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‘I’m so sorry. I’m better now. I don’t get them very often.’
‘I am glad to hear that...’ Presumably checking out her claim, he subjected her to a head-to-toe sweep, his conclusion hidden as his lash-shielded gaze was directed at the top of the sleeping baby’s head.
Probably too polite to say she didn’t look it, Rose decided, dragging a hand rather pointlessly through her hair. Not that so far he’d displayed much of that sort of restraint—he seemed a man who favoured calling a spade a spade, though when you were him there were no repercussions for being forthright. Nobody was going to cancel Zac Adamos and if they did, she doubted he’d care.
She watched as he shifted his position, sliding up in the chair as he flexed the fingers on the arm that was supporting the baby. ‘I think my arm has gone to sleep...’
‘Here, let me take him.’ She bent towards him and held her arms out. As she eased the baby carefully from his chest, for a moment their eyes connected and the air buzzed with something that she refused to acknowledge as she broke the contact.
Pretending something wasn’t happening got bad press but Rose was all for it. She positively embraced it!
He inhaled as she bent forward, her hair brushing his face, and Zac thought about it brushing his chest as she sat astride him. He was glad that the baby was there to bring some reality to the situation.
Lifting the baby into her arms jolted free the memory of him lifting her into his arms last night. Not much jolting was required—the memory was very close to the surface.
Equally easy to access was the strength of his arms, the warm solidity of his body something to cling to as the pain sucked her into her own private hell.
Her nostrils flared as she relived the moment minus, luckily, the pain, but with the warm male scent of him.
The blurred memories of the attack were sharpening with each passing second. She knew from experience that some would be lost for ever, but the ones that were not lost were making her squirm with embarrassment. Her boss had put her to bed, and, as if that weren’t crossing enough professional boundaries, she’d asked him about his family.
He had told her.
Zac watched her settle the baby on her shoulder, his face nuzzling into her neck. She made it look so easy but he knew it was not.
‘Have you been there all night?’ The idea of him sleeping in a chair with the baby made emotions clutch in her chest.
‘He fell asleep and I didn’t want to risk waking him.’
‘You fed him?’
‘I would claim it was easy,’ he said, levering himself into an upright position.
Rose watched, a worried corner of her brain noting the inescapable element of compulsion about her hungry scrutiny. But he made easy watching, she decided as he pressed one hand to the bottom of his spine and raised the other above his head to sinuously stretch out the kinks before he proceeded to rub a hand vigorously back and forth across his dark hair, creating a sexy mess.
Observing the effect, Rose wondered if the women he woke up with speared their perfectly manicured fingers into those ebony strands as they kissed their way down the column of his neck to his chest... Catching a sharp little breath, she applied the emergency brakes to the illicit scene playing in her head before it became personal.
‘So how did you?’
‘Cope...? I rang my mother, who talked me through the process. Once she had stopped laughing,’ he added darkly, thinking of the conversation he’d had with his parent, trying to make himself heard above a baby’s hungry screams.
This entire scene was so unimaginably impossible that Rose laughed too, then realised who she was laughing at, and stopped. The events of last night seemed to have significantly blurred the lines of their employer-employee relationship, a blurring that for her had started when he’d kissed her.
Was she imagining an intimacy that didn’t exist?
‘The one with four husbands?’ The words were out before she could stop them. It was the sort of spontaneous stupidity that a person blurted out when they were not fully awake and their brain was still playing catch up.
‘She only has one at a time and the last one appears to be a keeper,’ Zac observed, watching the baby nuzzle her neck. It was an image that gave him chest pain again. The sensation was not one he embraced. ‘She is a big believer in if at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try some more.’
Rose, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, could only assume this family-orientated person would disapprove of a nanny literally sleeping on the job. How much influence did she have with her son...enough to get Rose sacked?
And who could blame her? Rose thought. She had not exactly covered herself in glory so far, but she really didn’t want to lose this job, she decided fiercely. She didn’t want to miss the chance to see Greece.
Nothing at all to do with the man who had just risen to his feet looking like a ruffled sex god.
Oh, no, Rose, nothing at all.
‘I didn’t mean to be... You told me about your family last night,’ she finished on an awkward rush.
