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If a nurse came to take her pulse at that moment Erin knew her chances of going home the next day would be nil! It was far more likely that she would find herself rushed to Intensive Care and put on life support!
His long lashes fell in a screen against the angle of his cheekbones as he stretched and dragged both hands through his hair. ‘I was passing.’
He did not mention that he had been passing last night, too. What the night staff made of a man who came to watch his wife sleep he could not imagine!
‘Passing …?’ She reached for the light cord above her head and blinked as the beam of the reading lamp fell directly on her face.
‘I didn’t mean to wake you.’
‘Look, I know what this is about.’
Francesco went very still, colour seeping into his face consolidating into two dark bands of colour along the slashing angle of his cheekbones.
Frowning, she absently toyed with the shoestring strap of her nightgown and gave a shamed sigh.
‘I’m not stupid, Francesco. I mean, you’ve been haunting the place. It’s obvious you think that I’m going to do something stupid the moment your back is turned. Though quite what you think I’m going to do in a hospital bed, I don’t know.
‘But don’t worry, I’ve learnt my lesson. From now on,’ she promised him, curving a protective hand over her stomach, ‘I will always put the baby first. I will treat every stair with caution.’
She saw some of the tension slip from his shoulders and assumed that she had succeeded in reassuring him.
‘Have you finished?’
‘I don’t blame you for thinking me an unfit mother—I do myself.’
Francesco cursed softly in his own tongue.
Startled by the outrage in his expression, Erin sat passively as he strode across the room and framed her heart-shaped face between his big hands.
Her skin prickled with heat at his touch.
He studied her upturned features, the pallor only relieved by a light flush across the crests of her smooth cheekbones.
Francesco found himself longing to erase the haunted shadows from her lovely eyes. ‘You are not an unfit mother!’
Francesco closed his eyes and cursed. ‘What happened was not your fault. The sooner the better you are out of this place. Part of the problem is you have far too much time to think.’
‘You make it sound like thinking is a bad thing.’
Perhaps there was something in what he said? It was difficult to keep things in proportion when you woke in the middle of the night sure that your baby was dead.
‘You were the one who said that I needed someone to restrain my impulses!’ she reminded him.
Francesco, who couldn’t recall saying anything similar, dredged his memory. ‘What I actually said was restrain your impulses to overexert yourself, which was my way of saying you needed looking after without you going feral on me, which you are prone to do at the merest hint that you might not be totally self-sufficient.’
He traced the curve of her cheek with his thumb.
‘You have to let go of your fear,’ he said softly. ‘If our baby had died it would have been a tragedy, but he didn’t and it wasn’t.’
‘But you blame me …’
‘I blame me!’ he blurted out.
A look of total bewilderment crossed her face. ‘You?’ she echoed. ‘Why should you feel blame?’
‘Why?’ He stared down at her incredulously. ‘How can you ask that? If I had not put you in a position where you felt you had to run away from me the accident would never have happened. If you or the baby had been harmed it wou
ld have been my fault.’
