A Seasonal Secret. Diana Hamilton

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      Knotting her hands together in her lap, trying to erase the sheer magic of his touch and bring herself down to earth again, she drew herself up very straight and staunchly defended what her grandparents had regarded as indefensible. ‘My mother was very young and probably couldn’t face the responsibility of bringing a child up on her own. My grandparents would have given her a hard time. They certainly didn’t take the modern, relaxed attitude to single parenthood.’

      As she had discovered for herself!

      ‘You did. You shouldered the burden of responsibility,’ Carl put in quietly. ‘Did Frank and Ellen throw you out?’

      ‘Of course not!’ But their disgust and outrage at the way she’d followed in her mother’s footsteps and brought shame on them had made it impossible for her to stay. ‘And James has never been a burden. I wanted my baby!’

      Flushed and flustered, she pushed herself to her feet and cleared away the teacups. Why did talking to him, opening her heart to him, seem so right and natural? She wished he would leave. Any minute now she might say something that would alert him to the true situation. Hadn’t Gran always complained that she didn’t know how to keep a still tongue in her head?

      Rinsing the cups out under a furiously gushing tap, she desperately hoped he’d take the hint and leave. But his hand on her shoulder killed that hope stone-dead, and she could have cried with frustration as he reached over and turned off the tap.

      He was too close, far too close. Her breath ached in her lungs. His body heat burned her. They were nearly touching. Almost against her will, but unable to stop herself, she tilted back her head to look up at him.

      He had a beautiful mouth. Her eyes lingered on the wide, sensual contours. As if it had been only yesterday she could remember exactly how that mouth had felt as it had plundered hers, so sweetly and gently at first, and then with a passion that had swept her away in a floodtide of feverish longing. And love.

      A shiver raced through her as she heard him whisper her name, and her long lashes flickered as she raised her eyes to meet his. There was something in the slow, smoky burn of that intent gaze that made her gasp air into her oxygen-starved lungs.

      ‘Beth—’ Lean strong fingers reached out to touch a wildly beating pulse at the side of her lush mouth. ‘You don’t have to put on a brave face for me. Things must have been tough for you, and I’d like to help for old times’ sake. You say you’re working as a nanny. I assume that means you and your boy are living under someone else’s roof at your employer’s beck and call night and day? It shouldn’t have to be that way.’

      Beth was watching the way his mouth moved, inhaling the fresh masculine scent of him, fighting the insane impulse to wind her arms around his neck and move closer, close enough to be part of him. His words merely grazed the surface of her consciousness, drowned out by the thunder-beats of her heart.

      But when he asked gently, his fingers sliding down to briefly caress her delicate jawline, the slender line of her neck, ‘Beth, what happened? You didn’t marry your boy’s father—wouldn’t the relationship have worked out?’ she was jolted back to stark reality with a vengeance, like the shock of having been suddenly plunged into a pool of icy water.

      What in heaven’s name did she think she’d been doing? Having lustful thoughts about another woman’s husband, her whole body responding to his touch, the seductive velvet stroke of his eyes…

      And, just as dangerous, she heard the squeaky hinges of the boys’ bedroom door, tentative footsteps on the top of the stairs.

      Jerking backwards, she uttered thickly, ‘I don’t think that’s any of your business, do you? Now, if you’ll excuse me—’ she walked to the door on legs that felt as if they didn’t belong to her and dragged it open ‘—I have a lot to do.’

      And she willed him to go, right now, right this minute, before the boys reached the foot of the stairs and he had the time and the leisure to really look at James and begin to wonder…

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