‘That’s all been taken care of. This way.’ He glanced down at a now wide-awake Jamie and winked, and the smaller version of his own eyes widened and, after a pause, delivered a blink back. Then a small hand came up and covered one eye before he blinked again as they passed under an archway that took them out of sight of the cameras and into a brightly lit underground parking area.
Marisa took in the empty parking spaces with reserved signs on them, the occupied ones filled with an assortment of top-of-the-range vehicles, which explained the visible security presence and numerous CCTV cameras.
A man in uniform wearing a headset acknowledged them with a tip of his head as they walked past.
‘Can I have a biscuit?’ came a small voice.
‘How long have you been awake?’ Marisa exclaimed. She’d been nervous of Jamie’s reaction if he woke in a strange place and found Roman there too but he seemed remarkably relaxed, looking around with interest.
‘I wasn’t asleep.’ He gave her a cheeky grin from his pushchair and added, ‘I was just resting my eyes.’
Marisa laughed, the soft musical sound bouncing off the low ceiling and walls.
Listening to the interchange, Roman found himself feeling like an intruder; they had a relationship that he was not part of.
Was he really envying the thing that he had spent his whole adult life avoiding?
He heard Marisa say, ‘Say hello to Roman, sweetie...’
Roman dropped into a crouch beside the pushchair but, instead of responding to his own hello, Jamie reached out and touched Roman’s cheek, startling an expression from him that made Marisa look away. ‘Are you growing a beard?’
‘Not deliberately.’
Marisa could hear the smile in his voice and a deep quiver shimmered through her body as from the forbidden depths of her brain a memory surfaced. They had been lying amid a tumble of sheets, their sweat-soaked bodies cooling, her nostrils quivering as she’d inhaled the warm, musky male scent of his body.
Her chest had lifted in a sigh as she’d lain there experiencing a cell-deep contentment that had been entirely new to her. In some ways, the aftermath of sex had felt even more intimate to her than the act itself.
‘I need a shave,’ he’d murmured.
Her eyes had opened at the touch of his fingers on her breast. Despite the aftershocks of the climax still rippling through her body she’d felt her insides tighten as she’d watched his fingers massaging the sensitised, still-tingling pink skin of her breast.
He’d stopped then, self-reproach in his face, and had lifted a hand to his face, drawing it down across the abrasive dark growth on his jaw.
She’d put her hand over his, drawing her own fingers down the stubble. ‘I like it,’ she’d whispered.
‘I will have a beard when I grow to be a man and I’ll be tall too.’
Her son’s confident pronouncement dragged Marisa back to the present with a disorientating abruptness. She felt a tide of guilty colour wash over her skin and she struggled to share the amusement with Roman as they exchanged glances above their son’s head.
‘That sounds like a plan,’ Roman said.
Marisa was glad for the distraction when Jamie demanded her attention then. ‘So can I?’
‘Can you what?’
‘Have two biscuits?’
‘Later,’ Marisa said, before adopting a diversionary tactic. ‘Which car do you think is Roman’s?’
‘The one with our cases and the policeman standing by it.’
Her son, it turned out, was more observant than she was. The car in question was a big four-wheel drive with blacked-out windows standing about fifty feet away, and there was a security guard, not a policeman, standing beside the luggage she had last seen in London.
‘I want to walk,’ Jamie said, pulling at his safety harness.
Roman glanced at Marisa, who nodded before he carefully unfastened the strap and put the wriggling child on his feet.
‘I want my case.’
‘Fine, but you must hold my hand because of the traffic.’
Jamie’s childish features settled into a mulish expression she knew all too well as he tucked his hand behind his back. ‘But there isn’t any—’
Before Marisa could respond Roman stepped forward. ‘I need some help to put the cases in the car,’ he said casually.
Jamie looked at the hand extended to him for a moment before his mulish expression became a sunny smile. ‘OK...’ He glanced at his mother. ‘Can I?’
‘Off you go.’
Watching them walk away hand in hand, Marisa experienced a rush of emotions at the poignant picture of father and son. She felt recede some of the doubts she’d struggled with over her decision to make this trip. It was an effort to hold her emotions back as she followed them, very conscious of the ache in her chest. For someone who’d said he had no experience of children, Roman was doing a pretty good job.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE FOUR-WHEEL DRIVE they were eventually installed in was roomy, and the ‘nice smell’ that Jamie mentioned, ensconced in a booster seat in the back, was that of soft leather and newness.
It was not the only thing that Jamie commented on as they left the city lights behind them. He seemed to be enjoying a second wind, although finally the flow of questions petered out and his head began to droop once again.
Roman turned up the air conditioning on his side of the car, and a welcome blast of fresh air removed some of the distracting scent of Marisa’s perfume from his nostrils.
After silence had reigned for five minutes Roman risked a quiet question.
‘Is he asleep?’
He felt Marisa glance his way and saw her head nod in the periphery of his vision.
‘So he’s a good traveller?’
‘Not always,’ Marisa replied honestly, hoping that Jamie’s best-behaviour mode hadn’t raised false expectations in Roman. He was being a model child, so far only asking once if they were there yet, and happily accepting Roman’s response that he would tell him when they were.
Jamie hadn’t even requested a toilet break and the chocolate biscuit she had finally allowed him—because sometimes it was
