A Touch of Temptation(33)

“She can sense that I don’t care, that I want to be doing anything but looking after her. That’s it, right?”

* * *

Diego lowered the sleeping infant into the tiny bassinet and tucked her in tight. The little girl settled in without a whisper, and he rubbed his thumb over a plump cheek.

A soft, sleepy gurgle erupted from the baby’s tiny mouth.

Whatever his past sins, the new life that was coming was a precious gift. If only he could figure out what was worrying Kim.

Familiar frustration spiked through him. The past few weeks they had fallen into a somewhat torturous routine of sorts. With each passing day and every single minute they spent in each other’s company—and this was with both of them avidly trying to keep it to a minimum—he had realized how hard it was to keep his hands to himself. Especially when he had begun to see glimpses of the girl he had fallen in love with so long ago.

She still hadn’t cut down her work hours, but she had spent the last Sunday home watching a soccer game with him and Miguel. Who, interestingly, had said more to her than he had to Diego.

He might even say she was slowly letting her guard down with him. Except when Anna or he brought up the pregnancy.

Then she immediately retreated behind that shell of hers. She refused to share what was on her mind. And yet more than once he had seen her reading articles on motherhood on her tablet, lost in deep thought.

And tonight she had borrowed a baby. Because she had known he would be out for the night.

Foreboding inched across his skin. Once he had been too involved in his own world and had neglected Eduardo when he had needed him. He wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. He was going to get to the root of what was bothering her tonight.

He eyed her across the room. She was plumping the same pillow on the couch, her shoulders stiff with tension, her punches into it increasing steadily, until her jabs were vicious and accompanied by soft grunts.

He reached her quickly, meaning to catch her before she buried whatever was troubling her under grating self-sufficiency. With a hand on her shoulder, he turned her around. “If you’re imagining that to be my face,” he said, “let me...”

She let him look at her for only a second before she pushed away from him. But what he had seen in that second was enough to stun Diego.

Tears filled her huge brown eyes.

His breath felt as if it had been knocked out of him—as if someone had clocked his jaw. He had never seen her tears. Not when he had humiliated her, not when he had threatened her company, not even when her father had shredded her.

With an arm thrown around her waist he tugged her hard against him and locked her there. She was plastered to him from shoulder to thigh. Her soft flesh shuddered and rearranged itself against him.

“Let me go.”

“Shhh...” he whispered near her ear, knowing that she was extra-sensitive to any touch there. “I just want to look at you.”

Her hands against his chest, she glared at him, her tears unshed.

Every inch of her was taut, like a tightly wound spring, and a slow tremor was inching through her. Something had shaken her up badly. He tightened his arms around her, waiting for the tremors to pass.

Dark blue shadows danced under her huge eyes. Her hair was not the sleek polished silk that gleamed every time she moved her face in that arrogant, thoroughly sexy way of hers. Instead it curled around her face, lending a false vulnerability to the sharp angles of her face.

But the fact that she was close to exhaustion was written in the dull pallor of her skin, in the pinched look stamped upon her features.

His ire rose to the surface again, and he didn’t fool himself that he was worried for his unborn child. The anxiety that he couldn’t purge from his system, the anger that had his muscles quivering for action, was all for her.

Despite his best intentions he just couldn’t not care about her.

He moved his hand up from her waist to her nape and dug his fingers into her hair, held her tight.

His grip didn’t hurt her. He knew that. But he needed that hold on her for a second—the deceptive illusion of control over her, over her emotions.

Because she reduced him to what he’d been born to.

All the trappings of wealth, all the polish he had acquired in the past six years, fell away, reducing him to what he was at his core. Someone who had been born into the gutter and craved a better life that had remained out of his grasp for so long.

There was always a part of her that remained unreachable, unattainable to him, as though he still didn’t make the cut.

He trailed his gaze over her, from the well-worn Harvard T-shirt that hugged her breasts to the low slung sweatpants that left a strip of flesh bare at her midriff.