Modern Romance Collection: March 2018 Books 5 - 8. Robyn Donald

leanly muscled form, stripped down to swim shorts. Memory had seared in her and she’d had to drag her eyes away. But not before Anatole had seen her eyes go to him—and she knew that his had gone to her.

      Although she’d deliberately chosen, from the range available in the on-site shop, a very sporty swimsuit, not designed in the slightest to allure, consciousness of her body being displayed to him had burned in her as she’d felt his gaze wash over her.

      Then, thankfully, Nicky, his armbands inflated, had begun jumping up and down with eagerness to be in the water and the moment had passed.

      That consciousness, however, resurfaced now as, tea finished and back in the car for their return journey, she realised that Nicky had fallen asleep, overcome with exhaustion after the day’s delights. In the confined intimacy of the car, music playing softly, Anatole’s presence so close to her was disturbing her senses.

      She felt his eyes glance at her as he drove. Then he spoke. ‘What I said last night—has today shown you how good it would be, making a family for Nicky?’

      His tone was conversational, as if he’d asked her about the weather and not about the insanity of marrying him.

      She was silent for a moment. Though it seemed to her that her heavy heartbeat must be audible to him, as it was to her. She tried to choose her words carefully. One of them had to be sane here—and it had to be her.

      ‘Anatole, think about it rationally. You’re running on impulse, I suppose. You’ve only just discovered about Nicky, and Vasilis is barely in his grave. For you—for either of us!—to make any kind of drastic alteration to our lives at such a time would be disastrous.’ She looked at him. ‘Everything I’ve read about bereavement urges not to take any major decisions for at least a year.’

      Would that sufficiently deter him? She could only hope so. Pray so. Yet in the dimming light of the car she could see a mutinous look on his face. He was closing down—closing out what she’d said.

      ‘It’s the right thing to do,’ he said.

      There was insistence in his voice, and he could hear it himself. How could she not see the obvious sense of what he was proposing? The rightness of it. Yes, he was being impulsive—but that didn’t mean he was being irrational. In fact the very opposite! It was so clearly, unarguably right for him to make a family for this fatherless boy by marrying his mother—the very woman who’d once wanted a child by him...the woman he’d desired from the first moment he’d set eyes on her.

      And I desire her still! And she desires me too. There is no doubt of that—no doubt at all!

      Yet still she was denying it. As her blunt answer proved.

      ‘No,’ she answered. ‘It isn’t.’

      Her head dipped, and she stared at her hands, lying in her lap. What more could she say without ripping apart the fragile edifice of her life—plunging herself back into the desperate torment she had once known with Anatole? The torment that had raked her between temptation and desolation?

      She felt him glance at her. Felt the pause before he answered, with a tightness in his voice that she could not be deaf to.

      ‘I’m not used to you disagreeing with me,’ she heard him say. There was another pause. ‘You’ve changed, Tia—Christine.’

      Her head lifted, and she threw him a look. ‘Of course I’ve changed,’ she said. ‘What did you expect?’

      She took a breath that was half a sigh, remembering, for all her defiant words, how she’d used to love watching him drive, seeing how his hands curved so strongly over the wheel. How she’d drink in his profile, the keen concentration of his gaze. How she’d always loved gazing at him, all the time, marvelling over and over again at how wonderful, how blissful it was that he wanted her at all, how he had taken her by the hand and led her into the fantasy land where she’d dwelt with him...

      He caught her eye now, and there was a glint in it that was achingly familiar.

      ‘You used to gaze at me like that all the time, Tia. I could feel it, know it—sense it.’

      His voice had softened, and though there was a trace of amusement in it there was also a hint of something she had not heard from him at all since the moment he’d stalked into her life again.

      Tenderness.

      She felt her throat catch and she dragged her eyes away, out over the road, watching the cars coming towards them, headlights on now as dusk gathered in the countryside.

      ‘That was then, Anatole,’ she said unsteadily. ‘A long time ago—’

      ‘I’ve missed it,’ he answered her.

      She heard him take a breath—a ragged-sounding one.

      ‘I missed you, Tia, when you left me. When you walked out on me to marry my uncle, to become his pampered young bride.’ There was an edge in his voice now, like a blade.

      Her eyes flew to him, widening. ‘I didn’t leave you!’ she exclaimed. ‘You finished it with me! You told me you refused to have a relationship with someone who wanted to marry you, to get pregnant by you!’

      She saw a frown furrow his brow, and then he threw a fulminating look at her, his hands tightening on the wheel. ‘That didn’t mean you had to go,’ he retaliated. ‘It just meant—’ He stopped.

      ‘You just meant that I had to give up any idea of meaning anything to you at all—let alone as your wife or the potential mother of your children. Give up any idea of making a future with you!’

      Christine’s voice was dry, like sandpaper grating on bare skin. She shut her eyes for a moment, her head swirling, then opened them again, taking another weary breath.

      ‘Oh, Anatole,’ she said, and her voice was weary, ‘it’s all right. I get the picture. You were young, in the prime of your carefree life. I was an amusing diversion—a novelty! One that lasted a bit longer than you probably intended at first, when you scooped me off the road. I came from an entirely different walk of life from you—I was pretty, but totally naïve. I was so blatantly smitten by you that you couldn’t resist indulging yourself—and indulging me. But I know that didn’t give me any right to think you might want me long-term. Even if...’

      She swallowed painfully, knowing she had to say it.

      ‘Even if there hadn’t been that pregnancy...scare...’ she said the word with difficulty ‘...something else would have ended our affair. Because...’ Her throat was tight. ‘Because an affair was all it was. All it could ever be.’

      She knew that now—knew it with the hindsight of her greater years. She had been twenty-three... Anatole had been the first man in her life—and a man such as she had never dreamt of, not even in her girlish fantasies! He’d taken her to fairyland—and even in her youthful inexperience she had feared that it would all be fairy gold and turn to dust.

      And so it had. Painfully. Permanently.

      ‘But now I want more,’ he replied, and his words and the intensity of his voice made her eyes fly to him again. ‘I want much, much more than an affair with you.’

      He took a breath, changing gear, accelerating on an open stretch of road as if that would give escape to the emotion building up inside him. Emotion that was frustration at her obstinacy, at her refusal to concede the rightness of what he was proposing.

      ‘Christine, this works—you, me and Nicky! You can see it that works. Nicky likes me, trusts me...and, believe me, I meant exactly what I said to him last night. That he can believe that his pappou sent me to look after him in his place. To become his father—’

      He could have been my son! Had Tia been pregnant then—five years ago—Nicky would be my son. A handful of months older...no more.

      Emotion rolled him over. Over and over and over—like a boulder propelled down a mountainside by an overwhelming, unstoppable force. Emotion about what