Page 36 of His Wedding Day Revenge

Jane, who would have actually paid to see him manage this task, put the spoon down and, lips twitching, stepped away. ‘Feel free.’

‘When you sit down and eat.’ He pulled out one of the chairs beside the open window and gestured.

After a gentle push she took the seat and, actually, the smell wafting up from the bowl of fluffy scrambled eggs was not unpleasant.

She had eaten a plateful and two slices of toast dripping with butter when she broke down, laughing, as the expression of fierce determination on Draco’s face vanished when a lump of mashed baby food landed in his eye.

He pulled out a spare chair and straddled it, wiping his face with a napkin. ‘I think he has finished.’

‘All it took to bring a sex god down to earth was an eight-month-old baby. Who knew?’ she mocked, grinning.

‘A sex god...you think?’ he mused, sliding her a self-satisfied look that made her oversensitive stomach flip as he poured himself some coffee. ‘There are limits to my willingness to become an object of mockery. I have fed him. You can remove the food that did not land in his mouth.’

‘You gave him the spoon.’

‘Good for developing his dexterity and self-reliance,’ he came back glibly.

‘Seriously, Draco, I thought you were—’

‘My plans changed,’ he cut in, not quite meeting her eyes. ‘So I decided to check on you. Does that break any of your rules?’ He found himself really beginning to resent those rules.

‘I don’t think... No, probably not.’

‘I normally begin my day with a swim. Would you care to join me?’

‘Mattie—’

‘It is my understanding that it is never too soon to introduce a baby to water, and if you are worried about exposing his delicate skin to the sun we have an indoor complex as well as the outdoor pools.’

‘Of course you do,’ she came back drily. ‘Oh, why not? That would be nice, but he might not like it,’ she warned.

Draco had managed fifteen minutes of laps, pushing his body to the physical limits, before Jane appeared, and his body reacted independently of his brain to the sight of her standing there in a plain black relatively modest swimsuit, revealing that he had not reached his physical limits at all.

Actually it turned out that, after a first startled, wide-eyed look, Mattie did like the water. So did Jane but who wouldn’t?

The indoor pool was Roman themed, decorated from floor to ceiling with mosaic tiles of varying shades of blue all set against a background of gold, which gave a shimmering, breathtaking effect. The murals on the walls were classically inspired.

‘You want to swim? I could take him?’

‘You want to take Mattie?’

Want, Draco privately conceded, would have been overstating it.

‘Any instructions? Keep his head out of the water, is that right?’ he teased.

Jane handed him over with an eye roll, trying not to lust too obviously over Draco’s streamlined muscular frame and failing dramatically as she handed the baby over to his care, without, despite her reluctance, a qualm.

She always felt safe, at least physically, with Draco and she totally trusted him with Mattie.

She had managed a few lazy lengths of the middle pool—there were three—when she flipped onto her back, floating as she watched Draco, in the shallowest pool, swirl Mattie around before splashing him gently, resulting in the baby’s loud gurgling chuckle echoing off the ceiling.

An expression of sadness slid across her face and her heart tightened as she thought of the things that would never be.

One day Draco would make an incredible father.

Despite her belief in his fathering qualities, Draco was not involved in the soothing of the fretful baby post swim or the changing, feeding and settling.

Jane joined him again, very conscious of the heavy achy feeling low in her pelvis, aware as she lowered herself into the warmer shallower pool that his eyes were watching her every move.

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