by Kim Lawrence
She said nothing as she turned away, pointing to a gate in the low stone wall that ran down the length of the kitchen garden. ‘This way.’
CHAPTER FIVE
THE STRIP OF WOODLAND was carpeted with snowdrops in spring and later bluebells but now in midsummer the undergrowth was tall and thick enough to scratch the legs of a little boy wearing shorts.
Jamie’s yell of ‘Not fair’ drifted across the intervening space. He was fifty yards away on the other side of the small paddock where a goalpost had been erected, but Marisa could see that the blood oozing from a cut on Jamie’s knee was not a scratch, at least in her head.
She took a deep breath and talked herself away from what she visualised as the panic ledge in her head. There had been a time in the not so distant past when she would have reacted to the sight of a grazed knee with full-blown drama; it was always a fight to repress her maternal protective instincts but she was getting there.
Wrapping Jamie up in cotton wool would have made her life a lot easier but she had recognised it wouldn’t be good for him so she made an effort to allow him the rough and tumble that any little boy enjoyed.
Her own fight to control her instincts had distracted her for a split second from the man who was walking a few steps behind her.
The sound of his muffled exclamation brought her head around just as he released a low rush of words in his native Spanish. She had no idea what they meant but it was hard to hear the painfully raw intonation without feeling a stab of empathy for his shocked reaction.
Looking at the expression stamped on his lean features, an expression as raw as his words and filled with a kind of painful longing, made her throat ache; swallowing, she looked away.
The father of her child might be a virtual stranger to her outside the bedroom but every instinct she had told her that he would hate for anyone to witness anything that he would consider a weakness.
‘Apparently he has excellent hand-eye coordination,’ she said to fill the growing screaming silence and give him time to recover himself.
When he did speak it was clear that she wasn’t going to be getting any appreciation for her sensitivity.
‘So who the hell is that?’
Marisa’s head turned in response to his snarled question, the verbal equivalent of what she imagined a wolf’s growl would sound like.
Her sense of impending doom deepened as she took in the rigid lines on his scowling face, but now it was mingled with exasperation.
‘Your son,’ she said, delivering a tight fake smile in response to his accusing glare.
‘Do not be cute with me, Marisa.’
Her lips tightened. He might not like being on the receiving end of warnings but he appeared to have zero problem issuing them. Her indignation soared. Here was she, bending over backwards to make this as painless as possible for everyone, and all he could do was—
She heaved a deep restorative breath before tossing her head, causing several strands of shiny flaxen hair to escape the ponytail on the nape of her slim neck.
‘I am never cute.’ You could not be cute when you were a whisper short of five foot eleven. ‘I assume you’re referring to—’ But then she paused as he wasn’t just referring, he was positively glaring! ‘That’s Ashley.’
‘And just who is Ashley?’ Roman growled back, his eyes fixed on the rear view of the tall male who was kicking a ball back to his son...his son! The emotion swelled in his chest as his gaze transferred once more to the child with stick-thin legs who squealed with laughter as he kicked the ball past the man and then punched the air.
‘Not fair, I wasn’t ready!’ the young blond man yelled back.
‘Do you often leave our son in the care of your boyfriends?’
She blinked, her astonishment genuine, but it swiftly turned to annoyance. Eyes flaring, she folded her arms tightly across her chest. ‘Ashley is Jamie’s nanny.’ Her chin lifted a defiant notch as she fixed him with a narrow-eyed glare. ‘And what business of yours would it be if he was my boyfriend?’ she challenged, thinking this was rich coming from someone who had a partiality for scantily clad blondes.
Roman spun around. ‘Nanny?’ he echoed, fixing on the relevant part of her retort before his eyes and his brain got snagged on the sight of silky strands of pale hair shining against her dark jumper. The image was the catalyst that took him straight back to a time and place when that hair was longer and tangled, drifting across his chest as she sat astride him, the feathery light contact sending electrical surges along his nerve endings, before the caress was replaced by the touch of her lips.
The effort of escaping the erotic images before he was sucked back into the past brought a sheen of sweat to his brow, and his fingers clenched as he dragged in a mind-clearing lungful of oxygen.
Focus, man, think...he ordered himself.
The problem was, the thoughts in question involved another man playing with his son, his son looking up trustingly into another man’s face and laughing.
Roman realised he seriously hated the thought of that man being more than Marisa’s employee. From a mental file in his head of similar incidents came the memory of a scene, of his father driving them home after dinner, cross-examining his mother just because she had smiled at a waiter. She had flirted with the man, he’d accused, and he was sure she had given him her phone number.
They had sat there, he and Rio, and listened as their father had called their mother names that no man should call a woman. As children all they could do was kick the back of their father’s seat in protest to try to make him stop. No longer a child, he would do so much more if he heard similar abuse now.
He would not be that man.
‘I didn’t realise there were any male nannies.’ It was a rational observation, and he could have added that in his opinion nannies did not look as though they hit the gym on a daily basis before they ran out into the morning surf.
Marisa resisted the childish impulse to stamp her feet. It wasn’t even what he’d said, it was the way he’d said it, his attitude of teeth-grating certainty that by simply saying something it made it so.
‘Have you never heard of equality?’ she enquired sweetly and earned herself another glare. ‘Or do you think women have the exclusive rights on caring for children?’ she said with blighting scorn, seeing no reason to admit that it hadn’t exactly been her own enlightened thinking that had made her shortlist Ashley, because until he had walked through the door and her PA had leaned across and breathed, ‘Wow, can he be my nanny?’ she hadn’t even realised that Ashley was a man.
He had been the last interviewee, she remembered, and she’d been ready to give up, as none of the other well-qualified candidates had seemed a good fit. Probably because she hadn’t really wanted them to be, she thought wryly. She hadn’t wanted a mother substitute; she was Jamie’s mum.
She’d been the problem, not them, or at least the fact that she didn’t want a nanny, she needed a nanny. The bad case of flu that had meant she literally couldn’t get out of bed for a week—and, worse, had to keep away from Jamie because she couldn’t risk exposing him to the virulent bug—had proved that.
It was times like that it really hit home to her what it meant to be a single parent with no husband to step into the breach. She had no family ready to rush to help out in emergencies either... At least she was one of the lucky ones who had enough money to pay for staff to help her, who had gone way beyond the call of duty, so Jamie was being well cared for, but it meant that she was imposing on people who she was sure would have preferred to be spending time with their own families.
Had she taken to Ashley so quickly because he wasn’t a threat to her relationship with Jamie—he was not a mother substitute? She couldn’t swear hand on heart that it hadn’t been a factor but he was a good fit regardless, at least until Jamie started school full-time, or, to be more precise, the month before school sta
rted, which was when Ash was due to go travelling for a year before he started his university course next autumn, debt-free.
She really admired the young man’s practicality, the fact he had put his ambition to be an architect on hold and got a childcare qualification first so he could earn some money before taking up a university place and also had a way of earning his keep while he was there.
‘You kept very quiet about him,’ Roman observed tautly, interrupting her thoughts.
She shook her head in genuine bewilderment. ‘Was I quiet?’ He made it sound as if she’d deliberately not told him. ‘I’m pretty sure I mentioned him.’
‘That Jamie had a nanny, yes, but not that he was a he.’
Her lips tightened. ‘I didn’t think it was relevant, because it isn’t.’
‘So no one ever comments on it?’
Her eyes slid from his. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, what is your problem?’
‘I don’t have a problem,’ Roman denied, knowing he was lying.
Her delicate brows lifted. ‘Yes, it really shows.’
Her laugh brought Roman’s teeth together so hard he could feel them grate. It wasn’t caring men that Roman had a problem with, it was the strong possibility, no, more like the probability that he was not one of them, that this quality was something you couldn’t learn. You either had it, like the guy currently playing with his son, or you didn’t.
Did Marisa admire this guy’s caring qualities or was it his muscles she was interested in? Recognising that this less than charitable thought yet again came straight out of his own father’s playbook did not improve his mood one little bit.
‘I don’t have a problem with male nannies.’ He had no problems with male anything, he just had a problem with this particular guy, who was quite obviously being a great role model for his son, but he was not—absolutely not—jealous.
He was not that man; he was not his father.
His jaw clamped, the white line around his lips standing out stark against his tan. Dios, yes, he was!
This reaction was the reason he had spent his life avoiding caring enough to become a monster like his father. Only twice in his life had he allowed himself to care and each time—
He closed his eyes momentarily to cut out the sight of his child listening attentively to something the blond guy was saying to him. In fact, he was hanging on every syllable.
He wanted his son to look at him the way he was looking at his nanny.
The shock of that vibrated though him, jarring like a discordant off-key note. He had accepted that he had a son, accepted that the child was his responsibility, but he had not anticipated having these feelings for him, or that they would be instantaneous.
He hadn’t even registered the young guy who was the focus of his envy initially, because his focus had been so completely on the child running across the grass on his skinny little legs.
Knowing he had a child, he’d discovered, was an entirely different thing from actually seeing him, no longer a theoretical son, but a real flesh and blood kid. One with tangled hair, a shiny sweat-slicked face and blood from a graze on his knee staining one sock.
The impact was almost physical. Roman felt as if someone had just landed an unprotected direct hit on his solar plexus, the invisible blow causing the breath to leave his chest in a gasp as a nameless aching feeling rushed to fill the vacuum that was left.
It was not hard to recognise a game-changing moment when it hit you in the face, and this was it. Duty had brought him here but this totally unanticipated feeling was going to keep him here, was going to keep him in his son’s life.
‘Mum!’
Roman watched the child’s face light up as he spotted his mother, who began waving back.
‘Watch what I can do—it’s really cool skills!’ he yelled as he balanced the football on his knee for at least two seconds before picking it up and waiting for the applause.
It came right on cue, and the sight of Marisa’s smiling face, her enthusiastic clapping, her cheery thumbs up, shook loose some fresh nameless emotion deep inside Roman that he didn’t want to acknowledge.
‘Excellent skills!’ she approved.
He turned his head sharply, remembering again his brother’s expression as his twin had held his own small daughter close to his chest. It had been a faint echo compared to what Roman felt now. Envy, loss, regret... None of them were legitimate responses for a man who had never wanted children.
He still believed in the reasoning behind his decision not to have children. The facts had not changed, and it was a decision he would make again if he had been able to. Why run the risk of passing on the tainted genes, replicate painful history, inflict the sort of emotional damage on his child his own father had on him and Rio?
But that option was gone; it was firmly in the past. In the present he had a son, that was the reality he was dealing with now, and it came with an unaccustomed sense of inadequacy he was struggling to deal with.
So far he had succeeded in not acknowledging the fear he knew was lurking underneath the anger, but it had been much easier to focus on confronting Marisa about her actions than acknowledging it.
If it gets tough, you can always fall back on blaming her for everything, sneered the contemptuous voice in his head,
Roman knew about this visceral connection, this blood calling to blood... He glanced down and saw that his white-knuckled fist was clenched against his chest, and self-consciously he allowed it to fall back to his side. Now he knew why his brother had finally decided to break his silence about Jamie’s existence, break his promise to Marisa. Because of this feeling that was tearing Roman apart right now—Rio knew what it felt like to be a father.
To banish the surge of empathy, because he really didn’t want to stop being angry with his twin, and he definitely didn’t want to be grateful to him, Roman replaced his brother’s face with a mental image of their own father, who had rarely noticed his sons were alive unless he’d wanted to use them to get to their mother. They’d only ever been a useful tool or an inconvenience to him.
The voice in his head urging caution was almost drowned out by the overwhelming surge of paternal feeling that had just materialised out of nowhere.
There were still very good reasons why this child would be so much better off without Roman in his life, but he knew he was not selfless enough to keep a safe distance from him.
‘He is a big soccer fan.’
Roman didn’t respond to Marisa, but she could feel the emotions emanating from him across the distance between them. She slid a glance up at him. His profile was as rigid as his body language; everything about him was clenched.
No wonder he looked tense—this had to be his nightmare scenario. His apparently ingrained sense of duty was probably the only thing stopping him from heading for the nearest exit at high speed.
Would it be a problem if he did?
Not for her, she told herself. Her life would be a lot easier without Roman in it, a lot more vanilla and safe, which obviously would be a good thing. She could live without drama; she could live without sex.
Always good to wait to be asked before refusing it, Marisa.
Feeling the heat climb into her cheeks, she retracted her gaze, retreating under the shade of her lashes. Any sympathy she might feel for Roman—the man whose antipathy for children was presumably strong enough to make not having them a condition of a marriage proposal, and who had then found himself a father—was tempered by her main concern for Jamie and the effect the sudden appearance of a father in his life would have on him.
Roman was here now, but who was to say that he wouldn’t want to opt out at some future point, a point when Jamie would know he had been rejected? Having something and losing it was a lot different from not missing what you’d never had. A feeling she knew all too well, she mused grimly, reflecting on her blissful ignorance bef
ore Roman had taught her how to enjoy her own body and his!
This is about Jamie, Marisa.
‘So is he any good at what he does?’ Roman asked, resenting the ease with which Ashley was making his son laugh as he watched the interaction, the easy rapport between man and boy.
He made it look easy, and Rio had made it look easy too. To Roman it did not seem easy, it seemed—
He didn’t even know what the thing he lacked was, he concluded with a burst of self-contempt for his sheer cluelessness.
Could you learn how to be a good father? Just the basics—or if you couldn’t learn to be a good father, then at the very least one that did no harm.
Roman had achieved much that people would envy in his life, but it had all come so easily to him. At that moment he would have exchanged every single thing he had achieved for the nanny’s ability to be so relaxed with a child, or rather this particular child...his child.
It was her little artificial laugh that broke the downward spiral of his depressing internal dialogue. His glance slewed her way; there was no amusement on her face to match the laugh.
She was standing there ramrod stiff, her chin lifted to a militant angle as she fixed him with a narrow-eyed glare of icy challenge.
‘What exactly is that meant to mean?’
In the past Marisa had taken the teasing comments about Ashley and the inevitable double entendres when friends and other mothers had met the handsome young addition to her household in good part. None of it was malicious, although it got a bit tiresome at times, but nothing she couldn’t handle. If laughter didn’t close down the subject she had a whole list of comical comebacks at her disposal.
Somehow she didn’t feel like laughing now.
Roman’s brows tugged together as he studied her hot, antagonistic face.
‘I mean...’ he began, then stopped, comprehension spreading across his face as his gaze flashed between the young man and Marisa, something kicking hard in his gut as he joined the dots and watched a picture form that explained her defensive attitude.