Maid for Montero(56)

As if he didn’t already know that! Zoe slung him a cross look and sniffed. He wasn’t making this any easier.

‘A figure of speech,’ she muttered, knowing it had been much more than that and hoping he didn’t. ‘We’re really not discussing how great you are in bed.’

‘Sex with you is worth the odd desert crossing, too.’

Even above the presence of his painful arousal, Isandro was conscious of a strange heaviness in his chest as he made a conscious effort to capture Zoe’s eyes. She seemed determined to look anywhere but at him. The moment of success when he welded his sloe-black eyes on her bright burning blue…The heaviness in his chest bordered unbearable…Yet he felt strangely exhilarated. Was he having a heart attack?

Zoe licked her dry lips and struggled to think past the static buzz of electricity in the room.

‘Thanks…’ she said, not knowing what else to say, and not hearing the huskiness in her voice above the deafening clamour of her pounding pulses. ‘Children can be very cruel.’ She gave a loud sniff. ‘So you see that I can’t continue to live here to be your…mistress.’

‘You are not my mistress.’

His offended hauteur in his attitude struck her as weird. ‘I live here, and you own the place.’

‘You pay rent.’

‘A token amount. And the fact is you wouldn’t have offered me this place if we hadn’t been having sex.’

‘I have never paid for sex.’

‘We can play table tennis semantics all night, but it won’t stop other people seeing me as a kept woman.’

‘I don’t give a damn what people think.’

‘That’s not a luxury I can afford, Isandro,’ she said sadly. ‘It stopped being the day I took on the twins. It’s my job to be a good role model for them. Even if they didn’t have to contend with the sort of teasing that happened today, what sort message am I sending?’

‘Parents do have sex. That is the reality, and you cannot protect them from every hurt along the way. I will have a word with the headmaster.’

She stared at him. ‘I can’t believe you just said that!’ she yelped, dropping into a chair.

‘Neither can I,’ he admitted honestly.

‘You will not have any words with the headmaster. You will not go near the school…I want the children to know about adult relationships, know that sex should happen within the confines of a loving relationship. Not like…I may have…’ Her eyes filled as she trawled her vocabulary for a word that would cover what she had.

‘You’re overreacting,’ he accused.

She thought of Harry’s face and shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not.’

‘You want the children to go to school here. Where will you live? I know Polly well enough to know she’s probably paying you a pittance.’ Polly would have squeezed a stone dry if it put up her profit margins, and Zoe was too self-deprecating to know her own value.

‘I’m learning. She’s paying me a fair wage and I’ve already been looking for suitable accom—’

‘Looking!’ He pounced on the word like a circling tiger looking for a weakness. ‘So this thing with the twins is just an excuse? It’s not spontaneous. You were already planning—’

She bit her lip. ‘I wasn’t planning—preparing.’

Sally at the shop had some holiday lets by the canal—a row of terraced cottages that were empty now the season was over. She was willing to let Zoe have one until she sorted herself something more permanent.

‘You can’t. I won’t let you.’

‘You can’t stop me. It’s my choice.’

‘And you think it will be so easy, do you, to spend your nights alone in your solitary single bed?’

She reacted to this deliberate cruelty with a display of stubborn defiance. ‘The cottage runs to a double. And who says I’ll be alone?’

He was out of his chair and beside her, hauling her to her feet, before she had even finished speaking. His warm breath brushed her cheek as he bent in close. ‘Have you been preparing for that, too? Have you met someone?’

She closed her eyes, feeling faint, smelling the citrusy scent of the soap he used. Every instinct she possessed was telling her to sink into all his male hardness, but Zoe fought and from somewhere dredged up the strength to put her hands against his chest and push away.

‘I thought your speciality was painless break-ups,’ she panted as she drew her hair back from her face with a shaky hand. ‘Or is that only when you’re dictating the timing?’

He didn’t respond to the accusation. He was watching her rub her arm where he caught hold of her. He swore and touched her hand lightly; her fingers immediately curled around his. ‘Let me see…?’