AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Her eyes narrowed. She was only just about managing to hold on to her temper. ‘Oh, please...are you really expecting me to believe you were being considerate? After what you said last night?’ She didn’t bother hiding her incredulity.
His eyes didn’t leave her face. ‘He was starting to get upset.’
‘And I’m sure being picked up by some random stranger made him feel a whole lot better.’ She made sure to put emphasis on the word ‘stranger’, and was suitably gratified when a muscle flickered in Charlie’s cheek.
‘But I’m not a stranger, am I, Dora?’ He held her gaze. ‘I’m his brother. And I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how powerful the bond is between siblings—even those who have never met before.’
She wanted to hit him. Why did he have to look so together, so relaxed? Sitting there all smug and righteous, wearing an unobtrusive but no doubt paralysingly expensive espresso-coloured T-shirt and casual black trousers.
‘You should have woken me up.’
‘Perhaps you should have set an alarm.’
Excuse me? Her breath caught in her chest. Her pulse was jumping erratically, like a frog leaping between lily pads. Was he seriously trying to make this her fault?
Lifting her chin, she fixed him with the withering look that had silenced hecklers in clubs across London. ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have dragged us both over here and then I wouldn’t have been so tired.’
Annoyingly, his expression remained unchanged. Perhaps her powers of withering had been affected by jet lag.
‘You’re quite welcome to leave,’ he said softly. ‘Please feel free.’ His dark eyes seemed to pierce hers. ‘As long as Archie stays, of course. Your call.’
As long as Archie stays.
She was so strung up it took a couple of seconds for his words to hit home, and then slowly she felt a chill of understanding creep over her skin.
So that was what this was about.
Fury surged through her and she felt her whole body tense.
What a snake!
All that rubbish about not wanting to wake her up. Acting as if he cared. He didn’t care about anything but getting his own way. Making her panic like that had been a way to knock her off-balance, make her look and feel out of her depth.
As if she needed any help doing either.
She felt her throat tighten. After their showdown at Capel Muir Fellowes she had been petrified he was going to escalate things. But then, at his apartment, he had backed down, offering this trip as a compromise. And, believing that he had accepted her as Archie’s guardian, she had relaxed.
Only now she was here in Macau he was acting as though she was little more than an inconvenience. An annoyance. A nuisance to be sent packing at the earliest opportunity.
Thanks to her parents, it was a feeling she knew well. Not that they had ever cared about her feelings. Or her needs. It had always been what they felt, what they needed that mattered.
Her fingers tensed around Archie. It must be her—something she did—because now Charlie was following the same playbook.
But he could take a running jump if he thought she was going anywhere without Archie.
‘Over my dead body,’ she breathed. ‘Or, better still, yours.’
He stared at her for a long moment, and then frowned. ‘You’re being serious?’ His dark eyes mocked her. ‘Sorry, it’s just hard to feel that threatened by a woman in pink-and-white-striped pyjamas.’
Her heart thudded inside her chest. In her haste to find Archie she had not bothered to get dressed. But whose fault was that? she thought furiously.
Their eyes met, and then he tipped his head back a fraction, his gaze dropping from her face to her bare legs, lingering pointedly on the hem of her shorts where they hugged the curve of her bottom.
She felt her pulse stab at her throat as a flush of heat rose up over her shoulders. Against her will, she felt her blood rush. It wasn’t fair for him to look the way he did and make her feel this way. Not when he was so contemptible.
‘Thanks to you, I didn’t have a chance to get dressed before I came downstairs,’ she snapped. She softened her voice and expression as she turned to look down at Archie. ‘But we like to stay in our jammies anyway—don’t we, Buttons?’ Shifting the baby onto her hip, she blew onto his neck, making him squirm. ‘And we are on holiday after all.’
Charlie smiled then—the kind of smile a crocodile might give shortly before its jaws snapped shut on some poor unsuspecting prey.
