she didn’t care to have, Colette dug in her bag for Emma’s favorite storybook. “Would you like me to read to you before lights out?” she asked.
After Emma had listened to her favorite fairytale twice, read once by Colette and once again by Stephen, Emma drifted off to sleep in her high bed, a golden-haired angel dressed in yellow and pink.
“Thank you for letting her stay,” Stephen said quietly.
“She’s talked of nothing else for days,” she admitted.
They stood looking down at the sweet curve of Emma’s cheek and curled fist, neither of them speaking for several seconds.
“I think she likes the house,” he finally whispered.
“You think?” Colette shook her head, a small smile tugging at her mouth. “If you keep spoiling her like this,” she warned, “she’ll be impossible at thirteen.”
“We’ll deal with that when the time comes,” he answered in a low voice.
Colette turned to face him, stunned anew that he planned to be around for Emma’s adolescence. That the permanence of fatherhood didn’t seem to deter him at all. “You’re good with her,” she said softly. “Better than I expected.”
“You do tend to underestimate me, don’t you?” he answered, without lifting his gaze from their slumbering child.
She didn’t answer, uncomfortably aware that he probably spoke the truth.
“I’ve always liked children,” he continued, leaning to draw the blanket up over Emma’s curved shoulder. “And Emma’s particularly easy to like.” His big palm cupped the back of her head before he straightened and strode silently toward the door.
He exited the room without another word, and Colette felt her perceptions of him shift yet again. After watching him with Emma, his harsh edges softened by the incongruity of a child at his knee and a doll in his hand, she could no longer cast him in the role she’d formerly assigned to him.
For beneath the veneer of international playboy and ruthless businessman lurked a layer she’d never suspected. A layer Emma could rely on and trust.
A layer perhaps she could trust as well.
CHAPTER TEN
STEPHEN could hear Colette behind him as she closed Emma’s door with a soft click. Uncomfortable with the frustrated desire he always, always felt for her, he strode down the muffled carpet of the hall toward the staircase. Though he’d been able to keep himself in check these past few weeks, doing so had proven to be a special kind of hell.
No torture the Whitfield family had ever devised came close to the hours he’d spent with Colette without touching her. Without kissing her.
“Where’d you learn to interact with children?” she asked, stopping a couple of treads above the base of the staircase.
He turned to find her face at eye level with his, far closer than he’d anticipated. A few strands of hair had slipped their moorings to curl around her jaw, and the urge to tuck them back into the neat coil at her nape roared through him with the force of a hurricane.
Knowing that he didn’t dare touch her sent a sharp spike of irritation through his gut and sharpened his tone. “Why? Because a man like me shouldn’t know the first thing about how to behave around his own daughter?”
Her eyes widened in surprise while her skin blushed a soft, delectable pink. “I didn’t mean it that way,” she protested.
Feeling unreasonable, and not caring, he bit out, “No? Then how did you mean it, exactly?”
“Don’t bark at me for being curious, Stephen.” Her hand had tightened against the banister, her knuckles and fingertips white even though her voice remained calm. Oh, yes. That was his Colette. Eternally in control and calm. It made him want to shout at her, to shake her, to kiss her until ragged emotions made her hands and voice and flesh tremble. “Some men can be uncomfortable around kids,” she continued, unaware of the firestorm of longing, of pure, unadulterated want simmering beneath the surface of his skin. “And the world knows that caring for a child is hardly innate for a man who spends all his time—”
“I’m not that kind of man,” he snapped.
Though she stiffened, she didn’t back down. “It still doesn’t mean you’ve had experience with children.”
He glared at her for a moment, before biting out, “My mum’s family is big. Dozens of cousins all over the place, and most of them with a couple of kids apiece. Between holidays and Sunday dinners spent tending children while the adults gossiped, I probably have more experience than you.”
She stared at him, her mouth slightly parted and her eyes wide