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The little girl stared at her with the expression of someone encountering a foreign life form.
‘You eat chocolate for your breakfast?’ She regarded Kate with a mixture of awe and horror.
‘Well, birthdays are special and a little treat occasionally is nice.’
CHAPTER FOUR
FREYAWATCHEDASKate popped one of the pastries into her mouth whole.
‘Mmm...that was lovely.’ Kate sighed, smacking her lips and leaving buttery crumbs around her mouth.
The little girl gave a giggle. ‘You have sugar on your nose!’
It was the smothered giggle that stopped Marco, who was about to reveal himself to the oblivious pair, in his tracks. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard his daughtergiggle. Her solemnity and her slightly accusing stare, or so it always seemed to him, had been something else that had reminded him of her mother.
One of the manysomethingsthat had made him limit his contact with his daughter. Better by far to be a distant father than a terrible one, one not deserving or capable of returning her love. He had no idea if it was genetic, but he did remember the day that he had discovered his father was not a hero. He would spare Freya that disillusion.
Who are you protecting, Marco,asked the unsympathetic voice in his head,her or yourself?
Now able to see Kate Armstrong’s face, he watched as, head tilted back, his daughter’s new nanny went cross-eyed pretending to try and reach her nose with her tongue, while her charge fell off her chair onto the floor, laughing helplessly.
Kate wrinkled her nose. ‘Have I got it?’
‘No, let me...’
Kate turned her head literally as he spoke. A split second previously she had spotted him in the periphery of her vision. Shock nailed her to the spot as he planted himself beside her chair and leaned down.
It felt far too close and far too personal, close enough for her to feel the warmth of his body, and see the faint white scar on his lean cheek, white against the bronze.
Her nostrils flared and her stomach quivered in response to the clean male scent of him. He leaned in and touched the pad of one thumb to the sugar crumbs on the side of her nose.
The eye contact was infinitesimal but long enough to send her pulse rate into the stratosphere and her stomach into a deep dive.
He didn’t straighten up fast enough and the nerve-shredding interval necessitated several deep breaths before she could respond.
Oh, hell, what a time for her hormones to come out of hibernation!
‘Thanks.’ She didn’t make the mistake of eye contact a second time. Instead she focused on the little girl who was trying to get his attention. It made her want to kick him for not noticing.
Even surfacing from her semi-catatonic state Kate recognised that the child wanted to fling herself at her father—had his arms opened even a little she’d have been in there, but they didn’t and slowly Freya’s little smile wobbled.
Kate’s heart broke, her empathy swiftly followed by a rush of anger that freed her from the last lingering wisps of brain fog.Oh, God, you stupid man!
For a split second as his head turned and her eyes were once more captured by his cold hardgaze she really thought for a horror-struck moment that she had voiced her thoughts out loud.
‘Hello there, Freya, are you being a good girl?’
Toogood, Kate wanted to yell as she watched the stilted exchange between father and daughter.
‘Good morning, Ms Armstrong. I would ask you if you slept well but I suspect you didn’t.’
Kate hoped he was rudely referring to the bags under her eyes and that he had no insight into the dreams she had fought her way out of every time she had dozed off, leaving her guilty and exhausted. A situation she blamed on the flight.
‘I slept very well, thank you.’ She lifted a hand to her left eye to still the contradictory flutter of her left eyelid.
Marco watched as she rose from the awkward position on the chair in one fluid graceful motion—any clumsiness on her part had obviously been feigned for comic effect.
The sinuous action grabbed him below the belt, reinforcing the artistic analogy that had occurred to him in the early hours when his brain would not switch off. She looked as if she had stepped right out of a Degas painting—a warm, breathing version of one of those slim supple ballerina figures, all graceful, slender, boneless limbs and big eyes.
