the breakfast bar, and currently watching him with huge and anxious amethyst-coloured eyes over the top of the glass of orange juice she was drinking.
It was an anxiety Xander remembered from his own childhood.
An anxiety he was now responsible for causing, as his father once had for him.
Xander’s knowledge and experience of children was limited, to say the least, but even he could see that the child was a beauty, with her riot of long, red curls. Her features were more rounded than her mother’s, although the promise of the same beauty was definitely there. It was a cherubic face at the moment, dominated by large and serious eyes, and she had a similar endearing smattering of freckles across her cheeks and the bridge of her tiny nose.
She now struggled down from the tall bar stool to look up at him from beneath long dark lashes. ‘I’m very sorry for knocking you over, Mr Sterne.’
Oh, hell, she even had an endearing lisp when she talked, caused no doubt by that noticeably missing front tooth.
‘I didn’t mean to,’ she continued to lisp. ‘It’s just that I’ve never seen such a big television before.’ Her eyes filled with unshed tears. ‘But Mummy has told me re—re—’
‘Repeatedly,’ Samantha supplied helpfully as she placed a cup of steaming-hot tea and the sugar bowl down on the breakfast bar in front of where Xander stood.
‘Re— Lots of times,’ the little girl substituted endearingly, ‘not to run in the house.’
‘I’ve labelled it “the whipped puppy look”,’ Sam confided softly even as she ruffled her daughter’s red curls affectionately.
‘What?’ Xander had to drag his gaze away from the contrite-looking child in order to look at her mother.
‘The tears welling up in the big eyes, the trembling bottom lip; “whipped puppy” look,’ the mother supplied ruefully. ‘It’s a look my daughter, most young children in fact, have mastered to perfection by the time they’re three!’
‘Oh.’ How to feel foolish in one easy lesson; he was being played, and by a five-year-old, at that!
Sam gave a rueful smile as she obviously saw the confusion in his expression. ‘I assure you, the contrition is perfectly genuine, and you really shouldn’t feel bad about responding to “the look”; it usually works on me too.’
Xander had the distinct impression he was fast losing control of this situation. If he’d ever had control of it in the first place!
But it was well past time that he did.
Xander looked coldly down the length of his nose at the two Smith females. ‘Paul left your bags out in the vestibule, which for obvious reasons you will have to carry to your rooms yourself. You have the two adjoining bedrooms on the right at the end of the hallway. My own suite of rooms is behind the doors on the left. An area that, under no circumstances, will either of you enter without permission. For any reason,’ he stated decisively.
For a heartbeat or two she looked taken aback by the harshness of his tone after their earlier conversation, before she straightened her slender shoulders, seemingly unaware of how the movement thrust forward her tiny but perfectly rounded breasts.
Something Xander was completely aware of, in spite of himself.
‘Of course, Mr Sterne,’ she now answered him smoothly. ‘Come along, Daisy, Mr Sterne wants to be alone now.’ She held out her hand to her daughter, which Daisy took before turning to bestow another shy smile on Xander as they left the kitchen together.
Leaving Xander feeling like a complete boor for having spoken to the two of them so harshly.
He instantly dismissed the feeling; if Daisy Smith had that ‘whipped puppy’ look down to perfection, then she had almost certainly acquired it from her mother.
* * *
‘Is there anything else I can get for you, Mr Sterne?’
Sam kept her expression deliberately bland as she waited beside the formal dining table where she had just served him the first course of his dinner: perfectly cooked asparagus and Béarnaise sauce.
Her long hair was secured tidily at her nape, and she was wearing the same plain white shirt and tailored black trousers she had worn to her interview earlier in the week; it was her idea of her evening ‘uniform’ for the next two weeks.
Sam had brought all the ingredients with her for the meals she would be serving over the weekend, knowing that she wouldn’t have the time, with Darius and Andy’s wedding tomorrow, to go shopping for food until Monday.
She had decided to prepare something simple for Xander’s evening meal today: the asparagus, followed by steak and a fluffy stuffed potato and buttered carrots, and for dessert she had made a pineapple upside-down cake with ice cream; easy to make, but it looked and tasted good. And there was no denying that the kitchen was a dream to work in.
Sam had always liked preparing and cooking food, and it was something she knew she was good at too. Which was why she had been deeply disappointed when Malcolm had refused to allow her to cook for him, insisting that it was what he employed his chef for. The most Sam had been allowed to do in that area was to approve the menus for the week.
Unfortunately, since the separation and divorce Sam’s meagre budget had been a huge deciding factor in the meals she had been able to prepare for Daisy and herself.
Happily, there would be no such limitations in Xander’s household. Sam very much doubted he had ever eaten a bowl of home-made stew in the whole of his privileged life!
‘What did you have in mind?’ He leant back in his chair to look up at her with those dark unfathomable eyes, his only concession to changing for dinner being to replace the black T-shirt of earlier with a white one. But then, he was in his own home, and so perfectly at liberty to wear whatever he chose, whenever he chose. Or not...
It had been a couple of hours since he had dismissed Sam and Daisy from the kitchen, and Sam had made good use of that time, by unpacking their few belongings and putting them away in the empty drawers in their bedrooms. She had also put the food she had brought with her away in the fridge and kitchen cabinets, before preparing dinner.
Sam’s cheeks warmed now as she heard the unmistakeable challenge in his tone. A challenge she chose to ignore. She had been married to a man whose wealth, and the power that wealth gave him, had rendered him both arrogant and selfish, to the point that Malcolm had ridden roughshod over everybody. Including Sam and her romantic dreams of their happy future together.
She had no intentions of so much as acknowledging that Xander Sterne had that bad-boy look off to perfection, in the fitted white T-shirt that stretched tautly over his wide shoulders and chest, and revealing his tanned and muscled arms. Or that she was guilty of having noticed the tautness of his bottom earlier, in those hip-and-thigh-hugging black jeans.
Enough so that it now made Sam’s heart beat faster just to look at all that blatant maleness, her palms feeling slightly damp, a tingling warmth in her breasts and between her thighs.
None of which she wanted to feel for the arrogant man. ‘You made a comment earlier,’ she said coolly. ‘Something about rule number one being null and void?’
‘So
