did as she bid and was surprised to see her shake her head vehemently. “What? Wrong color?”
“Totally,” she muttered, digging back through the samples again. “Here, try this one.”
To him they looked identical, but he dutifully held the sample up for her.
“Yes, that’s better,” she said, tilting her head slightly to one side and taking a step back. “In fact, I think that’s perfect. We’ll put the drapes against the window with the sheers on the bedroom side. That way the sheers will soften the effect on the whole room when the drapes are closed.”
“I know what you’re saying should make sense,” he laughed. “But it sounds like a foreign language to me.”
Her face broke into a wide smile and she gave him a cheeky wink. “Then it’s a good job you hired Best for Baby, isn’t it?”
She looked just as she had when they’d talked over the dinner table in Hawaii. He’d been reluctant, after a taxing day with a client, to share his solitude. But when the restaurant hostess had requested he allow someone she’d had to turn away to join him, and had pointed Ali out in the bar, he’d recognized her as the woman he’d brushed against in the crowded restaurant lobby. The woman who’d unwittingly triggered a startlingly visceral reaction. His initial resistance had been demolished and he’d said yes.
He wanted that again. That carefree easiness between them. That sense of being on a voyage of discovery together.
“Ali—” he started, taking a tentative step toward her.
“Yes?”
God, he wanted nothing more than to take her in his arms and kiss her. To revisit that exquisite oblivion they’d shared the night they met.
“I—” He broke off with a muttered expletive as his phone chirped in his trouser pocket. He identified the number of his office on the screen. “I’m sorry, but I need to get this.”
“No problem. I’ll be around here or downstairs if you need me.”
She took the sample book from him, and as she moved away again he caught the fresh floral sweetness of her perfume. It was so subtle he was unsure he’d even smelled it at all, but it had a very immediate effect on his body. Need bloomed low in his groin. The phone in his hand continued to chirp. He forced his attention away from the woman who’d ensnared him and fought his libido under control. This kind of thing didn’t happen in his normally rigidly structured world. Yes, he knew desire—what man didn’t? But he’d never known it like this.
He barked a greeting into his phone. Walking from the nursery, he forced himself not to wonder why each step away from Ali felt as if it were a mile rather than a mere yard.
* * *
Well, that was intense, Ali thought as she watched Ronin leave the room. For a moment there she’d thought he was going to close the gap between them and kiss her. His eyes had darkened to a deep denim blue and fixed on her, as if the world had narrowed to only contain the two of them. Her heart still thumped in her chest, pumping blood to her extremities and heightening her awareness to a fever pitch.
She bit down on her lower lip. A lip that tingled in anticipation of his caress. A lip that mourned the caress that hadn’t happened. Obviously their initial attraction was still there just as strongly as it had been an entire hemisphere away—their more recent contretemps notwithstanding.
She closed the sample books and stacked them on one side of the room. It was getting more difficult every time she saw him to remind herself she didn’t want to go there again—that she was totally wrong for him. She had to stay professional. He was her client and she was contracted by him to do a job—a job that involved a helpless, parentless infant. Something deep inside her ached at the thought. What she wouldn’t give to be that parent—to be that special someone to nurture and raise and love the child.
When she’d discovered she couldn’t bear children of her own, she’d imagined that she and her husband would adopt, but he’d been opposed to the idea. She had thought he just needed a while to adjust to the idea of their dreams taking a different shape. She’d tried to give him space and time—space and time he’d used to go behind her back and fall in love with the woman he’d left her for. His lover had represented a new start for Richard, a second chance on the path to the life he’d planned...while Ali was clearly nothing more to him than a dead end.
It had been a painfully hard lesson to learn. Never in their years of courtship, or their marriage, had he even intimated that his love for her was contingent on her ability to produce and raise a family with him. That knowledge had been even more hurtful than the news that she was infertile.
Infertility was something they should have been able to deal with together. Thousands of couples the world over did every day. While she’d railed against the unfairness of it all—especially when faced consistently with evidence of her three sisters’ abundant fertility and happy marriages—it had been her husband’s rejection of her, and his twisted belief that it somehow reflected on him as a man, that had been her undoing. Those scars still ran deep—still made her feel vulnerable and inclined to withdraw from placing herself in that position a second time.
She reminded herself she was not, and probably never would be, ready to put herself out there again. There was no way she would run the risk of being rejected again. Hadn’t she learned her lesson? She’d already felt dreadful when Ronin had seemingly abandoned her after their night together. What if they did get together and he did let her down again?
“Talk about getting ahead of yourself,” she muttered to the empty space around her. “Very shortly he’s going to be incredibly busy raising a child. He certainly won’t have time for you. Nothing’s happened and nothing will happen.”
But there was a piece of her that wanted something to happen, that wanted Ronin Marshall with an ache that went deep down to her core.
* * *
Ali busied herself over the next few hours unpacking the boxes that had been stowed in the foyer. Some of the items needed assembly, so she retrieved her tool kit from her car before kicking off her heels and starting to put together the change station and the crib. After a short time, even without all the finishing touches, the nursery began to look like a baby’s room. Just doing this, creating a safe and loving haven for someone else’s unknown child, filled the echoing hollow inside her. Even if only briefly. It was why she loved doing what she did.
A sound at the door made her look up from where she was kneeling on the floor, reading the final instructions on the change station. Heat flushed her skin when she saw Ronin. She scrambled to her stocking feet, only to feel at a disadvantage as he towered over her.
“Is everything going okay here?” he asked, his eyes scanning the room.
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