‘I already said that I prefer to make my own way to Spain.’ She stood still, hugging Jamie’s warm body to her, enduring the forensic searching scrutiny of Roman’s dark stare.
‘Are you trying to make a point?’
‘No, I’m just not comfortable being organised.’
He lifted his hands in an acquiescent gesture and took a step back. ‘Fair enough.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
HOW MANY TIMES had he visited the Bardales family estate in Spain since he and Rio had inherited it from their father? Three or four occasions and on only one of those had he extended his stay overnight. This might have explained the shock displayed by the staff on his unexpected arrival. Even the undemonstrative estate manager who had walked in as Roman was giving instructions concerning the guests they were to expect had looked shaken. In fact, the other man had been so thrown by Roman’s presence that his handshake had turned into an affectionate bear hug for the man he had known since he was a boy.
He wasn’t the only member of staff to seem pleased to see him, but Roman felt it wasn’t an affection he deserved considering how long he had avoided the place that came burdened with too many memories.
Roman rarely slept late, but he had finally fallen asleep around five a.m. and by the time he clawed his way out of his restless slumber he glanced at his phone, saw the time and groaned.
He fell out of bed and into the car, the heavy traffic he had to negotiate on his way to the airport not improving the tension that had climbed into his shoulders. He was reluctant to admit even to himself that he was nervous, but this was definitely not your average day at the office. Even clinging to a rock face by a fingertip above a drop of several thousand feet would have been infinitely more relaxing.
He wasn’t late, but he wasn’t early either, and his efforts to check out the situation were frustrated by the arrivals board, which seemed to have gone totally blank.
He was making his way through the crowded concourse to the information desk when an overheard snippet of conversation made him stop. He tapped the man who had been speaking on his shoulder.
‘London plane? You said they had lost contact with the London plane?’
The man nodded. ‘You have someone on it?’
‘My family.’ Roman felt as if an icy fist had reached into his chest and grasped his heart. Then he shook his head, stubbornly refusing to accept that they could have...
‘Which flight are they on...the one from Heathrow or Gatwick?’
Roman just stared at him blankly. His brain had stopped working and the suffocating black coldness was pressing in on him.
‘Here you are. I’ve been looking for you everywhere!’
Roman spun around. Marisa was standing there looking tired, cranky and quite incredibly beautiful as she expertly jiggled a pushchair in which Jamie lay fast asleep.
She didn’t have a clue what was about to happen as he reached out for her, one hand curving around the nape of her neck the other one framing her face. Her eyes flew wide in comprehension a second before his mouth came down hard on hers in a long plundering, sensually explosive kiss that went on and on.
When it ended she was leaning into him, her knees shaking as she gasped for breath. He set her back on her feet a little way away from him.
Jamie, she saw, had not stirred.
‘Why on earth did you do that?’ She struggled to inject righteous indignation into her voice but she didn’t quite get there, probably because she couldn’t stop looking at his mouth, remembering that glorious kiss.
She had wanted it to go on for ever.
Roman dug his hands into his pockets. ‘A London flight has lost radio contact with air traffic control and I thought you were on it.’ Just one simple sentence and yet it covered a whole range of emotions that he had never felt before, and never wanted to feel ever again.
‘Oh...so...that was why—’
‘I was just glad to see you were alive.’
‘Right, well... OK, then.’
In an action that had all the hallmarks of compulsion he was unable to control, he extended his hand back towards her face.
As Marisa’s voice had earlier, her chain of thought broke, dilated pupils eating up the gold of her eyes. The quiver deep inside her expanded as he extended his reach, his square-tipped fingers brushing a stray strand of silvery-blonde hair from her cheek, the pad of his thumb trailing along the angle of her delicate jaw while he performed his task.
It was almost nothing, a whisper touch, but the nothing had the breath leaving her parted lips in a sharp sibilant hiss. The tenderness of his unexpected action made her throat tighten and she felt the heat of unshed tears stinging the backs of her eyelids.
Obeying an instinct too strong to resist, she turned her face until her cheek was nestled into his cupped palm and she was vaguely conscious of a foreign-sounding expletive too soft for her to catch.
Jamie’s sleepy murmur brought her to her senses and, appalled by her weakness but with her skin still being bombarded with needle-sharp prickles of attraction, she laid a soothing protective hand on her son’s head.
‘Last resort?’
She looked up and nodded to the hand luggage balanced on the handles of the pushchair. ‘I couldn’t manage everything.’ She paused and took a deep breath. ‘I really wish I’d come with you now.’
‘Yes, you should have.’ Those few awful minutes when he’d thought he might have lost them for ever had taken several years off his life. ‘Let me take it.’
‘Thanks.’ Their eyes locked and she immediately looked away.
The pushchair was easier to manoeuvre without the hand luggage, so she was able to keep up with his long-legged stride until she felt obliged to breathlessly point out the signs for the
