Dani Collins - Modern Romance March 2019 5-8

Flora’s chin went up in response. She opened her mouth, the huffy rejection ready to deliver with the right degree of ‘I can take care of myself’ ice, when on her shoulder the baby shifted and gave a sleepy sigh.

She reacted automatically, shifting his weight so that he lay against her chest in the crook of her right arm. She flexed the fingers of her left hand, still numb and tingling from the time she had taken his weight there.

Oh, God, what was she doing, and what place did pride have in the situation? She needed a helping hand even if that hand, with the long tapering brown fingers, did seem to exert a weird and worrying fascination. Help, even if it came from a totally unexpected and frankly disturbing quarter, was still help.

And on the plus side, accepting his offer would mean hopefully he’d vanish a lot quicker.

And Flora needed him to vanish. He was too big and too... everything for the room. His presence seemed to alter the constituents of the air she was breathing, making it heavy, making breathing require a conscious effort.

‘I have kind of lost the feeling in my left arm. If you could just pull the cot sheet back?’ Her chin resting on Jamie’s dark curls, she stretched out, letting out a tiny but revealing gasp as her hand felt the brush of his long brown fingers.

The electrical surge that made her eyes widen left her knees feeling weak and reawakened the shivery sensation that had originally alerted her to his presence a few heavy heartbeats before she actually saw him standing there, carrying off the tumbled-out-of-bed look like only your average sex god could.

She supposed that she should be grateful that he didn’t sleep naked, though the boxer shorts he wore were not substantial enough to help her!

‘Thank you.’

She had no defence mechanism to deal with the compulsion to stare at his long, lean, golden, totally magnificent body. There was not an ounce of surplus flesh to hide the perfect definition of his toned body. Her eyelids fluttered and her throat grew dry as her glance slid again over the broadness of his muscled shoulders and chest to the slabbed muscles of his belly. His legs were long, the muscular thighs slightly dusted with dark hair. The same dark hair that formed a directional arrow that vanished beneath the waistband of his boxer shorts.

Pulling in a sharp, tense breath, Flora lifted her gaze and found it connecting with his, dark shadowed and deeply disturbing. His olive skin looked warm, his carved mouth looked... She blinked hard and took a step back like someone who had just discovered they were standing on the edge of a precipice, which explained the dizziness.

He watched her lift a fluttering hand to her face, looking bemused as it came away wet. She frowned at her fingers, not seeming to make the connection between the salty moisture and her own tears.

He didn’t know if the tiny negative shake of her head was aimed at herself or him, and a moment later her expression was hidden from view, the silky curtain of her flame-red hair falling in an abundant cloud as she bent forward to lay the sleeping baby into the cot, fumbling with the crumpled sheet as she tried to pull it back.

‘Let me.’

Without waiting for a response, he pulled back the tangled sheet she had been struggling with, smoothing it back so that she could lay the baby down on his back.

As the baby lay there clenching and unclenching this pudgy fists, Ivo had his first proper look at his nephew, hungry to see a resemblance to his brother in the unformed features. He felt a strange tightness in his chest as he took in the details: dark hair, a snub nose and pale pink skin, eyes tightly closed, untouched by life yet and totally perfect.

So vulnerable.

Your father would have died for you, he thought.

Better Bruno had lived.

‘I...thank you.’ The light brush of his fingers lasted longer than it should this time. As for the stomach-clenching shudder that felt as though it would never go away even after his hand had moved and he had straightened up...

She took longer than she needed to smooth the sheet over the baby, giving herself some time to recover from the primal reaction that had convulsed her body when she’d seen him standing there, a confusing combination of heart-thudding excitement and fear blurred into one.

‘You must be cold,’ she blurted stupidly.

His mobile lips twitched into a wicked smile that made her stomach lurch.

The man looked like a fallen angel on steroids!

The impression intensified as he spread his arms wide, then slowly he glanced down, an expression of comical injured dismay on his ludicrously handsome chest. ‘You have very high standards, cara .’

The softly drawled cara hit her reasoning functions dead centre, delaying her deciphering of the softly seductive insinuation.

When his meaning hit she wanted to crawl under a stone. Instead she lifted her chin and, hampered by the need to keep the noise down, whispered, ‘I didn’t mean...’ She stopped. Of course he knew what she didn’t mean. ‘Funny!’ She sniffed, slinging him an unamused glance as she moved away from the cot containing the sleeping baby.

He followed her; the combination of handsome, half-naked, totally gorgeous man and small room was enough to make anyone hyperventilate. She resisted the impulse to pick a cushion from the rocker and wield it defensively. Instead she pressed a hand to her chest and willed her breathing to slow. ‘I’m sorry if I disturbed you.’

It was the next best thing to pushing him through the door, an obvious signal for him to go; it was equally obvious he didn’t recognise it as such. She ground her teeth in frustration and, seriously, he had to be cold by now. Despite the unbidden thought, by some miracle she kept her eyes above waist level, though the effort raised her own internal temperature by several uncomfortably shameful degrees.

She took another step towards the door and reached across to switch the lamp off, before turning the dimmer on the night light down. The room was now lit by the soft soothing silhouettes of moons and stars revolving on the ceiling.

‘So, goodnight, Mr Rocco,’ she said softly.

He saw the dismissal in her smile and, while part of him recognised walking away was a good idea, he just couldn’t let it go and he didn’t have a clue why!

She hadn’t quite reached the door when his soft voice brought her to a halt.

‘You’ve been crying.’

Her eyes flew to his face, her first instinct to deny this crazy assertion. It was a reflex. People looked at her and saw fragile; she wasn’t, and if it meant acting a bit tougher than she actually was to show them how wrong they were it was a price worth paying.

Fast on the first instinct and overpowering it in a heartbeat was the realisation that letting her guard down to someone who didn’t know her, and who couldn’t care less, someone who wasn’t going to lose sleep over anything, might be the outlet she needed.

In any event the internal debate was useless because the words came of their own volition.

‘It was the blinds.’ Her eyes went to the blinds with their cheery fabric of sailboats and balloons, drawn to cut out the darkness beyond. Flora had her own darkness inside and there was no hiding from that. She felt as though she’d never feel light again.

Only crazy people wept buckets about window dressings. She wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d made a dash for the door—it would save her making any more of a fool of herself than she had already.

But he didn’t.

‘Sami, my big sister, she made them—she could make anything!’ Her smile dissolved into a gulp as she rushed on. ‘We shopped for the material...’ It had been a girls’ day out in Edinburgh. ‘We had lunch, too many cocktails—it was a perfect day.’