Nathan's Child - By Anne McAllister Page 0,40

heart,” Carin grumbled, disbelieving.

“Exactly,” Nathan said, his tone gruff but something of a smile lurking at the corners of his mouth. Their gazes met. Something electric seemed to sizzle between them.

If she were healthy and whole she would run a mile, Carin thought.

“You’re doing this for Lacey,” she told Nathan sternly. Not for me. “Right, Nathan?”

He just looked at her. “What do you think?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

SHE WAS IN TROUBLE being at Nathan’s 24/7.

But she was stuck and she knew it.

As the doctor had predicted, she couldn’t manage on her own. It wasn’t just climbing the stairs in her house with her badly sprained ankle that she couldn’t have done. She couldn’t do simple things like cooking a meal or washing dishes. She certainly couldn’t frame her pictures or work at the store.

Just getting through the day was a struggle.

“Accidents do that,” Nathan said, taking her weakness in stride and with far more equanimity than she did.

Of course he did, she told herself, because he was getting what he wanted!

But why any sane man would want to be stuck with a cranky, annoying invalid and an exuberant twelve-year-old girl she couldn’t imagine.

Nathan seemed to take her crankiness and Lacey’s endless enthusiasm in stride, too.

He pretty much ignored the first and he actually encouraged the second. Mostly he seemed to be able to cope.

She wanted to be furious with him, to hate his bossiness and his presumptuousness and his general all-around taking over of her life.

But it was hard to hate the man who carried her to the bathroom, when she needed to get there, because she couldn’t use crutches and her leg wouldn’t let her put weight on it at first. It was hard to dislike him when he cooked her dinner and brought her breakfast and fixed her lunch. And it was hard to stay angry with a man who got up in the middle of the night to check on her and who every night bedded down on the sofa in the living room so he would be close enough for her to call if she needed something.

She wanted to turn away from him, to fight him, to resist him and, damn him, he was making it almighty difficult.

Of course, from the start she’d been cornered into calling a truce. After what he’d said about Lacey worrying about her, she’d had no choice. And once they got there, she’d understood what he meant.

Lacey had been standing on the porch, practically bouncing with joy at the sight of her mother. She had been so eager to have Carin back home, so obviously worried about her, and so delighted that they would all be there together at Nathan’s and that “everything would be all right now,” that Carin knew she had to try to make sure it was.

That meant she couldn’t fight with Nathan when Lacey was around. But the fact was, as the days went by, she couldn’t seem to fight with him, anyway.

He was still bossy and interfering and thought he knew best. But he was also making their daughter feel happy and secure. He was allowing Lacey to be a child instead of her mother’s caretaker.

Carin was grateful for that.

At the same time, though, it made her want more. It made her want things she’d wanted years ago, when she’d been starry-eyed and in love.

And she didn’t want to want that. Loving Nathan and not being loved in return simply hurt too much.

Still, at the moment she couldn’t change things. She had to stay here until she was well enough to go home. When at last she and Lacey were on their own again, she would do what she could to restore the distance between herself and Nathan.

In the meantime…in the meantime she was living dangerously.

Oh, yes.

Every day she felt herself sucked further into the web of desire. It was, in some ways, like the week they’d spent together all those years ago. She hadn’t wanted to want him then, either. But what her mind knew, her body disagreed with, and her heart…her heart was torn.

Watching Nathan day after day—studying him surreptitiously when he was cooking dinner in the kitchen or out on the deck repairing a railing or at the desk in the living room, bent over his light table picking over his slides—was a treat and a torture at the same time.

She’d always liked looking at Nathan. And his lean, agile young man’s body had matured well. He was still lean, though not slender. His shoulders were