Movement caught his eye. Sirena had brought Lucy into the garden. She wore a summer dress and bare feet. Her hair hung in a damp curtain down her back, its curls weighted into subtle waves that would spring up as the sun dried it. Folding one leg under herself the way she often did, she sat on the covered swing and kicked it into a gentle rock, head tilting back as she inhaled deeply.
She was pure woman in that moment, sensual yet maternal. Beautiful.
The want in him took on a new, disconcerting depth. It wasn’t just sexual. He remembered her efficiency, her smooth handling of difficult people, her quick smiles.
He wanted the Sirena he’d believed her to be before his dented bank balance had proved she wasn’t.
Damn it, he didn’t do complex relationships. Mother-son. Simple. Protective big brother. Easy. Boss and employee. Black-and-white.
With one noted exception.
His father’s suicide over what had seemed to be a sordid yet standard affair was earning some of his empathy. If his father had struggled with things like overstepping boundaries in the workplace and a lust that battled strength with his love for his child, Raoul could see where he’d felt torn in too many directions. Raoul wasn’t anywhere near killing himself over it, but he wasn’t getting much sleep.
But if he was about to be exposed for his perfidy, he might start thinking drastic thoughts. Sirena had threatened a publicity backlash and he believed her. He was learning there was a no-holds-barred quality when her basic rights were threatened and part of him respected her for it.
And if there was one thing he prided himself on, it was upholding his end of a bargain.
Cursing, he opened the French doors onto the patio and strolled across to Sirena, footsteps whispering across the grass. Her eyes opened, but only to slits.
“I’m floating down the river of denial. Don’t kill the mood,” she warned with a chilly edge to her soft tone.
The corner of his mouth quirked. She had always caught him off guard with her colorful expressions. There was a hidden poet in her, he suspected. A romantic.
He frowned, unable to fit that with the calculating vamp he knew her to be.
“Look,” he said, sweeping her multiple facets aside to work at keeping things simple. He’d been angry when he’d thrown his ultimatum at her, grumpily aware that he wanted her rather desperately while she thought he was trying to manipulate her. The manipulating factor was this infernal chemistry!
“I was wrong to say I’d go back on our agreement. You’re right. You negotiated in good faith and things between us will only get ugly if we don’t talk these things through without using Lucy as leverage.”
“Are you on drugs? I thought you said I was right.” Her eyes stayed shut, not revealing any of the willingness to compromise he was looking for.
“Where is all this sass coming from?” he demanded. “You never used to say things like that to me.”
“Sure I did. In my head. Now that you’ve fired me, I can use my outside voice.”
He accepted that with a disgruntled press of his lips, pushing his hands into his pockets as he rocked on his heels. The sun on his back was so hot he could feel the burn through his shirt. Sirena and the baby were in the shade, though, so he didn’t insist they go back into the house yet.
“Will you stay? You know what my workload is like. I have to travel and I don’t want to be half a globe from Lucy, not for weeks at a time.”
“So when you say stay, you mean follow you around like nomads?” Her eyes opened, lashes screening her thoughts, but the indignant lift of her brows said plenty.
“Why not? You liked the travel when you worked for me, didn’t you?”
Sirena pursed her lips. “When I got out of the hotels to see the sights.”
He frowned, sensing criticism when he was well aware she’d enjoyed visiting foreign cultures, welcoming new people and perspectives with excited curiosity, always ready with small talk full of well-researched questions about museums or local wonders, always craning her head at markets when they passed. She made good use of all she learned too, providing tidbits that informed his negotiations through foreign bureaucracy, but he wondered suddenly if he’d kept her too busy to actually experience all she’d wanted to.
They’d been there to work, though. That’s what he did and who he was.
He scowled as he contemplated how little of those countries he’d seen.
“It doesn’t matter what I want,” she sighed. “Lucy will have school—”
“Years down the road,” he argued, not letting her finish. “I’ll make allowances for that, but you know as well as I do it will take time to put things in place. For the next few years, as long as she has us, she’ll be happy anywhere. I’m not talking about leaving tomorrow. I realize you have medical checkups. We’ll stay here as long as you need, but later in the year I don’t see why we can’t take a few weeks in Milan. My mother is already asking when I’ll bring her to New York.”
“I can’t live with you permanently. How would we explain it to people? Your future bedmates sure wouldn’t like it, and what if one of us wants to get married?”
Irritated by the mention of bedmates and life mates, he dismissed both. “I’ve never been interested in marriage and see even less point now. As for bedmates, for Lucy’s sake, we should keep that in-house.”
Sirena suddenly stopped the swing. Raoul sensed refusal so tangibly he bristled.
“Wow. For Lucy’s sake I ought to have sex with you? That’s the kind of reasoning even someone with my damaged morals has trouble following.”
“If we sleep together, it’ll be because we both want to,” he snapped, aware he was handling this badly, but she was frustrating the hell out of him. “That train wreck last night was a head-on crash from both sides. You want me and when you get cleared by the doctor, you’ll be cleared for sex. Think about that.”
SIRENA DIDN’T HAVE much choice about whether to think on it. Her body was enamored with the idea of falling into bed with her old boss. Her mind drifted in that direction at the least bit of encouragement. Asleep, awake... He was always nearby, smelling like manly aftershave or endearingly like baby powder, telling family secrets to Lucy or speaking in some sexy foreign language on the phone, the syllables drifting teasingly into her ears...
She got so she conjured reasons not to trust him in order to counter the attraction, which wasn’t healthy. I’ve never been interested in marriage and see even less point now. That certainly told her where his interest in her as a bedmate started and stopped.
They wound up having abbreviated conversations punctuated by glances of awareness and stubborn avoidances. She had to move back into her own flat.
The trouble was, her neighbor’s niece was still begging to take it over. Sirena began thinking that if she could find a decent job in a less-expensive part of London, she might be able to keep renting out her existing flat and take something smaller for herself. Her flat was an asset she didn’t want to lose and without a better income soon, she would. Even at that, she wasn’t sure how she’d pay for day care so she could work.
Which was the sort of worn path of worry that made her circle back to what Raoul was offering. But it would be so wrong. He had wronged her and continued to feel wronged