‘Rio is considered in every way more upbeat than me. I am the deep thinker, apparently.’ His grin did not reach his dark heavy-lidded eyes.
‘Which is not saying very much.’
His sudden laugh dissolved the tension before it reached critical mass.
‘So do you want this breakfast on the balcony?’
She nodded. ‘Come along, Jamie.’
She ushered Jamie through the door to the balcony, following the tall figure who was positioning their breakfast on the wrought-iron table.
‘I like it here,’ Jamie declared.
‘Do you, darling?’
‘I’m glad he likes it. It’ll be his one day or at least half of it will be. I imagine Rio’s children will inherit the other half of the place.’ Her eyes flew wide open and he laughed. ‘You really haven’t considered that, have you?’
Recovering from the shock, she rallied. ‘Don’t be stupid. I’m the woman who married a dying man for his money, ask anyone.’ She heard the bitterness in her voice and winced. The scar on that particular wound was not as healed as she liked to think.
Forgetting that he had thought exactly that about her, he felt an urge to wipe the shadows from her face and berate the idiots who had put them there. ‘Anyone that actually counts?’
Her burst of angry resentment fizzled away. ‘Thanks for that. I know it’s stupid to let it bother me but the story was doing the rounds when I first discovered I was pregnant and it was sort of a double whammy, though when it became public knowledge I was pregnant I morphed into a lonely brave widow overnight.’
She glanced towards Jamie, who was ignoring them and tucking into his breakfast, and she smiled. Seeing him wolf down food never failed to make her happy.
‘He has a robust appetite.’
She nodded and said quietly, ‘For so long he had no appetite at all and it seemed like he was fading away before my eyes.’
‘You will, as well, if you don’t eat. Anyway, I came to ask if you would like the guided tour in, say, an hour.’
‘I would love to, but Jamie has been up since five.’ At least it had given her the opportunity to finally enjoy the pleasures of the decadent bath.
‘Which means you have been up since five too.’
She shrugged. ‘Give it another hour and he’ll be fading. He’ll need a nap.’
She saw the disappointment on Roman’s face and found herself suggesting, ‘How about this afternoon instead?’
‘That sounds like a good option but, in the meantime, how about I give the you the grown-up tour this morning? I’m sure we can cover more ground without Jamie.’
Marisa froze. She didn’t want to be without Jamie. Jamie’s presence was her shield, her protection against the feelings she didn’t want Roman to pick up on, the ones she didn’t want to feel.
If that made her a coward, she really didn’t care.
‘Sorry,’ she said, adopting an unconvincing expression of regret as she leaned forward to snatch a piece of fruit off the breakfast tray. ‘I couldn’t possibly leave him.’ She bit into a juicy peach and wiped the juice off her chin with a self-conscious grimace of apology.
‘You could,’ he said, while in his head he was tasting the sweetness of peach juice in her mouth and the resultant rise in his core temperature made him glad of the light breeze. ‘Maria, who you’ve already met, would be more than happy to babysit. I’d say being the eldest of seven makes her more than qualified and I have personally witnessed her keep several feral brothers in line without breaking a sweat. She is truly a phenomenon.’
‘She seems a bit wasted carrying trays, then.’
‘She is off to train as a children’s nurse next year.’ He offered up the information smug in the knowledge that he had delivered a deal clincher. ‘So...?’
‘All right, I suppose so.’ It wasn’t exactly a gracious acceptance but he didn’t seem to notice. After he had left she comforted herself with the fact that a tour couldn’t take long, and she was making a fuss about nothing; it wasn’t as if they were talking about a candlelit meal.
She was wrong; it did take a long, very long time.
The previous night she had not really taken on board the sheer vastness of the place or the number of people it seemed to employ. Aside from the private rooms, and the multiple banquet-size spaces and numerous bedroom suites, there were the domestic areas; not just the kitchen complex with its walk-in fridges and freezer and numerous ancillary rooms, but offices that housed the army of people involved in the running of several thousand acres of the estate, which boasted a bewildering diversity of industry from an organic vineyard to an area of productive forestry.
She would have been interested because Roman was a very well-informed guide, but he was still Roman and she had no Jamie to hide behind.
She had a suspicion that her fear, well founded, of revealing by a look, a gesture or a word the true depth of her feelings made her appear stiff, and her monosyllabic responses earned her more than a couple of puzzled looks.
But she could cope a lot better with his puzzled looks than with his pity—or he might even be angry? It was not a mystery she was in any hurry to solve, even though normally she relished a puzzle.
There was one thing that aroused her curiosity as they walked through the bewildering network of rooms and corridors. The staff they met, especially the ones that had known Roman as a child, displayed an obvious fondness for him, and Roman clearly felt the same, considering his relaxed manner with them.
There was respect and fondness on both
