FOR SOME REASON her baby’s father was standing there looking taller and more imposing than she remembered. He was wearing a medium grey tailored suit, white shirt open at the neck—the only concession to the setting. The bespoke tailoring was almost as inappropriate as the tight ache low in her pelvis. Yet somehow he made her feel as if she were the one dressed inappropriately or at least inadequately.
Screamingly self-conscious of every inch of exposed skin, Lily called on all her rusty acting skills and lifted her chin acknowledging his presence with a tiny lift of her hand and an expression of small world surprise. Only it wasn’t, it was a massive world and he was here. Hard to believe that meant anything good. Pushing through the moment of panic, she forced herself to leave the shallows; the sense of impending doom remained.
Counselling herself sternly not to assume the worst, she took a tiny grain of comfort from the fact that Emmy was safely at home. She wished she were there too as her eyes made an unscheduled covetous sweep up the long, lean length of him. It was pretty hard to pretend to be composed when your stomach felt as if you’d just stepped off a cliff.
But it was sand, not air, beneath her feet and she made herself walk towards him. Lily was so focused on controlling herself and taking that next step that she got within a few feet of Ben before registering the clenched rigidity of his stance. Anger—it radiated off him in waves, and it was all aimed at her. Anger was actually too mild a word for the volcanic aura of antagonism he was vibrating. He pinned her with a stare that was as hard and unforgiving as tempered steel.
Hampered by guilt, fear, a racing heart and a skin-crawling self-consciousness, Lily pushed away the image of her daughter’s face and struggled to return the glare with some degree of composure. Beneath her carefully schooled expression her brain was firing off scenarios to explain his presence, all carefully avoiding the most obvious.
He knew!
Fighting the increasingly urgent compulsion to swim back out to sea, she straightened her shoulders and speared her hands into her long drenched hair before shaking it back from her face. Unable to maintain contact with the accusing blue glare for more than a second, she cleared her throat and broke the tense, explosive silence.
‘Hello.’ She discovered her voice sounded weirdly normal.
* * *
Hello...?
She didn’t even have the grace to look guilty, she just looked... The muscles in his brown throat worked as he dragged his wandering gaze up the slim length of her sinuous pale curves. The fury he could barely contain mingled with a large dollop of desire. He couldn’t deny his reaction when his body still thrummed with the testosterone-fuelled heat that had immobilised him with lust as she’d emerged from the waves like some mythical goddess.
But, in his defence, Lily Gray was the sort of woman who could stop traffic wearing a bin sack. And right now she was wearing very little at all. His eyes made another unscheduled dip. The black bikini consisted of a few triangles of cloth tied together with tiny metallic loops, three in total, one rested between her glorious breasts, the others low on each hip bone. The colour emphasised the creamy, opalescent pallor of her glistening skin. It was every bit as incredible as he remembered it, he thought, hungrily devouring the details. Her body might be lusher than it had been three years ago—in a very good way—but he would still be able to span her waist with his hands.
He looked at them and now realised he still had hold of her towel. The muscles around his jaw tightened as he felt a fresh blast of scalding self-disgust at his lack of control over his emotions. He thrust the towel at her with a grunt.
* * *
‘Thank you.’ Under the cover of a stiff automatic smile, her swirling thoughts raced as she wrapped the soft fabric sarong-wise across her breasts and waited, with a sense of fatalism that approached a Zen-like calm, for him to speak.
When he didn’t, she flung a rope of wet hair over her shoulders. She was amazed that her hands were still steady, despite the fact that under the calm, pulses of fear continued to pound through her body and her knees felt ready to give way.
She was living her worst nightmare. If the ground had opened up at her feet, she would have gladly jumped into the black hole.
No obliging hole appeared, so she met his hostile stare with as much composure as she could summon.
‘This is a surprise. So what are you doing here?’
‘Have a guess?’ he ground back, tearing his eyes from the small trickle of sea water running down the curve of her pale, creamy shoulder.
‘I was never very good at guessing games,’ she blurted, her voice a low driven undertone almost drowned by the low hiss of waves breaking on the shore. ‘If you have something to say...?’ The tense silence stretched. ‘Well, if you’ll excuse me I’m late for my massage.’ She made to move past him but he blocked her path. The sheer menace of his physical presence would have made her pause if his next words hadn’t frozen her to the spot.
‘Oh, well, when you can fit me into your schedule, I thought we might have a conversation. One like—oh, I don’t know... How about: Ben, it totally slipped my mind, but I had your baby a few years back...?’
She closed her eyes and thought, Oh, hell... Well, maybe now was as good a time as any to get this over with. Sucking in a short, tense breath, every muscle in her body taut, she turned and looked him in the face and nodded.
‘Sorry.’ Then because it crossed her mind he might think she was sorry she’d had Emmy she tacked on hastily, ‘That you found out about it in the way—’ She stopped. She didn’t know how he’d found out, but she supposed the significant bit was it hadn’t been from her. ‘This way.’
He clenched his jaw and ground out grimly, ‘So you’re not even going to deny it?’
A bit late now. ‘I’m not a good liar.’
His lip curled. ‘Oh, I think you’re a very good liar.’
‘I didn’t lie, I just decided not to—’
‘Burden me with the truth?’
She winced at the acid sarcasm and began to resent his occupation of the moral high ground as she jerked her eyes up to meet his intense blue glare.
‘Or were you just not sure who the father was?’
The insult, because there was no doubt he intended it as such, drew a wobbly little laugh from her aching throat. She clamped her teeth over it and lifted her chin. It was an irony she had no intention of sharing with him. She could at least retain that much pride. Having him know she’d thought their one-night stand was the start of something special would have been too cringingly humiliating; she’d prefer he think she was some sort of bed-hopping tart.
‘Oh, there was never any doubt about that,’ she said quietly.
‘Because I’m curious,’ he said, his control straining at the leash. ‘Did you ever intend to tell me?’
‘I thought about it.’ Lily didn’t register the hissing sound her admission wrenched from his clenched teeth. Her eyes glazed as her thoughts drifted backwards. After the initial shock had worn off she had thought about little else. The tipping point had been the article his ex had written. It had seemed like fate that she’d picked it up in the waiting room before her first appointment with the midwife.
It turned out Ben had only been engaged for five minutes before he’d got cold feet and dumped the poor woman. Commitment phobic, the gorgeous ex-model had explained, but the real breaking point, she had confided, had been his refusal to have a family.
You had to admire the woman. She’d have been perfectly justified, in Lily’s opinion, if she’d chosen to stick the knife in. But instead she’d displayed a really healthy attitude focusing on the future, her career change and plugging her new cookery book that was to hit the shelves soon.
That