by Kim Lawrence
Checking the baby monitor, which was standing on a low table in the room, was working, she explored the other rooms in this guest suite before she returned to the sitting room.
She paused in the doorway. Roman was standing with his shoulder wedged against the wall, staring out of the stone mullioned window. He levered himself away and half turned.
‘Did he go back to sleep?’
Lingering in the doorway, fighting a reluctance to enter, she nodded. You’re acting as if he’s about to leap on you, mocked the voice in her head.
It was the mortifying possibility she might be the one to do the leaping that continued to hold her back.
‘He was so exhausted he barely stirred at all, not even when I put him in his pyjamas. He’s totally out.’
‘I asked for some supper to be left for us.’
It wasn’t the idea of sitting in some dauntingly enormous room at a table laden with candelabra and antique crystal that made her stomach flip, it was the knowledge of the person who would inevitably be sitting opposite her, which was ridiculous. It was something she was going to have to learn to cope with—but not today, she decided, pushing this hill to climb into the future with a mental sigh as the almost-kiss outside by the car still weighed guiltily on her conscience.
‘That’s thoughtful.’ Marisa, who had been hiding behind the heavy strands of hair that had escaped the knot on her nape, pushed them back before carefully closing the baby gate between the nursery and the sitting room, but left the door ajar. She’d been pleased to see there was a similar arrangement between the anteroom with the useful compact little kitchen, which connected to her own bedroom, and the nursery, so at night she could leave the doors ajar.
‘But I’m not really hungry.’ Her stomach chose that moment to growl so loudly to reveal her lie that his lips twitched.
Her lips stretched into a rueful smile that reached her amber eyes and immediately lit up her face, dissolving some of the tension.
‘All right, I am starving actually,’ she admitted, pressing a hand to her stomach. ‘But I’ll be fine.’ There seemed to be plenty of tea and coffee in the kitchen area. ‘I really don’t want Jamie to wake up alone in a strange place.’ This place was so enormous that even if she was alerted by the baby intercom it would take her far too long to reach him.
‘I assumed you wouldn’t,’ he replied calmly. ‘I’ll bring up a tray for you.’
‘You will?’
Her astonishment seemed to amuse him. ‘On occasion I have been known to tie my own shoelaces. Make yourself comfortable and I’ll be back shortly.’ The advice was slung over his shoulder as he exited through the door.
What she would really have liked was to take advantage of that spectacular en suite bathroom with its copper tub massive enough that you could swim or at least float in it. It was really calling to her and she could almost hear it as she lifted a lid on first one and then another of the glass flagons. Each sweet-smelling oil had an even more gorgeously heady scent than the one before it.
She reached out and experimentally pressed a button set into the marble tiled wall, jumping when the room was filled with music. Hastily depressing it again, she stood statue-still, listening intently, her eyes wide above the hand pressed to her mouth, but after a minute she relaxed; the noise had not woken Jamie.
Resisting the bath, she stripped off her clothes and left them where they fell, suddenly too weary to care about the crumpled heap.
The fabric of the building might be ancient but it was clear that it boasted the latest technology. She ran a finger around the edge of the bath tub and allowed herself an indulgent moment to fantasise wistfully about floating in the foamy sweet-smelling suds, just to wash away the day’s grime and ease the ache of tension in her limbs, before regretfully turning her back on it.
Grabbing a towel from the pile that was neatly stacked on a chest, she headed for the shower, very conscious that she had no idea how long she had before Roman appeared with her food, and as she didn’t want to be drifting around in a towel when he did she allowed herself the minimum time under the reviving spray.
Still damp and swathed in a towel, her skin pink and tingling from the arrows of water, she tipped out her carefully packed overnight bag onto the silk cover of the four-poster bed. Rifling through the spilled contents, she extracted the clean underclothes and the jeans and tee shirt she always packed in her hand luggage after the last time her hold cases had ended up on another continent, leaving her without even a toothbrush.
At least this time her luggage was not too far away, just in the car outside, but in some ways it was equally inaccessible. She had no intention of risking getting lost or setting off some sort of alarm trying to find it.
She had the basics, but not the time; in a feverish haste she had reached the stage of dragging a comb through her hair when she heard a sound which, unless she was being visited by one of the resident ghosts the place probably boasted, was Roman.
It offended her innately neat nature but she ignored the accusing pile of clothes she could see through the open bathroom door and glanced in the mirror, wishing she had time to disguise the violet smudges beneath her eyes, before she dashed for the door, arriving in the sitting room breathless and barefoot. The latter didn’t register with her until his interest in her pink-painted toenails brought her own attention downwards.
At least it was an excuse not to look at him and it gave her heart a chance to slow to a bearable canter.
‘I was in a hurry,’ she said, her voice indistinct as she shook her wet head, sending drops of moisture flying, and wondering why on earth she sounded so defensive.
Roman wrenched his eyes clear of her denim-covered thighs, trying hard not to notice that she possessed the sort of legs that seemed to go on for ever. Her black tee shirt was emblazoned with a daisy logo and was tucked neatly into her narrow waist.
Catching the direction of his gaze and misinterpreting it, she touched the daisy with a not quite steady finger. ‘Jamie was shopping with me and he loved this one. I’m afraid the rest of my bags are still in the car.’
‘He has excellent taste.’ Roman nodded towards the door. ‘The rest of your things are there. I’ll take them through into your room.’
Her eyes flew to the stack of cases by the door that led out to the corridor, then back to his face. ‘How?’
‘I waved my magic...’ He paused, because she didn’t look in the mood to appreciate his laboured humour. ‘I brought them up for you before I collected the supper tray.’
He had been in her room, just a wall separating him from her naked in the shower... She gulped. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’
‘Relax, I left them outside the door until I came back. I waited to be invited in.’
She felt her stomach muscles tremble in response to the predatory gleam in his dark eyes. ‘Just like a vampire.’ It didn’t seem such a bad analogy at all; weren’t vampires these days all sexy as hell and equally dangerous?
‘Except with no blood involved.’ Just a hell of a lot of self-control. What Roman hadn’t said was that he had opened the door, heard the shower and closed it again, because he didn’t trust himself not to go to her.
She reacted to the comment with a weak smile flashing out before she worked up the courage to meet his disconcertingly intense stare.
Dios, she looked as if stubbornness was the only thing keeping her upright. ‘Sit down,’ he said, his abrupt delivery hiding his concern.
His lip curled in self-disgust as she walked towards one of the sofas. He’d been too busy noticing how great her lush body looked in jeans to notice until now the cell-deep weariness in her body language.
She looked as though it was an effort to lift up her feet as she walked across to the sofa.
‘You’re tired.’
Her head lifted at the accusation.
‘When di
d you last sleep?’
‘What is this, twenty questions?’
Arms folded across his chest, he stood there waiting for her answer, and finally Marisa gave a sigh of defeat. ‘All right,’ she fired back. ‘I’m tired but I’ve had a lot on my mind. Just don’t fuss.’ She knew from experience that even when you felt you couldn’t go on for another minute—and there had been more days like that than she wanted to recall when Jamie had been ill—there were always reserves to call on.
The water-darkened ends of her hair brushed her neck as she sat down before carefully tucking the offending strands behind her ears.
‘I have not exactly dressed for dinner,’ he said abruptly as he bent forward to lay down the tray he was carrying on the coffee table between the two sofas.
She tucked her legs under her, thinking that he didn’t need to dress for anything; he looked gorgeous whatever he was wearing—or not wearing. She veiled her gaze guiltily as the thought slipped past her tired defences. After a few hours’ sleep this situation was going to be so much easier to cope with.
Want to bet?
‘I’m not really hungry.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘Not that again. You will eat,’ he remarked pleasantly. ‘Or I will feed you myself,’ he promised with a steely smile that left his eyes grimly determined.
She snorted to show how unimpressed she was but, despite her claim, she felt her empty stomach rumble once more when he whipped off the dome cover with a magician’s flourish to reveal a plate containing a selection of delicious-looking, artfully arranged sandwiches.
‘I’d say I made them with my own fair hands but I didn’t. The tea and coffee are, however, all my own work.’ He nodded to the pots he had balanced either end of the tray as, instead of taking a seat on the other sofa or, and this was the preferred option for Marisa, heading for the door, he sat down beside her.
Marisa directed her gaze at the safer option, another plate, this one containing beautifully decorated small cakes that would have graced the window of any high-class patisserie.
Not looking at him didn’t make her any less skin-tinglingly conscious of his closeness.
‘Eat!’
Eyes slitted, she slung him a recalcitrant look, but reached for a sandwich. One bite of the layers of smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwiched between moist rye bread and she forgot her reluctance.
She sampled two more before sitting back with her arms folded. ‘Well,’ she challenged. ‘Do I pass?’
He gave a concessionary grunt.
‘So what happens now? Oh, not now as in we go to bed—’ He snorted as an expression of comical horror spread across her face while she issued a hot-faced correction. ‘That is go to bed, but not together—I mean—’
‘I know what you mean and the answer is it’s up to you what happens next. I’m assuming that Jamie might be tired tomorrow and a little off his game after the journey?’
‘Cranky as hell probably. I usually try to keep to his routine as much as possible.’
‘And his routine is?’
‘When he is not in nursery I allow him to watch one of his cartoons after breakfast.’ She supposed that wasn’t an option here. ‘Ash or I usually take him for a walk later.’ Turning over a piece of rotting wood on the ground and discovering all the creeping life beneath could keep Jamie fascinated for hours. She found herself suddenly wondering what Roman had been like as a child. Had he approached life with curiosity and enthusiasm as Jamie did? Then she stopped wondering because the price was an ache in her chest. ‘In the afternoon it depends.’
‘He mentioned enjoying swimming. We have an indoor pool and a gym complex.’
‘Of course you do,’ she muttered, trying to ignore the arm he had thrown across the back of the sofa.
‘The outdoor pool is heated if you think that would be better for him.’
‘Doesn’t it seem a waste to you? Having all this here and no one to enjoy it?’ Aside from the invisible staff of dozens, which she would no doubt encounter tomorrow.
‘Rio and I never expected to inherit it.’ His eyes flashed her way before he turned back to the contemplation of his threaded fingers. ‘Disinheriting us from this place was always his threat of first resort and we both assumed he’d gone through with it, but he ended up leaving us the lot. I think he expected us to fail, but then he had never made any attempt to include us, or teach us anything about his empire. He was a total bastard, but at least he was a bastard with a golden touch. It wouldn’t have mattered a jot to him that our failure would have a knock-on effect that would deprive so many families of their livelihoods too.’
‘He sounds like—’ Words failed her as indignation for Roman and his twin swelled in her chest, well, mostly for Roman, if she was honest. It was beyond her comprehension that a parent could harm their child like that, toying with their emotions.
‘If you’re into labels, he ticked all the boxes of a narcissist, a malignant narcissist.’ He offered up the information in a curiously emotionless voice. ‘He was an expert at manipulation. He became incredibly vindictive whenever he felt threatened by literally any decision my mother made without him. He took it as a personal affront and he responded by belittling her, and undermining her confidence until she was utterly dependent on him. His jealousy was totally toxic—’
‘Coercive control,’ she said, remembering an article she had read about the subject.
His dark brows lifted. ‘I believe that is the term, yes.’
‘But your mother escaped.’
‘Yes, she escaped love, but she is a remarkably strong woman and not everyone would have been so lucky.’
Did he even realise what he had said? she wondered. Did he know how revealing his choice of words was? For Roman love was clearly something you escaped from, a trap. That seemed very sad to her, as did the suspicion that her own deception had probably played some part in setting this view of his in concrete.
As she struggled against a fresh wave of guilt she became belatedly aware that while he spoke she had turned towards him until she now faced him, her legs still tucked underneath her, the arm she placed along the back of the sofa stretched out so that her position mirrored his, their fingertips almost touching.
As surreptitiously as she could manage she slowly retracted her arm at the same time as she unfolded her legs and placed her bare feet on the floor, and she swivelled around so that she sat shoulder to shoulder against him.
‘A pity that there is no DNA test for being a bad father. Some men should not have children.’
His pronouncement had a hard uncompromising note in it that made her twist back towards him. His earlier comments about being more like his father than his brother floated to the surface in her memory and she realised that he was really talking about himself, that it was Roman’s inner fear that he would hurt those he loved as his father had.
A hundred images flashed through her mind before she accepted the truth—he did love Jamie. He might be the most aggravating, stubborn, difficult man she had ever met but Roman was no monster.
‘You are nothing like the man you have described to me.’ She caught the flash of some emotion in his face as their eyes connected and consciously lowered the tone of her voice before she added carefully, but firmly, ‘If you were I wouldn’t be here. I’ve already told you that if I thought you being around Jamie would harm him, I would build a fifty-foot-high wall to keep you out.
‘I was close to my father,’ she volunteered, not aware that her own expression softened as she spoke. ‘But there were only the two of us.’
‘Your mother died?’
‘My mother walked out on us soon after I was born,’ she revealed with a casualness that to Roman’s watchful eyes seemed too contrived. As if she still carried the invisible scars of the rejection but would die before she’d show it. ‘She didn’t like being a mother because she felt it �
��crushed her vitality”.’
He didn’t need to see quotation marks painted in the air to know she was directly quoting her mother. They were words that should have had a crushing impact, but her expression was serene. True, there was a sadness in her smile, but there was no discernible resentment that he could detect.
He thought about the extensive file headed ‘Marisa Rayner’ that remained unopened on his laptop.
Why commission something and not make use of it? He had fully intended to but in the short intervening time between requesting an in-depth report on Marisa’s life and it dropping into his email inbox something had changed.
He had been reluctant to admit it. He’d told himself that he was too busy to read it, that he wasn’t in the right frame of mind to view it objectively, he was too angry or too tired... But his inventive powers had eventually deserted him and he was left with only the truth, which was that he still wanted to know all about her, but he wanted her to volunteer the information.
‘She actually said that to you?’
‘Gracious, no...’ She flashed him a small smile, and in the semi-light her eyes made him think of pools of liquid gold.
‘Well, I suppose she might have,’ Marisa conceded, oblivious to his discomfort. ‘But as I was two months old the last time we met in person, I don’t really recall.’
Did the joking response hide a multitude of hurt, he wondered, or was she really as all right with being rejected as she sounded?
‘Actually she wrote me a letter when she left, for me to read when Dad thought I was old enough.’ It wasn’t the letter that had hurt, it was what she had discovered when she’d wanted to find out more about her mother, when her seventeen-year-old self had wondered if perhaps they could be friends as adults.
When she had found her mother online she had discovered that the woman who’d felt unable to be her mother was now remarried and was the mother to three step-children as well as a child of her own, Marisa’s half-sister.
No, they could never be friends.
She levelled her clear gaze on Roman’s face and thought about the demons he would never reveal, let alone allow her near enough to help him move past. And she wanted to help him, she wanted... Shock filtered into her eyes as she stilled, and everything inside her seemed to stop as the truth hit her.