‘This is a little girl’s room,’ Eros objected, only slowly lowering her son into his cot, his attention pinned to the pink cartoon mural of princesses on the wall.
‘We haven’t got around to redecorating yet,’ Winnie retorted, sidestepping the truth that the sisters had decided not to go to that trouble and expense when they were unsure how long their grandfather would allow them to make the house their home. Stepping over to the cot, she slipped off her son’s shoes and his sweatshirt and settled him down before tugging the string on the little musical mobile that had been his from birth.
Closing the curtains, she walked back to the door, watching Eros hover by the cot. ‘Why’s the cot in the middle of the room?’ he asked.
‘Because if you put it beside the furniture, Teddy will use it to climb out and I don’t want the hassle of trying to persuade him to stay put in a junior bed. He’s too young to understand.’
‘A nanny would remove much of the burden of childcare,’ Eros commented smoothly. ‘It must be hard for you to work and care adequately for him at the same time.’
‘Not with my sisters around,’ Winnie countered steadily, refusing to rise to the suggestion that she wasn’t doing the best mothering job possible.
Eros strode down the stairs only a step in her wake and she walked into the lounge. ‘I suppose I should offer you coffee,’ she said stiffly.
Eros sent her a winging hard glance. ‘No, thanks. Let’s not procrastinate.’
‘If you must know, I was trying to be polite.’
Eros shrugged a broad shoulder, the edge of his jacket falling back to expose a shirt front pulling taut across his muscular torso, delineating sleek bands of abdominal muscle. As she watched, her mouth ran dry and she looked hastily away, colour warming her cheeks.
‘Why bother?’ Eros incised drily. ‘We’re neither friends nor casual acquaintances.’
‘What do you want from me?’ Winnie fired back at him, anxiety biting through her.
‘Answers,’ Eros framed silkily. ‘And I’ll keep on coming back at you until I get them.’
‘ANSWERS? WELL, I can give you a question. Why didn’t you tell me that you were a married man?’ Winnie demanded abruptly, infuriated by his refusal to acknowledge that deception.
‘You never asked if I was married,’ Eros pointed out smoothly.
And that fast, Winnie wanted to hit him, hit him so hard she knocked him into the middle of next week. Her small hands curled into tight fists, her cheeks pink with the force of her resentment and the galling knowledge that she couldn’t afford to lose control of her temper. ‘Why would I have asked when ostensibly you were living alone and there was no visible woman in your life?’ she shot back at him. ‘I hadn’t the smallest suspicion that you were already in a relationship!’
‘My marriage is not a subject I’m prepared to discuss with you,’ Eros informed her arrogantly, clenching his strong jawline. ‘I would have been willing to discuss that topic two years ago. But two years on, I don’t believe I owe you that explanation.’
Winnie clenched her teeth together as hard as if she were biting into solid metal. ‘Oh, don’t you, indeed?’ she exclaimed, vexed by that provocative assurance and, if anything, madder than ever.
‘You met Tasha,’ Eros acknowledged curtly. ‘Eventually I did find that out and presumably that is why you chose to suddenly disappear without giving me any explanation.’
‘Don’t say that like it excuses you... Nothing excuses your behaviour!’ Winnie slammed back at him furiously. ‘And I didn’t owe you anything!’
Eros studied her with intent, glittering green eyes. She still had lousy dress sense, he conceded ruefully, invariably choosing to envelop herself in drab colours and very practical clothing, but he knew her ripe body as well as he knew his own and he could see the changes in her lush figure, which even clad in leggings and an all-concealing sweatshirt was visibly fuller at breast and hip. He hardened, momentarily snatched back into hot, sweaty memories of the passion that had once threatened to consume him. His treacherous libido heated up, sending a sensual pulse through his groin and making him bite back a curse at his lack of restraint.
For a while, the sheer novelty of that passion had obsessed him and, having recognised that as a dangerous weakness, he had refused to allow himself to look for her after she vanished out of his life. He could get by fine without sex; he had got by for years and he no longer fell as easily into temptation as he had fallen with her. He was free now, he reminded himself, but that old belief that he had to always stay in control of his physical urges was still ingrained in him. Giving way to those same urges had destroyed his father’s life. Winnie had made him feel dangerously out of control and that, if he was honest with himself, had unnerved him.
‘At the very least, you owed me the knowledge that you were pregnant with my child,’ Eros delivered in harsh condemnation.
‘No, I didn’t!’ Winnie slammed back at him in annoyance. ‘Your deception released me from any such obligation!’
His stunning eyes narrowed, black velvety lashes shading that mesmeric green. ‘There was no deception on my part. For a deception to be contrived, one must deliberately engage in concealment of the truth...and I did not. I didn’t tell you a single lie!’
For several unbearable seconds, Winnie searched her memory for evidence of a lie and her inability to find one merely enraged her more. He was so scheming, so specious in his arguments. ‘But you also knew I hadn’t the faintest suspicion that you were a married man!’ she flung back at him bitterly.
Eros inclined his glossy dark head. ‘Did I? Some women are content to sleep with married men without questioning their status.’
‘Stop playing with words!’ Winnie interrupted, rising up on her toes, pulsing with angry tension. ‘That’s what you’re doing in defiance of the facts! You knew I wasn’t that kind of woman... You knew I wouldn’t willingly get involved with a married man!’
Again, Eros shrugged, the lean, hard angles of his sculpted features set like granite. ‘None of this nonsense is pertinent now,’ he claimed in a dry tone of finality. ‘I will not engage in a slanging match about our past. That ship sailed a long time ago. What is germane now is that you have my son and you didn’t tell me about him. Let’s concentrate on that, rather than on facts we cannot change.’
Winnie tore her gaze from him with difficulty and turned her head away, momentarily at a loss. In one sense he was correct, in that there was nothing to be gained from arguing about what had happened between them two years earlier, but that also meant that he was denying her any justification for having chosen not to inform him of her pregnancy. Her slight shoulders stiffened and her head swung back, dark strands of her lush mane of hair falling across cheeks flushed by angry frustration.
‘How did you become pregnant anyway?’ Eros demanded without warning. ‘I always took precautions.’
At that much-too-intimate question, Winnie practically fried in mortification inside her own burning skin and she walked stiffly over to the window, momentarily turning her back on him. ‘No, there were times when you overlooked that necessity,’ she told him grudgingly, forced to recall early-morning encounters when she had wakened to his hard, thrillingly aroused body pressed to hers and in warm drowsy lust and need had succumbed without either of them thinking of contraception.
‘I don’t remember a single occasion,’ Eros informed her with a raw edge to his dark, deep, accented drawl.
‘Then you must have a very short memory because I remember at least