by Kim Lawrence
Jamie, she saw, had not stirred.
‘Why on earth did you do that?’ She struggled to inject righteous indignation into her voice but she didn’t quite get there, probably because she couldn’t stop looking at his mouth, remembering that glorious kiss.
She had wanted it to go on for ever.
Roman dug his hands into his pockets. ‘A London flight has lost radio contact with air traffic control and I thought you were on it.’ Just one simple sentence and yet it covered a whole range of emotions that he had never felt before, and never wanted to feel ever again.
‘Oh...so...that was why—’
‘I was just glad to see you were alive.’
‘Right, well... OK, then.’
In an action that had all the hallmarks of compulsion he was unable to control, he extended his hand back towards her face.
As Marisa’s voice had earlier, her chain of thought broke, dilated pupils eating up the gold of her eyes. The quiver deep inside her expanded as he extended his reach, his square-tipped fingers brushing a stray strand of silvery-blonde hair from her cheek, the pad of his thumb trailing along the angle of her delicate jaw while he performed his task.
It was almost nothing, a whisper touch, but the nothing had the breath leaving her parted lips in a sharp sibilant hiss. The tenderness of his unexpected action made her throat tighten and she felt the heat of unshed tears stinging the backs of her eyelids.
Obeying an instinct too strong to resist, she turned her face until her cheek was nestled into his cupped palm and she was vaguely conscious of a foreign-sounding expletive too soft for her to catch.
Jamie’s sleepy murmur brought her to her senses and, appalled by her weakness but with her skin still being bombarded with needle-sharp prickles of attraction, she laid a soothing protective hand on her son’s head.
‘Last resort?’
She looked up and nodded to the hand luggage balanced on the handles of the pushchair. ‘I couldn’t manage everything.’ She paused and took a deep breath. ‘I really wish I’d come with you now.’
‘Yes, you should have.’ Those few awful minutes when he’d thought he might have lost them for ever had taken several years off his life. ‘Let me take it.’
‘Thanks.’ Their eyes locked and she immediately looked away.
The pushchair was easier to manoeuvre without the hand luggage, so she was able to keep up with his long-legged stride until she felt obliged to breathlessly point out the signs for the luggage collection they had just walked past.
‘That’s all been taken care of. This way.’ He glanced down at a now wide-awake Jamie and winked, and the smaller version of his own eyes widened and, after a pause, delivered a blink back. Then a small hand came up and covered one eye before he blinked again as they passed under an archway that took them out of sight of the cameras and into a brightly lit underground parking area.
Marisa took in the empty parking spaces with reserved signs on them, the occupied ones filled with an assortment of top-of-the-range vehicles, which explained the visible security presence and numerous CCTV cameras.
A man in uniform wearing a headset acknowledged them with a tip of his head as they walked past.
‘Can I have a biscuit?’ came a small voice.
‘How long have you been awake?’ Marisa exclaimed. She’d been nervous of Jamie’s reaction if he woke in a strange place and found Roman there too but he seemed remarkably relaxed, looking around with interest.
‘I wasn’t asleep.’ He gave her a cheeky grin from his pushchair and added, ‘I was just resting my eyes.’
Marisa laughed, the soft musical sound bouncing off the low ceiling and walls.
Listening to the interchange, Roman found himself feeling like an intruder; they had a relationship that he was not part of.
Was he really envying the thing that he had spent his whole adult life avoiding?
He heard Marisa say, ‘Say hello to Roman, sweetie...’
Roman dropped into a crouch beside the pushchair but, instead of responding to his own hello, Jamie reached out and touched Roman’s cheek, startling an expression from him that made Marisa look away. ‘Are you growing a beard?’
‘Not deliberately.’
Marisa could hear the smile in his voice and a deep quiver shimmered through her body as from the forbidden depths of her brain a memory surfaced. They had been lying amid a tumble of sheets, their sweat-soaked bodies cooling, her nostrils quivering as she’d inhaled the warm, musky male scent of his body.
Her chest had lifted in a sigh as she’d lain there experiencing a cell-deep contentment that had been entirely new to her. In some ways, the aftermath of sex had felt even more intimate to her than the act itself.
‘I need a shave,’ he’d murmured.
Her eyes had opened at the touch of his fingers on her breast. Despite the aftershocks of the climax still rippling through her body she’d felt her insides tighten as she’d watched his fingers massaging the sensitised, still-tingling pink skin of her breast.
He’d stopped then, self-reproach in his face, and had lifted a hand to his face, drawing it down across the abrasive dark growth on his jaw.
She’d put her hand over his, drawing her own fingers down the stubble. ‘I like it,’ she’d whispered.
‘I will have a beard when I grow to be a man and I’ll be tall too.’
Her son’s confident pronouncement dragged Marisa back to the present with a disorientating abruptness. She felt a tide of guilty colour wash over her skin and she struggled to share the amusement with Roman as they exchanged glances above their son’s head.
‘That sounds like a plan,’ Roman said.
Marisa was glad for the distraction when Jamie demanded her attention then. ‘So can I?’
‘Can you what?’
‘Have two biscuits?’
‘Later,’ Marisa said, before adopting a diversionary tactic. ‘Which car do you think is Roman’s?’
‘The one with our cases and the policeman standing by it.’
Her son, it turned out, was more observant than she was. The car in question was a big four-wheel drive with blacked-out windows standing about fifty feet away, and there was a security guard, not a policeman, standing beside the luggage she had last seen in London.
‘I want to walk,’ Jamie said, pulling at his safety harness.
Roman glanced at Marisa, who nodded before he carefully unfastened the strap and put the wriggling child on his feet.
‘I want my case.’
‘Fine, but you must hold my hand because of the traffic.’
Jamie’s childish features settled into a mulish expression she knew all too well as he tucked his hand behind his back. ‘But there isn’t any—’
Before Marisa could respond Roman stepped forward. ‘I need some help to put the cases in the car,’ he said casually.
Jamie looked at the hand extended to him for a moment before his mulish expression became a sunny smile. ‘OK...’ He glanced at his mother. ‘Can I?’
‘Off you go.’
Watching them walk away hand in hand, Marisa experienced a rush of emotions at the poignant picture of father and son. She felt recede some of the doubts she’d struggled with over her decision to make this trip. It was an effort to hold her emotions back as she followed them, very conscious of the ache in her chest. For someone who’d said he had no experience of children, Roman was doing a pretty good job.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE FOUR-WHEEL DRIVE they were eventually installed in was roomy, and the ‘nice smell’ that Jamie mentioned, ensconced in a booster seat in the back, was that of soft leather and newness.
It was not the only thing that Jamie commented on as they left the city lights behind them. He seemed to be enjoying a second wind, although finally the flow of questions petered out and his head began t
o droop once again.
Roman turned up the air conditioning on his side of the car, and a welcome blast of fresh air removed some of the distracting scent of Marisa’s perfume from his nostrils.
After silence had reigned for five minutes Roman risked a quiet question.
‘Is he asleep?’
He felt Marisa glance his way and saw her head nod in the periphery of his vision.
‘So he’s a good traveller?’
‘Not always,’ Marisa replied honestly, hoping that Jamie’s best-behaviour mode hadn’t raised false expectations in Roman. He was being a model child, so far only asking once if they were there yet, and happily accepting Roman’s response that he would tell him when they were.
Jamie hadn’t even requested a toilet break and the chocolate biscuit she had finally allowed him—because sometimes it was just not worth the fight—had gone mostly in his mouth.
At least when he was awake she had been able to focus on him and the distractions his multitude of questions had afforded.
Now he was asleep, looking cute in his booster seat, cuddling the dog-eared giraffe that had been his companion and comfort all through his illness, and she was left with no option but to make polite conversation with Roman, polite conversation that did not involve mentioning that searing kiss at the airport.
She just wished she could stop thinking about it.
Roman’s gaze kept repeatedly flashing to the reflection of his sleeping son in the rear-view mirror.
‘Does he always ask so many questions?’ He was here to ask the questions, and Marisa—his glance flickered to her profile—was here to drive him to distraction.
The kiss had not been a good thing. It had just made him realise what he was missing and had provided even more fuel for the ever-present ache inside him.
‘Yes, but he doesn’t always sleep like this, but it was his first flight and he bounced the entire way, he was so excited. Oh, is this—’
She strained her neck to look out of the window and Roman knew what she’d be seeing. They were passing through a massive ornate wrought-iron gate. The gatehouse beside it was lit up but although there wasn’t anyone in it, there were security cameras mounted there. The road they were now driving along had fewer ruts for Roman to negotiate and it was less winding than the one they’d been on previously.
‘Yes, we’re on the estate now,’ he confirmed, his thoughts travelling back to that moment in the airport when he’d thought the very worst had happened. Maybe you had to face having something snatched away before you realised how much you wanted it?
With the gut-freezing fear had come clarity. In that moment the idea of being a distant but supportive figure in his son’s life, never realistic, had become a complete non-starter. Marisa had asked him what he wanted and he had dodged the issue because he hadn’t known then. He had still been in denial and avoiding owning the fact that being a father absolutely terrified him.
Now he had shrugged off the uncertainty, he knew the answer he would give her. He wanted to be a father to Jamie, the best father he could be. He might not be very good, but if he messed up, no, he amended with a flash of uncharacteristic humility, when he messed up, as he no doubt would, he was sure that Marisa would put him right. His glance slid sideways long enough to register the delicacy of her profile as she gazed out of the window.
Long enough to disintegrate his determination to not want her as his body clenched in hungry desire. It was a complication that he would need to deal with at some point soon but his ability to effortlessly multitask appeared to have deserted him.
He thought of the glazed passion burning in her eyes after he had kissed her at the airport. Stopping so abruptly had just about killed him, so maybe he’d just let nature take its course?
Aware that his thoughts had taken a dangerous direction, he blocked them, but not before he realised that despite all the danger he had courted, all the extreme sports he had thrown himself into, this was the most alive he had felt in over five years.
His expression one of fake ferocious concentration, he turned his attention back to the road that he knew like the back of his hand from the days when he had learnt to drive in the gardener’s Jeep. Until Rio, taking his turn in the driver’s seat, had swerved to avoid a wild boar and they’d ended up upside down in a ditch. Roman had an interesting scar to show for it and Rio had climbed out without a scratch.
His father had banned them from driving after that, and grounded them for a month, but the real punishment had been his sacking of the gardener whose car they had totalled, making sure that his sons knew the man’s fate was on their heads.
That ex-gardener was now his mother’s personal driver but at the time it had felt like something they would never recover from.
How his mind took the seemingly seamless leap from the man who was now his mother’s personal driver to the burning question of whether he and Marisa could live under the same roof and not end up sharing a bed would remain for ever one of life’s mysteries, but it was there now, in his head, and it showed remarkable staying power.
‘Are you all right?’ Marisa sat on her own hands while her eyes kept straying to his. Roman’s long brown fingers curled around the steering wheel were exerting a strange fascination for her, but it turned to concern when his light grip tightened until his knuckles turned an almost bloodless white.
He shot her a frowning look. ‘I’d be better if you stopped asking stupid questions.’
As she hadn’t said a word for a good five minutes the implication that she had been bombarding him with chit-chat struck her as deeply unfair. Lips twisted, she debated with herself whether to challenge him, but decided against it as she conceded, at least in the privacy of her own head, that he was allowed to be irritated after being forced to drive so far to collect them. Also she didn’t want to distract him as the road they were travelling along had some pretty scary hairpin bends and a few dramatic drops.
It was ten minutes later, and Marisa had maintained her silence, if you discounted the couple of gasps when a bend had revealed a particularly awesome vista. She was starting to get an idea of the scale of the estate when they hit an avenue of tall trees lining what she assumed must be the last part of the drive. They were up-lit by spaced floodlights that gave the impression they were driving through a tunnel of light. As they crested a hill to see the castillo come into view Marisa caught her breath. The same floodlit effect gave the aged stone walls of the imposing façade a silvered tinge, while the lights shining out from the windows glowed a warm gold that matched the last fading rays of a magnificent sunset.
Marisa had not been anticipating anything on this scale. She was accustomed to a home that many considered grand, but this building eclipsed anything she had seen.
It was a castle in every sense of the word.
A possibility that ought to have occurred to her on the journey here now popped into her head, and she wondered if there would be family members on hand to judge her.
This had all happened so quickly, the pace that everything had moved at was a million miles from her normal controlled, cautious approach where there were normally no surprises, unpleasant or otherwise.
She slid a covert glance at Roman’s patrician profile, the carved angles emphasised by the reflection from the outside lighting. It was hard to think of life around Roman as not containing surprises—admittedly not quite the sort that her dad had used to spring on her. She really couldn’t imagine Roman announcing that it would be fun to sell his Rolls-Royce so they could travel on public transport—but it was another reason she told herself to be glad that this visit was not a prequel to spending her whole life with him. She wasn’t interested in living a life of surprises any more.
This was about what was best for Jamie, who had a right to know his father so long as that father was good for him.
Transferring her gaze to the façade of the
looming building that looked grander and more ancient the nearer they got, she was conscious of the heavy nervous thud of her heartbeat. The darkness didn’t help—it probably exaggerated the imposing vibe. Not that she was holding out much hope of it appearing any more cosy in daylight, but she would settle for less daunting.
She was starting to realise that there were a lot of other questions she ought to have been asking instead of simply allowing Roman to call the shots and rush her.
‘Will any of your family be here?’ It wasn’t as if there wasn’t room—a dozen families could have shared the place and not bumped into one another.
He turned his head briefly, his expression impossible to read in the fading light, his proud profile a dark silhouette. ‘Unlikely. I assume my brother will be avoiding me for the considerable future.’
She took the sardonic comment as a reminder that she was responsible for a falling-out between the twins and squirmed uneasily in her soft leather seat, but then a noise from the back seat made her turn her head to look at her son.
Jamie was still sleeping, one hand thrown above his head, his face flushed. When he had been ill she had only ever thought a day ahead, and the only thing she had dreamt of was him being well. It had certainly never crossed her mind that she was in some way depriving him because he was an only child. She had been an only child and she hadn’t felt deprived, but last week when she had picked him up for a play date and seen him watching on as his little friend dropped a sloppy kiss on his chubby baby sister’s forehead it had made her wonder.
Jamie’s expression had brought a lump to her throat, despite the fact the children’s mother had admitted ruefully that for the first six months big brother had been jealous of his new sister.
She hadn’t missed out as a child, but twins, she thought, had a particularly special bond that shouldn’t be broken. She settled back into her seat, silently vowing that if there was some way she could repair the damage she’d wrought, she would, though at that moment, reading Roman’s grim profile, she couldn’t summon much optimism on the subject of her influence over him. He was probably still thinking about the last few hours that he’d never have back again.