His delivery was deadpan, the tone sardonic, but it was the predatory glow in his dark eyes... She wanted to look away. She wanted to run from the room in which the uncomfortable factor in the atmosphere she’d coped with up to this point by simply pretending it didn’t exist had hiked up several notches.
Ignoring was no longer an option.
But growing a backbone was.
Focusing on the sound of distant alarm bells and not the ache in her stomach, she lifted her chin and wrenched her eyes free of his molten stare. Or was it molten? Was she just seeing what she wanted to?
The mortifying idea that she wanted him to look at her that way cooled the sexual pulse that beat low and hot in her belly. Her initial antipathy had not been irrational but spot on. Her chin lifted. He might remind her of a sleek, well-fed predator, but she was damned if she was going to act like some little cowering mouse for his amusement.
Hope you freeze!
For one awful moment she thought she’d voiced the vicious and uncharitably spiteful thought out loud. She almost felt ashamed. She was neither vicious nor spiteful.
‘Goodnight, Mr Rocco.’
* * *
Flora waited until she had cleared the guest wing of the house before she leaned against the wall and released the tension that had her body in a stranglehold grip in a series of long hissing sighs.
Her legs felt like lead as she went back to the store cupboard and pulled out the heaters for Jamie’s room; her energy levels seemed to have seeped away along with the tension. She headed for the baby’s room. There were no heaters left for her own bedroom but then cooling down was probably not such a bad idea.
On tiptoe, barely breathing, Flora plugged the heaters in one of the sockets in Jamie’s room. She looked at the sleeping baby, the swell of love that tightened in her chest physically painful.
She might be a poor substitute for what he had lost but she was determined to give this baby all the love his parents would have if they had lived. If only, she mused wistfully, there were a handbook somewhere for people who had zero parenting skills.
Her mum was there to help and pass on her parenting skills and Flora was thankful for that, but she was also reluctant to rely on her too much. It was easy to forget sometimes, given her very youthful outlook and zest for life, that Grace Henderson had had her share of health problems. Typically, she played them down but losing Sami had taken a massive emotional toll and then she’d had her own accident... No, her mum needed to be resting and healing, not running to the aid of her pathetic daughter, which was why Flora had been glossing over any difficulties she was having and not confiding her doubts. She would tell her mum about the nightmare financial problems she had inherited after she had worked out a solution...or they foreclosed on the mortgage.
Pushing away the depressing thought, she took one last look at the sleeping baby, wondering if it was possible the baby just knew there was an amateur in charge, that at some instinctive baby level he knew that the two people who loved him most were gone.
But he’d know his parents; they would be real people to him. Flora had already begun putting items, photos and mementos in a memory book to show him when he was older. She had pasted photos of her sister growing up on the first few pages; she just wished she had more memories of his father to put in.
‘Sleep tight,’ she whispered, checking the red light on the baby monitor one last time before she quietly left the room, then slipping downstairs for a last-minute check. She switched off the outside light and peered through the window just as the moon appeared through the clouds.
Her stomach gave a little lurch of dismay and her eyes grew round in horror as the silver light revealed the water level; the waves were lapping in the middle of the road just feet from the low wall.
Was this the perfect storm moment, the once every twenty years that they would flood?
She pushed away the thought. She was not the sort of person who assumed the worst, though, after the worst had happened to their family, her built-in optimism was feeling more than a little battered and bruised. It was weariness and not optimism that enabled her to dismiss the potential disaster and make her way up the stairs.
* * *
With the heater turned up full the room became, if not toasty as his hostess had optimistically predicted, at least tolerably warm enough to make him feel able to strip down to his shorts before he got into the surprisingly comfortable bed with the pristine white sheets.
His head had barely made an indent in the pillow before he heard the sound, the soft but unmistakable sound of a baby’s cry above the sounds of the storm that continued to rage outside.
Ten minutes later the baby was still crying.
Did healthy babies cry this much?
Ivo had always possessed the ability to tune out background noise and distractions. He could sleep anywhere—at least he’d thought so. But it turned out there was a nerve-shredding noise that he couldn’t tune out. Twice over the next half an hour the sound stopped only to start up again just as he had been lulled into a false sense of security and relaxed.
When it happened a third time he snapped; throwing back the quilt, he bounced out of bed and over to the door.
The temperature in the hallway was several degrees colder than his room. At some point, he supposed, this had seemed like a good idea, if for no other reason than anything was better than lying there listening to the racket that was driving him crazy. Now you’ll just look crazy!
Quite suddenly the noise stopped. Aware it could be another false alarm, he didn’t relax, neither did he turn around and crawl into his comfortable bed and get what sleep he could. He was committed to the course of action that took his feet towards the flickering light he could see spilling out into the hallways ahead.
The compulsion that drove him was stronger than logic. His brother’s child, his nephew, was inside that room, the only part of Bruno that remained.
When he reached it, the door was ajar. On well-oiled hinges it swung silently inwards when he touched it. The room it revealed was small, painted a bright in-your-face yellow. The heat blasting out from the heaters that were positioned either end of it made the mobiles hanging from the ceiling spin, bringing the clowns and seals and cats to life. The effect when you added the stars and moons the night light projected on the ceiling was all a little surreal.
Ivo barely noticed.
His attention was completely focused on the spot where Flora Henderson was standing, her back turned to him, for the moment oblivious of his presence. She was holding the child, who seemed to be sleeping now; all he could see was the dark curly top of his head and his legs encased in blue, hanging limp.
He watched as she walked barefoot across the room to where the cot was situated under a curtained window. She was wearing a thin blue cotton nightdress that ended just below her knees and was held up by thin straps that revealed the curve of her delicate shoulder blades. The fabric billowed a little as she walked, allowing him to see the narrowness of her waist and the firm curves of her bottom through it.
Later, when he examined the moment he viewed it in the light of a long, very bad, incredibly frustrating day, but at that moment he could not apply logic to the scalding heat of the hormone rush that blanked his mind totally. Just wiped it clean of everything but the sense-destroying lust that for a few moments utterly consumed him.
He had begun to claw his way back to a semblance of control when she lifted her head, the upper half of her body half turning towards him, allowing him a view, through the gaping neck of her nightdress, of the smooth slopes of her breasts and the darker shadow of her nipples through the fabric. Their glances connected, blue on black, and he felt the control he had fought for slipping through his fingers like a wet rope burning flesh as he clung on.
Then