glorious night. She’d known the dangerous game she was playing when she had let him take her up to his room; known what she was doing, even though she had had just a little too much to drink that night, too much for her at any rate. It had been he who had suggested calling a halt to their caresses. He who had tried to tell her he didn’t believe in fooling around with women on the rebound, when she had so foolishly begged him not to go.
Her cheeks burned now with the shame of it and way down inside she felt the fierce pang of unwelcome desire undermined by the cutting pain of rejection.
‘Katrina’s my friend,’ she told him, ridiculously emotional. ‘She was only looking out for my interests.’ Suddenly she needed some spur, a point of antagonism to stab at the whole agonising trauma of the day. ‘I suppose in a minute you’ll be telling me you objected to her calling my boy “Seanie”!’ she tossed at him, with an emphasis on the ‘my boy’ that hit its mark if that tightening muscle in his jaw was anything to go by.
She heard him catch his breath and, after a moment, felt him glance her way.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’re both wound up. This has been an ordeal for both of us. Let’s not quarrel to add to it. It will all be sorted out a lot more painlessly if we remain civil.’
She nodded, saying nothing. But at least that seemed to ease some of the tension between them.
Outside her flat, she was first out of the car, reaching into the back to try and free Sean from the unfamiliar seat.
‘Here, let me,’ Brant advised.
Leaning across the seat, he had released him in a second. Head lolling to one side, Sean was still sleeping soundly.
‘May I?’ Brant whispered.
Annie swallowed, nodded. Well he had to some time, didn’t he?
As he picked up the sleeping child, his features were marked with raw emotion and Annie felt the almost painful constriction of her throat.
What was he thinking, looking for, as those dark, searching eyes roamed over the infant? Some resemblance to the woman he’d loved? Had he already wondered, just as she had, if that distinctive little nose could be his? That the sun-streaked, tawny hair could be a feature of his wife’s and not hers—hers and Warren’s—as he could easily have supposed?
Fear rose in her again, the feeling that she was in danger of losing the only thing that really mattered to her—her baby—and immediately they were inside the flat she retrieved him from Brant.
When he was tucked up in bed for his afternoon nap she fed Bouncer, who was mewing around her ankles in the kitchen, and went back to join Brant in the sitting room.
He was looking at her paintings, particularly the miniature of a mistle thrush she was still working on. There were landscapes too. A sunset over a shadowy headland and a steam train, its plume of blue smoke like a heralding flag above the cutting of a distant hill.
‘These are good. They’re very good,’ he complimented.
At any other time she would have derived great pleasure from his saying so. Now, though, in view of everything, all she felt was a mild satisfaction that her labours were appreciated.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘We’re going to have to arrange for you to see Jack.’ He had straightened again, dominating the small room with his sheer presence. ‘Maybe tomorrow I can—’
‘No!’ Her panicked response put a query in his eyes. Hers were darkened almost to black. ‘I can’t—yet.’ She could feel herself trembling. Even her voice shook. ‘I’m not ready,’ she uttered, trying to make him understand.
She hankered after knowing what her birth child—if he was her child—was like. She also knew any meeting with him would be all too traumatic at present.
Suddenly she looked very pale and weary, a small, vulnerable figure in her clinging top and cropped trousers, shoulders slumping with emotional fatigue.
A couple of strides brought him over to her and somehow, she didn’t quite know how, she was standing in the circle of his arms with her cheek against the hard, warm wall of his chest.
In the silence of the room, she could hear the heavy rhythm of his heart, then from the kitchen the swift, dull clack of the cat-flap.
She raised her head, lifting her face to his, the need in those green-gold eyes meeting an answering need in Annie.
His lips were gentle on hers, a light, tentative touch meant only to console, an offer of solace from one troubled human being to another.
Annie groaned from deep in her throat, and, unable to stop herself, let her arms slide up around his neck.
His breathing quickened in response, and he caught her to him, his arms tightening around her yielding softness, drawing her hard against him.
His kiss had deepened into something more sensual and demanding, and Annie returned it with a fervour she hadn’t known she was still capable of, needing his strength, to be engulfed by the powerful aura of his sexuality and his hard-edged masculinity that was suddenly as familiar to her as her own name.
She wasn’t sure at what point she felt him withdraw. She only knew he had and she uttered a small protest when he unclasped her hands from behind his head and dragged them down, leaving her silently pleading, cast adrift, humiliated.
‘No, Annie. This will just complicate things,’ he stressed, but the raw intensity in his voice and his laboured breathing assured her that he was just as affected as she was. ‘I think it would be best if I left you for the time being. We’re both frayed by what has happened. Today hasn’t been easy—for either of us, but I think particularly for you. You need time to adjust to things. We both do. May I?’ He was indicating Sean’s bedroom door.
How could she stop him? she wondered achingly.
When she nodded he pushed the door quietly open, and just stood there in the doorway, gazing across at the sleeping infant.
After a few moments he moved back out again, and gently closed the door.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ he told her, his voice thick with restrained emotion. ‘In the meantime I think you should telephone your parents. They’re really going to have to know.’
When he had gone, Annie sank down into a chair.
How could she? she thought, ashamed of the way she had behaved with him. How could she have been so stupid? Hadn’t she learned by now that caresses and tender kisses meant very little to a man? That they could demonstrate one thing and mean entirely another? Hadn’t she grasped that yet? Not only with him, but before with Warren, with every man she’d given more than a passing glance to?
It was her behaviour with Brant that she least wanted to remember. But her actions today had only served to bring it all back.
She had been ensnared from the moment she had first laid eyes on Brant Cadman, a reluctant victim of his dark, enslaving sexuality. She had denied it, of course, betrothed as she was to another man. But the fact that he had noticed her, too, had been doubly disturbing.
She had been
