‘And you haven’t answered my question. Did you treat him the same way, even though you were pregnant with his child?’
The glare of the sun on the water seemed to be acting like a laser on her tortured head. She heard a deep groan and only realised it came from her own lips a moment before the vibrant pink and greens of the foliage around the poolside splintered into a thousand pieces and she saw indigo tiles rushing up to meet her.
When she opened her eyes she was lying on a bed.
Andreas’s bed! she realised at once, from the collection of very masculine furnishings within her sight.
She sat up quickly. Too quickly, she decided, flopping down again when her head swam sickeningly in protest.
‘Take it easy.’ Andreas’s voice above her right shoulder was deep and steadying. It was the only steady thing in the wavering room. ‘You passed out and I thought it best to get you inside. How do you feel?’
‘Lousy,’ Magenta admitted with a grimace, too weak and unbalanced at that moment to try and prevaricate. She was still in her sodden swimsuit, but he had wrapped a towelling robe around her. His robe, she realised as things began to settle down. There was the recognisable scent of his cologne clinging to it, along with more elusive traces of his own personal scent. ‘It must have been the sun.’
‘Possibly, but not very likely.’ His sensual mouth pulled down at one corner. ‘Staying up too late, maybe? Or perhaps you just haven’t been taking care of yourself properly.’
‘What—what do you mean?’
Damn! She wasn’t going through a set-back after all these years, was she? she thought in despair, sitting up again, but much more carefully this time. It had taken her months of hard work and effort to perfect her speech in the long battle to reconstruct her life again.
‘What are you saying?’ She studied him fully now, and wished she hadn’t when the sight of him sitting there on the bed in a grey striped silk robe that did little to hide his flagrant masculinity caused a different sort of throbbing in her. ‘When her son’s away, Magenta will play?’ she misquoted. What did he imagine she was doing every night? Having a whale of a time, painting the town bright pink?
‘What I meant was that from the way you felt when I carried you up here—like a wisp of nothing—I’d say that you haven’t been eating properly.’
‘Oh...’ she uttered, feeling suitably chastised.
But she didn’t tell Andreas that he was right. That lately she had had to be so frugal with her own diet in order to make sure her son had enough to eat that sometimes she’d wound up skipping meals altogether. She hadn’t been sleeping properly either, ever since she’d met up with Andreas again, and when she did eventually manage to drop off she was plagued by troubling images that had her waking up trembling and perspiring, struggling to make sense of her disturbing dreams.
‘You’re just so hunky that any woman would seem light to you,’ she parried, trying not to think of how devastating he had looked with his bronze and muscular body all wet and glistening when he’d chased after her out of the pool. ‘Besides, I’ve been a model. I’ve never quite managed to adopt the desire to over-eat.’
‘That’s all going to change while you’re working for me,’ he remonstrated, his hand suddenly palming the curve of a rather too-slender shoulder, where the robe had slipped down, too voluminous for her slim frame.
‘You’re going to fatten me up?’ Her voice sounded squeaky now, but for a different reason. She ached to lean in to his massaging hand. ‘Is that another condition of my employment? To put on “all those unwanted pounds”?’ She dropped her voice as she said it, as if she was advertising some new-fangled slimming product, trying to ignore his casual but very disturbing touch.
‘Very necessary pounds,’ he corrected. ‘I’m not having you passing out on me again at the drop of a hat.’
‘That’s probably unlikely too, as neither of us wears one,’ she quipped, trying to make light of the situation.
She needed to say something to distract her from those lusciously dark-lashed eyes that were using the subject of her weight to examine her with disconcerting thoroughness. His thick black hair was still damp from his swim and she had to stem the almost irresistible urge to run her fingers through it.
‘I’m making your bed all wet.’ Her voice was husky, and she sounded breathless. But the robe she was wearing was soaking up the water from her swimsuit and it couldn’t be doing much for his duvet.
‘It wouldn’t be the first time,’ he said wryly.