Prognosis Baby Daddy - Amy Andrews Page 0,35

anyone to know that they weren’t in a bona fide relationship. She had queried the need for staff at all and he told her that removing them would trigger even more gossip.

So, she dreaded the moment every night. Was even getting really good at stalling. Because climbing into bed next to a man that would tempt a nun and then having to platonically go to sleep was an impossible task. And when she did manage to grasp the elusive tendrils of slumber?

She dreamed about him. About their night together.

Was it just her stage of pregnancy? Was it just her hormones that made the images so erotic she’d wake up with a hum in her veins and a buzz deep down inside? Was it them that caused her heart to trip when she glanced at his sexy sleeping profile? Or dared her to reach out and touch him, run her finger down his cheek, so much so that her palm would tingle and she had to clamp it between her thighs to stop it from following through?

And why did she have to dream in such agonising Technicolor detail? Why was her mind blowing it up into a scene of such amazing proportions? In reality, in the grand scheme of things, it probably hadn’t been that good. Really, what comparison did she have? In fact, it could have been fairly average.

It probably was.

She’d been a virgin after all, so what did she know?

And then she’d wake in the morning, tired and irritable, only to find a heavy male arm slung across her belly or her head snuggled into his chest and his lazy morning smile grinning down at her.

Yep, sharing a bed with Ben was a particularly exquisite form of torture.

Katya lived for the weekends when they went to the villa far away from Ravello and had separate rooms. It was strange and lonely, the bed big and empty, but by the time Friday night came around she was usually too tired to give it more than a fleeting thought.

Consequently, needing a major distraction, she threw herself into the Lucia Trust work. Every day they operated on a growing number of unfortunate patients as their work became better known. They were children mainly, some born with severe deformities, others having acquired them through horrific accidents. There were a lot of burns related cases and quite a few involving large, disfiguring but benign tumours.

It was rewarding work, seeing kids with such a poor quality of life have their lot improved so dramatically. And the whole surgical team was proud of their work. Katya even started to take an interest in the behind-the-scenes work of the foundation.

Ben introduced her to Carmella Rossi, the foundation’s field officer, who was infectiously exuberant about her work and explained to Katya all the ins and outs of working with myriad charities and government agencies to identify patients, and the intricacies and red tape involved with getting them to Italy.

Katya soaked it up, asking questions, even going to the control room after surgery had finished for the day. Anything -anything - to take her mind off Ben and that bed.

A week later Katya found herself standing next to Ben, gowned up ready to repair a severe bilateral cleft lip and palate. She yawned behind her mask as she daydreamed about Ben’s lips. The last few nights her imagination had started to embellish her dream. The Ben in her dream had told her he loved her and the Katya in the dream had confessed her love too and they’d gone on to make love again, this time even better than the first. The joining more intense, the passion even deeper.

‘Katya!’

Ben’s impatient exclamation cut into her fantasy. She looked at him startled, her brain taking a few more seconds to shed the heavy cloak of the fantasy and focus on the present.

‘What?’

‘I said are you ready to start?’

Above his mask Katya could only see Ben’s eyes and for a moment, as he looked at her, they were the eyes from her dreams. Deep and dark and brown, and getting darker and stormier the more he kissed her. Those incredible drugging kisses that made her lose track of time and place.

‘Katya?’

She saw his eyes widen fractionally and heard the slight husky tremor in his inquisitive voice. She blinked to dispel the images in her head. ‘Right, yes.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Okie dokie.’

Ben chuckled at her use of slang. It seemed so strange coming in her accented English. But it was a