Ким Лоренс – Pregnant with His Baby!: Secret Baby, Convenient Wife / Innocent Wife, Baby of Shame / The Surgeon's Secret Baby Wish (страница 8)
‘Look, is there anyone I can contact for you?’ In her opinion this was not a time when anyone should be alone.
‘I am more than capable of making a phone call should I need to.’
It was clear he was also capable of being even more abrasively rude if he felt she had trespassed on personal territory. ‘Fine.’ She accepted the latest snub with a smile but risked another by adding, ‘Alberto’s mother or …?’
The hand dropped and he looked at her coldly, condensing what must have been a heartbreaking event in his life into a short factual sentence. ‘Alberto’s mother is dead.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘And to save you the bother, it’s not a juicy titbit that the papers will shell out for. Old news, I’m afraid. The media have already done the story to death.’
It took a few seconds for the implication to sink in. When it did the angry colour flew to her cheeks.
With a forced smile she levelled her glittering gaze on his face. ‘I can assure you, Mr Bruni, that like myself all the hospital staff here take patient confidentiality very seriously.’
‘I made you angry.’
He sounded surprised … Good God, how did the wretched man expect her to feel? He’d just virtually said she’d sell her soul if the price was right! She compressed her generous lips into a tight smile. ‘I’m not angry,’ she lied.
Her denial appeared to amuse him, if the cynical curve of his sensual mouth could be termed a smile. ‘The voice was good but the eyes need some work … they are very expressive.’ His glance lingered briefly on her wide emerald-green eyes. ‘No insult was intended, Nurse …’ his heavy lidded eyes swerved to the name badge on her heaving bosom before he inserted ‘… Smith.’
His cynical drawl got so far under Dervla’s skin that she really struggled to remember that he was a man in an emotionally vulnerable position in need of sensitive handling.
‘It’s nothing personal,’ he added. ‘Everyone has their price.’
‘If I believed that, I’d be too depressed to get up in the morning, Mr Bruni. There’s a coffee machine in the relatives’ sitting room,’ she added, hoping that coffee was an impersonal enough subject to suit this cynical man with the obvious allergy to sympathy. ‘If you’d like to go there while I make Alberto comfortable …?’
‘I would have thought that making my son comfortable with half a dozen tubes sticking out of him is well nigh impossible.’
‘They do tea and hot chocolate too. Though it’s actually pretty hard to tell the difference,’ she admitted. ‘But it’s wet.’
‘Tea …
‘I wasn’t trying to antagonise you!’ she protested, then added belatedly, ‘Or mother you.’ Being forced to talk to the back of his head gave her the opportunity to see that underneath the layer of dust, blood and grime his hair was black as ebony and silky straight. It was the sort of hair that might be pleasant to run your fingers through—if, of course, it were on someone else’s head.
‘Actually I was just being tactful. It will be easier to attend to your son if you are … well, not here.’ She was barely able to repress a shudder at the thought of those dark eyes watching her every move.
He turned his head. The smile on his lips did not reach his eyes. ‘I admire your candour,’ he said, sounding anything but admiring. ‘And let me pay you the compliment of being equally frank. I am not even slightly concerned with making your life easier, or hospital protocol.’
Big surprise!
By sheer will she kept her expression impassive. It was hard. She found it impossible not to be moved by his obvious devotion to his son, but, God, this man was hard going.
‘Relatives very often find it distressing to watch their loved ones—’
He cut across her in a voice that leaked impatience, the same impatience that was evident in the tension in every sinew of his long, lean body. ‘It was distressing to be required to dig my son out of the rubble.’
The reminder of the ordeal he had so recently endured made Dervla ashamed of losing her objectivity. There was no excuse in her eyes for allowing personal feelings, especially antagonism, to influence her in the workplace.
‘It must have been terrible,’ she said softly.
Appearing not to hear her soft comment, Gianfranco held up his hands and stared at his long fingers ingrained with dirt and blood for several seconds before he shook his head.
Wondering what images he was trying to banish, Dervla felt a surge of sympathy that she knew better than to express.
‘Watching you take his blood pressure—’ he said, switching his attention back to her so abruptly that Dervla flinched ‘—is something I feel able to deal with without passing out.’
She wished she could share his confidence. The man was obviously operating on adrenaline, and will-power. The former at least was not inexhaustible and at some point it was going to hit him.
Not yet, it seemed.
She watched as he rotated his broad shoulders as if to iron out the kinks in his spine, then with a fluid shrug he drew himself up to his full height.
Forced to tilt her head back to meet his eyes, Dervla was struck even more forcibly than ever by the overwhelming nature of the Italian’s physical presence.
He levelled a thoughtful gaze at her, holding her eyes for several uncomfortable—as her sweaty palms attested—moments, and then without a word took hold of the chair drawn up to the bed and dragged it back a few feet to give her clear access.
‘I will not get in your way, but I will not leave.’
By his standards this was clearly a major concession and there seemed very little point in pushing it—the man had about as much flexibility as a chunk of granite.
Her lashes lowered as her eyes slid downwards skimming his long, lean body. He was hard in a physical as well as intellectual sense, but, added the voice in her head, much warmer to the touch.
Before she could prevent it an image formed in Dervla’s head of pale fingers trailing down the perfectly formed contours of his golden chest.
Utterly appalled at the intrusive image—for heaven’s sake, she was a professional!—Dervla grunted some sort of acknowledgement and moved past him.
Once she began to work and focus her attention on what she was actually here to do it was a relief to be able to push all thought of warm, silky-textured skin from her mind. Heaven knew how it got there to begin with!
Dervla was pleased to discover the young Italian boy’s observations gave no cause for concern. Casting a final expert eye over the boy’s pale face, she smoothed back a hank of dark hair from his brow and murmured, ‘All done for now, Alberto.’
Straightening up, she walked to the bottom of the bed and washed her hands with the gel provided before she acknowledged the father’s presence.
‘He’s doing—’
‘Let me guess, as well as can be expected.
‘Your son is young and strong and the surgery went well, Mr Bruni. You really shouldn’t anticipate problems before they happen,’ she counselled calmly.
‘You were talking to him?’
‘Yes, I always explain what I’m doing to patients.’
He angled a dark brow and winced slightly as the movement evidently tugged at the raw open edges of the deep gash on his forehead. ‘It does have a soothing quality.’
She stared at him with a perplexed frown.
‘Your voice.’ Before she could decide how to respond to this comment his attention shifted back to his son. ‘If he had not gone back for that damned computer game … a computer game!’ He closed his eyes and inhaled, rubbing the indentation between his brows as he rose to his feet.
He stood there towering over her, staring down at his son’s bruised face, a nerve clenching in his angular jaw as he sucked in air through flared nostrils before adding in a harsh driven voice, ‘My son might die because I wanted to teach him a lesson about values, that being a rich man’s only child doesn’t mean you don’t have to work. He went back for his game because he knew I wouldn’t replace something lost through his carelessness. That might prove to be an expensive lesson—for Alberto.’
Dervla watched, sympathy lodged like a stone in her chest, as his dark lashes swept downwards.
The Italian swallowed hard, causing a convulsive ripple beneath the brown skin of his throat as he made a visible effort to suck in the emotions that spilled out.
Dervla tensed as his dark eyes lifted.
‘What? No “It’s not your fault, Mr Bruni”?’ he drawled sarcastically.
‘I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that,’ she said quietly.
‘You are clearly not a parent.’
Dervla flinched as if he had inadvertently touched an exposed nerve. ‘No,’ she agreed levelly. ‘I am not a parent.’ And never would be.
‘A game worth a few pounds and I own the company …’ The rest of his raw observations were delivered in a staccato burst of Italian, but the sentiment of self-loathing was pretty much the same in any language.