landed on his desk that morning. His jaw hardened as his fingers closed around it—the symbolism had been obvious, but if she thought she could excise him from her life he was here to make her realise that was not going to happen.
Nell barely noticed as the book fell from her nerveless fingers and onto the floor, or registered the mothers who had begun to collect their offspring, most finding a reason to linger as the tall, utterly gorgeous, rampantly male figure drew closer.
Struggling to cope with her fluttering heart, she was oblivious to the collective fluttering of every female within a fifty-yard radius. By the time Luiz finally stopped a few feet away and stood there, one hand dug in the pocket of his dark jacket, the other sweeping his lush hair, which since their last meeting had grown, away from his forehead, Nell felt physically sick.
Brace yourself, Nell, she told herself. Don’t lose it, girl. She picked up the book she had dropped on the floor and adopted an exaggerated expression of surprise as she straightened up.
‘Luiz? Sorry, I didn’t see you there.’ Nell struggled not to wince. Luiz might be extraordinarily lacking in vanity considering he was a lot of people’s idea of perfect—or was that just hers?—but even he was not going to swallow that.
‘Some things do not change.’
But he had, Luiz reflected, and there was no going back to the man he had been. He didn’t intend to do so; his life for the first time in years was going forward. A flicker of tenderness warmed the somber, shadowy darkness of his eyes as he added huskily, ‘You still lie very badly, querida.’ ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she husked. ‘We had an agreement…’ Her eyes drank him in, her nostrils widening as her starved senses inhaled the scent of his body. She took a step back and almost tripped over one of the bright floor cushions.
In her head she could see his arms opening and her walking into them. She blinked to clear the scarily real product of her wishful thinking.
‘Hello, Nell, and for the record I agreed to nothing.’
‘What are you doing here?’ She missed the casual she was aiming for by about a million miles and produced shaky scared.
The muscles in his brown throat worked convulsively as the knot of emotion behind his breastbone hardened. ‘I came to see you.’
‘You did?’
‘You look…’ He stopped, unable to continue as the impulse to gather her in his arms became overwhelming.
Why was he fighting it? It was where she belonged.
Nell, practically able to feel the tension that rolled off his rigid body in waves, inserted, ‘Well, I can’t look much worse than you do. When was the last time you had a decent meal?’
‘Meal?’ he echoed, looking at her as though she had gone mad. ‘I’ve no time for food.’
Nell hid her anxiety behind a sarcastic façade. ‘You make it sound optional.’
‘I have not come here to discuss dietary requirements.’
‘You should not be here at all. I’m at work.’ She swallowed as tears filled her eyes. ‘Please, Luiz, I really can’t take this. You…don’t, Jack,’ she added, directing a distracted glance towards the small figure with a grubby face and very sticky hands who pulled urgently at Luiz’s immaculately tailored trouser leg.
She privately blessed the child for the interruption. Another second and she might have said something embarrassingly stupid. ‘I’m sorry, your suit…’
‘Relax…’ Luiz recommended. Dropping down into a graceful squat, head tilted a little to one side, he looked at the chubby-faced child. ‘It’s fine.’
Watching him smile at the toddler made Nell’s heart squeeze in her chest. Her hands went to her stomach. He would make a
great dad. Was she being totally selfish refusing to marry him? Did she have the right to deprive her baby of a full-time dad?
She shook her head. A week earlier it had all seemed perfectly straightforward, but the intervening time had lessened her conviction—was she doing the right thing? What were the right reasons for marriage? Was compromise so bad?
Feeling torn apart by the arguments going round and round in her head, Nell wrapped her arms around herself and hugged tight in a protective gesture. It was impossible to make an objective decision when she ached so much to be with him it physically hurt.
Luiz, a smile curving his lips, glanced up at her. Nell, unable to hide her feelings—it was so damn exhausting and he was so damn gorgeous—watched his expression change, the humour fade, and saw the flicker of male satisfaction replace it in his dark eyes.
A second firm tug on his trouser leg dragged Luiz’s attention back to the child.
‘What can I do for you, Jack?’
The little boy fixed him with a critical eye. ‘You’re big, but not as big as my dad,’ he added loyally.
‘I expect you will be big one day like your dad.’
‘Have you got a dog?’
‘I do have a dog.’
‘He’s got a dog!’ Jack shouted to anyone who would listen. ‘I want a dog.’ He thought about it a bit and added, ‘I need a dog. My mum says dogs are—’
Nell took him by the shoulders and gently but firmly turned him around. ‘Say goodbye, Jack, your mum is here.’
Jack spotted his mother and trotted off.
‘Nice kid.’
Nell nodded. ‘It’s a lovely age. Jack,’ she explained with a strained laugh, ‘has something of a one-track mind.’
She watched through her lashes as Luiz rose to his feet with effortless elegance.
‘I find myself in a similar position.’ Despite being spoken in a soft voice, the emotion-packed statement emerged with a force that rocked Nell like an emotional force ten.
