He thought about the agreement, about the money he’d offered and the way she’d protested every step of the way and he finally realised why she would have done this for nothing. Finally he understood.
She deserved a thousand times more for doing what she was doing but she’d wanted nothing and he hadn’t believed her.
Not completely. Not until now.
He held her while her sobs abated, while her breathing calmed. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘You didn’t need to hear all that.’
‘I think I did,’ he told her, his lips brushing her hair, drinking in her scent. ‘And now I understand. Now I know why you are such a special woman.’
She turned her face up to him and he saw the questions skate across the surface of her liquid eyes. Her face was flushed and tear-swept. There were mascara smudges at both eyes. He brushed a loose strand of hair from her face, stroked the pads of his fingers down her cheek and jaw, till they got to her chin and he could angle her face just the way he wanted. She looked so sad he wanted to kiss away her pain. Wanted to let her know he understood.
For a scant second he wondered at his actions. Once before he’d wanted to kiss her. He’d written off the impulse as an aberration. But it hadn’t been an aberration, he now realised. It had been a necessity. An imperative.
One he wasn’t about to let pass again. ‘You are special,’ he told her, part because he suspected she needed to hear it, part because it was true and another part because he damned well wanted to. ‘You are strong and beautiful and if I may say so, very, very alluring.’
Her gasp told him all he needed to know. She didn’t believe it. Which meant that he would just have to convince her.
‘Believe it,’ he said, his lips coming closer, the first pass no more than a whisper of shared air and coiled expectation. Her lips followed his and he smiled. She wanted him. He wanted her to want him.
He knew this was right. Even here, sitting in a car in the midst of a nursery equipment warehouse car park in the middle of a busy day, he knew this was no aberration. This was right.
And this time his lips hesitated, hovered breathlessly above, until the need became urgent and the lure of her became too great. And then his lips met hers and he came undone.
His mouth meshed with hers, his fingers tangling in her hair and, like a man dying of thirst, he drank her in.
She was breathing hard when he broke off the kiss.
Breathing almost as hard as he was when he pulled away, his hands lining her jaw, his thumbs working the space between where her lips ended and her cheeks began. Her eyes were wide, brilliant blue and brimming with questions and wonder and fear. It was the fear that scared him the most, the fear that made him realise what he’d done.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, letting her go. ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’
‘It’s okay,’ she said, dabbing her eyes with a tissue, still looking shell-shocked though he could see she was aiming for cool. ‘I realise it didn’t mean anything.’
He climbed from the car, rankled that she’d used the very words that would normally be uppermost in his mind. ‘It meant something,’ he said, pulling her door open a few moments later. ‘It meant sorry for everything you’ve been through. It meant thank you for what you are doing. It meant thank you for telling me.’
‘That’s okay then,’ she said, her composure returned though still wary enough to keep her distance as she climbed out. ‘Maybe we should just forget it happened.’ And she headed for the entrance.
Forget it happened? Forget the sweet taste of her mouth under his? Forget the way she felt so right in his arms?
How the hell was he supposed to do that?
The shop helped. Only it wasn’t a shop, he decided, it was his worst nightmare. The place was acres across. How could anything as tiny as a baby warrant so much stuff?
‘How do we do this quickly?’ he asked.
She looked almost as overwhelmed. ‘Maybe they have some kind of personal shopping consultant service.’
The notion appealed immensely. ‘Let’s find out,’ he said, cutting a swathe through the crowds of couples inspecting prams and cots and baby gear to the service desk.