Page 28 of Cinderella's One-Night Baby

Her giggle turned into a snigger. ‘I have no idea—my dad had put his foot down by the time I was born and insisted on normal names.’

‘You are one of how many?’

‘Three,’ she replied, glad he’d phrased the question in a way that meant her answer wouldn’t turn the conversation onto darker territory. ‘I’m the youngest.’

‘The baby of the family like me.’

She prodded his thigh with her toe. ‘I bet you hated being the baby.’

Andrés breathed through the tightening of his chest. He’d never known anyone to get him the way Gabrielle instinctively seemed to. If he didn’t know better he would think she had a conduit to his brain. ‘Loathed it,’ he admitted.

Her teeth flashed. ‘Knew it.’

‘How?’

She shrugged. One of her breasts crested above the inches-deep bath foam, giving him a tantalising glimpse of its succulent perfection. ‘I don’t know. I just can’t imagine you being happy being coddled and petted and told you were too young to do the things your big sister was allowed to do.’

‘When I was small, my grandmother always used to pinch my cheek when she visited and tell me what a cute little boy I was.’ He grunted at the memory. ‘I hated being babied. The worst was when Sophia was old enough to be left in charge of me. She took an evil delight in bossing me around.’

‘Did you put up with it?’

‘What do you think?’

Her eyes narrowed in contemplation. ‘I think you probably took an evil delight in winding her up.’

He grinned at her astuteness. ‘And you? No, let me guess...’ Narrowing his own eyes in contemplation, he said, ‘No one babied you.’

Her eyes flashed with surprise. ‘How did you guess?’

‘You haven’t got a spoilt bone in your body.’ And what a body it was, he thought, his loins stirring just to remember what lay beneath the thick bath foam.

The dress Gabrielle had worn that night had displayed her curves to perfection but he’d been prepared for the signs of birth. They would have made no difference to him—to Andrés, the stretchmarks of the belly and thighs, and the loosening of the flesh of the breasts that came with birth should be worn as a badge of honour for the giving of life—but Gabrielle had none of them. Her breasts were plump and succulent, her belly and thighs toned, not even a silvery sliver of a stretchmark on them.

Had her young age when having her son protected her from those effects? he wondered. He was no expert, had only a vague memory of his mother’s stretch-marked body from the days she’d sunbathed in a bikini in their tiny garden when he’d been growing up to go on, so what did he know?

Still, it was strange. Surely childbirth should leave some form of mark on the body?

‘Romeo’s five years older than me and was always too busy knocking a ball about with his friends to pay much attention to me,’ she said, breaking through his thoughts. ‘He’s always looked out for me though.’

‘He looks out for your son?’

‘As much as he can. He works on an oil rig, six weeks on, two weeks off. His girlfriend lives in Cadiz so when he’s off he splits his time between us and her.’

‘And your other... You never said if it was a brother or sister.’

Sadness flitted over her face and she looked away, draining her champagne before answering. ‘A sister. Eloise. If I’d been born a week earlier we would have been in the same school year.’

‘I went to school with identical twins born four minutes apart. Sergio told everyone who would listen that he was the eldest.’

She smiled at the anecdote but the sadness remained. ‘Eloise was never like that.’

By the time Gabrielle started school, she’d already known in the instinctive way that children just knew things that Eloise needed protecting.

‘Enough talk,’ she declared.

A thick black eyebrow rose. ‘Oh?’

Tonight was the first night Gabrielle had taken for herself since bringing Lucas home, a memory she knew she would treasure for the rest of her life. To bring Eloise into it when just saying her name made her heart weep...

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