the pitch where Ben stood, the children all lined up neatly on one side. Ben explained to the children, in careful Italian which both surprised and touched her, how to dribble the ball, which, Natalia discovered, meant just kicking it with your feet. Then Ben punted the ball upwards off his foot and bounced it off his head, garnering a giggle from the crowd. He turned to Natalia, smiling, yet with the steel of challenge in his eyes. He could have chosen any of the other volunteers for this little exercise, but he’d chosen her. Of course. The children weren’t the only ones Ben wanted to learn a lesson.
‘Simple, right?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Natalia assured him. ‘Simple.’ Simpler, in any case, than writing name tags. She straightened, ready to show Ben just how well she could kick. Or dribble. Or whatever.
Ben dribbled the ball neatly between his feet and then sent a kick over to her. Natalia tensed, tried to kick it back, but the ball rolled right past her while her foot arced widely through the air, connecting with nothing. She heard a few snickers from the crowd of children, and felt her face burn.
She hated being laughed at. Hated, hated, hated it. It made her feel twelve years old again, her first year of boarding school, standing in front of her entire class while the teacher proclaimed in ringing tones, Natalia Santina is the slowest girl in this school! She writes like a six-year-old!
She still felt the shame. Slow. Stupid.
Taking a deep breath, she squared her shoulders and marched over to where the ball had come to a stop. Then she gave it a satisfyingly hard kick back towards Ben. He trapped it neatly between his feet, his eyebrows raised in question as he glanced her. As usual, he was able to guess something of her mood.
‘Shall we try again?’
Natalia just shrugged. She felt unbearably tense and brittle, as if she might snap right in half. Ben kicked the ball again, slow this time, an obviously easy shot so she’d be able to kick it back.
She didn’t.
Once again the ball rolled by her and her foot swung through the air. She heard a few children giggle from behind their hands.
Tears of frustration burned beneath her lids. Couldn’t she do anything right? Ben was probably enjoying this, she thought savagely as she went to retrieve the ball. He’d probably been dreaming of this—Princess Natalia, humiliated on his football pitch! She grabbed the ball and threw it back to him, forgetting that in this wretched sport you weren’t supposed to use your hands.
Ben caught the ball easily, giving her a quick, frowning look of concern before he turned back to the crowd of children. ‘You get the idea?’ he asked in his careful Italian. ‘Why don’t you pair up and practise dribbling and then kicking the ball back and forth.’ He glanced back at her again, and Natalia knew he was wondering just what was going on. She folded her arms and did her best to look bored. She would not give him the satisfaction of knowing how that little episode had rattled her.
The children quickly paired up and Ben strolled between them, offering pointers and encouragement. After a few moments he glanced back at her again and she could tell he wanted her to do something. But what? What could she do? She was so bloody useless. She’d never minded so much before.
Then she saw Ben’s glance move to a little girl standing off to the side, one long dark strand of hair twirled around a finger. She was watching the kids all in pairs, happily dribbling and kicking away, and nobody noticed she was all alone. Natalia knew how that felt. She might be the party princess now, but she’d been the big loser in school.
Without even thinking about what she was doing, she jogged over to her and crouched down so she was eye-level. ‘Gabriella, sì?’ The girl nodded solemnly. ‘You want to practice dribbling?’ She shrugged, trying to act like she didn’t care, but Natalia saw the eagerness in her eyes. She knew all about that too. Pretending you didn’t care when you were dying inside. ‘I don’t have a partner,’ Natalia said. ‘Will you be my partner?’ The girl shrugged again, clearly not wanting her pity. Another thing Natalia understood. ‘Because,’ she continued, ‘you saw how terrible I was, didn’t you? I can’t even kick the ball, never mind this dribbling.’ She was rewarded with a tiny smile. ‘I think I’m the worst player on the pitch, so I hope you don’t mind being my partner.’
A long moment passed where Gabriella just gazed at her with those sad, dark eyes. ‘I don’t mind,’ she finally whispered, and she followed Natalia out onto the pitch. Natalia forced her own self-consciousness back as she attempted to dribble the ball between her feet before passing it to Gabriella. It really was harder than it looked. A lot harder. They managed a tentative back and forth for a few minutes and then Natalia went to give a big kick, missed the ball completely and fell flat on her back.
She lay there for a moment, the wind knocked right out of her, and blinked slowly up at the cloudless blue sky. Then she heard someone jogging towards her, and suddenly she was looking into Ben’s face, close enough so she could see the sunlight glinting off the faint stubble on his chin. He gazed down at her, and Natalia saw a shadow of anxious concern in his eyes. He touched her cheek once, gently, before pulling his hand quickly away. He’d surprised them both by touching her. Staring up at him, Natalia suddenly felt breathless for an entirely different reason.
Ben sat back on his heels. ‘You OK, Princess?’
She spread her arms and legs out as far as she could and managed a sunny smile. ‘Never better.’
His mouth quirked upwards. ‘That was quite a fall.’
‘I know, it took me a long time to perfect it.’ She moved, experimentally, wincing a little bit at how her back hurt. Ben frowned, placed a hand on her shoulder. Even in her bruised state she felt another jolt of awareness.
‘Stay still. You might have hurt something.’
‘I know I hurt something. But nothing’s broken.’
She eased herself up into a sitting position. ‘Trust me, I’m a complete coward when it comes to pain.’
Ben was giving her a rather strange look. His hand remained on her shoulder. ‘Somehow I doubt that.’
Discomfited, Natalia looked away from him and saw that the productivity on the pitch—all that dribbling and kicking—had come to a complete halt as a hundred pairs of eyes stared at her with a mixture of concern and amusement. Talk about humiliation.
Yet as Gabriella walked up to her, her eyes wide, Natalia found, to her own amazement, that she didn’t really mind. Not this time. Not if it made just one child feel a little bit better about herself. She winked at Gabriella. ‘I told you I was terrible, didn’t I?’ Gabriella gave a little laugh, and this time Natalia didn’t feel like she was being laughed at. She had made the joke, not been the butt of it. She stood, trying not to wince because her back did really hurt, and held the ball out to Gabriella. ‘Your turn, I think.’
‘Maybe you should sit out—’ Ben offered. He still looked rather touchingly concerned. Probably just his overblown sense of responsibility, Natalia told herself. It would be stupid to read anything more into it. To want more. She gave him a mocking look.
‘Don’t coddle the princess, hotshot. I can do it.’
A surprised smile quirked the corner of his mouth and his expression lightened. ‘I know you can,’ he said.
Ben watched Natalia walk away and felt a surprising surge of admiration—and maybe something else. Something deeper. The tangle of emotions he’d felt inside him since the day spent with Natalia had tuned into a knot that seemed to be taking over his body. His thoughts. His heart.
He’d spent far too much time thinking about that almost-kiss, as if it had meant something. As if it could have. In a desperate attempt at distraction he’d gone into the office on Sunday, hoping that piles of paperwork would keep him from remembering just how perfect Natalia had fit against him, how right she’d felt in his arms.
And it had worked, for a little while. Until