His eyes narrowed on her flushed, angry and quite heart-stoppingly beautiful face and he felt his blood heat with inconvenient but inevitable lust. ‘I’m sure you’re the epitome of tact and political correctness.’
‘Things nobody is going to accuse you of!’ she fired back.
His sensual lips twisted into a smile. ‘Well, at least we’ve stopped being painfully polite to one another.’
‘Iam polite.’
‘I’m starting to get the idea that you’d be happier if I wanted to escape my responsibilities.’
‘I...we are not anyone’sresponsibility—’ She stopped mid angry flow, her eyes widening to their fullest extent as she stared at him in dawning horror. ‘You mean you’re not?’
‘What do you think I’ve been trying to say?’
‘I won’t know until you say it.’
‘I want to co-parent Ellie. I want to be fully involved in her life.’
‘Co-parent?’ she parroted as though the word made no sense to her. ‘Youwantto be involved?’
‘Why are you so shocked? I may not have given birth to her, but half that child’s make-up is mine.’
Gwen’s bubble of laughter was half a sob. ‘That’s hard to miss.’ She shook her head. ‘But you have said that you don’t have contact with your son so I assumed—’
‘You mean you hoped?’ he said cynically.
Her eyes slid away from his.
‘Look, I’m not going to force you into anything. I just want to get to know my daughter and I think you owe me that at least.’
Any brownie points his placatory manner might have won was clearly cancelled out by thatoweand he could see Gwen’s temper fizz. ‘Owe?So are you keeping some sort of score card? You know, you might think I’m dim, but I can’t for the life of me think what I could possibly owe you!’
‘Ellie’s first steps?’
He watched an arrested expression steal across her face. She was so easy to read that he wondered how she’d got this far without someone taking advantage of her.
She hadn’t. Because you did.
‘First smile,’ he ground out, pushing away the guilt. ‘First word... In fact, you owe me for all the things I have already missed, all the milestone moments that I will never experience!’
The emotion that thickened his normally slight Spanish accent obviously shocked her deeply.
‘I didn’t think you’d want to experience them.’ Honesty rang out in her voice.
‘I have told you I want to be a part of her life. I meant it.’
Rio paused, tilting his head to shield the expression that flashed into his dark eyes as the dark irony struck home. He was fighting for a role that he had colluded with another to deprive his twin of.
He tensed, ready to quash the guilt and nagging doubts that inevitably accompanied the acknowledgement of his role in the deception, given an added knife twist now that he had discovered he was a secret father too.
But the two situations were different, he reasoned. Roman’s relationship with the mother of his child had been over long before she had come to Rio asking for his help.
You never had a relationship with Gwen, though, the voice in his head contributed unhelpfully.You just had sex.
His jaw clenched. He did not need reminding about the sex. He remembered every touch, every gasp, every soft sigh... With an effort he dragged his thoughts away from the warm distractions filling it and focused on the facts that had influenced his decision.
The mother of his brother’s child had approached Rio at a time when every media outlet had been delivering a new image of Roman, a now famous bestselling author who was as daring and handsome as his fictional hero on an almost daily basis. In every image the same woman was with him, frequently gazing lovingly up at him. His twin was happy, or appeared to be, with another woman. His life had clearly moved on.
Had Rio’s own ever really moved on from the short torrid affair with Gwen?