‘Why not decorate the nursery, if you’re so keen to keep busy?’
‘The nursery?’
‘I’ll need somewhere for this baby when it’s born.’
‘But I don’t…It’s not…Dominic, it’s not my place to organise your baby’s nursery. It’s not like it’s my baby.’
He looked at her levelly, resenting the way she could so easily divorce herself from the child she carried as if it meant nothing to her. Wasn’t she a woman? Surely she must have one maternal bone in her body? ‘You wanted a job. I’m giving you one.’
Singapore was hot. Drenching. The negotiations over the sale of an office and shopping complex even more draining. But the buyers had wilted first, and he’d got his price and even an earlier flight home to Sydney. Now all he wanted was a shower and a cold beer and a chance to read the article he’d spied in a woman’s magazine left on the seat next to him in the plane, not necessarily in that order.
He pulled the car up outside the garage. He’d put it away later on when he went down to the workshop after dinner. It relaxed him even when it frustrated him, and it frustrated him a lot. He still didn’t know what he was doing, but he sensed he was getting better. Or maybe he just needed the escape.
A sound alerted him—a splash that hadn’t come from the low swell on the rocks below. Someone was in the pool? Curious, he went to investigate, rounding the wall that screened off the pool area.
Someone was in the pool, submerged dolphin style halfway along the bottom. Angelina, he realised, with those long limbs, although it was hard to see anything more than two brief splashes of colour through the water. A few more underwater strokes and she neared the end, rising to the surface with a gasp. Not bad, he acknowledged. He knew what it took to get from one end of that pool to the other on one breath. Not bad at all.
And then she climbed out of the pool and his own breath was punched out of him. She was long and sleek and glowing wet, the bikini top struggling to cover her breasts, her upper arms slim rather than skinny now, even managing to look toned.
She’d put on weight, he realised approvingly. And as his gaze travelled down, he saw her belly, softly rounded, and felt a surge of masculine pride that was aeons old.
That was his child growing. His child swelling this woman’s body and turning her lush like fruit ripening on a tree. As he watched, she turned her face up to the sun and squeezed the water from her hair, the action lifting her swelling breasts and emphasizing the long, fluid lines of her body.
God, but she looked sexy with his baby in her belly. And he was hit by a surge of lust so sudden and overwhelming that he had to force himself not to bridge the distance between them and snatch her up and bury himself in her long, sleek depths.
A moment later, appalled, he strode into the house. What the hell was wrong with him? How long had it been since he’d had sex? Clearly too long if he was starting to have fantasies about the likes of Mrs Cameron.
Rosa met him inside. ‘Welcome home, Dominic. I trust everything went well. Is there anything you need?’
‘A shower,’ he said thickly, having no trouble working out the order he wanted things now, unable to meet Rosa’s gaze in case the images he’d seen were still burned on his eyes for all to see. A long cold shower. ‘That’ll do for starters.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
HE WAS doing it all wrong. He was in his office, showered, with a cold beer in a frosted glass beside him, poring over the article.
He was only on page two of Bonding with Your Unborn Baby, but he didn’t have to finish it to know he was doing it all wrong.
It was important, the experts advised, to start bonding with your child even before it was born. Women had an advantage over men, the article maintained, the bond developing naturally over the course of nine months of pregnancy. Women naturally connected with the baby sooner. Men had to make an effort.
He rubbed his jaw with one hand. He wasn’t making an effort. He’d done everything he could in the last month to avoid contact with the woman who bore his child. Which might have been all right if Angelina was picking up the slack.
But she wasn’t going to be around after the baby was born. She didn’t even want a baby. She was the last person who was into forming bonds or making connections. Hell, she was so not into this child that she hadn’t even wanted to have anything to do with organising a nursery for it!