She leapt out of bed, flew into Tilly’s bedroom and then all hell broke loose when she realised that her daughter was missing.
She spent five minutes hunting her down, opening and closing cupboards, panic levels rising by the second, before she remembered the all-important buzzer by the bed whereby anyone could be summoned at any time of the day or night.
She summoned.
Within minutes there was a knock on her door and she yanked it open to Abe standing in the doorway with Tilly in his arms and Georgie’s first instinct was to pull her daughter away from him and hold her tight.
Tilly responded by vehemently protesting while Georgie glared at a composed and cool-as-a-cucumber Abe.
‘What theheckis going on?’ She tried to keep her voice controlled for the sake of her daughter, who was demanding release, but she was shaking with anger.
‘Nothing isgoing on,’ Abe responded, looking slightly taken aback by her frantic response. ‘Mind if I come in?’
‘Yes!’
‘Mummy, I want toplay!’
‘Playwhere, Tilly?’ Georgie was finding it impossible to contain a wriggling toddler and, with a sigh of pure, teary-eyed frustration, she stepped back, allowing Abe to brush past her before swinging around and pinning her to the spot with his dark gaze.
Georgie fell back. Their eyes met and hers involuntarily dipped to his sensuous mouth, hot colour staining her cheeks as she remembered that kiss of the evening before.
‘What’s going on, Abe? Why wasn’t I called when Tilly woke up?’ she demanded in a more restrained voice.
‘I thought that you might sleep a little more soundly than you expected and in a new environment, Tilly might not necessarily wander into your bedroom, not knowing the layout of the suite, so I positioned one of my people by the door to the suite and to inform me immediately if there were any signs of a small, curious child on a mission to explore.’
‘I should have taken her into bed with me. I planned to but I was so tired.’
She deposited Tilly on the ground and hugged her arms around herself, awash with guilt.
‘Go get changed,’ Abe said gently. ‘I will take care of Tilly while you do.’
‘You had no right,’ Georgie muttered helplessly, watching as her daughter wandered off back towards her bedroom and the familiarity of the handful of soft toys that had made the journey with them. Through the open door, Georgie could see her happily holding bunny by the ears while sourcing a few more from the suitcase on the ground.
‘I am her father.’ Abe’s voice was reasonable. ‘You may not want to accept it yet, but I have every right.’
‘She doesn’t know you.’
‘She knows me a lot better now that I have had a chance to spend some time with her. Go and change, Georgie, and try to stop seeing me as the bad guy in all of this, because we’ll never get anywhere otherwise.’
She was still in her pyjamas. Her pyjamas consisted of an old tee shirt with a cartoon character on the front and a pair of stretchy sleeping shorts that left very little to the imagination and she was suddenly conscious of how little she was wearing.
Hard on the heels of that came a surge of heat and she nodded abruptly. ‘Okay, but we need to talk.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘We most certainly do. We will be seeing my father later, and before then we have some important issues to iron out. I have made sure that Tilly has eaten. When you’re changed, I will take you to where Tilly has just been playing—supervised, I should add, by two highly qualified nannies, just in case you might be tempted to think that I might be witless enough to not provide the necessary safeguards for my daughter.’
‘I didn’t think any such thing. Don’t put words into my mouth, Abe.’
Important issues to iron out...
Georgie knew exactly what he was talking about. That marriage proposal. It had been put on ice because he had wanted to give her time to digest what he had put on the table but now there was a thread of steel in his voice and she quailed at what lay ahead of her, a complete unknown.
She had spent the past few years struggling to make sure her life was as secure and as stable as possible, thattheirlives, hers and Tilly’s, were as secure and as stable as possible. It was all she had wanted. For Tilly to have stability. She knew how disorienting and painful a lack of security could be. Now all of that was up in the air and she felt sick at the thought of how she could try and correct it.
She had a sudden, fierce longing for the routine of her poorly paid hotel job and for her small flat and those trips to the park on rainy weekends.
It might not have been grand, but that life had beenhers, and now she was scared stiff because it had been ripped out from under her feet.
She hurried off to change, casting one last look at Tilly, who was happily introducing Abe to her stuffed toy collection.
