She had built a life that was stable and secure, for her and for Jamie, who’d had enough trauma in his short life to last several lifetimes. There had to be a way of allowing Roman access to him without disrupting what they had, and that wouldn’t happen if she couldn’t get her hormones under control.
She looked away and felt a fleeting stab of nostalgia for the days when she had imagined she was not someone who was particularly interested in sex. All it had taken was for Roman to appear on her horizon to blow that comforting theory completely out of the water.
‘When he was...ill I promised him a garden. I thought he’d forget but—’ she gave a rueful laugh ‘—he didn’t, so don’t go making any promises you can’t keep because he’ll hold you to them.’
Roman frowned. ‘Very subtle.’
The sardonic rejoinder brought a sting of colour to her cheeks.
‘Next you’ll be telling me a child is for life, not just for Christmas. So is telling him lies prohibited or is lying by omission allowed?’
Roman watched her flush again as the jibe hit home, but it didn’t make him feel particularly good.
She sighed.
‘I’ll tell Jamie you’re a friend.’
He hid his reaction beneath his heavy half-lowered lids.
‘So you’ll lie to him again.’ His head tilted to a mocking quizzical angle. ‘Or are we friends?’
The mockery stung. Marisa knew they could never be friends...and she hated that the acknowledgment, quite illogically, made her sad.
People who had been lovers did stay friends but she assumed those people had things in common besides sex. The only thing they had in common besides sleeping together was Jamie. Without Jamie, Roman would not be here and she would not be... She took a deep breath and dragged her hand across the smooth hair that was moulded to her head like a shiny cap. She was skirting around the real elephant in the room, which was the complicated confusion of her feelings, the buzz in her bloodstream. She didn’t want Roman here, so why did she feel more alive than she had in a long time?
‘So you’re all right with that?’ she threw back with more than a hint of challenge.
The tightening of his jaw was a lot less casual than his shrug. ‘Do I have a choice?’
She said nothing as she turned away, pointing to a gate in the low stone wall that ran down the length of the kitchen garden. ‘This way.’
CHAPTER FIVE
THE STRIP OF WOODLAND was carpeted with snowdrops in spring and later bluebells but now in midsummer the undergrowth was tall and thick enough to scratch the legs of a little boy wearing shorts.
Jamie’s yell of ‘Not fair’ drifted across the intervening space. He was fifty yards away on the other side of the small paddock where a goalpost had been erected, but Marisa could see that the blood oozing from a cut on Jamie’s knee was not a scratch, at least in her head.
She took a deep breath and talked herself away from what she visualised as the panic ledge in her head. There had been a time in the not so distant past when she would have reacted to the sight of a grazed knee with full-blown drama; it was always a fight to repress her maternal protective instincts but she was getting there.
Wrapping Jamie up in cotton wool would have made her life a lot easier but she had recognised it wouldn’t be good for him so she made an effort to allow him the rough and tumble that any little boy enjoyed.
Her own fight to control her instincts had distracted her for a split second from the man who was walking a few steps behind her.
The sound of his muffled exclamation brought her head around just as he released a low rush of words in his native Spanish. She had no idea what they meant but it was hard to hear the painfully raw intonation without feeling a stab of empathy for his shocked reaction.
Looking at the expression stamped on his lean features, an expression as raw as his words and filled with a kind of painful longing, made her throat ache; swallowing, she looked away.
The father of her child might be a virtual stranger to her outside the bedroom but every instinct she had told her that he would hate for anyone to witness anything that he would consider a weakness.
‘Apparently he has excellent hand-eye coordination,’ she said to fill the growing screaming silence and give him time to recover himself.
When he did speak it was clear that she wasn’t going to be getting any appreciation for her sensitivity.
‘So who the hell is that?’
Marisa’s head turned in response to his snarled question, the verbal equivalent of what she imagined a wolf’s growl would sound like.
Her sense of impending doom deepened as she took in the rigid lines on his scowling face, but now it was mingled with exasperation.
‘Your son,’ she said, delivering a tight fake smile in response to his accusing glare.
‘Do not be cute with me, Marisa.’
Her lips tightened. He might not like being on the receiving end of warnings but he appeared to have zero problem issuing them. Her indignation soared. Here was she, bending over backwards to make this as painless as possible for everyone, and all he could do was—
She heaved a deep restorative breath before tossing her head, causing several strands of shiny flaxen hair to escape the ponytail on the nape of her slim neck.
‘I am never cute.’ You could not be cute when you were a whisper short of five foot eleven. ‘I assume you’re referring to—’ But then she paused as he wasn’t just referring, he was positively glaring! ‘That’s Ashley.’
‘And just who is Ashley?’ Roman growled back, his eyes fixed on the rear view of the tall male who
