‘So you think the best way to work out an amicable arrangement between us is to walk in here and start throwing around accusations? You are here as a guest. I do not answer to you. I have been taking care of Jamie for four and a half years...’ Unconsciously her hands went to her stomach as she pulled in a tense breath. ‘Actually, even longer than that. He is everything to me and has been ever since the moment I knew I’d conceived and I would—’ She suddenly stopped. ‘Why on earth am I defending myself to you?’ she muttered half to herself.
She didn’t add the words, To someone who hasn’t been here and didn’t even want a child, but she really wanted to. He clearly read the sentiment shining in the contempt of her glare, because he spread his hands, his long fingers extended in a pacifying gesture.
‘I might have overreacted somewhat.’
Partly mollified by his unexpected climbdown, even if it had come across as reluctant rather than humble, she gave a slightly hysterical laugh from her dry throat, which she covered with a fake cough that quickly turned into a genuine one.
‘Are you contagious?’
‘You can’t control a cough...’ she retorted, reading irritation in his stiff expression. An image floated unbidden into her head of Roman, his face a mask of carnal need, curved over her, his knees between her thighs and his hands curled around her wrists. It was so real she could have sworn in the split second before she banished it that she could feel his warm breath on her face.
‘Shall we start again?’ he suggested.
Her fingernails inscribing crescent moons into the soft palms of her hands, she nodded and made an effort to unclench, everywhere.
‘I know this must be hard for you—’ she began, only to be spoken over immediately.
‘I do not require your sympathy.’
She sucked in a breath and glared at him standing there, hauteur and disdain stamped all over his patrician face. ‘Fine, then assume you don’t have it,’ she countered, her eyes flashing gold fire before she pulled her protective cloak of coolness around her once more. ‘For the record, it’s a very quiet area.’ She made sure there was nothing whatever placatory about her statement. ‘Jamie is never alone; if I’m not there, his nanny is.’
She could tell he was thinking that a nanny did not seem adequate protection against an individual intent on kidnap or whatever it was he was imagining would happen, but he clamped his lips over this observation instead.
‘We really do have a good security system and the estate wall is several feet of solid granite,’ she continued, ‘but I want Jamie to have as normal a childhood as possible and he is perfectly safe here.’
She could almost see him fighting back another retort but she was too stressed to see the funny side of this—was there even a funny side to see?
‘I never intended to imply—’ he began.
She cut across him in a flat voice and dug her hands into the pockets of the trousers that were tailored enough to show off the narrowness of her waist and the shapely length of her thighs and slim calves.
‘But you did.’
It was a relief when his intense gaze left her face and she took the opportunity to breathe, really breathe. She could only hope that this would get easier because the effort of maintaining the illusion that she was in charge of this situation... No, she was in charge, she told herself, but it was still exhausting.
Yet it was essential. If she lowered her guard she was convinced Roman would bulldoze through her to get to Jamie, and this, she reminded herself, ashamed that she even needed to, was all about Jamie and what was best for him.
If Roman got the idea that she was a doormat, he would keep trying to walk all over her. She unconsciously lifted her chin; in her defence it was easy to forget who was in charge when you were in a room with a man who dominated this and any other space he happened to be in.
‘Can I get you anything...tea, coffee?’
The polite question brought his wandering gaze back to her face as he slung her an incredulous Are you joking? look.
‘You can get me my son.’
It wasn’t just the possessive inflection but the underlying hungry need in his voice that sent a fresh trickle of unease down her stiff spine. As the tension climbed back into her shoulders, she watched his eyes search the space behind her as though he expected to see Jamie suddenly appear.
‘Jamie is outside in the garden,’ she explained with a sense of calm she was certainly not feeling. ‘I want to get a few ground rules sorted first.’
Astonishment flashed across his face. ‘You...?’ She could almost see the quivering line as he reeled in the rest of his response and stood there directing his fierce black stare at her, presumably waiting for her to fall apart or maybe at his feet begging forgiveness. He might have stepped out of the boardroom in recent years but he had lost none of the arrogance she remembered...if she had ever needed a reminder that he was no laid-back thriller writer. Roman was a maverick, the man who made the rules, not the man who followed them.
She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue and waited as long as she could bear before she blurted out, ‘So are you all right with that?’ The tiny flash of something close to admiration in his dark eyes before he dropped his gimlet gaze might only have existed in her imagination, but her sense of triumph was real as she silently chalked up an invisible line in the air.
Her tiny burst of optimism vanished as she contemplated her immediate future stretching out in front of her like a winding road with no end in sight.
God, it was depressing! Somehow she would have to
