Blame It on the Bikini - By Natalie Anderson Page 0,22
led her the length of the wooden-floored hallway.
‘I don’t need to see your private things.’ She regretted this now. She’d have been better off winging the assignment by cobbling together an average essay with reference to just the few textbooks she had in her flat.
‘Yes, you do. Otherwise you’ll be curious, and if you’re curious you won’t be able to concentrate.’
She managed a smile. ‘Because all women are curious about seeing your room?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Kitchen and lounge are this way.’
They faced out to the back of the house, the garden not visible this time of night. For a guy who didn’t cook, he still had all the mod cons in the kitchen. She stayed in the doorway, really not wanting to take in the atmosphere of being in his personal space.
‘Guest bathroom this way.’ He brushed past her as he stepped back out to the hall and opened a door on the other side of it. ‘Then there are a couple of spare bedrooms. One is my office. The other is a library and workroom for my assistant.’ He opened the door opposite.
She didn’t go into his office but into the one he’d said was the library. She wouldn’t have guessed he’d have a library—certainly not such a varied one.
‘You have a whole bookcase of children’s books.’ She read the spines. She recognised so many she’d read in her hanging-out-at-the-library days when she’d avoided all the other students. Avoided the teasing. That was where she’d met Lauren—who’d been ripping a page out of a book she could have afforded a million times over.
‘I work for children,’ he answered briefly. ‘I got a bulk lot from a second-hand store.’
Internally she laughed at the way everything was shelved in the ‘right’ place. Clearly he hadn’t been kidding about his library-assistant job. She pulled one from the ‘teen-read’ shelf and flicked it open. Inside the front cover a name had been written in boyish scrawl—Brad Davenport. Second-hand store, huh?
She smiled. ‘That was my favourite for years. I read it so many times.’
‘Uh-huh.’ He took the book off her.
‘Did you cry at the end?’ she asked.
He smiled but didn’t confess.
‘I did every time,’ she admitted with a whisper.
Still he didn’t give it up.
‘You don’t want me to know that you’re a marshmallow inside?’
‘I’m no marshmallow,’ he answered. ‘I have them here for the look of it. Generally the kids only come here to meet and talk with me so they’re not so nervous in court. I’m not their counsellor or anything. I’m merely their legal representative.’
‘But they’re your books.’ And the kids he was supposedly not that close to drew pictures for him that he put on his walls?
His reluctant smile came with a small sigh. ‘I like to read.’
‘And you like kids?
‘Sometimes.’ He drew the word out, his voice ringing with caveats. ‘But I have no interest in having any myself.’ He put the book back. ‘There are enough out there who’ve been done over by their dipstick parents.’
‘You think you’d be a dipstick parent?’
‘Undoubtedly.’
She smiled.
‘I think parenting is one of those things you learn from the example you had,’ he said lightly. ‘I didn’t have a great example.’
‘So you know what not to do.’
He shook his head. ‘It’s never that simple. I see the cycle of dysfunctional families in my office every day. Now—’ he moved back out of the room ‘—the last room is my bedroom.’
Mya hovered in the doorway, really not wanting to intrude as the sense of intimacy built between them.
He turned and saw her hesitating and rolled his eyes. ‘I promise not to pounce.’
She stepped right into the room. He had the biggest bed she’d ever seen, smothered in white coverings. It would be like resting in a bowl of whipped cream. Definitely not a bed for pyjamas; there should be nothing but bare skin in that.
‘Why is it so high?’ she asked, then quickly cleared her throat of the embarrassing rasp that had roughened her voice.
‘I’m tall.’
‘You wouldn’t want to fall out of it, would you?’ If she sat on the edge of it, her feet couldn’t touch the floor. ‘It’s like Mount Olympus or something.’
There was no giant TV screen on a table at the foot of the bed. No chest of drawers for clothing. No bookshelf. No, it was just that massive bed with the billowing white covering demanding her attention.
‘Nice to know I inspire you to think of Greek gods.’
She sent him a baleful look. It was unfair of him to start