‘Don’t,’ Sergio warned her gruffly.
She blinked at him in an attempt to clear her head. ‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t look at me like that.’ He shook his head, broke eye contact briefly, but then was compelled to look at her again.
‘Like what?’
‘Like you’re issuing an invitation.’
Or maybe he had misread that expression on her face? Before he had always had complete and utter confidence in his ability to have whatever woman he wanted, but she had managed to instil in him a healthy vein of self-doubt.
‘You’re tired,’ he continued. ‘We’re both exhausted after tonight.’
‘Which means...’ she was angry with herself again, because she had only just managed to catch herself before she fell headlong into what would have been a stupid mistake ‘...that it’s time for you to leave.’
She hazarded a smile, which seemed to do the trick, breaking the spell between them and allowing her to breathe as though something heavy wasn’t sitting on her chest. She stood up and began walking him to the front door, keeping her distance.
It was bad enough that she would have to fight her feelings for him without the luxury of having time out when he wasn’t around, but how much worse if she had given in? If she had done what her body had been urging her to do? If she had just...stepped towards him, laid her palm on his hard chest, stripped off her jumper and her thick thermal vest and her sensible bra so that he could swirl his tongue over her sensitive nipples...?
How uncomfortable would that have made the situation? Because he would have responded. She had glimpsed the flare of hunger in his eyes. And maybe he was just horny because he hadn’t had sex in a while, or maybe he was curious to find out what it felt like to make love to a woman who was big with his child, but he would have responded...
And then in the morning he would no longer have been horny, and would no longer have been curious, and where would that have left them?
She heard herself talking normally to him as she showed him out, even though her mind was in a whirl, and when he had gone she leaned against the front door and finally allowed herself to breathe evenly.
How the heck was she going to survive the next couple of months? she wondered.
CHAPTER TEN
‘I THINK I felt something...’
Sergio looked up from the report he had been scanning on his computer. Sometimes he found it hard to believe that he was the same man who had wined and dined women, slept with them, moved on... The same man whose entire life had been focused on work and the thrill of making money and growing an empire. A man who had enjoyed the freedom of living exclusively for himself.
He had moved in with her seven weeks previously and they had settled into a routine which was one born of necessity. He knew that. Of course he did. Circumstances had compelled him to live life at a pace he would never have imagined possible. What made him uneasy was the fact that he had adapted so fast.
They were living in a weird kind of bubble, in which they functioned as a couple for the sake of their unborn child. Bubbles eventually burst. When this one did the dithering would be over and she would accept the inevitable. He had indulged her by not forcing her hand, but in the end the result would be the same.
Except now the certainty that this was going to work out as planned seemed to hang in the balance, and he felt a rare surge of confusion.
‘No, it’s nothing.’
Susie had been frankly terrified of this arrangement, and sometimes when she thought about it she was still terrified—because she had become so accustomed to sharing space with him. Had he been right all along? That a marriage of convenience would be a workable marriage? Had she made far too big a deal of wanting the fairy tale of love and romance and assuming that anything that fell short of that was a waste of time?
‘You’re becoming the queen of the false alarm,’ Sergio said drily, flipping shut his laptop and standing to stretch out his muscles, which had tightened from sitting in one place for too long.
He had gone into the office today, had successfully signed on the dotted line for a deal that had been brewing for nearly a year and a half, and yet his only thoughts had been of how fast he could get back to her.