when she thought of him tonight…the way his safe, solid presence had taken away all her fears and made her feel secure…
‘Good. Okay.’
‘I’ll even take the load from your shoulders by helping with the cooking,’ he said, and shot her a slanting smile that set her whole body alight.
‘Is that a threat or a promise?’
‘You have my solemn word that I’ll consult recipe books before I decide to fling a few things into a pan.’
‘I guess it would be nice to have somebody cook for me.’
She was a woman built to share her life with someone, and that fact was brought forcibly home to him when she said that, her voice wistful. Hard on the heels of that thought came a less pleasant one, and that was that the person she would end up sharing her life with wouldn’t be him—even though between them they had created the new life growing in her stomach.
‘No stress. Remember what the consultant said? And I don’t like the thought of you spending hours in that studio of yours, doing painstaking work.’
‘I move around a lot,’ Susie confessed. ‘I draw and paint a little, and then I stretch my legs and wander around the house to make sure my muscles don’t decide to seize up on me. Besides, I’m nearly finished with my commission, and the next one is for a children’s book so it’ll be far less detailed. In fact I shall probably be able to do a lot of it in front of the telly. Sergio, there’s no need for you to feel that you have to micromanage every single aspect of my life because I’m pregnant.’
Sergio ignored that. ‘Are you all right to stay on your own tonight?’
‘Of course I am—and that’s just what I’m talking about!’ She took a deep breath. ‘In fact,’ she said evenly, ‘I’m so tired I shall probably fall asleep the second my head hits the pillow.’
Unlike all those other times, when bed had signalled a lot more than falling asleep.
A rush of jumbled thoughts crowded into her head, jostling for space. Memories of being touched by him combined with the stress of the past few hours, the security she had felt at having him at her side, the relief at having received the all-clear…the sadness of realising that he truly saw her as nothing more than a responsibility, the helplessness at wanting more and knowing she would never have it.
Her eyes darkened and she licked suddenly dry lips. He was staring at her and she was rooted to the chair, unable to move a muscle. Except for her heart. Her heart was the only thing moving, beating inside her so fast and so hard that she wanted to faint.
‘Don’t,’ Sergio warned her gruffly.
She blinked at him in an attempt to clear her head. ‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t look at me like that.’ He shook his head, broke eye contact briefly, but then was compelled to look at her again.
‘Like what?’
‘Like you’re issuing an invitation.’
Or maybe he had misread that expression on her face? Before he had always had complete and utter confidence in his ability to have whatever woman he wanted, but she had managed to instil in him a healthy vein of self-doubt.
‘You’re tired,’ he continued. ‘We’re both exhausted after tonight.’
‘Which means…’ she was angry with herself again, because she had only just managed to catch herself before she fell headlong into what would have been a stupid mistake ‘…that it’s time for you to leave.’
She hazarded a smile, which seemed to do the trick, breaking the spell between them and allowing her to breathe as though something heavy wasn’t sitting on her chest. She stood up and began walking him to the front door, keeping her distance.
It was bad enough that she would have to fight her feelings for him without the luxury of having time out when he wasn’t around, but how much worse if she had given in? If she had done what her body had been urging her to do? If she had just…stepped towards him, laid her palm on his hard chest, stripped off her jumper and her thick thermal vest and her sensible bra so that he could swirl his tongue over her sensitive nipples…?
How uncomfortable would that have made the situation? Because he would have responded. She had glimpsed the flare of hunger in his eyes. And maybe he was just horny because he hadn’t had sex in a while, or maybe he was curious to find out what it felt like to make love to a woman who was big with his child, but he would have responded…
And then in the morning he would no longer have been horny, and would no longer have been curious, and where would that have left them?
She heard herself talking normally to him as she showed him out, even though her mind was in a whirl, and when he had gone she leaned against the front door and finally allowed herself to breathe evenly.
How the heck was she going to survive the next couple of months? she wondered.
‘I THINK I felt something…’
Sergio looked up from the report he had been scanning on his computer. Sometimes he found it hard to believe that he was the same man who had wined and dined women, slept with them, moved on… The same man whose entire life had been focused on work and the thrill of making money and growing an empire. A man who had enjoyed the freedom of living exclusively for himself.
He had moved in with her seven weeks previously and they had settled into a routine which was one born of necessity. He knew that. Of course he did. Circumstances had compelled him to live life at a pace he would never have imagined possible. What made him uneasy was the fact that he had adapted so fast.
They were living in a weird kind of bubble, in which they functioned as a couple for the sake of their unborn child. Bubbles eventually burst. When this one did the dithering would be over and she would accept the inevitable. He had indulged her by not forcing her hand, but in the end the result would be the same.
Except now the certainty that this was going to work out as planned seemed to hang in the balance, and he felt a rare surge of confusion.
‘No, it’s nothing.’
Susie had been frankly terrified of this arrangement, and sometimes when she thought about it she was still terrified—because she had become so accustomed to sharing space with him. Had he been right all along? That a marriage of convenience would be a workable marriage? Had she made far too big a deal of wanting the fairy tale of love and romance and assuming that anything that fell short of that was a waste of time?
‘You’re becoming the queen of the false alarm,’ Sergio said drily, flipping shut his laptop and standing to stretch out his muscles, which had tightened from sitting in one place for too long.
He had gone into the office today, had successfully signed on the dotted line for a deal that had been brewing for nearly a year and a half, and yet his only thoughts had been of how fast he could get back to her.
He looked at her broodingly and she met his gaze and then glanced away.
This happened a lot less than she had feared…this flipping over of her heart when their eyes met and held for a fraction too long…when she happened to see something in his gaze that spoke of other stuff…not just the normal, casual, comfortable stuff that passed between them from day to day.
It was like looking down into a clear stream and glimpsing the swirl of dangerous currents moving so fast and so deep that they didn’t ruffle the calm surface except very occasionally, when they glittered and seduced and held her temporarily captive.
Dry-mouthed, she dragged her eyes away from him, half wishing that he wouldn’t stand there, stretching, so that his shirt tugged free from the waistband