about her seemed to spark with life: her hair, her eyes, that flush in her cheeks, a puffy fullness to her slightly parted lips, her nipples aroused and pressing against her bra and the thin jersey of her jumper.
‘I don’t know—how did we come to that?’ Xander asked softly. ‘Maybe if you were to stop ly— Maybe if you told me the truth,’ he amended as Samantha looked ready to explode if he called her a liar one more time tonight, ‘I wouldn’t have to keep asking the same question but in a different format.’
‘The question being who was the man at the hotel earlier?’ she snapped impatiently.
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve told you, I don’t—’ Sam broke off her protest as the sound of a piercing scream filled the apartment.
‘Daisy!’ She sprang quickly to her feet, not sparing Xander a second glance as she fled from the room and down the hallway to her daughter’s bedroom.
SAM HAD LEFT Daisy’s door slightly ajar and a night light on, as she always did, and she quickly pushed the door fully open now before running across the room to where her daughter was sitting up in bed. Daisy’s eyes were wide, the tears streaming down her feverishly flushed face as she continued to scream.
‘I’m here, Daisy.’ Sam sat on the side of the bed to take her daughter into her arms. ‘It’s okay, darling,’ she soothed as her daughter struggled to be set free. ‘It’s Mummy, darling. It’s Mummy, Daisy,’ she repeated firmly as she stroked her daughter’s hair back from her flushed face.
Daisy stopped struggling but still trembled as she now looked up uncertainly. ‘Mummy?’
Sam smiled at her reassuringly. ‘You had a bad dream, darling. Just a dream,’ she soothed as Daisy, calmer now, snuggled against her for comfort.
At the same time Sam’s thoughts were inwardly racing. Had Daisy recognised Malcolm at the hotel earlier, after all? Either consciously, or subconsciously? And was that the reason for her daughter’s nightmare?
It was like one of those night terrors that Daisy had suffered from as a very young child, but she hadn’t had a single one in the past three years. Not since they’d left Malcolm.
‘Is she okay?’
Sam turned sharply to look at Xander as he quietly entered the bedroom, an anxious frown on her face as she wondered how Daisy would react to the presence of a man in her bedroom so soon after her nightmare.
‘Xander!’ Daisy pulled out of Sam’s arms before launching herself off the bed towards him.
Giving Sam a very definitive answer to that question.
Xander only just managed to open his arms in time to the little girl. As it was, he had to drop his walking stick on the floor, swaying precariously for several seconds as his injured leg threatened to collapse beneath him. Daisy might only be a lightweight, but her sudden weightfirm grasp on his leg caused a jolt of pain from Xander’s thigh down to his knee.
Xander glanced at Samantha, noting the pallor of her cheeks, and the tears glistening in her shadowed eyes, her expression dazed, lost, as she sat on Daisy’s bed looking at them both. Had there been something more sinister to Daisy’s nightmare than that the little girl had simply had an over-stimulating day?
Daisy gave a yawn as she nestled against him and he slowly led her back to the bed.
Within seconds of her lying down, it seemed, the little girl had fallen back to sleep, as if the nightmare had never occurred or woken her up screaming. Chances were—Xander hoped—that Daisy wouldn’t even remember she’d had the nightmare in the morning.
Her mother looked far less composed, Xander noted. Samantha’s expression was still one of devastation, her face drawn and pale, shadows having deepened in those beautiful eyes.
‘Let’s go and finish our brandy,’ Xander encouraged, wincing slightly as he straightened from picking his cane up from the bedroom floor.
‘Maybe I should stay here for a while, just in case?’ Samantha looked worriedly at her sleeping daughter.
‘We’ll hear her if she calls out again.’ Xander held his hand out to Samantha as encouragement for her to stand up and leave the bedroom with him. It was the most he could manage, his leg now a painful and throbbing ache. ‘Come on, Samantha,’ he encouraged gruffly, knowing he badly needed to sit down.
Sam looked up at him blankly, too disturbed still by Daisy’s nightmare to be able to respond.
Nightmares had been a regular occurrence when Daisy was much younger, and at the time Sam hadn’t equated them with the tension of living with Malcolm. She had only realised that significance when they had abruptly stopped once she and Daisy had moved out of Malcolm’s house and begun living on their own.
Until tonight.
It was too much of a coincidence, surely, that this should have happened after seeing Malcolm at the hotel earlier?
Admittedly Daisy had given no indication at the time that she had recognised her father, but maybe it hadn’t been a conscious recognition but a subliminal one? The mind often played strange tricks on people, so maybe Daisy had recognised Malcolm without even being aware that she had?
‘Samantha?’ Xander asked again gently.
She blinked, focusing on him with effort. ‘Sorry.’ She grimaced, giving herself a mental shake as she stood up. ‘That was...unexpected,’ she murmured as she followed him from the bedroom, leaving the door wide open this time, the better to be able to hear Daisy if she should call out again.
‘Just over-excitement, do you think?’ Xander wondered, replenishing their brandy glasses once they had returned to the sitting room, before handing one to Samantha. ‘You’ll feel better if you drink some more of that,’ he encouraged gruffly. ‘Slowly this time.’
Sam obediently took the glass from him, still worried about Daisy’s nightmare, and not in the mood to argue with Xander over a glass of brandy. ‘It was a different sort of day for her, with lots of unusual, if exciting, stimuli,’ she answered him woodenly.
‘But?’ Xander observed her closely as he moved to sink down onto the sofa.
Because he really did think he was now in danger of falling down.
And wouldn’t that look just wonderful, very manly, if he were to keel over and collapse at Samantha’s bare feet?
His leg was giving him hell, after he had been on it for so many hours already today, and it hadn’t helped when Daisy had launched herself at him just now when he hadn’t been expecting it.
Although physically painful, having Daisy turn to him in that way for reassurance and comfort had surprisingly felt quite nice.
To know that Daisy liked him enough, trusted him enough, to want to turn to him for comfort was a good feeling after Xander’s weeks of uncertainty about himself.
It made him even more determined to be worthy of Daisy’s trust.
Samantha looked as if she was in need of a little comfort too right now.
‘Come and sit beside me,’ he instructed in a voice that brooked no argument. ‘Don’t make me have to stand up again and come get you, Samantha,’ he added with a pained wince.
She looked at him blankly again for several long seconds, almost as if she had forgotten he was there, before moving stiffly across the room to sit down beside him.
Maybe she really had forgotten he was there?
Surely children of all ages had nightmares? A result of a too-active imagination at that age? Xander seemed to remember having them as a child himself. Of course, his had been due to living with his bastard of a father,