CHAPTER SIX
SAM HAD LEFT Daisy’s door slightly ajar and a night light on, as she always did, and she quickly pushed the door fully open now before running across the room to where her daughter was sitting up in bed. Daisy’s eyes were wide, the tears streaming down her feverishly flushed face as she continued to scream.
‘I’m here, Daisy.’ Sam sat on the side of the bed to take her daughter into her arms. ‘It’s okay, darling,’ she soothed as her daughter struggled to be set free. ‘It’s Mummy, darling. It’s Mummy, Daisy,’ she repeated firmly as she stroked her daughter’s hair back from her flushed face.
Daisy stopped struggling but still trembled as she now looked up uncertainly. ‘Mummy?’
Sam smiled at her reassuringly. ‘You had a bad dream, darling. Just a dream,’ she soothed as Daisy, calmer now, snuggled against her for comfort.
At the same time Sam’s thoughts were inwardly racing. Had Daisy recognised Malcolm at the hotel earlier, after all? Either consciously, or subconsciously? And was that the reason for her daughter’s nightmare?
It was like one of those night terrors that Daisy had suffered from as a very young child, but she hadn’t had a single one in the past three years. Not since they’d left Malcolm.
‘Is she okay?’
Sam turned sharply to look at Xander as he quietly entered the bedroom, an anxious frown on her face as she wondered how Daisy would react to the presence of a man in her bedroom so soon after her nightmare.
‘Xander!’ Daisy pulled out of Sam’s arms before launching herself off the bed towards him.
Giving Sam a very definitive answer to that question.
Xander only just managed to open his arms in time to the little girl. As it was, he had to drop his walking stick on the floor, swaying precariously for several seconds as his injured leg threatened to collapse beneath him. Daisy might only be a lightweight, but her sudden weightfirm grasp on his leg caused a jolt of pain from Xander’s thigh down to his knee.
Xander glanced at Samantha, noting the pallor of her cheeks, and the tears glistening in her shadowed eyes, her expression dazed, lost, as she sat on Daisy’s bed looking at them both. Had there been something more sinister to Daisy’s nightmare than that the little girl had simply had an over-stimulating day?
Daisy gave a yawn as she nestled against him and he slowly led her back to the bed.
Within seconds of her lying down, it seemed, the little girl had fallen back to sleep, as if the nightmare had never occurred or woken her up screaming. Chances were—Xander hoped—that Daisy wouldn’t even remember she’d had the nightmare in the morning.
Her mother looked far less composed, Xander noted. Samantha’s expression was still one of devastation, her face drawn and pale, shadows having deepened in those beautiful eyes.
‘Let’s go and finish our brandy,’ Xander encouraged, wincing slightly as he straightened from picking his cane up from the bedroom floor.
‘Maybe I should stay here for a while, just in case?’ Samantha looked worriedly at her sleeping daughter.
‘We’ll hear her if she calls out again.’ Xander held his hand out to Samantha as encouragement for her to stand up and leave the bedroom with him. It was the most he could manage, his leg now a painful and throbbing ache. ‘Come on, Samantha,’ he encouraged gruffly, knowing he badly needed to sit down.