Sweet Child of Mine by Jean Brashear Page B

finger at him. “Don’t tell me your bedroom is through that door.”
    His eyes went flat. “All right. I won’t tell you.”
    “Michael, this won’t work. Give me another room.”
    “There isn’t another room.”
    “Give me Bobby’s room.”
    “A ten-year-old boy would hate this room. It would attack his very tenuous manhood.”
    “Then use some of that money you’re so free with and redecorate it for him.”
    “What am I supposed to do with all these furnishings? They won’t fit in the other room.”
    She tried not to feel the pang of loss over a room she already adored. “I don’t care. Store them or whatever.”
    “No.”
    “No? Just like that, no?”
    “If you want it, you pay for it.”
    She sucked in a breath. “You know I can’t afford that. It would cost a fortune.”
    “Exactly.”
    “You could do it, Michael.”
    He shrugged. “But I don’t want to.”
    “I can’t believe you’re behaving like this.”
    His cold eyes challenged her. “Are you saying you can’t resist me? That you don’t have the self-control to stay in your own room?”
    “Of course not,” she snapped. “It’s just—”
    “There are two doors between us. You can shove a chair under the knob if you think your charm is so fatal that my self-control will fail.”
    She thought of hot, deep kisses and his hard male body pressing into hers—but then she reminded herself that she’d just seen a side of him she hadn’t known. That he could be hard and cold, that he’d just demonstrated vividly how unsuitable she’d always known they were.
    This man had women aplenty only too happy tofall into his arms. Women who were hothouse flowers, not sturdy weeds.
    “Fine. But you knock before you enter the dressing room, and I’ll do the same.”
    He quickly shuttered his gaze and nodded. Walking to the bed, he laid her packages on the coverlet. “I’ll be downstairs whenever you’re ready to leave. Look around all you want. I have no secrets.”
    She watched him go, mouth agape at the blatant falsehood. Maybe he really believed that, but she knew she’d never met a more complicated or mystifying man in her life.
    She started to follow him down, then decided a break was in order. A few minutes apart, after the intensity of the last two days, would be very welcome.
    She should go see what Bobby’s room looked like. It still didn’t seem real that someday soon her child would live with her, that she would be the mother she’d wanted to be for ten years. Fear set down roots in her chest, a fear she’d been keeping at bay until now, caught up in the whirlwind of this marriage.
    She’d dealt with kids for years and had been good with them, but being a mother was completely different. What if she couldn’t give Bobby everything he needed? What if he and Michael didn’t suit? Worse, what if he got attached to Michael?
    Fear was a hammer tattooing a beat on her heart. Nothing had ever meant more in her life than doingthis right, than reclaiming the child she’d never wanted to give up. She could still recall his tiny features, the perfect shell of his ears, the nose smaller than a button, the dark hair so like hers that lay against his fragile skull. She’d only had a few moments with him, and she’d spent too many of them wanting to take back her promise, to forget everything she’d known was best for him.
    Drying up the milk in her breasts had been painful, but it had paled against the agony of drying up the love in her heart. The best she’d been able to do was to lock down the forbidden chamber where yearning for her child still dwelled to this day. She’d done the right thing for Bobby because she’d been too young, had had no resources to care for him the way he deserved.
    But knowing that had never seemed to lessen the pain. The best she’d been able to do was to transfer that need to the children she tried to help.
    Which brought the children of Hopechest Ranch to mind. Time to stop thinking about this