Tomorrow's Child by Lilian Darcy

Author:Lilian Darcy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2013-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE alarm. Music blared from the clock radio precisely at six-thirty, and Paula jerked into wakefulness and froze at once. The room was so light already! Surely it wasn’t usually this light!

It looked like a classical painting—her pale sheets etched with light and shade where their folds draped and highlighted Max’s long body. The yellow glow of morning contoured his hair and his face, gave a sheen to the tanned knobs of his shoulders and showed golden glints at the ends of his dark eyelashes.

As she watched he stirred, and at the exact moment when he opened his eyes she realised that she had missed her one crucial opportunity for escape. Now she was trapped. Naked beneath the sheets, which she’d pulled protectively almost to her chin, she would have to expose herself to him in the moment when she emerged from the bed and crossed the floor to the master bathroom.

No. She couldn’t do it

The ‘morning after’ was tailor-made for regrets, and if he was having any now, without the blessed concealment of darkness, then the sight of her scarred, incomplete body would have to confront him with the issue in the starkest possible way.

He grunted huskily, rolled his athletic body over, smiled a rumpled, gorgeous smile and squinted at the clock. ‘Six-thirty? I think I’ll swear…’ He did, comprehensively, though mildly, and he grinned at the end of it and was already, in only a few seconds, fully awake. ‘I have to go, Paula.’

‘Uh-huh…’ was all she could manage, still wrapped in the sheets like a mummy, biding her time, loving him like crazy, hating the brightness of day.

‘There are some case notes I took home last night that I need today, and I’ve got hospital patients to see,’ he explained.

‘You don’t have to apologise, Max,’ she told him. ‘I know how it is, remember?’

She had two or three problem patients scheduled this morning, as well as a visit from the decorator who had been hired to put the finishing touches to the new suite, which would mean her having to sound articulate about colours and finishes. Did she want stencilling? Marbling? Wallpaper borders?

‘Breakfast would have been nice, though,’ he suggested caressingly. ‘In bed, maybe, with neither of us in any hurry.’

He reached out a finger and softly stroked it along her jaw, her neck, her collar-bone…

‘It’s all right,’ she replied quickly, tense. She definitely didn’t want him to go any lower. ‘We’ll…we’ll manage that another time.’

‘Hope so.’ He hesitated for a moment, and she knew he’d noticed that she wasn’t exactly responding. One red number on the clock radio silently changed from two to three. Three minutes, already, since the music had started. She could see the wheels turning in his mind, and knew the exact moment when he’d reached a decision—to let her mood go unchallenged. Well, there wasn’t time to do anything else, was there?

He slid easily from the bed to sit on its edge and said, more casually than he meant, ‘Mind if I grab a shower?’

‘Go ahead,’ she offered, just as casually.

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