by Trish Morey; Day Leclaire; Natalie Anderson; Brenda Jackson; Ann Voss Peterson
He wasn’t sure he was hearing her right. A woman was complaining about having nothing to do but lounge by the pool or go shopping? Carla had never complained about not having a job. Carla had never complained about not having anything to do. But he shoved thoughts of Carla away. At least he knew from what he’d seen and what Rosa had confirmed, she knew how to eat. ‘You didn’t sound bored when I walked in before.’
‘Rosa took pity on me. She’ll soon get sick of it. But if I had a job at the supermarket—’
‘No.’
‘It’s only just around the corner—’
‘Out of the question.’
‘Just a few shifts a week—’
‘Is there something wrong with your hearing? I said no!’
She stamped her foot. ‘Then what am I supposed to do all day? What am I allowed to do by the lord and master of the house?’
He shrugged, half smiling to himself. Did she have any idea how cute she looked when she got angry and stamped her foot?
‘Why not decorate the nursery, if you’re so keen to keep busy?’
‘The nursery?’
‘I’ll need somewhere for this baby when it’s born.’
‘But I don’t…It’s not…Dominic, it’s not my place to organise your baby’s nursery. It’s not like it’s my baby.’
He looked at her levelly, resenting the way she could so easily divorce herself from the child she carried as if it meant nothing to her. Wasn’t she a woman? Surely she must have one maternal bone in her body? ‘You wanted a job. I’m giving you one.’
Singapore was hot. Drenching. The negotiations over the sale of an office and shopping complex even more draining. But the buyers had wilted first, and he’d got his price and even an earlier flight home to Sydney. Now all he wanted was a shower and a cold beer and a chance to read the article he’d spied in a woman’s magazine left on the seat next to him in the plane, not necessarily in that order.
He pulled the car up outside the garage. He’d put it away later on when he went down to the workshop after dinner. It relaxed him even when it frustrated him, and it frustrated him a lot. He still didn’t know what he was doing, but he sensed he was getting better. Or maybe he just needed the escape.
A sound alerted him—a splash that hadn’t come from the low swell on the rocks below. Someone was in the pool? Curious, he went to investigate, rounding the wall that screened off the pool area.
Someone was in the pool, submerged dolphin style halfway along the bottom. Angelina, he realised, with those long limbs, although it was hard to see anything more than two brief splashes of colour through the water. A few more underwater strokes and she neared the end, rising to the surface with a gasp. Not bad, he acknowledged. He knew what it took to get from one end of that pool to the other on one breath. Not bad at all.
And then she climbed out of the pool and his own breath was punched out of him. She was long and sleek and glowing wet, the bikini top struggling to cover her breasts, her upper arms slim rather than skinny now, even managing to look toned.
She’d put on weight, he realised approvingly. And as his gaze travelled down, he saw her belly, softly rounded, and felt a surge of masculine pride that was aeons old.
That was his child growing. His child swelling this woman’s body and turning her lush like fruit ripening on a tree. As he watched, she turned her face up to the sun and squeezed the water from her hair, the action lifting her swelling breasts and emphasizing the long, fluid lines of her body.
God, but she looked sexy with his baby in her belly. And he was hit by a surge of lust so sudden and overwhelming that he had to force himself not to bridge the distance between them and snatch her up and bury himself in her long, sleek depths.
A moment later, appalled, he strode into the house. What the hell was wrong with him? How long had it been since he’d had sex? Clearly too long if he was starting to have fantasies about the likes of Mrs Cameron.
Rosa met him inside. ‘Welcome home, Dominic. I trust everything went well. Is there anything you need?’
‘A shower,’ he said thickly, having no trouble working out the order he wanted things now, unable to meet Rosa’s gaze in case the images he’d seen were still burned on his eyes for all to see. A long cold shower. ‘That’ll do for starters.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
HE WAS doing it all wrong. He was in his office, showered, with a cold beer in a frosted glass beside him, poring over the article.
He was only on page two of Bonding with Your Unborn Baby, but he didn’t have to finish it to know he was doing it all wrong.
It was important, the experts advised, to start bonding with your child even before it was born. Women had an advantage over men, the article maintained, the bond developing naturally over the course of nine months of pregnancy. Women naturally connected with the baby sooner. Men had to make an effort.
He rubbed his jaw with one hand. He wasn’t making an effort. He’d done everything he could in the last month to avoid contact with the woman who bore his child. Which might have been all right if Angelina was picking up the slack.
But she wasn’t going to be around after the baby was born. She didn’t even want a baby. She was the last person who was into forming bonds or making connections. Hell, she was so not into this child that she hadn’t even wanted to have anything to do with organising a nursery for it!
Which meant he had no choice. He was just going to have to become more involved. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t survive the odd encounter with Angelina for his baby’s sake. And he might as well start with organising the nursery.
‘Do you have a list?’ he asked as he steered the car onto the road.
‘A long one. Not that you need everything now. Some things can wait.’
‘Best to get it all now,’ he said. ‘Rosa will be too busy with the baby afterwards.’
‘Rosa is going to be looking after the baby? Does Rosa know that?’
‘It was her idea. Do you have a problem with that?’
She tried to suppress her objections. It wasn’t her place to be concerned with how he intended to manage the care of a new baby with the hours he worked. But still… ‘Rosa would do anything for you and you know it. But she already does so much. How’s she supposed to manage the house and the cooking and a new baby?’
He glanced sideways at her. ‘I thought you were happy to walk away. Why should you even care what happens after you’re gone?’
‘I don’t care,’ she huffed, tired of the direction the conversation was taking, blinking against the sun emerging from behind the dark cloud responsible for the last rain shower and now slanting through her window. ‘You do what you like.’ She tried to tell herself she didn’t care. But he couldn’t be serious, surely? There was no way he could expect Rosa to do all she did and lumber her with a new baby as well.
She tugged on her seat belt, releasing some of the tension so she could angle herself away from the sun, already intent on turning the damp road to steaming. She idly rubbed her belly with her free hand. She was more and more aware of her growing bump now and what it did and didn’t like. Humidity it didn’t.
She wasn’t big by any means, but the changes in her body were a revelation. Every day she seemed to notice something new, a slight change in her shape or the fit of her clothes as her bump grew and her waist thickened.
‘So who would have looked after this baby if it had been yours?’
She swung her head around. ‘Me, of course.’
‘But you never wanted a baby. That’s what you told me.’
So what if she didn’t? ‘Is this actually relevant to anything?’
He shrugged, looked in his mirrors as the lane in front blocked up and smoothly changed gears and lanes in one fluid movement.
‘Why did you marry him?’
‘Did I miss a clause in that agreement I signed? The one that said you were entitled to know my deepest and darkest secrets, along with my most stupid mistakes.’
He flashed her a smile that made her bones turn to jelly and made her glad she was sitting down. He never smiled at her. He avoided her. And when he couldn’t avoid her, he tolerated her. He didn’t smile. ‘Clause twenty-four, sub-clause C. You must have missed it.’
‘Fine,’ she said, still wilting under the combined effects of the sun and one devastating smile. ‘In that case, it was my mother’s fault.’
‘You’re blaming your mother for you marrying Shayne?’
‘Yes. No. Well, sort of. We hadn’t been going out long when we learned she was sick. He was good to me then—good to us—and my mother wanted to see me settled before she died. Wanted me to have the whole white wedding she’d never had. Shayne seemed keen.’ She shrugged. ‘It was the least I could do, under the circumstances.
‘And it was okay. For a while.’ She turned her head away. ‘You know the rest.’ She squeezed her eyes shut, expecting the pain and the prick of tears and wanting to hide her face before that happened, but surprisingly neither pain nor tears arrived. She exhaled a long, slow sigh of relief. Good. So maybe she was over feeling sorry for herself. Just as well, because by the lack of response, it looked like nobody else was interested. ‘So that, in a nutshell, is the whole sad story. Are you asleep yet?’
‘Not likely. Tell me, how did your mother die?’
She looked around, searching the high street shops lining the road, wanting a diversion if not an escape and wondering if it was fair to blame all her discomfort on the humidity. How far was this baby shop anyway? And why was he insisting she even do this? She didn’t want to buy things for a baby she’d never know. She didn’t want to lie in bed at night and imagine it lying in a tiny bassinet she’d chosen or wearing precious little outfits she’d selected.
Couldn’t he see that? Couldn’t he tell that she didn’t want to know anything that would make it harder to forget this child?
And what was he even doing here? He’d shown no real interest in this baby, other than claiming ownership. He’d avoided her the last month and now he wanted to go nursery shopping? What was that about?
‘Unless you don’t want to tell me,’ he prompted.
She put her head back against the headrest, closing her eyes. ‘Breast cancer,’ she said finally. ‘By the time they found it…’ She squeezed her lids tighter together, but this time there was no denying the pain or the tears that squeezed out, suddenly right back there, back at the restaurant and the celebration they’d all assumed it was.
‘Mum treated us all for Christmas lunch, said she’d won some money on Lotto and wanted to splurge. She shouted us all—Shayne and me, his parents, even his sisters and their partners. I think she loved the idea of having a big family around her for once.’ She paused. ‘We’d never had a Christmas meal out before. It was such a treat to eat in a real restaurant. Everyone was wearing party hats and pulling Christmas crackers. It was the best Christmas we’d ever had.’
She dragged in air. She should have realised how tired her mother had looked, even as she’d so valiantly smiled and laughed and joined in. She should have noticed the shadows under her eyes and how little she had eaten herself while everyone around her was feasting. ‘Mum made it a special Christmas for everyone. Until we got home and she confided to Shayne and me the truth. That she was dying. That she had only weeks to live and there was nothing anyone could do for her. The only thing she wanted more than anything was to know that her daughter would be taken care of.’
She took a deep breath, praying for strength to finish. Somehow she needed to finish, if only to explain how she could marry someone who could let her down so badly. ‘We’d only been going out three months by then—when it came down to it we barely knew each other—but Shayne, to his damn credit and his eternal damnation, got down on his knee and proposed right then and there in front of her and what could I do? What could I say? I knew it was crazy and reckless but how could I say no to someone who wanted a dying woman’s wish to come true? We were married a month later next to her hospital bed. Mum was my matron of honour.’
She dropped her head into her lap, one hand covering her mouth to cover the sobs she could no longer contain. ‘We lost her the next day.’
Grief took her then. Grief for her loss. Grief for a well-intentioned but hasty and ill-conceived marriage. Grief for a lost mother and all those lost years. And then she felt his hand around hers, and this time it wasn’t sparks she felt, but warmth and a jolt of connectivity as his fingers squeezed hers, his thumb stroking the back of her hand until the car jerked to a stop and he hauled her bodily against him. She tried to fight, she tried to push herself away, finally giving in when she knew she had no energy for the fight. No hope.
‘She was the reason I was born at all!’ She turned her head up to him through the curtain of her tears, uncaring of her swollen eyes and the mess she’d made of her face. ‘My scumbag father wanted me aborted to avoid the responsibility of having a child. My grandparents wanted me aborted to avoid the shame of an illegitimate grandchild. My mother refused them all. She left everything and everyone she had once loved to protect me.’
Her sobs racked her slender body and he pulled her closer, surprised how easily, how comfortably, she fitted against him, how right it felt holding her.
She made another futile attempt to push away again but there was no way he was letting her go. ‘I’m making you all wet,’ she protested, and still he clung on.
How could he let her go? Because suddenly he understood. Suddenly it all made sense. He had never understood before why she had taken the stance she had, why she had refused her husband the solution the clinic had offered and that Shayne had demanded.
She herself had been given the opportunity to live.
So she would not take another’s life.
And he didn’t want to let her go.
He thought about the agreement, about the money he’d offered and the way she’d protested every step of the way and he finally realised why she would have done this for nothing. Finally he understood.
She deserved a thousand times more for doing what she was doing but she’d wanted nothing and he hadn’t believed her.
Not completely. Not until now.
He held her while her sobs abated, while her breathing calmed. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘You didn’t need to hear all that.’
‘I think I did,’ he told her, his lips brushing her hair, drinking in her scent. ‘And now I understand. Now I know why you are such a special woman.’
She turned her face up to him and he saw the questions skate across the surface of her liquid eyes. Her face was flushed and tear-swept. There were mascara smudges at both eyes. He brushed a loose strand of hair from her face, stroked the pads of his fingers down her cheek and jaw, till they got to her chin and he could angle her face just the way he wanted. She looked so sad he wanted to kiss away her pain. Wanted to let her know he understood.
For a scant second he wondered at his actions. Once before he’d wanted to kiss her. He’d written off the impulse as an aberration. But it hadn’t been an aberration, he now realised. It had been a necessity. An imperative.
One he wasn’t about to let pass again. ‘You are special,’ he told her, part because he suspected she needed to hear it, part because it was true and another part because he damned well wanted to. ‘You are strong and beautiful and if I may say so, very, very alluring.’
Her gasp told him all he needed to know. She didn’t believe it. Which meant that he would just have to convince her.
‘Believe it,’ he said, his lips coming closer, the first pass no more than a whisper of shared air and coiled expectation. Her lips followed his and he smiled. She wanted him. He wanted her to want him.
He knew this was right. Even here, sitting in a car in the midst of a nursery equipment warehouse car park in the middle of a busy day, he knew this was no aberration. This was right.
And this time his lips hesitated, hovered breathlessly above, until the need became urgent and the lu
re of her became too great. And then his lips met hers and he came undone.
His mouth meshed with hers, his fingers tangling in her hair and, like a man dying of thirst, he drank her in.
She was breathing hard when he broke off the kiss.
Breathing almost as hard as he was when he pulled away, his hands lining her jaw, his thumbs working the space between where her lips ended and her cheeks began. Her eyes were wide, brilliant blue and brimming with questions and wonder and fear. It was the fear that scared him the most, the fear that made him realise what he’d done.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, letting her go. ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’
‘It’s okay,’ she said, dabbing her eyes with a tissue, still looking shell-shocked though he could see she was aiming for cool. ‘I realise it didn’t mean anything.’
He climbed from the car, rankled that she’d used the very words that would normally be uppermost in his mind. ‘It meant something,’ he said, pulling her door open a few moments later. ‘It meant sorry for everything you’ve been through. It meant thank you for what you are doing. It meant thank you for telling me.’
‘That’s okay then,’ she said, her composure returned though still wary enough to keep her distance as she climbed out. ‘Maybe we should just forget it happened.’ And she headed for the entrance.
Forget it happened? Forget the sweet taste of her mouth under his? Forget the way she felt so right in his arms?
How the hell was he supposed to do that?
The shop helped. Only it wasn’t a shop, he decided, it was his worst nightmare. The place was acres across. How could anything as tiny as a baby warrant so much stuff?
‘How do we do this quickly?’ he asked.
She looked almost as overwhelmed. ‘Maybe they have some kind of personal shopping consultant service.’
The notion appealed immensely. ‘Let’s find out,’ he said, cutting a swathe through the crowds of couples inspecting prams and cots and baby gear to the service desk.
The woman was serving someone at the head of a line but still she looked up, as if some sixth sense had alerted her. Looked again when she saw what was approaching in his dark trousers and fitted cotton knit top.
