had stipulated that their marriage was only to last six months, and besides, he didn’t strike her as the kind of man who would marry simply because of emotion.
Paul had turned away from her and was lying rigidly in the bed, his stiff little back expressive of all she herself had felt and never been able to say. She could almost feel him wishing her away.
She touched his arm gently. ‘Paul… You don’t have to hide your leg away from me, you know.’
If anything the little boy became even more stiff.
‘Look,’ she said lightly, ‘my leg’s the same.’
At first he didn’t move, and then very slowly and disbelievingly he turned towards her.
‘Let me see it.’
Obligingly she raised the hem of the bathsheet, holding her breath as she waited for Paul’s reaction. For some obscure reason it had become overwhelmingly important that she win the confidence of this withdrawn, too thin and pale child. Perhaps it was an innate fellow-feeling that told her that he had been fibbed to and fobbed off too often to accept platitudes any longer, and for the first time since her accident she actually didn’t mind someone seeing the unpleasant scars.
Even when Paul’s small stubby fingers touched the ridged and puckered skin she didn’t flinch.
‘I was knocked down by a car—how did you get yours?’ she asked conversationally.
‘He was in a car accident—with his mother,’ drawled a mocking familiar voice from the doorway.
Shock jolted through Amber as she saw Joel’s lean frame propped up against the door, the brief terry towelling robe he was wearing doing nothing to conceal the potent masculinity of his body. As though it were a magnet it drew Amber’s fevered gaze, hot pulses beating insistently through her veins in mute reaction to the sensuality of the lean-muscled male body. What was happening to her? She had never felt like this with Rob. Was it something to do with the fact that she now knew that there would be no lover, no fulfilment for her? Was that what was making her so intensely aware of Joel Sinclair; a stranger?
‘Oh, don’t look like that,’ Joel drawled, totally misunderstanding the reason for her shocked expression. ‘She got off completely unscathed. You ought to be asleep,’ he told his son, walking across to the bed, which depressed under his weight.
‘I heard him crying,’ Amber explained the reason for her presence.
‘And like the compassionate motherly creature that you are you came to investigate.’
‘Her name’s Amber,’ Paul told his father, suddenly joining in the conversation. ‘And her leg is like mine.’
Over his head golden eyes met grey, and Amber knew that in some part she had been right, unbelievable though it seemed, and that Joel Sinclair had made her that offer of a temporary marriage because of his son’s damaged leg.
‘Are you going to stay with us?’ he demanded suddenly of Amber, adding to Joel, ‘I like her, Daddy—make her stay. I don’t want her to go away like Mummy did.’ Tears filled his eyes, and Amber’s tender heart was wrung with pity. Why wasn’t this child with his mother, wherever she was? It was obvious from what Joel had said that he wasn’t a widower, so where was his wife? Obviously she couldn’t ask in front of Paul.
‘I won’t, Paul,’ Joel assured him softly. ‘Amber is going to come and live with us for a while.’
‘Will she be my new mummy?’
The air was fraught with sudden tension. Amber could feel it in the sudden tensing of Joel’s body, the watchful expression in his eyes.
‘We’ll see, Paul. Now try to go back to sleep.’
‘I want Amber to kiss me first,’ Paul protested, turning towards her.
Amber’s own eyes were damp as she leaned down to kiss the soft childish skin. Paul put his arms round her neck, hugging her fiercely, and it was Joel who released the small clinging fingers and switched off the bedside light.
‘Perhaps I ought to stay with him until he falls asleep,’ Amber suggested in a soft whisper. There was a chair beside the bed, and she would be quite happy to sit in it until Paul drifted off.
‘If you’re sure you don’t mind? I didn’t get back until the early hours.’
It was very peaceful, listening to the gradually deepening sounds of Paul’s breathing, going over what she had just learned. Poor Paul! The accident must have been a traumatic experience for him; doubly so because his mother had been with him at the time. And what of her? How she must have suffered, Amber reflected, especially if she had been driving. She must ask Joel how seriously damaged Paul’s leg was. Slowly her own eyes started to close, and when dawn finally tinged the sky Amber herself was too deeply asleep to see it.
The warm male fingers on her shoulder felt vaguely familiar. Submerged in dreams, she murmured Rob’s name, rubbing her face against the male hand, a slight smile curving the soft warmth of her mouth.
‘Darling…’ The word left her lips of a faint sigh, her eyes opening, golden with happiness and love, trust in the shyly provocative manner in which she raised her face for Rob’s kiss.
Only there was no Rob any longer, but the knowledge came too late to stop the swift downward descent of a dark male head, predatory lips capturing the softness of her own in a kiss that tingled warmly right through her body to her toes, bringing it fully alive for the first time in months.
Joel’s hands gripped the slenderness of her body beneath her arms, and hauled her effortlessly out of the chair.
‘Well, well!’
Fully awake, Amber saw the dangerous glitter in the grey eyes she had previously thought of as cold. Now they were hot, burning with an anger that threatened to destroy everything in its path.
‘And just who is Rob?’
‘He was my fiancé.’ When she had told him about her accident and her mother’s remarriage, Amber had omitted to mention Rob and their now defunct engagement.
‘Rob?’ The razor-sharp word warned her that she was treading treacherous ground.
‘We were engaged,’ she told him. ‘He’s a doctor, but he wants to specialise, and specialists can’t afford invalid wives.’
‘So he ditched you?’ he asked crisply.
Stung, Amber retorted, ‘What makes you think that?’
‘If he hadn’t, you wouldn’t be dreaming about him the way you were. Don’t ever mistake me for another man again, Amber, and just to make sure you won’t…’
She could feel the palms of his hands resting against the gentle swell of her breasts and her heart started to thunder in panic, but there was no avoiding those punishing lips, bent on exacting revenge for her mistake, and teaching her that he was most definitely not Rob. Rob had never kissed her like this, with a cool skill that demanded contempt, but which instead brought from her trembling lips a response that astounded her in its intensity. She tried to pull away, and felt her bathsheet begin to slip, her face crimsoning as she realised
