“What’s wrong?”
“Cramp. Get it all the time,” he said through gritted teeth.
Charlie crossed to his side. “You need to stop clenching. Flex your foot,” she instructed, batting his hands away.
She dug her fingers into his calf, massaging the spasming muscle. He groaned and she dug a little harder, reaching for his foot. Gripping it, she arched it toward his body, then away again so his foot was extended. She repeated the motion and after a few seconds she felt his muscle loosen beneath her fingers.
“Better?”
“Yes. Man, that’s a killer.”
She dug her thumb into his muscle one last time before letting go and straightening.
“You need to stretch more.”
“That’s what my personal trainer says.”
“He’s right.” She was standing so close the outside of her thigh was pressed against his knee. She told herself to move, but Rhys looked at her with an appreciative smile and her legs ignored her.
“You have strong hands,” he said.
“Thanks. I think.”
“That was a compliment, in case you missed it.”
“I’m not sure it is.”
“Sure it is. I didn’t say you had man hands.”
“God forbid.”
His smile broadened. Of its own accord, her gaze drifted below his neck. She could see the dark curls of his chest hair through the open collar of his shirt, and a small patch of his flat belly where his shirt had ridden up. His knees were slightly bent and the fabric of his trousers hugged his legs, outlining his powerful thigh muscles.
She knew what those thighs looked like. She knew what lay between them, too.
Suddenly he shifted, dropping his legs to the ground. She took a hasty step backward as he stood. Her heel caught on one of his shoes and she lost her balance.
Rhys’s reflexes were lightning fast as he steadied her with one hand at her waist and the other on her upper arm.
“Sorry.”
His eyes were very dark as he looked at her. “I think this is officially déjà vu.”
It took her a moment to understand he was referring to the night they’d first met. Looking into his handsome face, she felt a bittersweet pang of regret for the excitement and promise of that night.
“Did you ever get that shirt cleaned?”
“Nope.”
“I left you money.”
Her gaze dropped to the strong column of his throat. Not so many weeks ago she’d kissed him there. She’d pressed her face against his skin and inhaled the lovely smell of him. Spice and man and heat.
“I know. I have to say, I thought you were a little on the stingy side. Took a while for my ego to recover.”
She started then saw his smile and realized he was joking. She smiled sheepishly. “I never thought of it that way.”
“I should hope not.”
“If I had I would definitely have left a bigger tip.”
He laughed. His fingers flexed lightly into the muscles of her shoulder and waist, almost as though he was encouraging her to step closer.
Maybe.
Hot desire flooded her as she contemplated taking that step. The urge was so powerful it stole the breath from her lungs and made the backs of her knees, the creases of her elbows and the nape of her neck instantly damp with sweat.
A long-drawn-out second passed as they stared at one another. Then another.
She had an out-of-body experience as she imagined how they must look to a fly on the wall, standing so close, him holding her as though he was about to kiss her.
As though they were lovers.
Maybe.
She sucked in a shallow, inadequate breath and forced herself to step backward instead of forward. He let go of her slowly, reluctantly—or so it seemed. And then she took another step and common sense returned with a rush of cool objectivity and she shook her head at her own foolishness.
“I’ll get the DVD for you.” She walked to the player, crouching to hit the eject button and collect the disk. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him sit and grab his shoes. By the time she had the DVD in its case he was on his feet again.
“Thanks for coming over,” she said, careful to keep her voice absolutely neutral as she passed him the DVD.
“Thanks for having me.”
They walked to the front door in thick silence.
“I’ll call you on the weekend,” Rhys said as he faced her across the threshold.
“Okay.”
He turned toward the stairs.
“Drive carefully,” she said.
She pushed the door shut between them, only letting out her breath when she’d twisted the lock. She stood very still, listening to his retreating footsteps. Then she walked into the bathroom and flicked on the overhead light. She stood in front of the mirror and stared herself in the eye.
“Don’t be an idiot.”
The woman in the mirror stared back at her. Her hair was a straggly mess, her lipstick long gone, her complexion unflatteringly pale. She looked tired and very, very plain.
As she always did.
Far too plain for a man like Rhys Walker to want.
“Don’t be an idiot,” she said again. Because it was good advice and it bore repeating.
She reached for her toothbrush and prepared for bed—brushing her teeth and washing her face before smoothing on moisturizer. She walked into the bedroom and stripped off her jeans and sweater then pulled on her pajamas.
Right from the start she’d been very clear with herself about what she wanted from her relationship with Rhys—security, love and stability for her child. Another pair of loving hands. Extended family.
What she didn’t want was to develop some kind of ridiculous unrequited crush on a man who was around only because of contraceptive failure. She had spent the first ten years of her life craving something from her father that he had never given her, and she’d learned her lesson as far as that sort of pointless, soul-destroying yearning went. By the time she was twelve she’d understood that happiness was about setting her sights on the things that were possible, the things she could earn and achieve herself without relying on anyone else.
Rhys was not one of those things. She could not win him with her attention to detail and her conscientiousness. She could not earn him with her staying power and determination and smarts.
Therefore she would not want him. She simply refused to. Refused to set herself up for failure and pain by buying into a ridiculous fantasy that would never come to be.
She climbed into bed and turned off the light. She closed her eyes and instantly she was in her living room, staring into Rhys’s face, feeling the pull of desire, every inch of her skin lighting up in anticipation of his touch.
Her lip curled into a sneer at her own foolishness, but she didn’t force the memory away. Instead, she fixed it in her mind, going over and over it, forcing herself to imagine what Rhys had seen when he’d looked into her face—her neediness, her desire, her hope. Forcing herself to see the scene as it had really played out, and not through the hazy, gauzy filter of wishful thinking.
Heat washed through her—embarrassed, self-conscious heat this time instead of desire.
Thank God she hadn’t obeyed the voice screaming in her head and taken a step forward. Thank. God.
Tugging the covers higher around her shoulders, she rolled onto her side, her hand sliding to cover the barely-there bump of her belly.
After long moments the tight feeling in her chest eased.
The small person growing beneath her hand was what was important right now. Nothing else.
Good to remind herself of that.
CHAPTER TEN
WHAT ARE YOU DOING, MAN?
Rhys asked himself that question all the way home from Charlie’s place.
He’d almost kissed her tonight. If she’d been any other woman, he would have. He would have pulled her into his arms and kissed her and seen where it took them—but there was no “seeing where things go” when a woman was pregnant with your child.
Through some miracle, he and Charlie had formed a friendship over the past month. Out of potential disaster they had discovered a shared sense of humor, common values and, he hoped, mutual respect. On a very basic, human level, he liked her. He liked her a lot.
He liked her calm, no-nonsense, straightforward approach. He liked her honesty and quiet courage. He liked her slow smile and her dry wit. He even liked her quietness. With Charlie, there was no pointless chatter. She said what needed to be said. She listened. And when she did say something, it was always worth hearing.
If they’d met under any other circumstances he would have been intrigued and attracted by her. But they hadn’t. They’d had one fiery night together, and now she was carrying their baby.
All of which meant she was out-of-bounds. Big-time.
The relationship they were forging would be tested in a hundred different ways over the coming months. There would be stress and sleeplessness and a million other doubts and domestic crises—he’d seen what happened when a baby was thrown into the mix with his brothers and sisters. Tempers were short. Sleep was precious. Time was at a premium.
He and Charlie were going to need every scrap of goodwill toward one another that they could muster. What they didn’t need was a failed romance lying between them. Hurt feelings and guilt and anger and sadness. It would be tough enough without making their lives more complicated.
Of course, there was always the chance that a romance might work between them. He’d never embarked on a relationship yet that he hadn’t hoped would lead to marriage—he didn’t know anyone who did. What was the point, after all, if you didn’t think things would go all the way? But as his current single status so eloquently proved, none of those relationships had worked out, for a variety of reasons. And there were no guarantees one would work out between him and Charlie, either.
For starters, he had no idea where her head was at in regard to him. Sometimes she looked at him and he was sure he saw an echo of the intense attraction they’d shared that night. Other times she was unreadable and utterly unknowable. If he’d given in to his instincts tonight and kissed her, in all honesty he had no idea if she would have kissed him back or pushed him away.
She stepped away, remember?
So maybe that was his answer. Which meant that he was mulling over a problem that didn’t even exist. If Charlie wasn’t attracted to him the way he was attracted to her, he was spinning his wheels and giving himself a hard time for nothing.
Except…
There had been something in her eyes tonight. Desire. Need. Want. Maybe all of the above. Surely he hadn’t simply imagined that, projecting it on to her because, no matter what else lay between them—the baby, the future—for the life of him he couldn’t forget the night they’d had together.
And it wasn’t only about good sex. Okay, great sex. It was about the whole night. The conversation they’d enjoyed before they went to his place and those moments in the small hours when they’d talked and laughed, lying skin to skin in his bed.
The only way he could explain that came even close to doing it justice was that he’d felt an unspoken connection with her. As cheesy and clichéd as that sounded. No, he hadn’t heard birds singing or a choir reaching for high notes. But it had been real. He’d felt as though they’d seen each other. It definitely hadn’t been just a roll in the hay.
For you, maybe. But she left without waking you. Remember?
Rhys pulled into his building’s underground parking garage and cut the engine. It hit him for the first time him how incredibly un-Charlie-like it had been to sneak off like that. He’d watched her gird her loins prior to meeting his family. He’d seen her gumption and spine and been on the receiving end of her clear-eyed, sharp gaze. Charlie wasn’t a slinker or a sneaker. She stared things in the eye and dealt with them head-on.
So why had she left that night? It had bugged him then, and it bugged him now. He’d asked her once and she’d given him a nonanswer. A really unsatisfying nonanswer.
He made his way to the elevator. The doors opened when he hit the button and he stepped inside and swiped his security card before punching the number for his floor. The car stopped on the first floor, the doors sliding open then starting to close almost immediately.
Maybe he should tackle Charlie on the issue again. Maybe—
“Could you hold the lift, please?”
He stuck his arm out to stop the doors. He heard the clatter of heels, then a woman appeared, her face flushed, a small rolling suitcase trailing behind her. She was slim and blonde, late twenties, early thirties, and wearing one of those jaunty little neck scarves that he always associated with flight attendants. His gaze dropped to her tailored, discreetly sexy dress and he realized she was an air hostess. Complete with name tag—Heather—and uniform.
“Thanks,” Heather said as she dragged her bag over the gap between the lift and the floor. “Huh. We’re on the same floor. How’s that for a coincidence?” She pushed a strand of wavy blond hair out of her eye and gave him a friendly smile as she offered him her hand. “Heather, apartment 4A. I moved in last month.”
“Rhys, 4D. Been here awhile,” he said as they shook hands as the lift began to ascend.
“Ah, so you must know where I can find a decent cup of coffee around here. Because the café around the corner—”
“Sucks hard. I know. Don’t worry, everyone gets conned at least once. Try the place up the hill. The one with the orange sign. They do a mean single origin.”
Heather’s smile broadened. Her gaze flicked down his body in a lightning-fast appraisal before finding his face again. “Orange sign, up the hill. Got it.”
A pinging sound announced their arrival on the fourth floor. Rhys stood back while Heather maneuvered her suitcase out of the elevator.
“Thanks,” she said. “You’d think I’d be better with this thing, after all these years but I think I must be suitcase challenged.”
They paused in the hall. His apartment was to the right, hers to the left.
“Well, nice to meet you, Rhys,” Heather said.
“You, too.”
Rhys was turning away when she spoke again.
“Maybe we could have coffee or wine sometime and you can fill me in on the other local secrets.”
She fiddled with the suitcase handle as she waited for his response. He was so fixated on what had almost happened with Charlie that it took him a moment to realize that Heather was signaling her interest—in the nicest possible way.
“Um, yeah. Sure. Why not?” he heard himself say after a slightly-too-long pause.
She nodded uncertainly, clearly picking up on the ambivalence in his lukewarm response. “Okay. I guess I’ll see you around.” She hesitated a second as though she was waiting for him to say something else, then she waved and headed up the corridor.
Rhys walked to his own apartment and let himself in. He shrugged out of his jacket, slinging it over the back of the nearest chair.
He was very aware that Heather had been waiting for him to name a time and place for them to get together. Which he hadn’t done because the first thing that sprang to mind when he thought about having a coffee with another woman was that it would be a betrayal of Charlie.
Which was pretty much crazy. Especially considering the lecture he’d been giving himself in the garage not five minutes ago. He and Charlie were friends, and they were about to become parents. He owed
her his support and his patience and his time. He did not owe her his emotional or sexual loyalty. They had a relationship, but they weren’t in a relationship. And the odds were good they never would be, for all the reasons he’d already listed. There was too much at stake.
So he could have said yes to Heather. Apart from a lackluster blind date that Greg’s wife, Jessica, had set up for him a few weeks after that fateful night at Café Sydney, he hadn’t been out with anyone since Charlie. He’d been too busy with work to socialize. And, if he was honest with himself, he’d been a little thrown after his experience with Charlie. The intensity of it, followed by the fact that she’d simply bailed on him the next day. He hadn’t exactly felt like diving into the dating pool.
He ran his hand through his hair, very aware that the real reason he hadn’t set up a date with Heather—and the reason why he wasn’t knocking on her door now to do so—was because, as attractive as she was, he really wasn’t that interested.
His head was too full of Charlie. And not only because of the baby.
Better get past that, buddy, because it’s never going to happen.
Stripping off his shirt, he strode through the bedroom into the en suite. He shed the rest of his clothes and stepped beneath the shower, washing away the day’s labors.
Not so long ago, his life had been simple. He’d known what he wanted, and he’d had a plan to get it. Now…he had no idea what he wanted. And half the things he’d once thought were important had lost their shiny allure. The wharf apartment, the European sports car, the high-roller lifestyle.
That apartment was no place for a baby, let alone a toddler. There was no outdoor space, and the thought of combining even a moderately enterprising kid with some outdoor furniture and a balcony frankly freaked him out. The sleek Aston Martin Vanquish he’d been stalking for the past few years… It wasn’t as though the designers had put a lot of thought into how to fit a car seat into one of those things. When he got a new vehicle, it was far more likely to be a sedan with a good safety rating. He didn’t think he could go as far as a van—he still had his pride, after all—but a new Audi or BMW would probably hit the mark. And when he moved out of this apartment, he would probably look for a house with a yard, instead of a slick bachelor pad.
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