His Baby!

‘Do you think that you can suddenly arrive back here and start playing the heavy?’ she demanded furiously. ‘Or does it just do your ego good to have Mick kowtowing to you as if you were the village squire?’

The grey eyes glittered. ‘I really don’t see what you’re so uptight about, Daisy. I would have thought it was perfectly normal to enquire when we might expect you home. It’s a question I would have asked if it had been my mother he was driving. The roads are particularly icy at this time of year, as I’m sure you know.’

Oh, how great to be compared to his mother! ‘Mick’s a perfectly good driver!’ defended Daisy, who had never been in a car with him in her life.

‘I’m delighted to hear it,’ answered Matt urbanely, but his eyes were hard as they flicked intently and tellingly at the amount of leg she was showing. ‘And is that all he’s good at, I wonder?’

Daisy’s cheeks flamed at the implication and at the sudden fizzing of excitement which his cool scrutiny of her legs could provoke. ‘That was a cheap remark!’

He shrugged. ‘Only if you choose to interpret it that way. I could have been talking about his ability to handle a—tractor.’

‘Oh, sure!’

‘And you still haven’t told me what time you’ll be home.’

‘The dance finishes at eleven,’ said Daisy reluctantly, because she knew that determined glint in Matt’s eyes of old.

‘Good. I’ll expect you back by eleven-thirty. I’ll wait up,’ he added, his eyes glittering with a spark of humour as he registered the set line of her mouth.

Something about his confident self-assurance and that arrogant grace sent her blood-pressure soaring. ‘You’ve been away for years!’ Daisy, who knew it down to practically the very second, cried exasperatedly. ‘So how do you think I’ve managed to survive without your bully-boy tactics up until now?’

There was something very like a warning glint in those narrow grey eyes. ‘I don’t know, Daisy,’ he murmured softly. ‘But I intend finding out. You certainly aren’t the same girl I remember.’

‘Of course I’m not! I’m eighteen years old now!’

‘Positively ancient,’ he mocked.

‘And I’m not a girl any more—I’m a ...’ She flushed but still stared at him defiantly, just daring him to make fun of her. ‘Woman,’ she finished, but reluctantly.

The blazing grey gaze was very steady, no trace of mockery there now. ‘So you are,’ he said quietly, and then, on a different, indefinable note which made Daisy’s heart lurch, he added, ‘Somehow I wasn’t expecting it. And now I must go and check on Sophie. Goodnight, Daisy.’ But just before he turned to walk up the stairs he gave her a long, hard look, and she remembered just how for midable he could be. ‘And don’t be late,’ he added softly.

Daisy gulped as she watched his dark, retreating frame, her eyes unwillingly drawn to the long, long legs in the black denim, the broad shoulders in the soft grey shirt. Don’t be late! She’d be as late as she liked! She certainly wasn’t afraid of Matt.

She wasn’t!

Well, maybe she was. Just a little bit. And wasn’t it best to humour him? Because there was no way she wanted him to discover that she’d opted out of doing her exams and didn’t have a clue what she wanted to do in the future. Daisy shuddered as she tried to imagine Matt’s reaction to that. No way. She couldn’t face his anger—certainly not at Christmas.

But there was no reason why he should find out, she told herself reassuringly as she pulled on her thick black coat and buttoned it up to her neck. Mrs Hamilton had promised faithfully that she wouldn’t breathe a word to Matt. And she wouldn’t go back on a promise. And, she thought, if he was only here for a short while, he’d be busy with the baby and catching up with his old friends for most of the time.

Especially friends of the female variety, thought Daisy gloomily. No doubt every woman within miles would soon be flocking to the house, like ants crawling over a jam-pot, once news got round that he was back. There was something very appealing and romantic about a man looking after a baby on his own at the very best of times, but if that man happened to possess over six feet of dark, devastating charm, with a mind like a steel trap, and a self-made fortune which would rival Rockefeller’s—then he’d probably have to fight them off in droves.

Daisy was filled with a stubbornly persistent air of dejection as she swung her long legs into Mick’s battered old car, taking care to keep her knees tightly pressed together, the way they showed you in the magazines. And her mood wasn’t exactly lightened by the truculent scowl which was putting unaccustomed furrows on Mick’s normally smooth, tanned forehead.

‘You didn’t tell me that he was home!’ he muttered darkly as the ignition spluttered then fired on the third attempt and the car pulled away up the curving drive.

Daisy turned to him in surprise. ‘Why on earth should I?’

‘You know,’ he mumbled awkwardly.

‘No, I don’t know. What possible difference should Matt being home make to me? He’s not my guardian. He’s just the son of my mother’s employer.’

Mick shrugged. ‘I suppose I’ll have to get you home on time now, won’t I?’

Daisy frowned. ‘Why? Weren’t you going to?’

His perfect white teeth gleamed like tombstones in the darkness. ‘Thought we’d take the old Delaware road on the way home. They say there’s a great view from there.’ He leered suggestively. ‘Maybe another time. How long’s he staying?’

Absolutely ages,’ lied Daisy sharply, annoyed at herself for feeling so relieved that Matt’s intervention had obviously tempered the ardent desires of Mick Farlow.

Or so she thought.

What she hadn’t expected was for Mick to have the memory span of a gnat, and to forget about not drinking and getting her home on time. His eyes nearly popped out of his head when she took off her coat and he saw what she was wearing, and he immediately took her over to join a group of his friends she’d never met or even seen before. One or two of them looked distinctly shady and she didn’t like the way they were eyeing her up and down, their eyes frequently drawn to her high bust and long legs. She fervently began to wish that she hadn’t worn the dress after all. Oh, why the hell hadn’t she listened to Matt?

She watched uneasily as Mick drank three pints of beer in quick succession, but immediately agreed to his suggestion of a dance. At least if he was dancing he wouldn’t be drinking.

Which was pretty dumb of her. If she’d stopped to think about it, she would have expected him suddenly to develop the dexterity of a feeding octopus once he got her onto the dance floor.

As the dance progressed, Daisy grew more and more uneasy, and then she heard a ribald chuckle and loud whistles from his friends as he slid his hand down to rest proprietorially on her bottom. She felt quite ill.

‘Get your hands off,’ she hissed.

The fingers splayed out over one buttock. ‘Come on, baby—you know you love it really.’

Repelled and beginning to feel frightened, Daisy tried to wriggle out of his arms, but he was a strong farm worker, his burly arms bearing testimony to the physical work he did all day, and his grip was too tight for her to release herself.

‘Yeah, that’s nice.’ He leered. ‘Do it some more. Move that beautiful body against me, baby.’

Really scared now, Daisy was nonetheless determined to keep her head, recognising with disgust that the struggle was exciting him, and that he was making damned sure that she knew about it. ‘Will you let go of me?’ she demanded with icy authority.

‘Oh, come on . . .’ His words sounded slurred. ‘Sexy little thing like you—’

‘Please?’ she appealed.

‘Just begging for it—’

‘Or I’ll scream—’

‘Yeah, scream,’ he mumbled into her hair. ‘A little resistance makes it a lot more fun. And I’ll sure have you screaming later. Screaming for more—’

Daisy brought her foot down hard on his, but since she didn’t weigh a lot and her shoe was completely flat it made no impact whatsoever.

She bent her mouth close to his ear and spoke very slowly and deliberately. ‘If you don’t let go of me right now, then I shall use my knee to hit you in a part of your anatomy which I am assured is painful beyond belief—’

To her astonishment, he let her go at once, and Daisy searched around wildly before grabbing her coat and bag. Blindly, she ran out of the hall and into the cold night air of the December evening, every instinct in her body telling her to put as much distance between them as possible.

Her heart was pounding and her breath was coming in short, painful bursts which looked like smoke against the blackness of the night. At least the snow of earlier hadn’t settled, she thought fleetingly as she stumbled along. She tried to reason with herself that she was probably overreacting, that Mick had just been a little drunk and over-amorous, and that he wouldn’t actually have tried anything.

But there had been something so determinedly sinister about the way he had been holding her against her will that nothing she told herself gave her any comfort. For the first time in her life Daisy felt vulnerable and weak and abused. She had come up against a superior masculine strength which had been cruelly manipulative and had threatened her, and she didn’t like it one little bit.