Tess’s startled gasp was audible in the short, tense silence that followed his words.
‘Does that have the required degree of character-enhancing humility to suit you?’
CHAPTER TWO
‘YOU were going out with a married woman?’ Tess didn’t know what made her feel most uncomfortable: the part that Rafe had been messing with a married woman, or the part that said he’d been contemplating wedding bells and babies.
‘You want to have babies…?’
Rafe, regretting his unusual episode of soul-baring the instant the self-pitying words emerged from his lips, dragged an angry hand through his hair as Tess, after visibly recoiling from him as though he had a particularly nasty disease, started staring at him with the expression she obviously reserved for moral degenerates. He resisted the impulse to unkindly point out she was no saint herself!
‘I don’t think I’ve got the hips for it.’ He didn’t understand why this sarcastic response should make her flinch.
‘And just for the record I didn’t know she was married until it was too late.’ He didn’t know why the hell he was explaining himself to her.
‘Too late for what?’
Rafe scowled at her dogged persistence. ‘Too late not to fall in love!’ he bellowed.
He saw her soft wide lips quiver and a misty expression drift over her almost pretty features. Oh, God, not sympathy…please…he thought with a nauseated grimace.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I need to sit down, and from the look of you so do you.’
Tess looked askance at the guiding hand on her arm but decided not to object; she found that she did need to sit down too. She made no immediate connection between the half-empty mug of wine still clutched in her hand and the shaky quality of her knees.
Rafe was relieved to find that Tess’s spring-cleaning efforts hadn’t extended as far as the small oak-beamed sitting room. He pushed a sleeping cat off the overstuffed chintzy sofa and sat down with a grunt. The grunt became a pained yelp as he quickly leapt up. A quick search behind the cushion recovered the item responsible for his bruised dignity.
He held aloft the culprit, a battered-looking three-wheeled tractor.
‘I searched everywhere for that earlier,’ Tess choked thickly, taking the toy from his unresisting fingers and nursing it against her chest.
‘Are you crying…?’ Rafe wondered suspiciously. He didn’t associate feminine tears or even more obviously feminine bosoms, of which he’d had that unexpected eyeful, with Tess, and he was getting both tonight. It intensified that vague feeling of discomfort.
Tess sharply turned her slender back on him and stowed the toy away in an overflowing, brightly painted toy chest tucked in the corner of the room. Scrubbing her knuckles across her damp cheeks, she turned back.
‘What if I am?’ she growled mutinously.
A nasty thought occurred to Rafe. ‘Ben is all right, isn’t he?’ he asked sharply. A picture of a dribbly baby came into his head and he felt an unexpected twinge of affection. ‘I mean, he’s not ill or anything…?’
It occurred to him, as it perhaps should have done sooner if he was the friend he claimed to be, that it must be hard bringing up a baby alone. He couldn’t be a babe in arms any longer, he must be—what? One…more, even…?
‘Ben’s fine…asleep upstairs.’ The tears were starting to flow again and there was zilch she could do about it, so Tess abandoned her attempt at pretence of being normal or in control—of her tears ducts, her life…anything!
‘Something’s wrong, though.’
‘You don’t usually state the obvious,’ she croaked.
Rafe gave an indulgent sigh. ‘You’d better tell me.’
‘Why bother?’ she asked with a wild little laugh. ‘You can’t do anything!’
‘Oh, ye of little faith.’
‘Nobody can,’ she insisted bleakly. The alcohol had broken down all the defensive walls she’d built up with a resounding bang. Without lifting her head to look at him, she laid it against the wide expanse of chest that was suddenly conveniently close to hand. Eyes tight closed, hardly aware of what she was doing, she brought her fist down once, twice, three times hard against his shoulder.
At some deep subconscious level that dealt with things beyond her immediate misery her brain was storing irrelevant information like the level of hard toughness in his body and the nice, musky, warm scent that rose from his skin.
‘I can’t bear to lose him. I just can’t bear it, Rafe!’ she sobbed in a tortured whisper.
Her distress made him feel helpless. Helpless and a rat! Tess was putting herself quite literally in his hands, displaying a trust and confidence she had every right to expect if he was any sort of friend. It made the response of his body to the soft, fragrant female frame plastered against it all the more of a betrayal!
‘Lose who? Your vet…?’ he prompted. He took her by the shoulders and gave her an urgent little shake.
‘You can’t lose what you never had and furthermore don’t want! Don’t you ever listen?’ she demanded hotly.
‘Then who or what have you lost?’
‘Lost my inhibitions—it must be the wine.’
‘Stop laughing.’
Fine! If he preferred tears, he could have them! ‘Lose Ben!’
‘You’re not going to lose Ben,’ he soothed confidently.
Rafe always did think he knew everything—well, not this time! Angrily she lifted her head; tears sparkled on the ends of her spiky dark eyelashes.
‘I am. Chloe wants him!’ she wailed.
Rafe looked at her blankly. She wasn’t making sense at all…maybe she had an even lower tolerance for alcohol than he’d thought.
‘I know Chloe gets what she wants,’ he observed drily,
‘but on this occasion I don’t think you’re obliged to say yes. You really shouldn’t drink, Tess…’
‘You don’t understand!’
Rafe shook his head and didn’t dispute her claim as haunted, anguish-filled emerald eyes fixed once more on his face.
‘I’m not Ben’s mother, Chloe is…’ Sobbing pitifully, she collapsed once more against Rafe’s chest, leaving him to digest the incredible information she’d just hit him with.
If it was true, and he couldn’t for the life of him think why she’d lie about something like that, it was a hell of a lot to take in.
