‘Not fair, I wasn’t ready!’ the young blond man yelled back.
‘Do you often leave our son in the care of your boyfriends?’
She blinked, her astonishment genuine, but it swiftly turned to annoyance. Eyes flaring, she folded her arms tightly across her chest. ‘Ashley is Jamie’s nanny.’ Her chin lifted a defiant notch as she fixed him with a narrow-eyed glare. ‘And what business of yours would it be if he was my boyfriend?’ she challenged, thinking this was rich coming from someone who had a partiality for scantily clad blondes.
Roman spun around. ‘Nanny?’ he echoed, fixing on the relevant part of her retort before his eyes and his brain got snagged on the sight of silky strands of pale hair shining against her dark jumper. The image was the catalyst that took him straight back to a time and place when that hair was longer and tangled, drifting across his chest as she sat astride him, the feathery light contact sending electrical surges along his nerve endings, before the caress was replaced by the touch of her lips.
The effort of escaping the erotic images before he was sucked back into the past brought a sheen of sweat to his brow, and his fingers clenched as he dragged in a mind-clearing lungful of oxygen.
Focus, man, think...he ordered himself.
The problem was, the thoughts in question involved another man playing with his son, his son looking up trustingly into another man’s face and laughing.
Roman realised he seriously hated the thought of that man being more than Marisa’s employee. From a mental file in his head of similar incidents came the memory of a scene, of his father driving them home after dinner, cross-examining his mother just because she had smiled at a waiter. She had flirted with the man, he’d accused, and he was sure she had given him her phone number.
They had sat there, he and Rio, and listened as their father had called their mother names that no man should call a woman. As children all they could do was kick the back of their father’s seat in protest to try to make him stop. No longer a child, he would do so much more if he heard similar abuse now.
He would not be that man.
‘I didn’t realise there were any male nannies.’ It was a rational observation, and he could have added that in his opinion nannies did not look as though they hit the gym on a daily basis before they ran out into the morning surf.
Marisa resisted the childish impulse to stamp her feet. It wasn’t even what he’d said, it was the way he’d said it, his attitude of teeth-grating certainty that by simply saying something it made it so.
‘Have you never heard of equality?’ she enquired sweetly and earned herself another glare. ‘Or do you think women have the exclusive rights on caring for children?’ she said with blighting scorn, seeing no reason to admit that it hadn’t exactly been her own enlightened thinking that had made her shortlist Ashley, because until he had walked through the door and her PA had leaned across and breathed, ‘Wow, can he be my nanny?’ she hadn’t even realised that Ashley was a man.
He had been the last interviewee, she remembered, and she’d been ready to give up, as none of the other well-qualified candidates had seemed a good fit. Probably because she hadn’t really wanted them to be, she thought wryly. She hadn’t wanted a mother substitute; she was Jamie’s mum.
She’d been the problem, not them, or at least the fact that she didn’t want a nanny, she needed a nanny. The bad case of flu that had meant she literally couldn’t get out of bed for a week—and, worse, had to keep away from Jamie because she couldn’t risk exposing him to the virulent bug—had proved that.
It was times like that it really hit home to her what it meant to be a single parent with no husband to step into the breach. She had no family ready to rush to help out in emergencies either... At least she was one of the lucky ones who had enough money to pay for staff to help her, who had gone way beyond the call of duty, so Jamie was being well cared for, but it meant that she was imposing on people who she was sure would have preferred to be spending time with their own families.
Had she taken to Ashley so quickly because he wasn’t a threat to her relationship with Jamie—he was not a mother substitute? She couldn’t swear hand on heart that it hadn’t been a factor but he was a good fit regardless, at least until Jamie started school full-time, or, to be more precise, the month before school started, which was when Ash was due to go travelling for a year before he started his university course next autumn, debt-free.
She really admired the young man’s practicality, the fact he had put his ambition to be an architect on hold and got a childcare qualification first so he could earn some money before taking up a university place and also had a way of earning his keep while he was there.
‘You kept very quiet about him,’ Roman observed tautly, interrupting her thoughts.
She shook her head in genuine bewilderment. ‘Was I quiet?’ He made it sound as if she’d deliberately not told him. ‘I’m pretty sure I mentioned him.’
‘That Jamie had a nanny, yes, but not that he was a he.’
Her lips tightened. ‘I didn’t think it was relevant, because it isn’t.’
‘So no one ever comments on it?’
Her eyes slid from his. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, what is your problem?’
‘I don’t have a problem,’ Roman denied, knowing he was lying.
Her delicate brows
