Melting the Argentine Doctor's Heart / Small Town Marriage Miracle by Meredith Webber / Jennifer Taylor Read Free Book Online Page B

inside him and heat had sizzled in the air around them, thickening it like unseen smoke.
    Well, he could forget about sizzle and thick air between them, she’d made it very clear she was over him long ago, yet she’d hesitated before answering that she couldn’t afford to have come sooner and he’d sensed that might only be part of the truth.
    Estúpido!
That was what he was, to be feeling disappointment about these revelations. He’d deliberately worded his email to hurt her sufficiently that she wouldn’t rush to his bedside and make a martyr of herself caring for him. Not that there was much of the martyr in Caroline, she was far too practical for that,and speaking of practical, he should go home and check what food he had. Maybe someone
would
have to go shopping.
    At least a trip to the market would take him out of Caroline’s orbit for a while.
    With that decided he headed back to the hut, to find Caroline stripping the extremely grubby clothes off an extremely grubby small child.
    ‘I played with the kids, Hor-hay,’ Ella told him. ‘Mummy should have changed my shoes first so my good shoes didn’t get dirty but Mummy says we can clean them, and I can kick the ball a very long way.’
    He looked at the naked child and felt a pang of some indescribable emotion deep inside him. Part ownership, although he knew no one could own another person, and part pride, that he had helped create this perfect little being, and part something else—wonder was the closest he could come to it.
    ‘I have a big tub outside the back door where I do the washing. Do you want to have a bath in that?’ he asked, pleased now he’d insisted on building his hut in the old way with the bench and tub outside. Beyond it he’d put in a shower, but the tub was where the local people bathed their infants.
    ‘Will you help?’ Ella asked. ‘I can do my tummy and my legs and toes and arms and fingers,
and
my ears.’ She threw a glare at Caroline as she added the last bit and he realised it must be a source of argument between them. Was she enlisting his aid against her mother? Could three-year-olds be so manipulative?
    ‘Manipulator
par excellence,’
Caroline said drily, rolling the dirty clothes into a ball. ‘Watch yourself! ‘
    ‘I can do ears if you need help,’ he told Ella, who was practising the new word she’d just heard. ‘Manpitor,’ issued from the small lips, the determination in her practice so charming, so delightful, his chest went tight with pain.
    Again!
    ‘I’ll boil some water for the bath,’ he said, needing to get away for a minute while he took stock of his feelings. It was okay to fall in love with his daughter, he told himself, but now he’d admitted that he found fears rising in the joy—fears for her safety, fears for her health, nameless fears.
    The trouble was, falling in love with anyone, particularly a daughter, hadn’t been part of his life plan.
His
life plan, carefully considered over months of difficult operations, painful treatment and rehabilitation, had been to avoid all emotion in the future. To cut himself off, not from feeling for others, from empathy, but from personal emotional involvement. His father’s love he could handle. He could even cope with Antoinette’s fussing for she’d been their housekeeper since he was a child, but beyond the safe realm of family, he didn’t do emotion any more.
    Or hadn’t up until now, when the figure of a little girl earnestly practising the word ‘manipulator’ had stolen his heart.
    ‘Right, I’ve run cold water in the tub—actually, it’s lukewarm and she probably doesn’t need too much hot in it.’
    Caroline was standing behind him in the small kitchen area, Ella on her hip, a small, super-absorbent towel and a wash-bag in one hand.
    ‘I can do better than that for towels,’ he said, trying to come to terms with the sheer normality of Caroline’s behaviour. She was calmly going about what had to be done as if she hadn’t just