guessing that Bella might enjoy a play in the pool before it gets too hot,’ Seth said when they’d finished their meal.
‘I’m sure she would. She loves the water.’ Amy was grateful that she’d included their bathers when she’d packed, but she’d expected to be swimming in an Outback creek or a river, not a beautifully tiled, sparkling, manmade pool.
‘Go swimming,’ Bella announced, pulling at Amy’s hand.
Amy gave her a wistful smile. ‘When your breakfast’s gone down.’
But it wasn’t very long before she gave in and Bella was racing ahead of her down the smooth stone steps to greet Seth at the edge of the pool.
‘Look, Sef!’ the little girl announced with great excitement. ‘I’m a ballerdina!’ She spun around, so he could admire her red and white spotted swimsuit edged with cute frills.
‘You’re a beautiful ballerina,’ he assured her. ‘Bella the water-baby ballerina.’
His smiling gaze flickered to Amy and she was glad she’d splurged on a new swimsuit for herself. She knew she was no real beauty, but she’d always been told she had decent legs, and the swimsuit was dark green and perfectly cut to flatter her figure. Even though she wasn’t trying to impress this man, she was quietly pleased that she looked OK.
Seth looked more than OK, of course, in black swimming trunks and with a towel slung around his magnificent shoulders.
It was hard to stop stealing glances at his bare chest and his deeply bronzed, fabulous physique.
‘Well, let’s have a splash, shall we, Bella?’
The little girl loved the water, but she couldn’t swim, so she needed constant help and supervision and Amy was grateful that she was kept busy. It helped to ignore Seth while he swam up and down the pool with smooth, powerful strokes.
After a bit, he joined them. ‘Your turn,’ he told Amy, sending her a grin that made his teeth flash white against his tan. ‘I’ll look after Bella, while you have a swim.’
It was unsettling to hand Bella over, almost as if it was a foretaste of the future. Amy struggled with her reluctance. ‘You need to watch her like a hawk,’ she told Seth. ‘She thinks she can swim.’
‘I’ll be careful.’
She had no choice but to trust him. ‘She’s not scared of the water, and she doesn’t mind putting her face under.’
Bella was so excited and wet and wriggly that the handover was precarious. Amy almost dropped the little girl when she felt Seth’s bare leg brush against hers and she fumbled again when their hands touched and they bumped elbows.
It was bittersweet relief to leave them at last and to swim away in a careful breaststroke to the deep end of the pool. As she swam she could hear Bella’s delighted squeals and laughter.
When she reached the other end, she turned and looked back and saw them together—father and daughter, looking so alike with their dark wet hair, sleek against their skulls—and she felt another tremor of fear deep inside.
Was she being silly, or was she really in danger of losing Bella? Would Seth demand that his daughter live with him?
The thought brought a hot swirl of panic. She’d been so sure she was doing the right thing, that bringing Bella here was in line with Rachel’s intentions.
But now she’d met Seth and seen his beautiful home she couldn’t help wondering why Rachel had objected to living here. She wondered if there was a deeper reason behind Rachel’s avoidance of this meeting with Seth. And was there also an equally good reason why she’d named Amy, and not Seth, as Bella’s guardian?
Amy was sure she was entitled to the role. She adored Bella, had been involved in her life since her birth, had actually been present at her birth.
She would never forget that incredible, joyous morning. Now, the possibility that she might lose Bella made her want to weep.
She dived under the water to wash away the possibility of tears. She had to be strong, to remember that she’d come here for this—to allow Bella and her father to meet—and she was pleased they were getting on so well. He’d accepted that Amy was Bella’s guardian and she had to have faith in her decisions and in her instincts that told her Seth Reardon could be trusted.
Even so, the few days that she would spend here suddenly felt like a dangerously long stretch of time.
‘Everything’s so different and exotic here,’ Amy said later, waving her hand to the view of the terraced hillside and the bright blue sea framed by a tangle of rainforest jungle. ‘I find it hard to believe that I’m still in Australia. I feel as if I’ve crossed hemispheres.’
‘In a way you have.’ Seth sent her a slow smile, aware that it was becoming a habit, this smiling at Amy. It was highly likely that, between them, she and Bella had made him smile more times in the past twenty-four hours than he had in the past twelve months.
He said, ‘Weren’t you telling me yesterday that Serenity is as far from Melbourne as London is from Moscow?’
She turned to him, giving him the full benefit of her warm chocolate eyes, and he was very glad he’d suggested that they take this time to sit on the veranda, drinking coffee after lunch, while Bella napped.
‘It must have been quite a culture shock for you to move all the way from Sydney to here,’ she said earnestly. ‘You were only twelve. That’s smack on the edge of adolescence, when everything looms larger than life.’
‘Actually, I think the fact that everything was so different here helped me,’ he said. ‘I was overawed by this place, but I thought it was incredibly exciting, and my uncle kept me busy from first thing in the morning till I fell into bed at night. He turned my life into an adventure. I’m sure I’d have found it much harder to get over my father’s death if I’d stayed in Sydney.’
Surprised that he’d told Amy so much, he reached for his coffee cup and drank deeply.
Her face was soft with sympathy, as if she was picturing how it had been for him. ‘It can’t have been easy though, when you didn’t have a mother.’
From force of habit, Seth brushed her comment aside. He had no intention of explaining about his mother. She was a subject he never talked about. There was no reason to discuss her.
But Amy had hooked her elbow over the arm of her chair and she was leaning towards him, watching him with her complete attention. Two small lines of worry drew her brows low and her brown eyes were rounded with concern, her pink lips parted. Seth found himself wanting to lean closer, too, to kiss those soft, inviting lips, to kiss away that frown.
It would be so easy.
So incredibly satisfying.
And…totally inappropriate. She hadn’t come here for a fling.
All day he’d been struggling to blank out the picture of Amy this morning in her flimsy cotton nightdress. He tried not to think about the soft round outline of her breasts, the smooth skin of her shoulders, the tapering curve of her waist.
But
