Ким Лоренс – The Italian's Baby of Passion: The Italian's Secret Baby / One-Night Baby / The Italian's Secret Child (страница 13)

Her imagination went into overdrive. Oh, my God, it was so bad they hadn’t been able to break the news over the phone.

‘What’s happened to Sam? You can tell me,’ she added, an icy calm settling over her as she prepared herself to hear the worst.

Roman’s dark eyes scanned her distressed features; the only trace of colour in her face was supplied by her jewel-bright eyes. He appeared about to say something and then changed his mind.

‘Just tell me,’ she begged. Imagining was so bad, could the reality be worse?

‘Let me in.’

‘Of course, of course,’ she cried, fumbling with the door chain, her hands trembling. ‘Have they taken him to the hospital?’ She pushed her fingers into her hair, dislodging one of her hair grips; a section of hair slithered free, falling across her cheek as she flung the door wide and stepped aside for him to enter.

Think, Scarlet, think…‘Now let me think…’ she said out loud as she tried to organise her thoughts and keep panic at arm’s length. ‘Yes, get dressed.’ She flashed him a whitefaced but encouraging smile. ‘It won’t take me a minute to get dressed,’ she promised, turning to suit her words to action.

Roman closed the front door. ‘I don’t know who the Bradleys are.’

Halfway to the bedroom door, Scarlet stopped. ‘What?’

‘I don’t know the Bradleys and, as far as I am aware, Sam is not in hospital.’

Her marble-pale brow creased. ‘But you said…’

‘No, actually, I didn’t, you said.’

She started shaking in reaction as a massive wave of relief hit her. Impetuously she wrapped her arms around him and hugged hard. ‘Thank God!’ she breathed fervently.

Roman looked at the heart-shaped face complete with misty eyes and trusting sunny smile tilted up to him and felt his focus slipping. He’d come here to uncover some truths, not fantasise about a sexy mouth and what he’d like to do with it.

It wasn’t until she encountered his broodingly black and icy cold mesmeric eyes that Scarlet recalled with a rush of scalding embarrassment that she wasn’t dealing with someone into spontaneous hugs. Feeling a total idiot, she unpeeled herself from him and stepped away with a self-conscious grimace and a murmur of, ‘Sorry.’

She tucked her hands behind her back and resisted the self-indulgent impulse to smooth down the non-existent creases in his jacket, recognizing that the impulse to touch his lithe body no longer had anything to do with spontaneity and a hell of a lot to do with sexual curiosity. It was deeply mortifying to have to acknowledge she had enjoyed the contact with a very well-developed male physique.

She felt she had to offer some sort of explanation for her strange behaviour.

‘I know he’s perfectly safe with the Bradleys, but when I saw you I thought the worst…’ She released a small self-derisive chuckle. ‘But I expect you’ve already gathered that much.’

Her brow wrinkled as an inconsistency she had been too panic stricken to notice earlier struck her.

‘Why didn’t you say straight off that you didn’t know the Bradleys?’

It wasn’t as if he could have missed the fact she had been two steps away from hysteria.

‘I wanted to talk to you and I wasn’t sure you’d let me in.’

Scarlet stared at him. Staggeringly there was no hint of apology in his manner. His behaviour was so extraordinary that it took her a while to get her head around what he had done. ‘You wanted to come in,’ she repeated in a dangerously flat tone as her temper fizzed dramatically into life. ‘You wanted to come in.’

Only someone totally callous could act with such calculated cruelty.

‘I need to talk to you.’

‘Oh, that makes it all right, then!’ she said contemptuously.

His classically pure jawline tautened as a dark line appeared across his cheekbones. ‘Will you calm yourself, woman?’

‘I’m not a woman…well, not your woman, anyhow, and for that,’ she added with incoherent fervour, ‘I shall be eternally grateful. Nothing makes it all right for you to scare me half to death that way. It was a totally despicable thing to do!’

And it also proved her first impressions had been right; he was a man who didn’t care about anything but getting what he wanted! If other people got hurt in the process, so what? It didn’t matter to Roman.

‘You disgust me!’ Her voice rose a quivering octave. ‘Get out, get out of my home right now!’

‘I think you’re overreacting just a little here.’

Her eyes flashed pure green fire as she glared up at him. ‘Overreacting? I thought that Sam was—’ She broke off, her voice suspended by tears as the nightmare images crowded into her head. ‘Maybe I am overreacting,’ she conceded huskily. ‘But this is only the second time Sam has spent a night away from home and…’ She shook her head. ‘If you had a child maybe you’d understand.’

His nostrils flared and something she couldn’t identify flashed in his eyes. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

From his expression she couldn’t imagine he wanted to say anything nice.

‘I realise that I should be thanking my lucky stars, but strangely I’m not.’ She strode to the door and pulled it open. ‘I don’t want to talk to you, Mr O’Hagan, and you were right, I wouldn’t have let you in.’

Why would she? To allow someone who was broadcasting dangerous and volatile into your home was asking for trouble. Every inch of his powerful frame suggested he was struggling to contain his anger and with limited success.

‘If this has something to do with the university you should be speaking to David.’

His dark brows arched. ‘University?’ he repeated, his lip curling. ‘You’re a nursery nurse. Why would I come here if I wanted to discuss anything involving the university.’

‘Frankly, I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘But it makes about as much sense as anything else I could come up with to explain you being here.’

And it was a lot more feasible than the inspired, but seriously misguided notion that Scarlet was embarrassed to admit she had entertained for a brief mad moment when she had seen him standing there. The one that relied on him having spent the last ten days wrestling with an overpowering attraction for her he could no longer resist.

So it wasn’t exactly plausible, but it was a well-known fact that some men liked glasses and flat chests, and if you were going to fantasise you might as well do it properly.

He walked towards her and for a moment Scarlet thought he was going to carry on past her and through the door, but her optimism proved premature. Instead of walking through the door he casually wrenched it from her grasp. It closed with a very decisive click.

‘I’m sorry if I alarmed you.’ He watched her rub her shoulder and the indentation between his brows deepened. ‘Did I hurt you?’

She looked from the closed door to the man—he was alarming her some more and also, much more disturbingly, he was exciting her. ‘And that would bother you?’ She delivered a brittle laugh. ‘Credit me with a little intelligence.’ Even if I’ve shown precious little of it to date. ‘You obviously get a kick out of bullying women. And you’re not sorry, so don’t say you are,’ she hissed furiously.

His eyes narrowed on her belligerent face. ‘You make it extremely difficult for a man to be sorry,’ he ground out grimly.

‘Yes, I know you don’t like me, which makes it even more difficult to imagine why you’d want to talk to me or what you’d want to say, and quite frankly I don’t want to know!’ she lied grandly as she opened the door again. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, it’s late and I’m busy.’

His even teeth flashed white in his dark face as a smile that had nothing whatsoever to do with humour formed on his sensual lips. ‘You won’t sleep tonight…’

Scarlet froze, her body stiffening as if in anticipation of a blow.

‘Curiosity killed the cat and you’re going to be wondering what I did it for,’ he warned. ‘Admit it, you will.’

Scarlet exhaled. She was light-headed with relief and willing to admit almost anything. For a split second she had jumped to the totally irrational conclusion that he possessed some insider knowledge of the dreams that had given her several nights of broken sleep recently.

Dark, erotic dreams.

Angie is always telling me I need to get out more—she’s right!

Was it possible that at some subconscious level she was as frustrated as her friend claimed? That could account for the dreams and the fact she hadn’t been able to get him out of her head.

‘I’ve told you, I’m busy,’ she repeated dismissively.

‘Well, you can tell him to clear off.’ His fine nostrils quivered in distaste. ‘I will not be dismissed.’

He might not know much about bringing up a child, but even he knew that a single mother with a series of boyfriends hardly provided the sort of stable background a child needed—his child needed.

She blinked, and tore her eyes from the nerve clenching spasmodically in the hollow of his lean cheek. This conversation was like walking in halfway through a film after the vital scene when the hero’s motivations had been explained.

Roman would be the hero, of course; he had hero written all over him. She, on the other hand, would be one of the character actors, which would suit her—nobody remembered your name and you were always in work.