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Nia bit her lip to stop herself grinning—actually she knew a lot more about babies than she’d let on.
‘I do admire a confident attitude.’ She bent over and picked up a large holdall emblazoned with big fluffy yellow rabbits. ‘This looks promising,’ she added, tossing it towards him.
Jake automatically caught it one handed. He had an enviable athletic coordination, which was probably why she found herself staring when he walked across a room.
‘But…’
‘I’ll cancel your appointments,’ she said, turning a deliberate blind eye to his stereotypical display of helpless male panic.
When she returned a few minutes later Jake was struggling with the plastic tags of a disposable nappy, several ruined ones lay on the floor beside him. The baby was kicking happily, enjoying his freedom.
He glanced around as she came in. His eyes moved upwards from her slim ankles, moving up the shapely curve of her calves before eventually reaching her face. His colour was slightly heightened.
‘A very poor design,’ he grumbled as she dropped down onto the floor beside him.
‘Perhaps you don’t have the gentle touch?’ He’d used his folded jacket as a changing mat for the baby and through the fine fabric of his shirt she could make out the shadowy suggestion outline of dark hair across his chest.
Anyone would think the man was stark naked, she told herself impatiently. That neat jolt of inexplicable sexual awareness had been impossible to misinterpret even if she’d wanted to. Remember rule number one, Nia. Never, never get romantically interested in your boss. She’d seen too many friends take that particular path to disaster.
‘Nobody has ever complained about my touch.’ It was impossible to tell from his sardonic expression if any double entendre was intended. The mere possibility was enough to make her lower jaw drop. ‘I thought you didn’t know anything about babies?’
Hands flat on the floor, Nia leaned over the baby, making those unintelligible noises small helpless things inspired in the female breast. Half of her hair was loose again, he’d noticed it didn’t usually last beyond midmorning no matter how she tried to restrain it. The swathe of pre-Raphaelite curls swung with a life of their own over her shoulders and brushed the floor. Jake could smell the fresh scent of her shampoo, and a muscle in his lean cheek jumped.
The baby watched the fiery cloud apparently fascinated—genetics had a lot to answer for, Jake thought drily. Then his nephew did something he’d spent far too long thinking about, either by design or accident, he reached up and wrapped his small chubby fingers in a handy strand. Nia let out a yelp and then a soft chuckle.
‘Aren’t you a strong boy,’ she admired warmly, trying to loosen the tenacious grip with little success.
Jake doubted her response would have been as mild had he chosen to sink his fingers deep into that glowing mass that was composed of shades that ran the full length of the spectrum from gold to deepest Titian.
‘What’s his name?’ A smile on her face, she turned her head and found that Jake was watching her with an odd, stomach-tightening intensity.
He didn’t look away, just held her eyes. She didn’t know why, perhaps just because he could? He could make female hearts—not to mention stomachs, go haywire, even if their owners didn’t actually like him. Even if their owners were supposed to be happily engaged to someone else.
‘Liam.’
‘What a lovely name.’ Nia didn’t like the way her voice had dropped a husky octave. It had a worrying come-hither sound to it. She waited hopefully for her pulse rate to slow down.
‘Bridie was Irish.’
‘How did she…? Sorry it’s none of my—ouch!’ She winced and bent her head closer as the baby tugged.
‘Let me.’ With one hand he took some of the slack out of the long silky hank of hair to protect her scalp from sudden assaults and with the other he gently prized the tiny curling fingers from her hair.
It was just as well the task didn’t take him long because she’d forgotten to breathe for the duration. The couple of deep restoring breaths she took to compensate had the middle two buttons on her shirt popping. She hastily pulled the two sides together to cover the pretty lavender lace of her bra.
Whilst she’d automatically adapted her clothes to blend in with the conspicuous conservative office dress policy she’d seen no need—until now—to extend that trend to her undergarments.
‘Is he a toucher?’ her flatmate Toni had sympathetically asked when she’d confessed she wished she’d never started this particular job. Nia had laughed—her laughter had been a little strained. The idea of Jake Prentice chasing her around his desk, or even hers, had been so ludicrous she couldn’t even bring herself to think about it—you couldn’t count one or two disturbing dreams as thinking, could you? The subconscious was a law unto itself.
She hadn’t realised until that moment that he’d never touched her before, not even the casual touching of hands—she’d have remembered. She skipped swiftly over the worrying fact she was so certain of this. It was almost as if he had actively avoided touching her. With an impatient shake of her head, she dismissed this silly idea.
‘Thank you,’ she said huskily as, cheeks pink, she tried to refasten the buttons with clumsy fingers.
What would she do if he tried to help her out of that situation, too? She had a sudden mental image of his long clever fingers dextrously addressing the problem of her buttons—only he wasn’t fastening them! She could feel the warm surge of blood that washed over her fair Celtic skin.
‘I think he’s hungry.’
‘Is he bottle fed?’ she wondered out loud.
‘The poor little tyke didn’t have the option.’
‘Of course not,’ Nia said, miserable that she’d been so tactless. Then as she saw the direction of his oddly distracted gaze she glanced down to check that she was still fully buttoned.
When she raised her relieved eyes, they collided explosively with his. The impact shuddered through her body, awakening all sorts of embarrassing physical responses. Rather than draw attention to the most obvious of these, she didn’t lift her hands like a shield over her tingling breasts.
Jake was astonished that his eyes had strayed as obviously as a schoolboy or some sort of pathetic lecher when he was speaking to the woman. The breast-feeding connection had just been too much for his self-control, especially after that tantalising glimpse of creamy cleavage.
‘Perhaps there’s a bottle in the bag?’ Her voice was desperately normal.
‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ Because you were too busy ogling your secretary is why, he silently replied with a self-derisive shrug. He had no intention of getting a reputation as a serial sucker in the workplace. Besides, she wasn’t available… which was just as well because they had nothing whatever in common.
‘Let me hold him.’ The darkened damp patch on the lining of his jacket was pretty obvious as she picked up the baby. ‘Oops.’ Considering the name she’d seen hand-stitched into the lining, that was quite a costly accident.
To her surprise Jake gave a quick grin—the spontaneous nice sort of grin that she hadn’t known he was capable of. Nia frowned, she’d felt safer when he was an inhumanly demanding boss; she didn’t need any hints of niceness. Not when she had developed this worrying tendency to think lustful thoughts about him. Actually she didn’t even think them—they’d been springing fully formed into her head all afternoon!
CHAPTER TWO
JAKE divided the list of anyone he thought might be able to locate his brother in two and whilst the baby, his stomach full, slept, they worked their way through the contacts.
‘Any joy?’ He pushed the intervening door open and leaned against the jamb, rolling his head slowly from side to side to relieve the tension.
Despite a work schedule that would have had normal mortals on their knees, this was the first time Nia had ever seen him display any physical tiredness. She shook her head rapidly when his quizzical expression brought home the fact she’d been staring a little too obviously.
‘Then we’d better try his place. I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do if there’s no clue there. Are you ready?’
It wasn’t a question or even a request. Nia resisted the temptation to salute.
‘Isn’t there anyone who could look after the baby? Grandparents…?’
Jake glanced rather impatiently down at her, adjusting his stride, rather belatedly, to accommodate the height of her heels and the disparity in their leg length.
‘My mother’s in the States where my sister’s due to give birth to twins at any second, and Josh’s in-laws would only be too happy to take responsibility. As far as they’re concerned possession’s nine-tenths of the law,’ he said drily.
Nia watched as he clipped the baby seat into the back of the Jaguar saloon he drove and wondered where she’d have sat if he’d gone in for a convertible—the boot, probably.
‘You can’t think they wouldn’t give Liam back.’
‘That,’ he said, holding the door open for her—coldly courteous to the last, ‘is exactly what I think. They’ve been trying to convince Josh to let them bring up the baby ever since Bridie died—subtly, and then not so subtly. They’d like nothing better than for Josh to prove himself an unfit father and Josh—being Josh,’ he grated, his voice harsh with frustration, ‘is going out of his way to prove their case. They never wanted Bridie to marry him in the first place.’
Something about the way he said that made her frown thoughtfully. ‘Why, did they have someone else in mind?’ she asked, responding to an intuitive flash.
Jake turned the key in the ignition and the car purred smoothly into life. He’d known it was a mistake to take her out of the office environment. Those big eyes were going to get all misty any minute now, and then she’d decide to personally sort out his life.
‘Yes,’ he said, turning his head to look at her. ‘Me.’
‘Oh!’
This astonishing revelation put an entirely new twist on matters. God knows what emotions were bottled up in that very impressive chest, she thought, unable to resist a furtive little glance at that general area of his anatomy.
He wouldn’t be human if he didn’t feel a bit ambivalent about his twin. On top of that, he was obviously grieving for a woman he’d once loved—still did, for all she knew. God, what a mess, she thought, feeling way out of her depth.
‘Oh indeed,’ he mocked, nodding to the uniformed guardian of the underground parking area. ‘I was engaged to Bridie before she met Josh. If any aspects of my personal life fascinate you, just come right out and ask. The office grapevine has only recently become relatively quiet on the subject. I’d prefer nobody resurrected it.’ His eyes were icily cold as they touched her face.
‘I’m aware you don’t think much of me as a secretary, Mr. Prentice, but I’m no gossip,’ she responded huffily.
‘Under the circumstances I think you’d better make it Jake, and you should know how to keep a secret. I would imagine every soul in the building has confided their deepest darkest ones to you by now. Does it ever occur to you you’ve picked the wrong profession? You seem to think it your mission in life to sort out peoples’ lives.’
‘I’ve had no complaints about my secretarial skills until now—well, not many,’ she conceded honestly. ‘But that wasn’t my fault. I don’t like being groped,’ she added darkly.
‘I’ll keep that in mind,’ came the dry reply.
‘I didn’t mean you,’ she said with startled dismay. ‘I know you wouldn’t dream…’
‘We all dream, Nia,’ he replied cryptically.
There was a really tight feeling in her chest as her racing mind delivered various versions of what the man beside her might dream—not about her, of course—he didn’t like red hair and hers was very hard to ignore.
‘I didn’t know your brother lived out of town,’ she said after they’d travelled for a short time in uncompanionable silence.
He flicked her a quick sideways glance that said he’d forgotten she was there. ‘He does.’
‘How far out?’ She was doing some quick mental calculations. Just how long would it take her to get back from wherever he was taking her? ‘It won’t do me much good if you let me go on time if it’s going to take me hours to get back to the city,’ she added crisply when he didn’t immediately respond.
‘Oh, I forgot, your urgent appointment.’ His mocking drawl made her eyes narrow angrily.
‘I realise that my personal life fades into insignificance beside yours.’
‘What is it that’s so damned important, anyway?’
‘I need to catch a train home for the weekend.’
‘Oh, yes, the girl from the valleys.’
‘Actually I live on a mountain, not in a valley, and your acccent’s all wrong. I’m from North Wales not South.’
‘Why would someone who lives on a mountain—the northern variety—want to come and live in a poky bedsit?’
‘How do you know I live in a poky bedsit? Actually I share a flat—quite a nice flat.’ Though that depended on what you were used to, and she suspected Jake Prentice was used to the very best—top-drawer houses, cars, she stroked the soft leather upholstery, and women, she decided with throwing him a sour look.
‘And do you share this flat with the fiancé?’
Nia’s eyes transferred to her lap where she selfconsciously rubbed the antique garnet-and-pearl-encrusted ring on her left hand.
‘Huw lives in Wales,’ she said shortly.
‘Hence the breathless eagerness to get back home.’ His tone held a faint but definite impression of a sneer. ‘I’m surprised he’s happy to let you move so far away.’ She was wilful enough, he thought, thinking of that square determined little chin, to go her own way regardless.
His quick glance, she decided, suggested he wouldn’t have trusted her as far as he could throw her.
‘There aren’t many jobs to be had on mountainsides.’
‘But…Huw, he has one?’
‘His family’s land adjoins Dad’s farm,’ she replied shortly, uncomfortable at the probing nature of his questions.
‘I can’t see you as a farmer’s wife.’
Nia wasn’t sure she wanted to know what he did see her as. She saw no reason to correct this shaky interpretation of the information, either. In one way Huw’s family were farmers, they did own vast tracts of hill land and also a tidy bit of much more profitable lowland pasture and woods. The estate had at least a dozen tenant farms and a beautiful manor house with gardens that were open to the public on bank holidays.
These days the estate, which Huw ran, was almost a hobby, most of the family’s money came from some very clever investments in the leisure industry. If she had still been engaged to Huw and wearing his ring, not the one she’d inherited from her grandmother, Huw might indeed have been unhappy about her decision to move to London. As it was, he probably felt relief.
She gave a quick glance over her shoulder at the sleeping baby—happily, he was still dead to the world—just as Jake slowed down to pass several people on horseback. It really was getting worryingly rural.
‘Why didn’t you tell me your brother lived in the back of beyond?’
‘If I had, would you have come along?’ He glanced coolly at her indignant face. ‘Exactly.’
‘I’ll miss my train. Not that you’d care,’ she added wrathfully. ‘Just so long as you’re getting your own way.’
‘You think I want to spend my afternoon with a crying baby and a…’ He broke off suspiciously abruptly and continued in a reasonable voice she didn’t believe for an instant. ‘If you miss your train tonight you can have Monday off.’
‘And a what?’ she said in a dangerously quiet voice. ‘A baby and a what?’
‘Secretary.’
She gave a dismissive snort that went a bit wobbly because he was negotiating a rough bone-shaking mud track. ‘That wasn’t what you were going to say.’
‘I thought better of it,’ he admitted frankly as he drew up in front of a small but picturesque cottage. ‘I have a healthy respect for red-headed tempers. Here we are,’ he added unnecessarily. ‘No signs of life that I can see,’ he concluded gloomily after his initial inspection.
Nia followed his lead and clambered out of the car. ‘I know you don’t like redheads,’ she shouted at him. Hearing the childish sound of her waspish accusation, she winced.
Jake’s initial sharp glance held surprise and then, as she watched, amusement pulled at the corners of his mouth. Whilst he was still watching, she lurched inelegantly as one heel slid on the slippery cobbled surface. Go on, girl, give him something to laugh properly about, why don’t you?
‘Farmer’s daughter did you say?’
Nia caught her breath and her balance. ‘I thought I was dressing for the office today,’ she replied with as much dignity as she could muster.
‘Is that what you call it?’ His eyes ran comprehensively over her pale green, soft faux silk skirt and matching blouse, they dwelt on the perilously high heels she wore.
