Page 24 of His Wedding Day Revenge

‘But—’

Her reluctance served to harden his resolve. ‘There are a lot of steps and it is dark; you can’t see your own feet carrying the baby.’

He watched her little grimace of acknowledgment as she pulled the baby in closer, her chin resting on his head.

‘I should have driven you down...’ But this was one of the best views of the palazzo and he had wanted to see her reaction. He winced at the insight.

He had wanted to see her regret when she saw what she had walked away from. In the end, though, she had walked away from him, and his ego wouldn’t allow him to admit that this inescapable fact still hurt.

‘Well, thank you, but the gardens are lovely. I can’t wait to see them in daylight.’ The light had almost faded completely now, though the path was well lit, and she got a sense of the garden. ‘It smells gorgeous. Thank you...’ she husked again as Draco bent forward, arms outreached to take the baby from her. She held her breath but still felt her senses thrum when the warm scent of his skin tickled her nose.

‘Yep, perfect,’ she praised.

Jane lowered her gaze, for some reason she didn’t delve too deeply into, the sight of him standing there with Mattie in his arms. The contrast of big man and tiny baby, made her throat tighten with emotion.

‘My mother replanted this area many years ago.’ Her startled gaze lifted in time to catch the softening around his mouth, the warmth in his eyes, which a moment later vanished as the iron hardness reappeared as if a switch had been flicked and he provided unemotional additional information. ‘I tried to reinstate the planting exactly as it was as a memorial to her.’

‘That’s a nice thing to do.’ It suddenly struck her how strange this was, to be standing here talking this way.

When they had been together Draco had never discussed his family much, and when he had it was mostly information about his younger half-brother’s achievements. His late father he’d never spoken of at all, she didn’t have any idea when he had died, and the only time he had mentioned his mother it had been bare, bleak, bone-dry facts.

His parents had divorced and she’d died a year later.

When Jane had offered sympathy he had closed the conversation down, leaving her in no doubt that the subject was a no-go area—there had been a lot of those.

Jane had wanted to probe but never asked questions back then, had told herself that he would confide in her when he needed to. Now, of course, she knew he never would have.

Their relationship, certainly from his side, had never been about talking or sharing; it had been about sex. Maybe they were talking because they were no longer a couple. They were no longer having mind-numbing, incredible sex... Even then, when she had been so invested in being with him, she had sometimes wondered what, beyond the sex, was keeping them together.

She shook away the thoughts in her head, annoyed with herself for reading anything significant into a casual comment, for making it something more than it was.

Ah, well, the ‘keep out’ signs no longer applied to her. She wasn’t the fiancée trying to say the right thing. Now she could say the normal thing. If he didn’t like it, it no longer mattered, she told herself, wanting to distance herself as far as she could from the woman she had been.

‘Did you go with her, your mother, when your parents split up?’ She half expected him to tell her it was none of her business but, rather to her surprise, after a pause he responded.

‘He wouldn’t let her take me. And once Jamie was born, I couldn’t have left him anyway.’

Jane felt a stab of frustration when he stopped talking. She remembered that feeling of being kept on the outside all too well. His expression was hidden from her by his long, luxuriant lashes, but she’d already seen the regret in the dark depths, presumably that he had told her even this much.

She felt a wave of self-disgust, hardly able to believe that she had meekly accepted his lack of communication as the norm when they were meant to be in a relationship.

‘I remember Jamie,’ she said, thinking of the stick-thin shy thirteen-year-old she had been introduced to the night before the wedding.

‘You made a big impression on him,’ Draco said drily, remembering his brother’s accusing eyes when he had demanded to know what Draco had done to make her run away.

‘How old were you when your parents divorced?’

‘Fifteen.’

‘So that would have made Jamie...?’

‘He was born a month after they married. Watch your step. There’s a...’ With the hand that wasn’t supporting the baby, he caught her elbow as she stepped off into space, or at least six unexpected inches, and landed with a jolt.

‘Thanks...sorry, I wasn’t looking where I was going.’

No, she’d been looking at him. There was no doubt he was well worth looking at, no point denying the glaringly obvious, and the stubble that was now darkening his cheeks and jawline added an extra earthy... Do not think earthy, Jane, she told herself firmly. She could not allow this to drift towards the obsession she had once felt. No, he was just a good-looking man—okay, a gorgeous man—she had once had a relationship with.

If only he’d let go of her elbow!

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