by Kim Lawrence
She loved Roman; she had when he’d proposed to her, but she had taken refuge from the truth, telling herself it was just physical because the reality was too painful to own—the fact that she’d had to walk away from the only man she had ever loved.
The man who would never forgive her for her double deception of being married and hiding the existence of his child from him. If he had ever loved her, she had surely killed that love stone dead years ago, and that was her punishment to bear.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Fine,’ she lied, forcing a smile. ‘I loved my father. And he loved me, but he left me in a desperate situation when he died. Without Rupert I really don’t know what would have happened to me. But that’s the way with addicts and Dad was a reckless gambler who walked the line between being legal and being a con man, although mostly he stayed on the right side of the law. He never really grew up, my mother deserted her own child, but nevertheless I am not like either of them. Who you are isn’t all about DNA and you can’t allow an accident of birth to define who you are.’
Roman closed his eyes, wishing he had her certainty and hoping that she never had that belief crushed, because he knew what that felt like. ‘You really believe that, don’t you?’
She nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘I do.’ She eased her back away from the sofa. ‘Do you mind if I go to bed now? I’m pretty tired.’
He vaulted to his feet without a word. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. I hope Jamie has an undisturbed night.’ He turned away but then swung back almost immediately. ‘I’d say whistle if you need anything but in this place I wouldn’t hear you.’ He picked up her mobile phone from where it lay on the coffee table and, flicking through it, he punched in a rapid series of numbers. ‘So call me if there are any problems.’
‘How did you know my phone pin?’
‘Jamie’s date of birth? You really should double protect.’
Outside the door he leaned against the wall and wished that protection against the hunger Marisa aroused in him were so readily available.
CHAPTER TEN
MARISA WAS IN her bedroom hanging her belongings in the cavernous walk-in wardrobe when she heard the knock. Tightening the belt on her robe, she hurried past Jamie, who was still in his pyjamas, bent over colouring books and crayons he had spread across the coffee table.
She took a deep breath and opened the door. Despite the mood-lowering sense of anticlimax when she saw a young woman in a neat uniform standing there, she kept her smile painted in place.
‘Buenos dias, señora.’
‘Buenos dias.’
‘I am just asking if you would like to take your breakfast here or in the breakfast room with Señor Roman.’
‘I’m hungry, Mum!’
‘All right, big ears,’ she tossed back. ‘In here, if that is no problem.’
‘And what would señora like?’
‘Coffee, juice and toast, please. Oh, and some fruit would be lovely too.’
‘Scrambled egg,’ came Jamie’s voice.
Marisa smiled at the girl. ‘And scrambled egg.’
‘Sí, señora.’ She bobbed a little curtsy and walked away swiftly.
‘Have you cleaned your teeth yet?’
‘Yes,’ he said with his hand over his mouth.
Marisa’s lips twitched. ‘Go clean them again, please. I can see you found the clothes I left on your bed but you did actually wash your face, didn’t you?’
Jamie looked hurt. ‘Of course I did.’
Squatting down to readjust the top that Jamie had put on back to front, she let it pass, putting a hand on the floor to stop herself losing her balance when there was a knock on the door. She had already opened the doors to the balcony where the table and chairs afforded a gorgeous view of the acres of green manicured lawn and the mountains beyond.
‘Come in!’ she yelled, then as the door opened she asked without turning around, ‘Could you put it on the balcony, please? It’s such a glorious morning.’
‘Sí, señora.’
She almost lost her balance before finding her centre of gravity and rising rapidly to her feet. ‘Roman!’ Tall, effortlessly elegant and showing no after-effects from yesterday’s emotional dramas, he made her heart pick up tempo. ‘I thought you were the—’
‘Maria.’ His grin flashed, making her remember how easily he could charm her when he wanted to. ‘An easy mistake to make. Many have commented on the likeness.’
Roman’s lips twitched as she tightened the knot on her robe, but she couldn’t add a few more inches to the length and it showed an amazing amount of her smooth shapely legs, which he thoroughly enjoyed looking at. He was able to observe her tousled, just-got-out-of-bed appearance without feeling tortured, because there was nothing to be tortured about. She was utterly gorgeous and he wanted her.
There were two options: he either did something about it or he didn’t. Neither choice was going to have life-changing consequences. If he opted for the sex, he had no doubt it would be absolutely fantastic.
His sleepless night had not been a total waste. After ruminating for hours, he now knew he was seeing problems where there were just choices, and nothing, as he reminded himself again, was life-changing.
Jamie was life-changing, and now that he’d had the time to consider it objectively Roman realised that his son was not just life-changing, but life-enhancing.
Jamie’s mother, on the other hand, well, that ship had sailed years ago. Roman had been a fool to propose to her, and, although at first she had taken a part of him with her that had left him feeling as though he had lost a limb, he had rebuilt his protective walls until they now formed an impenetrable barrier.
Even if he hadn’t, it would take a very stupid man to allow a woman to do that to him twice, especially one who had already displayed a disturbing ability to wander around inside his head.
Marisa fought off a smile at his teasing and bit her quivering lip. ‘Sure, you and Maria could be twins.’ She sucked in a dismayed breath but the words were out before she could pull them back.
‘I already have a twin. I believe you know him.’
And they were right back onto the subject that could never be a winner for her, but she squared her jaw. There were limits and she was getting tired of dissolving into an apologetic heap all the time. ‘Not really. I’ve only ever seen him when he looks as if he is wrestling with a choice between the fire or the frying pan. I imagine he has his lighter moments.’
‘Rio is considered in every way more upbeat than me. I am the deep thinker, apparently.’ His grin did not reach his dark heavy-lidded eyes.
‘Which is not saying very much.’
His sudden laugh dissolved the tension before it reached critical mass.
‘So do you want this breakfast on the balcony?’
She nodded. ‘Come along, Jamie.’
She ushered Jamie through the door to the balcony, following the tall figure who was positioning their breakfast on the wrought-iron table.
‘I like it here,’ Jamie declared.
‘Do you, darling?’
‘I’m glad he likes it. It’ll be his one day or at least half of it will be. I imagine Rio’s children will inherit the other half of the place.’ Her eyes flew wide open and he laughed. ‘You really haven’t considered that, have you?’
Recovering from the shock, she rallied. ‘Don’t be stupid. I’m the woman who married a dying man for his money, ask anyone.’ She heard the bitterness in her voice and winced. The scar on that particular wound was not as healed as she liked to think.
Forgetting that he had thought exactly that about her, he felt an urge to wipe the shadows from her face and berate the idiots who had put them there. ‘Anyone that actually counts?’
Her burst of angry resentment fizzled away. ‘Thanks for that. I know it’s stupid to let it bo
ther me but the story was doing the rounds when I first discovered I was pregnant and it was sort of a double whammy, though when it became public knowledge I was pregnant I morphed into a lonely brave widow overnight.’
She glanced towards Jamie, who was ignoring them and tucking into his breakfast, and she smiled. Seeing him wolf down food never failed to make her happy.
‘He has a robust appetite.’
She nodded and said quietly, ‘For so long he had no appetite at all and it seemed like he was fading away before my eyes.’
‘You will, as well, if you don’t eat. Anyway, I came to ask if you would like the guided tour in, say, an hour.’
‘I would love to, but Jamie has been up since five.’ At least it had given her the opportunity to finally enjoy the pleasures of the decadent bath.
‘Which means you have been up since five too.’
She shrugged. ‘Give it another hour and he’ll be fading. He’ll need a nap.’
She saw the disappointment on Roman’s face and found herself suggesting, ‘How about this afternoon instead?’
‘That sounds like a good option but, in the meantime, how about I give the you the grown-up tour this morning? I’m sure we can cover more ground without Jamie.’
Marisa froze. She didn’t want to be without Jamie. Jamie’s presence was her shield, her protection against the feelings she didn’t want Roman to pick up on, the ones she didn’t want to feel.
If that made her a coward, she really didn’t care.
‘Sorry,’ she said, adopting an unconvincing expression of regret as she leaned forward to snatch a piece of fruit off the breakfast tray. ‘I couldn’t possibly leave him.’ She bit into a juicy peach and wiped the juice off her chin with a self-conscious grimace of apology.
‘You could,’ he said, while in his head he was tasting the sweetness of peach juice in her mouth and the resultant rise in his core temperature made him glad of the light breeze. ‘Maria, who you’ve already met, would be more than happy to babysit. I’d say being the eldest of seven makes her more than qualified and I have personally witnessed her keep several feral brothers in line without breaking a sweat. She is truly a phenomenon.’
‘She seems a bit wasted carrying trays, then.’
‘She is off to train as a children’s nurse next year.’ He offered up the information smug in the knowledge that he had delivered a deal clincher. ‘So...?’
‘All right, I suppose so.’ It wasn’t exactly a gracious acceptance but he didn’t seem to notice. After he had left she comforted herself with the fact that a tour couldn’t take long, and she was making a fuss about nothing; it wasn’t as if they were talking about a candlelit meal.
She was wrong; it did take a long, very long time.
The previous night she had not really taken on board the sheer vastness of the place or the number of people it seemed to employ. Aside from the private rooms, and the multiple banquet-size spaces and numerous bedroom suites, there were the domestic areas; not just the kitchen complex with its walk-in fridges and freezer and numerous ancillary rooms, but offices that housed the army of people involved in the running of several thousand acres of the estate, which boasted a bewildering diversity of industry from an organic vineyard to an area of productive forestry.
She would have been interested because Roman was a very well-informed guide, but he was still Roman and she had no Jamie to hide behind.
She had a suspicion that her fear, well founded, of revealing by a look, a gesture or a word the true depth of her feelings made her appear stiff, and her monosyllabic responses earned her more than a couple of puzzled looks.
But she could cope a lot better with his puzzled looks than with his pity—or he might even be angry? It was not a mystery she was in any hurry to solve, even though normally she relished a puzzle.
There was one thing that aroused her curiosity as they walked through the bewildering network of rooms and corridors. The staff they met, especially the ones that had known Roman as a child, displayed an obvious fondness for him, and Roman clearly felt the same, considering his relaxed manner with them.
There was respect and fondness on both sides and for someone who professed to hate this place he seemed to have a great deal of knowledge of its workings.
They had only explored a fraction of the buildings, she suspected, when he led her outside. The heat of the sun after the cool afforded by the thick stone walls hit her like a wall and she was grateful of the thin-strapped sundress she had chosen to wear. She was glad she had applied a liberal coating of suncream to her exposed flesh, but beside her Roman didn’t appear to even notice the heat.
‘You must need an army of gardeners.’
‘Some, but they are not here today. There is a horticultural show on locally, so they have decamped en masse. The tennis courts are that way.’
She could make out some green through the screen of trees in the direction he pointed. She had left behind her idea that this would take half an hour tops when he mentioned visiting the olive groves that were only half a mile away, groves which apparently kept the estate supplied with their own olive oil all year-round.
She had rather tetchily pointed out that as no one lived here that couldn’t be so difficult, at which point he had made her feel silly by explaining about all the families that lived on the estate as well as the satellite farms.
‘Would you like to see the pool now?’
She dragged her eyes away from admiring his impossibly long eyelashes. ‘No, that’s fine. I’m sure you have other things to do. You’ve already been very kind with your time—’ Her voice faded in the face of his unblinking stare.
‘I am rarely kind, mi vida.’ The slow, contemplative, wolflike smile that accompanied his drawled observation sent a shiver right down to her toes.
‘I just meant—’
‘This way...’ He placed his hand between her shoulder blades, his eyes darkening as he felt the silky warmth of her suncreamed flesh.
His light touch carried an electrical charge that sent a convulsive shiver over which she had no control through Marisa’s body, silencing the protest on the tip of her tongue.
‘Are you cold?’
‘No, I’m fine.’ Shrugging off his touch would have been too revealing of her helpless reaction so she had no option but to endure the torture.
Her escape in the end didn’t come in the form of a rehearsed ploy, but a natural spontaneous reaction to the sight of the huge outdoor pool.
Roman watched with a smile, contrasting her childlike enthusiasm with the image of serene elegance she projected in public. Right at that moment she looked just like a carefree teenager.
She balanced on the edge, taking it all in. It wasn’t just the size; it was the way it was landscaped almost organically into its setting. Along one length was a series of arches housing stone benches and formal potted palms; the other length was landscaped with opulent-looking greenery interspersed with splashes of colour provided by exotic flowers. Beyond the waterfall that cascaded over artfully arranged rocks, there was a terracotta-roofed gazebo that sheltered low daybeds piled high with cushions.
This was one aspect of a billionaire lifestyle that she had no problems with! She kicked off her sandals and flexed her toes against the marble tiles swirled with pink that edged the pool. By contrast the pool itself looked as though it was scooped out of solid polished stone.
‘Are those reeds?’ she exclaimed, directing an enquiring look over her shoulder before she turned back to look at the greenery growing in the water.
‘They provide a natural filter because there are no chemicals in the water.’
‘I might camp here.’ Her childish enthusiasm was contagious.
‘You enjoy roughing it, then?’
She threw him a twinkling grin of reciprocal amusement that faded when she realised who she was with. This rapport
would only ever be an illusion and there was far too much risk in lowering her guard around Roman.
‘This is all pretty spectacular.’
Roman felt a sting of frustration as he sensed the restraint in her response, as if she was suddenly thinking twice about each syllable before she gave voice to an entire sentence.
Marisa blinked and closed her eyes as a sunbeam fractured on the water’s surface, dazzling her.
There were some moments in life that were indelibly imprinted on your consciousness and this, he recognised, was one of them. He would never forget the image of Marisa, slim and supple, her body curved, poised like a dancer on the edge of the pool with her head thrown back, eyes closed, her face lifted to the sun.
‘You look like a nymph. Is the water calling to you?’
She turned, shading her eyes before she turned back to the pool. ‘I wish I’d thought to wear my swimsuit,’ she admitted, gazing deep into the inviting turquoise depths.
He walked towards her. ‘You really don’t need one.’
She shook her head then as comprehension dawned, and darted him a shocked look.
‘You know you want to,’ he taunted, sliding a finger under the top button of his shirt.
‘You wouldn’t,’ Marisa gasped with a weak laugh, but she knew of course that he would.
Another button and then another followed. ‘You don’t have to watch,’ he taunted.
Actually she did, and she stood there, throat dry, one hand pressed to her parted lips, unable to tear her eyes off the slow teasing reveal as each successive button slipped from its mooring. His shirt gaped a little more, revealing another tantalising section of golden chest and ridged washboard-flat belly.
‘Roman...you... Someone might see!’ Her voice was barely more than an agonised husky whisper.