Her laugh brought Roman’s teeth together so hard he could feel them grate. It wasn’t caring men that Roman had a problem with, it was the strong possibility, no, more like the probability that he was not one of them, that this quality was something you couldn’t learn. You either had it, like the guy currently playing with his son, or you didn’t.
Did Marisa admire this guy’s caring qualities or was it his muscles she was interested in? Recognising that this less than charitable thought yet again came straight out of his own father’s playbook did not improve his mood one little bit.
‘I don’t have a problem with male nannies.’ He had no problems with male anything, he just had a problem with this particular guy, who was quite obviously being a great role model for his son, but he was not—absolutely not—jealous.
He was not that man; he was not his father.
His jaw clamped, the white line around his lips standing out stark against his tan. Dios, yes, he was!
This reaction was the reason he had spent his life avoiding caring enough to become a monster like his father. Only twice in his life had he allowed himself to care and each time—
He closed his eyes momentarily to cut out the sight of his child listening attentively to something the blond guy was saying to him. In fact, he was hanging on every syllable.
He wanted his son to look at him the way he was looking at his nanny.
The shock of that vibrated though him, jarring like a discordant off-key note. He had accepted that he had a son, accepted that the child was his responsibility, but he had not anticipated having these feelings for him, or that they would be instantaneous.
He hadn’t even registered the young guy who was the focus of his envy initially, because his focus had been so completely on the child running across the grass on his skinny little legs.
Knowing he had a child, he’d discovered, was an entirely different thing from actually seeing him, no longer a theoretical son, but a real flesh and blood kid. One with tangled hair, a shiny sweat-slicked face and blood from a graze on his knee staining one sock.
The impact was almost physical. Roman felt as if someone had just landed an unprotected direct hit on his solar plexus, the invisible blow causing the breath to leave his chest in a gasp as a nameless aching feeling rushed to fill the vacuum that was left.
It was not hard to recognise a game-changing moment when it hit you in the face, and this was it. Duty had brought him here but this totally unanticipated feeling was going to keep him here, was going to keep him in his son’s life.
‘Mum!’
Roman watched the child’s face light up as he spotted his mother, who began waving back.
‘Watch what I can do—it’s really cool skills!’ he yelled as he balanced the football on his knee for at least two seconds before picking it up and waiting for the applause.
It came right on cue, and the sight of Marisa’s smiling face, her enthusiastic clapping, her cheery thumbs up, shook loose some fresh nameless emotion deep inside Roman that he didn’t want to acknowledge.
‘Excellent skills!’ she approved.
He turned his head sharply, remembering again his brother’s expression as his twin had held his own small daughter close to his chest. It had been a faint echo compared to what Roman felt now. Envy, loss, regret... None of them were legitimate responses for a man who had never wanted children.
He still believed in the reasoning behind his decision not to have children. The facts had not changed, and it was a decision he would make again if he had been able to. Why run the risk of passing on the tainted genes, replicate painful history, inflict the sort of emotional damage on his child his own father had on him and Rio?
But that option was gone; it was firmly in the past. In the present he had a son, that was the reality he was dealing with now, and it came with an unaccustomed sense of inadequacy he was struggling to deal with.
So far he had succeeded in not acknowledging the fear he knew was lurking underneath the anger, but it had been much easier to focus on confronting Marisa about her actions than acknowledging it.
If it gets tough, you can always fall back on blaming her for everything, sneered the contemptuous voice in his head,
Roman knew about this visceral connection, this blood calling to blood... He glanced down and saw that his white-knuckled fist was clenched against his chest, and self-consciously he allowed it to fall back to his side. Now he knew why his brother had finally decided to break his silence about Jamie’s existence, break his promise to Marisa. Because of this feeling that was tearing Roman apart right now—Rio knew what it felt like to be a father.
To banish the surge of empathy, because he really didn’t want to stop being angry with his twin, and he definitely didn’t want to be grateful to him, Roman replaced his brother’s face with a mental image of their own father, who had rarely noticed his sons were alive unless he’d wanted to use them to get to their mother. They’d only ever been a useful tool or an inconvenience to him.
The voice in his head urging caution was almost drowned out by the overwhelming surge of paternal feeling that had just materialised out of nowhere.
There were still very good reasons why this child would be so much better off without Roman in his life, but he knew he was not selfless enough to keep a safe distance from him.
‘He is a big soccer fan.’
Roman didn’t respond to Marisa, but she could feel the emotions emanating from him across the distance between them. She slid a glance up at him. His profile was as rigid as his body language; everything about
