smile was faintly reproving. ‘Don’t sound so shocked, Paulo—I know I’m on the wrong side of forty, but I’m still capable of having a relationship!’
It occurred to him that Jessie might fall in love. Might even leave him. And, oddly enough, the idea alarmed him far less than he would have imagined. ‘Is it…serious?’
‘Not yet,’ she said quietly. ‘But I think it’s getting there.’
‘Whoa! And there was me thinking you were in love with your work!’
‘In your dreams!’
He drew a breath and followed her out to the front door, where he helped her into her coat and handed her her gloves. ‘Listen, Jessie—’
She turned to look up at him. ‘I’m listening.’
‘About Isabella—’
She shook her head firmly. ‘No, honestly. You don’t have to tell me anything—and I won’t ask you anything.’ She screwed her face up uncomfortably. ‘Well, maybe just one thing—but then you probably know what that is, already.’
His gaze was nothing more than curious. ‘What?’
‘Are you the father?’
He very nearly spat his whisky out, and it took him several seconds before he was ready to answer. ‘Jessie—that’s so outrageous, it’s almost funny! Almost,’ he added warningly and his dark eyes glittered with indignant question. ‘You don’t honestly think that, do you? That I would suddenly produce a child-to-be? That I would have been having a relationship with Judy, when all the time I had made another woman pregnant?’
‘No, of course I don’t.’ Jessie shrugged and sighed. ‘When you put it like that, I suppose the very idea is crazy. But isn’t that what everyone else is going to think?’
‘Why would they think that?’ he growled. ‘She’s only twenty!’
‘And you’re only just thirty!’ Jessie retorted. ‘It’s not exactly the age-gap from hell!’
‘And I’ve known her since she was a child,’ he said stubbornly.
‘Well, she’s certainly no child now!’ retorted Jessie.
After she’d gone, he walked back into the sitting room to stand over the sleeping woman on the sofa once more, mesmerised by the soft movement of her breathing. No, Jessie was right. Isabella was certainly no child.
She’d relaxed into her sleep even more. Her arms were stretched above her head and a smile played around her lips—the first really decent smile he’d seen all day. Though maybe that wasn’t so surprising, in the circumstances. Maybe sleep offered her the only true refuge at the moment. And he realised with a pang just how much he had missed that easy, soft smile.
Overwhelmed by a sense of deep compassion, he leaned over her and put his hand on her shoulder and gave it a gentle shake.
‘Isabella?’ he said quietly.
She didn’t respond—not verbally, anyway. She murmured something incomprehensible underneath her breath, and wriggled deeper into the sofa, and the movement made the fabric of her maternity dress cling to her thighs.
Paulo swallowed.
Pushing against the sheen of the material, the bump of the baby could be seen in its true magnitude. She should have looked ungainly, but she looked nothing of the sort—she looked quite lovely, and he felt his body battling with his conscience as he gently shook her shoulder again, but she continued to writhe softly.
He felt desire shoot through him like an arrow—all the more piercing for its unexpectedness and its inappropriateness. And he must have made a small sound, because her eyelids fluttered half-open to stare at him.
And in the unreal world between waking and sleeping, it seemed perfectly natural for Paulo’s darkly implacable face to be bent so close to her that for a moment it seemed as though he might kiss her. It was a lifetime’s fantasy come true and she stretched her arms above her head in unconscious invitation.
‘Paulo?’ she whispered dreamily. ‘What is it?’
He shook his head, telling himself that she had aroused in him feelings of protectiveness, nothing more. Nature was cunning like that—it made a woman who was ripe with child look oddly beautiful so that men would want to protect her. ‘It’s bedtime,’ he responded sternly, but the trusting tremble of her lashes stabbed him in the heart, and made him ache in the most unexpected of places. ‘You look like you need it. If you want, I can carry you.’
‘Heavens, no—I’ll walk,’ she protested, wide awake now. ‘I’m much too heavy to carry.’
‘No, you’re not—I bet you’re as light as a little bird. Want to test me it out?’
‘No,’ she lied, and struggled up into a sitting position.
He helped her to her feet and put his hand in the small of her back to support her, just the way he had once done with Elizabeth.
Except that Elizabeth had been almost as tall as him—while Isabella seemed such a tiny little thing beside him. Why, she barely came up to his shoulder. And yet looks could be deceptive—he knew how tough she could be. You only had to see her astride an excitable horse, expertly subduing it into submission, to realise how strong she could be. He had never imagined that she could look almost frail.
‘Come on,’ he said softly. ‘Lean against me.’
Too sleepy to refuse, she allowed him to guide her upstairs and into a bedroom, where there was a large bed with a duvet lying invitingly folded back.
‘Get undressed now,’ he whispered, as she flopped down on the mattress and sighed.
‘Nnnng!’ She pillowed her head on her hands, and closed her eyes.
‘Isabella!’ he said sternly. ‘Get yourself ready for bed, unless you want me to do it for you!’
Her eyes snapped open. This was no dream. Paulo was here. Right here. And he was threatening to undress her! ‘I can manage. Really.’
He gave her a narrow-eyed look of assessment, only really believing her when she unclipped her gold wristwatch and slid it down over the narrow wrist.
‘Goodnight,’ he said abruptly.
‘Goodnight, Paulo.’
He left the door slightly ajar, so that the light from the corridor would penetrate the room if she woke. She would not flounder around frightened in the middle of the night in unfamiliar darkness.
But he was restless. Too restless for newspapers or the stack of paperwork he kept in the study, and which always needed attention. He drank some coffee and showered, and then slipped naked into bed, the cool sheets lying like silk against his bare skin while he lay and thought about the woman in the next room and who had made her pregnant. And how she could be persuaded to return to her own country—because surely that was the only rational option open to her.
He scowled up
