Assignment: Baby

‘Oh, don’t make such a fuss.’ she said, half-exasperated, half-indulgent. ‘It’s only a bit of milk.’ She rubbed his shirt vigorously. ‘There…all gone.’

He peered suspiciously at the unpleasantly damp patch behind his shoulder before raising his gaze to meet Tess’s. The honey-coloured eyes were dancing with amusement, and Gabriel felt as if his stomach had disappeared without warning, leaving him with a strange, hollow feeling inside. All at once he was acutely conscious of Tess standing close beside him, of her hand burning through the fine material of his shirt, of her hair, glimmering in the glare of the overhead light, of her perfume, elusive, beguiling, faintly spicy.

At almost exactly the same moment, Tess became aware of the solid strength of the shoulder she was dabbing in such a casual manner. The arm she had taken hold of so intimately was warm, and she had a sudden, shocking sense of him as a man. A man with steely muscles and sleek, bare flesh beneath his clothes. Unaccountably flustered, she jerked her hand away and stepped back.

‘I’ll…er…I’ll see what we have to do next,’ she muttered.

Her fingers were not quite steady as she smoothed out Bella’s instructions on the kitchen worktop. Really, she had to get a grip. She had never found Gabriel remotely attractive before, and she wasn’t about to start now.

Tess concentrated on the notes. ‘There’s something here about a bath,’ she said after a moment, glad to hear that her voice sounded almost normal again. ‘I wonder if we should have done that before feeding him? It’s a bit hard to tell from this.’

In the end, they decided that it wouldn’t hurt Harry to miss a bath for one night. The nanny would be able to wash him the next day and in the meantime wiping him with a flannel, changing his nappy and buttoning him into a clean Babygro presented enough of a challenge for them.

‘Let’s put him in here.’ Gabriel snapped on a light by a low, wide bed set against the far wall of the apartment. To one side, a wall of glass gave a spectacular view over the city lights, while a range of wardrobes curved round like a protective arm, providing privacy from the rest of the apartment.

Tess looked around her, noting the gleaming bathroom to one side. It, at least, had a door. Apart from the front door, it appeared to be the only one in the apartment.

‘Is this where you sleep?’

‘Yes.’ Now that he knew how they worked, Gabriel went over to pull the blinds over the window, but something in the quality of Tess’s silence made him turn. ‘Not tonight, however. You needn’t worry,’ he went on in a dry voice. ‘You’ll have the bed to yourself. I’ll sleep on the couch.’

Tess flushed a little. ‘I wasn’t worrying,’ she said, lifting her chin in a familiar gesture. ‘I was simply thinking that you wouldn’t be very comfortable.’ The sofas were luxuriously wide, but he was well over six foot with a massive strength that she couldn’t imagine fitting very easily onto the cream cushions.

He shrugged. ‘It’s not a problem.’

‘I don’t mind sleeping on the sofa,’ she offered hesitantly. ‘I’m shorter than you.’

Gabriel had been opening and closing wardrobe doors, but he paused at that and looked over his shoulder at her. ‘I realise you have a very low opinion of me, Tess,’ he said with some asperity, ‘but I didn’t know it was quite that low. Do you really think I would let you sleep on the couch while I was warm and comfortable in bed?’