Page 22 of Bound By Her Baby Revelation (Hot Winter Escapes)

She was burning up. How could he sit there, as cool as a cucumber, while she wasburning up? And how could her body be soawareof him even though her head was fuming, hating him and going over what had happened in those briefsecondsin torturous detail?

Her brain was being sensible and giving her the ammunition to rage, but her body...that was a different matter. She thought of his eyes resting on her,seeingher the way no man had ever seen her before, and something tingled between her thighs and made her nipples tighten in crazy awareness, filled her veins with a rush of hot blood.

And her disobedient eyes were trying hard to put him into perspective, to see him as the stranger who had turned her world upside down by inconsiderately showing up before she’d had time to get her house in order. But instead all she could see was his ridiculously handsome face: the sharp, chiselled features, the thick, sooty lashes and those deep, dark eyes watching her without revealing anything.

‘I knocked.’

‘That’s a lie!’

‘Let me get you something to eat...to drink.’

‘I’m not hungry!’

‘Kaya...’

‘You might own this house but that doesn’t mean that you can open and shut doors without knocking first.’

‘I knocked!’ He vaulted to his feet, pausing briefly to stand in front of her and meet her furious eyes head on.

In his head, he saw her naked coming out of that bath, water streaming over her beautiful, supple body. He couldn’t get the image out of his mind, and when he next spoke his voice was low and hoarse.

‘I knocked, Kaya. I was worried. I left you alone and came down here, and the minutes ticked by, and the next time I looked at the clock nearly an hour had gone by and, damn it, I was worried!’

He stared at her, raked his fingers through his hair and was overwhelmed. Overwhelmed, now that he was verbalising how he’d felt, by astonishment at just how worried he had been that something had happened to her—that she’d fallen, banged her head, knocked herself out, hell, pretty much gone and done anything to herself.

She wasn’t his responsibility!

So why had he been worried sick about her?

Worrying sick about anybody just wasn’t in his DNA. He didn’t have that gene. He knew what strength and independence felt like and they didn’t include vivid scenarios in his head that bore no relation to reality when he sat down and analysed them.

He was way too emotionally detached for any show of weakness along those lines. He wondered whether, in some weird low-level way, hedidfeel responsible for her and decided that, if he did, then it made perfect sense. She was in his house, temporarily displaced because of him, and while she was there then surely he couldn’t treat her with the sort of bone-deep detachment with which he treated everybody else?

And then...there was the connection to his mother, the woman he had never known. Kaya had known her. It was a peculiar situation. When he’d arrived here, the last thing he’d expected to find, or perhaps the last thing he’d had any interest in finding, had been connections to the woman who had given him up for adoption.

Yet, he had not been able to escape the slow build-up of a picture he hadn’t asked to see. The mere fact that Kaya was who she was, and there was no denying her inherentgoodness, gave him the sort of insight into the woman who had given birth to him that he hadn’t asked for

However hard he subconsciously tried to prevent his thoughts from meandering into areas he knew would always prove futile, he still found himself doing it. He told her that her pleas for him to try and see Julie Anne for the person she had been before she had died were falling on deaf ears, andof coursethey were, but even so...

His imagination had been stirred, much to his annoyance. So it was a complex situation—little wonder his responses weren’t in line with what he would have expected them to be!

‘I don’t need you being worried on my behalf,’ Kaya snapped.

‘You could have fallen...hurt yourself.’

‘And I definitelydon’tneed a knight in shining armour to rescue me from an accident that never happened!’

‘Trust me,’ Leo ground out, ‘No one on this planet would ever be tempted to call me a knight in shining armour...’

Their eyes tangled. He moved towards her and pulled a chair so close to her he could see the luminous, satiny smoothness of her skin close up.

‘I’ll bet,’ Kaya returned in a driven undertone, but her heart was beating fast and there was a swooping inside her that made her mouth go dry.

He might not be a knight in shining armour but he had taken care of her after she’d twisted her ankle. It had been a simple accident but she knew that there were guys who, in a similar position, would have seen her as a nuisance, hobbling around and taking up space in a house they had come to sell.

She thought of him carrying her up those stairs, thought of the gentle way he had examined her ankle and the way he had done his utmost to make sure she was relaxed because of how highly strung and sensitive she’d been with him, and she felt a whoosh of shame at her ungracious attack on him now.

He wouldn’t have just barged in for the hell of it.

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