‘Are you Welsh?’
She nodded. ‘I’m impressed. Not many people outside the UK would get the accent first time.’
‘I’m the intuitive one, or so they say.’
Gwen, who had always found Rio uniquely intuitive, lowered her gaze rather than challenge his claim. It crossed her mind that perhaps people assigned twins’ roles early on in childhood—bright twin, athletic twin, leader, follower, and so on—and they stuck to them unquestioningly throughout their whole lives.
She lifted her gaze and caught him yawning. He intercepted her look and grinned. ‘Long drive, a last-minute decision to come. I thought I’d be here for the party. And you are staying here with...?’ One dark brow floated upwards the same way she had noticed in Rio a hundred times, the likenesses as much as the differences between them fascinating Gwen. ‘I am assuming that Rio is here?’
‘He’s in bed,’ she blurted, then compounded her embarrassment by blushing like a teenager. ‘That is... I mean...’
Rio’s twin smiled wickedly and again Gwen was struck by the similarity of their posture and body language. ‘I get the picture.’
She wanted to say,No, you really don’t because I hardly get it myself,but stopped herself because he probably did, just not the entire picture! Still playing catch-up, she suddenly registered his earlier comment.Party?
What party did he mean?
‘You should put something on that,’ she said, changing the subject as she nodded to indicate his finger that appeared to be still oozing blood, though to her relief it was no longer dripping. Rio would be oozing blood too, she decided, if he had deliberately kept her in the dark about some sort of party. The idea that Rio was manipulating her for some reason brought a spark of caution to her blue eyes.
‘I’ll live.’ She sensed Roman had to put some effort into his smile. ‘Look, I’m sorry if my arrival is badly timed but I’m off to my bed. I’ll look in on Rio first, so could you point me in the direction of my big brother’s...usual room?’ He was already moving towards the door and Gwen was still nailed to the spot; similarly her tongue felt glued to the roof of her mouth.
‘No...yes... I think maybe...your mother was looking for you earlier,’ she stammered.
His brow knitted. ‘Shewas? She left?’
Gwen nodded.
‘So you have already met our mother?’ There was a new interest in his eyes now as he studied her. ‘Rio finally fetched a girl home!’ He gave a low laugh, amused by his private joke.
Before she could figure out how to respond to this the door to the hallway was pushed open, clearly with a foot, as that came into the room first, followed by a sleep-dishevelled Rio with a very wide-awake Ellie in his arms.
CHAPTER NINE
IFROMANHADlooked surprised when he’d first seen Gwen, he now looked like a man who had put chocolate in his mouth and tasted hot chilli instead. He genuinely looked as though he could not believe his eyes as his astonished stare went from his bare-footed brother to the child he was carrying.
If he was even half as quick on the uptake as Rio it would take him only about a heartbeat to fill in the blanks.
Rio saw Gwen and felt a sense of relief that could not entirely be put down to the fact he felt somewhat out of his depth entertaining a very unpredictable toddler whose speech patterns remained a bit of a mystery to him. Understanding what she said was pretty much ninety per cent guesswork on his part and his mistakes elicited a bad-tempered response in his daughter, who, he was learning, got even louder when she was frustrated.
The communication problem was a two-way thing. She didn’t appear to understand his requests, or maybe she just thought it was fine to ignore him—like mother, like daughter. The irony was that when he’d finally resorted to speaking Spanish out of sheer frustration, she seemed to respond to it just as well as his English!
He couldn’t decide if it was the novelty value or the proof that children mopped up new languages like little sponges at this age, but they had got there in the end after a fashion. When he’d recalled his lack of empathy and patience when Gwen had been packing up to leave the cottage he’d felt a twinge of guilt—it seemed there was nothing like a two-year-old to teach a man some humility.
Getting a child out of bed, picking her up and coaxing her to stop crying was a lot less straightforward than it had first appeared. People really did downplay the difficulty of this parenting role! In his career there had been moments when he had felt a degree of complacent self-satisfaction when he’d pulled off a major financial deal against the odds and despite the critics, but that emotion paled beside the glow of triumph when they had gone in search of Gwen to show her how well they’d managed by themselves.
‘So there you are. I should warn you to speak up, Gwen—I might have lost my hearing.’ The child’s cries, amplified by the volume control beside the bed, had woken him, but even that sound had been drowned out for a few moments when he’d realised Gwen was gone. Panic wasn’t the right word, nor even a feeling of loss, he mused, his expression sobering as he remembered reaching out to feel a cold sheet that still bore the imprint of her body instead of soft warm skin.
His eyes drifted over the shape and warmness he had missed earlier. The robe she wore outlined the fluid grace of the lovely long lines of her body, her vibrant glowing hair lying loose and wild down her back, making him think of how it had felt as he’d trickled it through his fingers last night before burying his face in it.
‘Where did you get to? Couldn’t you sleep?’ His voice slid a few husky notes lower. ‘You really should have woken me.’
She had definitely slept for some of last night at least. He knew that because he had lain awake himself for a while, just watching her gently breathing.
Her eyes were not closed now. They were urgently signalling some sort of message to him, but Ellie’s curly head kept bobbing into his line of vision. He tilted his head to see around her and Ellie immediately yelled again, not wanting to be ignored.
Gwen stood there, silently discounting the twin telepathy theory. Rio clearly hadn’t caught on to the fact that his brother was standing right behind him, but then he did have his hands full quite literally and she knew from experience that containing a wriggling Ellie took all your focus and strength, not to mention dexterity.
‘Rio?’ Gwen said, but the rest of her words were drowned out by an extra loud yell of complaint from Ellie. Rio went to put her down, probably thinking she wanted to run to her mother.