Midwife in the Family Way

‘Would you like me to fasten your belt for you?’ He’d turned to face her and she realised she’d forgotten the obvious. She bit her lip. The man was scrambling her brains the way her hands were scrambling to get the clasp done up before, heaven forbid, he did help her.

‘Does the roof go up?’ She was gabbling but suddenly it was very close inside the car.

‘No.’ He reached forward and the engine started with a muted roar. ‘It’s a coupé. A Cambiocorsa 2007. I have one at home.’

‘Really? Only one?’ she said straight-faced. The car was black and low to the ground. She could see that. But she doubted she’d ever feel the need to hire one. ‘So you drove down from Brisbane? This is a hire car?’ And he had one at home. He was certainly from a different world.

His profile shifted as he glanced at her. ‘Are you interested in cars?’

Was she? The subject wasn’t one she’d buy a magazine on. ‘Not really.’

He nodded as if the answer was what he expected. ‘Then let us not discuss them.’ End of discussion.

Emma blinked. He’d assumed a protective and almost fatherly role, and Emma wasn’t sure she liked it. Well, she was no doormat for obedience. Think of your own topic, then, buddy, she thought. He didn’t offer any other conversational gambit and the silence stretched.

He was going tomorrow, she told herself, which made it acceptable if she gave in. ‘I live straight down this road. Barely worth driving, in fact,’ she said with less than subtle pointedness.

‘Si. And I also do not live far from here as I have rented a chalet at the Lakeside.’ He glanced across and then away. ‘They have a fine restaurant. Italian.’ She could hear the smile in his voice, and she wondered if it was just because it was almost dark and she had to rely on other senses or if it was because for the first time today he’d smiled broadly enough that it affected his voice. She was glad she couldn’t see the curve of his lips. She’d been trying not to look at the sinful promise of his mouth all day. No doubt the sight would haunt her.

‘So?’ he said.

What on earth was he saying? ‘So, what?’

He sighed. Patiently, as if with a child, and with this man she was beginning to feel like one. Not something she’d felt since she the age of sixteen and not something she decided she enjoyed. ‘Will you join me for a meal, please, Emma?’

Her heart did that fish thing again. Now? ‘Aren’t you going back to Angus’s?’

He shook his head once in the dimness. ‘His stepmother is there tonight. I dined with him last night and we talked. I will lunch with him tomorrow before I leave.’

Emma filled the silence while she considered the implications of his invitation. ‘Angus had a wonderful relationship with Ned since he’d made up with his father.’ Her mind skittered to the idea of dining alone with Gianni in an intimate setting and away again. Her thoughts went back to Angus. It was safer. ‘He seems to be at peace with Ned’s passing.’

‘Yes.’ Gianni inclined his head while he contemplated her profile. ‘Thankfully they had time to enjoy each other’s company. And Angus was instrumental in my recent contact with my brother. But you haven’t answered my question.’

The guy had a single focus. She went with the answer she’d known she’d make from the beginning. To live dangerously. ‘Perhaps. I need to eat.’ She looked down at her grubby skirt that she’d played cricket in. ‘I’d like to get changed, though.’

He nodded again. ‘How much time do you need?’

She thought about it. How much did she really need? Five minutes. ‘Half an hour,’ she said.

‘Good.’ Satisfaction was obvious. ‘Much faster than I expected.’

She tried vainly not to smile and she hoped he didn’t see or think she was making fun of him. ‘It’s this house, with the roses over the gate.’

She lifted her hand to the handle and his fingers came over the top to stay it. ‘Please wait for me to open it,’ he said quietly, and her hand froze under his. She sighed and leaned back against the leather.

She’d been right. His skin was warm and made the gooseflesh pop up on her arms like bubbles in the muddy sand at the edge of the lake. His hand moved away and she would have sworn his fingers were still there. Hot over hers.

If he could do that with just a touch, she was in big trouble if she invited anything else. But she wouldn’t. It was just a meal, she was feeling flat after the funeral and Grace was away, and she didn’t get to eat at the Lakeside very often. Never had, actually.

He opened her car door and she climbed out. It seemed a waste of energy to her but the cosseting was strangely compelling. He ushered her through the gate and up the path to her front door like an old-fashioned footman. Then waited while she unlocked the door and only left her when she entered her house, but he didn’t drive away until she’d shut the door.

She heard the roar of the car as it accelerated away and Emma’s heart flopped around as she leant back against the closed door. Her hand actually slid to her throat where her pulse pounded. What had happened to her in the last five minutes? It had just been a lift a few hundred metres but she felt vibrantly alive. Ridiculously so.

There were a hundred good reasons not to be attracted to this man, or any man for that matter, and fifteen good reasons to wallow in it.

The hundred were all complications and she didn’t need them.

The fifteen were about the number of good years she estimated she had before the disease that had turned her graceful and gracious mother into a tormented bed-ridden shell of a woman could begin to do the same to her.

Fifty per cent chance of having the gene. In the last few years Emma had toyed briefly with the idea of taking the final genetic test, a test that could prove her fate irrevocably, but she’d always come back to that tiny spark of hope she’d not inherited the predisposing gene. She didn’t think she’d cope if that hope was gone. She couldn’t give up that tiny beam of optimism that once lost would never return.

Her arms crept around her waist and Gianni was forgotten, everything was forgotten, as her worst nightmare touched her again with cold fingers of dread.

The fear was for Grace, her daughter, and the fact that if Emma was shadowed then Grace had a fifty per cent chance of having it, too. Emma couldn’t do it. At this time in her life she couldn’t live with Grace being positive for Huntington’s disease.

Instead, Emma lived her life as if she had only until she turned forty, like her mother had before she’d become ill, and she saved every penny to ensure Grace would have the choices for the support Emma might not be able to give.

But for this moment Emma was alive, she was well, and apparently she was an attractive woman. Not something she’d thought about for a very long time. She didn’t know when she’d decided that she wanted to savour a little of what Gianni had to offer. If he was offering anything apart from a meal, that was.

She’d never looked for another boyfriend after she and Tommy had drifted apart. She’d been too busy. Too focussed.

As two sixteen-year-olds she and Tommy had discovered they’d little in common except Grace, and Emma had been sensible enough not to tie herself to a man she’d already grown out of. Tommy had left to see the world with Emma’s blessing. But maybe she’d missed out on the subtle thrill of a man’s appreciation.

In fact, even with the little exposure to Gianni’s attention today she’d begun to revel in the unfamiliar feeling of being a fragile flower to be cherished and taken care of. Not something she had any experience of and no doubt it would irk her very quickly in the real world, but this was an out-of-the-ordinary opportunity to let herself be spoiled.

And there was something about Gianni that called to her in a way she’d never heard before. Heaven forbid, there might be a fabulous encounter her body was trying to tempt her into, and the idea had a compulsive magnetism, like the man did. As long as she was careful and it didn’t get out of hand.

Gianni was right out of her comfort zone. And he was leaving soon. To go back to Italy. If she made a fool of herself, he was a ship in the night with a home port she couldn’t get much further away from than inland Queensland.

She looked at her watch and bounced away from the door as if someone had poked her with a cattle prod. She’d wasted five minutes!

Chapter Three

TWENTY-FIVE minutes later Gianni knocked on Emma’s door and the sound echoed through Emma’s chest and under her ribcage. Boom. Boom. Boom. He was here. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a real date. Probably never.

She sucked in her breath and ran her tongue inside her gums to make sure she didn’t have any lipstick on her teeth. Still not convinced, she grimaced toothily at the mirror on the way to her door. Yep. All was well. Another deep breath as she paused and hoped she’d dressed right. She opened the door.

Christo. Gianni sucked his own lungful of air. Emma’s blonde hair was loose over her shoulders and she’d abandoned the pink lipstick for a deep sultry red that matched the lush material of her blouse. To call it a blouse was a blasphemy. The soft material clung like a skin and lingered like his eyes on the swell of her breasts and plunged, also like his eyes, down into a V of paradise.

His breath jammed for a moment and then resumed, like his mesmerised surveillance of her preparations. All this in half an hour?

He’d never been attracted to trousers on women, preferring the femininity of a swirling skirt, but when she twirled to show him, the way her firm buttocks snuggled into the stretchy black material made his eyes blink. Then she moved back further to open the door for him and he could see it hung almost like a skirt, lots of fabric swirling around her legs from the tight tapering waist, teasing him with the thought of it in a pool of darkness at her feet.

‘Hello?’ Her voice broke the spell and he blinked and swore again in his head. What was it about this woman that grabbed him by the throat and demolished his brain?

‘Bella. You are beautiful and took my breath away.’

She laughed. Softly, and to him like the musical bells of his favourite chapel. Everything she did entranced him. ‘Thank you.’ she said. ‘The men around here would be far too embarrassed to say that out loud.’