After a while, she stopped saying it. What was there to apologize for? He was as much in her way as she was in his.
And how did he manage to get to Sam’s side so quickly? All the baby had to do was whimper and Dante, damn him, was there.
Tally told herself she’d at least have the pleasure of watching him suffer through the horrors of a full diaper but apparently he’d mastered Diaper 101 on his own. All right, she thought with petty satisfaction, at least he wouldn’t know how to mash a banana just the way Sam liked it—and she was right. He didn’t.
It didn’t matter.
Her sweet little traitor liked Dante’s method just fine. She liked everything he did, including taking her for hand-in-hand walks along the beach, the warm water lapping at her ankles.
When Tally attempted the same thing, Sam shrieked with horror.
Dante could charm any woman he set his eyes on, including two-year-old females.
But he couldn’t charm Tally. Not that he tried. He looked right through her. That was fine. She’d gone back to hating him. She’d never let her little girl be raised by such a cold-hearted tyrant, never mind the performance he was putting on with Sam, never mind the way his face lit each time the baby toddled toward him…
Never mind the numbing sense of sorrow in her own heart at glimpses of what might have been.
As midnight approached, with Sam sound asleep and the house silent, Tally was close to tears, but it wasn’t over Dante.
Never over him.
“Never,” Tally whispered, and wept as if her heart might break in half.
TALLY’S SOFT SOBS carried through the walls.
Lying on his bed, arms folded beneath his head, Dante stared up at the dark ceiling. Let her cry, he thought coldly. For all he gave a damn, she could cry enough salt tears to fill the sea.
After a long time, the sound of her weeping grew softer, then stopped. A muscle in his jaw flexed. Good. Now, at least, he might get some sleep.
Half an hour later, he sat up.
To hell with sleep. He was going crazy, trapped in a house that was rapidly becoming a prison. He pulled on a pair of shorts, opened the patio doors and strode over the beach until he reached the surf.
The moon, full and round, was bright enough to carve shadows into the sand. Dante’s mouth thinned. It was the kind of night you saw on picture postcards. The endless stretch of sand. The white ruffle of the surf. The dark sea stretching to the horizon under the elegantly cool eye of the moon.
Once, he’d considered buying a house in these islands. He’d even mentioned it to Taylor. The idea had come from out of nowhere…or maybe not. Maybe he’d thought of the beauty of this place because Taylor was so beautiful. Because, fool that he was, he’d imagined he was feeling something for her he’d never felt for another woman.
He’d stepped back from that precipice.
And here he was, three years later, with her in the very setting he’d imagined, except all he wanted was to get away from her and return to New York.
Dio, the irony of it!
Dante kicked at the sand as he walked slowly along the beach.
A beautiful island. A beautiful woman, but what good was her beauty if she had no heart? Not when it came to him.
And why should that mean a damn anyway, when he’d never thought the human heart was responsible for anything more than pumping blood through the body?
Wrong, he thought, tilting back his head and staring blindly at the moon. Dead wrong, and it had taken a two-year-old imp to teach him the lesson.
A painful lesson.
For the first time in his life, he’d begun to think about a different existence from any he’d ever known. A house in the country. A dog, a couple of cats, a station wagon. A little girl to run to the door when she heard his key in the lock and maybe a little boy, too…
And a wife, to step into his embrac
e.