Several feet of air separated them but Gwen could still literallyfeelhis big body clench and still. His intimidating concentrated maleness was even more pronounced than normal as the tension stretched the skin tight against his incredible bone structure. His eyes swivelled from her hand cradling the back of Ellie’s head to her face.
It felt like years before he spoke but it was probably only seconds, his voice low and soft. He seemed unaware that he was speaking Spanish and, while she only had a schoolgirl smattering of the language, Gwen didn’t need a dictionary to translate the stream of hoarse words.
He knew—ofcoursehe knew!
You’d have to be wilfully blind or stupid not to see what had drained the vibrant colour from his olive-toned face and dissolved his habitual aura of cool command.
He was seeing the same thing she had the moment she’d looked into her newborn baby’s face. Previous to that day she had gone along with loving new parents who said their baby was the spitting image of one or other parent, while in her experience the soft infant features all looked alike.
But Ellie’s baby face had borne a startling likeness to Rio from day one. She’d tried to tell herself that the likeness would lessen as the little girl got older, but seeing them together now dispelled that vain hope. If anything, being able to study their faces side by side made the likeness between father and daughter all the more striking.
He wouldn’t need a DNA test to confirm his fatherhood this time, she thought bitterly. It was practically like looking in a mirror for him. It was all in the bones, the angle of the jaw, the hairline, the shape of Ellie’s forehead and, most of all, her eyes, fringed by a double row of sooty eyelashes.
‘The child...she is mine.’ He sounded as shocked as he looked for a man who’d presumably been there and done this before. But maybe it was easier to deal with the facts on paper rather than be confronted with a real-life person. For all she knew he might never have even seen his son.
Or he might be with, or even have married, the mother of his firstborn. Both were equally possible, she realised with a rush of shock.
Strangely she found the latter possibility more disturbing and her feelings could not be totally explained away by her natural sadness for the things his firstborn would have that Ellie wouldn’t—like the love of his father.
She couldn’t take her eyes off the muscle clenching and unclenching in his concave cheek. It didn’t even cross her mind to lie—what would be the point now?
‘Yes, she is yours. Her name is Ellie and she’s just two.’
She could see he was struggling to string a sentence together and waited, stomach clenched, for what he might say next.
‘Does your husband know the truth or does he think she is his?’
Her delicate jaw clenched as she eyed him with disdain. If she’d had a free hand she might have forgotten she was a committed pacifist—again!—and slapped his face!The question of whysomething about this man had bypassed a few thousand years of evolution and made her feel primal was for another time.
‘Your opinion of me is so flattering, as always.’ So not only was she the woman who went through his private correspondence, now she was the woman who pretended another man’s child was her husband’s. ‘But I don’t actually have a husband. All female staff here are referred to as Mrs, regardless of marital status.’
He dismissed the explanation with an impatient shake of his dark head. ‘But you said—’
Her chin lifted to a challenging angle. ‘Actually,’ she countered, ‘Ididn’t say anything, you just assumed. Hush, Ellie, darling,’ she murmured, and brushed a strand of dark hair back from her daughter’s flushed forehead as the sharp voices made her start to cry again.
‘You allowed me to think—’
‘I don’t owe you any explanations,’ she hissed back quietly between clenched teeth for the sake of her fretful, feverish daughter. She really didn’t have the time or energy to deal with his indignation or anger right now.
His eyes were on the poorly child who had settled a little now, and the expression in those dark depths was almost hungry. Gwen experienced a spasm of gut-clenching fear. Suddenly, for the very first time she encountered the possibility that he mightwantEllie. He might actually want to take Ellie away from her.
‘I think explanations are the least you owe me,’ he intoned grimly, equally quietly.
She closed her eyes and gave her head a tiny shake of disbelief, the anger spilling through her pushing away the last vestiges of guilt. ‘I owe you nothing and you owe me nothing. We are simply two people who...who...collided.’
Rio’s eyes lifted to hers. ‘Several times,’ he murmured, the brief wicked gleam in his eyes fading as he struggled to clear the sound of a child crying that was still echoing in his head. It was disconcerting as the echo was playing in sync with the real thing.
The child...hischild—and would that ever seem real to him?—had begun to sob and squirm in her mother’s arms. As his focus widened beyond his own private drama involving the three of them, he became aware for the first time that they were beginning to attract attention. Some of the pupils and staff filing out of the hall had slowed to stare at them curiously.
‘I can’t believe that we are having this conversation.’
‘What did you think would happen?’ he bit out.
Colour stinging her cheeks, Gwen rebutted, ‘What I mean is this was not supposed to happen.’
‘What, getting pregnant, or me finding out I had a child?’
‘Both,’ she admitted removing a hank of her hair from his daughter’s—Ellie’s—tenacious grip.