‘Truly,’ she said, curling her head and seeking out his lips for more oxygen deprivation. ‘They can’t be any worse than the sound of the yak on the way up.’
Two years later
EXACTLY as Hayden had promised her all those adventures ago at Everest, it was so much less terrifying when there was someone there, stepping out into the nothingness with you.
He hadn’t left her side, not for one overwhelming moment of the birth.
She lay curled around their tiny baby boy, throbbing with love for this precious, precious gift. She’d thought it impossible to feel more love than she already did for her complex, brave Hayden but this little bundle had come out with masses more all ready to go.
She stroked his tiny cheek and glanced at her sleeping husband.
Hayden had pulled a chair up to the side of the bed and leaned forward to watch his son nurse with all the pride and amazement and trepidation of a first-time dad. Then he’d fallen asleep there, totally destroyed by the past forty hours, with one hand on her and one on his new son, draped on the side of her bed. Even the visiting nurses worked quietly around him so that he could sleep.
Then again, he had charmed every one of them. They would have done anything for him. She bundled Leo up more tightly in her hold and looked up and around her, too shattered—too happy—to sleep.
‘Mum,’ she whispered to the night. ‘This is your grandson, Leonidas. I’m sorry you can’t hold him yourself but Hayden and I will hold him for ever for you and keep him safe.’
She stroked his flushed little cheek with her index finger. ‘I get it now, Mum. How unprepared we all are at this moment. How much we want to be the perfect parent for our babies. But it doesn’t change us. It can’t make us perfect, or even better. We can only do our best.’
She gently extracted the sleeping baby from under Hayden’s touch, bundled him more securely and curled him into a hold close to her body.
And then she rocked him and told him all about his grandma.
Tick.
AMY ANDREWS has always loved writing and still can’t quite believe that she gets to do it for a living. Creating wonderful heroines and gorgeous heroes and telling their stories is an amazing way to pass the day. Sometimes they don’t always act as she’d like them to—but then neither do her kids, so she’s kind of used to it. Amy lives in the very beautiful Samford Valley, with her husband and aforementioned children, along with six brown chickens and two black dogs.
She loves to hear from her readers. Drop her a line at www.amyandrews.com.au.
For Halle Anne Baxter.
Much loved.
Lady Mary Bingham had never seen such a fine specimen of manhood in all her twenty years as she held out her hand to her unlikely saviour so he could aid her aboard. Pirate or not, Vasco Ramirez’s potent masculinity tingled through every cell of her body. And even had it not, his piercing blue eyes, the exact colour of warm, tropical waters that fringed the reefs he was rumoured to know like the back of his hand, touched a place inside her that she’d never known existed.
A place she could never now deny.
She supposed, if she were given to swooning, this would be as good a time as any. But she wasn’t. In fact she’d always found the practice rather tiresome and refused to even allow her knees the slightest tremble. Women who had fits of the vapours and cried for their smelling salts every two seconds—like her aunt—were not the kind of women she admired.
Her breath hitched as sable lashes framing those incredible eyes swept downwards in a frank inspection of every inch of her body. When his gaze returned to her face she was left in no doubt that he’d liked what he’d seen. His thumb lightly stroked the skin of her forearm and she felt the caress deep inside that newly awakened place.
Looking at the bronzed angles of his exotic face, she knew she should be afraid for had she not just gone from the frying pan straight into the fire?
Yet strangely she wasn’t.
Not even when his gaze dropped to the pulse beating rapidly against the milky white skin of her neck. Or lower to where her breasts strained against the constrictive fabric of her bodice. His lazy inspection of the agitated rise of her bosom did not elicit fear even when what it did elicit was reason for fear itself.
Her uncle, the bishop, would have declared him an instrument of the devil. A man willing to lead unsuspecting ladies to the edge of sin but strangely she’d never felt so compelled to transgress. The thought was titillating and she sucked in a breath, annoyed that this buccaneer had caused such consternation after such short acquaintance.
After all, was not one pirate just like the next?
Mary looked down at the insolent drift of his thumb. ‘You will unhand me immediately,’ she intoned in a voice that brooked no argument.
Ramirez’s smile was nine parts charm one part insolence as he slowly—very slowly—ceased the involuntary caress.
‘As you wish,’ he murmured, bowing slightly over her hand, his fingers tracing down the delicate blue veins of her forearm, whispering over the fragile bones of her wrist and the flat of her palm as he released her.
Lady Mary swallowed as the accented English slid velvet gloves over already sensitised skin. ‘I insist that you return me to my uncle forthwith.’
Vasco admired her pluck. The girl, who he knew to be barely out of her teens, may well be staring him straight in the eye but he could smell her fear as only a veteran of a hundred raids on the high seas could.
Lord alone knew what had happened to her in the two days she’d been at the mercy of Juan Del Toro and his ruffians. But something told him this pampered English miss could certainly hold her own.
And virgins fetched a much higher price at the slave markets.
‘As you wish,’ he murmured again.
Mary narrowed her eyes, suspicious of his easy capitulation. ‘You know my uncle? You know who I am?’
He smiled at her. ‘You are Lady Mary Bingham. The bishop commissioned me to...retrieve you.’
For the first time in two days Mary could see an end to the nightmare that had begun with her abduction down by the wharfs a mere forty-eight hours before and she almost sagged to the damp floorboards at his feet. She’d heard her former captives
