with shock.
“What?” he sneered. “Not convinced? Shall I tell you about all the nappies I changed, the bottles I heated, the—?”
“No,” she rushed to say. “It’s just … I have a hard time picturing you as the family nanny.”
“Only because you can’t see beyond your own prejudices,” he ground out.
“I don’t—”
“You do. You look at me and see a playboy.” Defensiveness and righteous anger flared hot within his chest. “A selfish, self-centered man incapable of commitment or fatherhood.”
“No,” she protested. “I don’t. Not anymore. I mean, I did at first, but I’m beginning to realize I never really knew you at all.”
“And whose fault is that?” he asked.
When she stared at him, stunned and silent, he turned on his heel and strode toward the wing that housed his master suite.
“Certainly not mine!” she finally blurted, clambering down the remaining steps and hurrying after him. “You’re the one who never told me anything about yourself beyond the most superficial of details!”
He stopped at the door to his bedroom, turning to face her with fury tightening his lungs. “Would you have been interested if I had?”
She stiffened as if he’d slapped her. “How can you even ask such a thing?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” He leaned over her until she arched her neck to maintain the distance between them. He could see the fragile beat of the pulse in the side of her neck, the dilated pupils of her wide, distressed eyes. Knowing he’d disconcerted her made him viciously, irrationally glad. “It could be that talk about your past was strictly off-limits,” he reminded her in a low, menacing voice. “Or have you conveniently forgotten about your demand for no commitments, no strings, and no questions?”
She pressed her mouth shut to conceal its faint hint of trembling.
“You wanted nothing beyond hours of mind-altering sex and culinary abandon,” he continued cruelly. “Which I provided. Without complaint.”
A crimson blush streaked northward from her neck. “We didn’t share a child then.”
The air between them heated with his frustration, his banked arousal, and an anger he didn’t dare analyze. “Are you telling me that now we have Emma you’re suddenly going to tell me all about your past and answer all of my questions?”
Hazel eyes flared in alarm before she shuttered them behind a sweep of lashes. “Is that what you want?”
I want a hell of a lot more than that, sweet. “You can’t even stomach the idea of kissing me again. Why would I be foolish enough to think you’ll answer questions you’d never answer before?”
“Because it’s your right to know about the mother of your child.” She swallowed, her hazel eyes filled with a dizzying combination of guilt and fear. “You deserve to ask any question you want, no matter how difficult it might prove for me to answer.”
Her response slugged him like a hammer to the chest. “You don’t mean that,” he finally said. “I do.”
He stared at her without speaking for several long seconds, her offer hanging suspended between them like a white flag of truce when he’d expected nothing but more walls and more weapons.
“Do you still see them?” she ventured, breaking the silence. “The cousins you tended?”
His jaw bunched and he averted his eyes, torn between the dual desires to glean information about Colette and keep the details of his own past buried. “No,” he said flatly.
“No?” She dipped to study his downturned face. “Why not?”
He lifted his chin and answered, his face and voice carefully blank. “After my parents died, my father’s family sent me to boarding school. It didn’t provide much opportunity for visiting.” And the rare days that were allocated for family visits had been, for him at least, achingly empty. He still remembered how alone and lost he’d felt, how he’d waited in the receiving room with his heart in his throat while he watched happy boys reunite with their adoring families. He remembered every Friday, when the post delivered gifts and cookies and newsy letters from home to everyone but him. Separate, forgotten and abandoned, he’d sworn never to need anyone ever again.
“Your parents died?” Colette asked, ripping his thoughts back to the present. “How? What happened?”
He’d spare her the details of his mother’s death and his father’s subsequent despair. “It was an accident.”
She reached for his taut forearm, her cool fingers like a brand upon his flesh. “I’m so sorry, Stephen. No one should have to endure a loss like that when they’re a child.”
He looked at her hand without moving. “I survived,” he said