In Christofides' Keeping. ABBY GREEN

an ease that would have had her horrorstruck in any normal circumstance. ‘My daughter…I had to get home to my daughter.’ And then she cursed herself. She hadn’t denied that she’d run.

      At that moment the rain started to fall more heavily, scattering the local teens around them. Rico Christofides gestured to her door, which was up a few steps. ‘Let me help you with the pram.’

      Panic rose. Gypsy protested, not wanting him anywhere near her place or Lola. ‘No, really, I can manage…’ But even as she spoke Rico Christofides took hold of the pram and lifted it bodily against him, as if it weighed no more than a bag of sugar. She had to let go or it would have become a tug of war. The irony that Lola could become an object of a tug of war was not lost on Gypsy at that moment.

      The rain was teeming down now, flattening his black hair against his skull. Gypsy could feel drops of water falling down her back. When he gestured with his head, she had no choice but to precede him up the steps to the front door. In the manoeuvring that was done to open the door and get Lola inside, with Rico Christofides hanging onto the buggy relentlessly, he was in her tiny one-bedroomed apartment before she knew what was happening or could stop it.

      He placed the buggy back down in the pitiful excuse for a sitting room with a gentleness that momentarily disarmed Gypsy. She was a little stunned. With a brusque economy of movement he shut the main front door and came back to shut her ground-floor apartment door. Now he was looking around, and asked, ‘Have you got a towel?’

      ‘A towel?’ Gypsy repeated stupidly, knowing on some level that she was going into shock.

      ‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘A towel…You’re soaked through and so am I.’

      ‘A towel,’ she repeated again, and then, as if jolted by a stun gun, she came out of her shocked inertia. ‘A towel—of course.’ Get the towel, let him dry off and he’ll be gone.

      Gypsy walked on stiff legs to the tiny bedroom she shared with Lola and opened the cupboard to take out a towel. Coming back, she handed it to Rico Christofides, trying not to notice how huge he appeared to be in the small room.

      Immediately he frowned and handed the towel back to her. ‘You first—you’re soaked. Surely you have more than one?’

      Gypsy looked at it stupidly, and then gabbled, ‘Of course.’ She gestured jerkily. ‘You take that one. I’ll get another.’ She tried not to let the mounting impatience she felt be heard in her voice. Why wouldn’t he just leave?

      Coming back to the sitting room, she saw him drying his hair roughly with big hands. He’d taken off his coat to drape it over a threadbare chair, and his impeccable suit was moulded to his strong frame, making her throat dry at recalling the body underneath.

      He turned to face her, taking his hands down, leaving his short hair sexily dishevelled. He glowed with vitality and health, making Gypsy feel pale and wan.

      He frowned down at her. ‘You should take off your coat and hat…’ He looked around. ‘Do you have a heater in here?’

      Reluctantly she pulled off her hat and started to undo her coat, knowing he was right; the last thing she needed was to get ill. She shook her head when those grey eyes settled on her again, expecting an answer, and flushed when they dropped imperceptibly to take in her shabby clothes as her coat slid off. She was very aware of her hair, which now curled in wild abandon around her shoulders, and could just imagine how frizzy it would be from the rain. She wanted to pull it back and tie it up. And she hated that he was making her aware of herself like that.

      ‘Our heater broke this morning. The storage heating will come on in a couple of hours.’

      Rico Christofides looked comically shocked. ‘You’ve no heat? But you have a child—it’s freezing outside.’

      Gypsy flushed with a mother’s guilt. ‘This is the first day it’s been broken. We’ll manage until we can get a replacement…’ She trailed off, suddenly thinking of the fact that now she was out of work her meagre savings wouldn’t be stretching to cover a new heater. As if she could explain she’d lost her job because of him. How irresponsible was she?

      She looked at Rico Christofides and recognised his wide-legged stance with dismay. He wasn’t going anywhere any time soon. With extreme reluctance she finally said, ‘Can I get you tea or coffee?’

      His eyes narrowed on her once again. The barest hint of a smile tipped up one corner of his wickedly sensual mouth as he recognised her capitulation. ‘I’d love a coffee, please. Black, no sugar.’

      Stark, with no sweetener—just like him, Gypsy thought churlishly as she went into the kitchen to put on the kettle. All she could hope for now was that Lola wouldn’t wake up and Rico Christofides would satisfy whatever bizarre lingering curiosity he had about her and leave. Soon.

      

      Rico looked around the bare apartment as Gypsy moved about the kitchen and he suppressed a shudder of distaste. Without her presence right in front of him his brain seemed to clear slightly. Once again he questioned his sanity in pursuing her here, especially when his eyes fell on the battered-looking buggy which sat just feet away against the wall. His sane impulse was to come up with some plausible excuse—even just ask her why she seemed to be determined to pretend she didn’t know him—but a greater overriding impulse was urging him to stay. Even if there was a child in the picture.

      He could only make out the fact that her daughter was quite small, so therefore she must have had her since she’d been with him. And even though Rico knew he had no right to feel a surge of anger at that, he did.

      Even just watching her pull off that damned unflattering hat and coat had scrambled his brain and made him almost forget the presence of the child. The quick movement of her small hands had reminded him of how they’d felt on him, stroking along the most sensitive part of his anatomy until he’d had to beg her to stop…He frowned. Why was she so intent on denying she knew him? And that night? Even if he had left the way he had, he knew it had been as cataclysmic for her too. The shocked look of awe on her face just after she’d exploded around him had told him that.

      With no false pride he knew he was a good lover, but what he’d experienced that night with Gypsy had gone beyond anything he’d ever known before. Or since. It had shaken him out of his complacency. Was that why he needed to see her again? To recapture that moment? To see if it had been his imagination or something…more? He balked at that. He never wanted anything more with any woman. But that night with Gypsy had touched him on a level that had left him feeling an ache of dissatisfaction, and it had only grown since then, pervading everything around him and tainting the few liaisons he’d had with women in the interim.

      He knew seeing her last night had thrown the fact that he’d been trying to recapture that fleeting transcendence he’d experienced with her into sharp relief. With that thought reverberating through his mind he heard Gypsy re-enter the room. He turned to face her and took the coffee she held out. She was avoiding his eyes.

      

      Gypsy escaped Rico’s gaze and occupied herself by going to peek in at Lola who, to her relief, was still sleeping peacefully, her cheeks pink and her rosebud mouth in a little moue. Long black lashes rested against plump baby cheeks. Gypsy’s heart swelled, as it did every time she looked at her daughter, and at that moment she felt an overwhelming surge of guilt at knowing she was denying Lola’s father knowledge of her when he stood only feet away.

      She quashed it down, telling herself that she was doing it for good reasons, and straightened up, crossing her arms defensively over her chest. To her surprise she saw that Rico Christofides had taken a saucepan from the kitchen and was placing it in the corner of the room where, to her dismay, she saw that he’d spotted a leak.

      As he straightened up again she said, more caustically than she’d intended, ‘Look, what is it you want from me?’ The rogue thought that he could be there because after seeing her again he’d been overcome with lust set her mind spinning, before she realised how unlikely that had to be.

      Rico