Gabri stumbled and groped for the bathroom door-frame to hold himself up. She nearly ran into him, he stopped so suddenly.
‘That’s horrible!’ When he glanced accusingly over his shoulder at her, his pallor was green.
‘It’s part of life,’ she explained. ‘He’d just lost a baby tooth. That’s all. Sometimes, they bleed.’
‘Oddio,’ he muttered on a tortured breath.
As she followed him into the bathroom, she tried to comfort him with the information a well-meaning nurse had passed on to her at some stage of Cillian’s childhood. ‘It always looks like more blood than it really is, especially when it’s a puddle on the floor.’
‘A puddle on the…’ He gulped. ‘Let me get you bandages.’
Although he seemed to have accepted that she’d rather doctor herself, he overcompensated by piling up dressings and swabs and an entire box of plasters.
‘Antiseptic?’
‘Wait, that’s in the fridge.’
She peered after him as he wobbled to the kitchenette and returned with a small bottle.
‘What’s this?’
‘Put a few drops onto the dressing. It’s prickly pear seed oil. Pressed last week at the co-operative in Sant’Andrea. It’s antibacterial.’
‘This island really does look after you,’ she commented as she took the bottle and sat on the edge of the bath. He turned to go, his hand gripped in his hair and his shoulders tense, but she stopped him. ‘Gabri, what’s the matter? I didn’t mean to upset you with all the…’
‘Blood?’ he prompted.
‘Well, yes.’
He leaned heavily in the doorway, propping an arm on the opposite side. He wasn’t looking at her, so she dared to unwrap the shirt. The splash of red did look like something out of a horror film, but the bleeding appeared to have stopped.
‘Don’t look just now,’ she warned him as she dampened a swab. A hiss from the doorway suggested he’d ignored her warning. ‘You don’t have to talk about it,’ she continued. ‘I’m sorry to have gone on about Cillian’s mishaps.’
‘No,’ he insisted, his voice low and rough. ‘It’s not your fault. It’s about my ex-wife.’
Toni paused with the second swab halfway along the cut. There was trauma in his tone. She recognised it. ‘What was her name?’
‘Rosa,’ he answered flatly. ‘Rosalba,’ he qualified, his jaw working. ‘She… did want children. Even though she miscarried four times and the few weeks she was pregnant were… difficult. There was a lot of—’ He couldn’t even say the word any more.
She wanted to say something, butsorryfelt overused in the past few minutes. ‘I saw you were uncomfortable and I shouldn’t have said anything.’
His gaze swung to her, on her face, not dipping to the cut on her leg. His soft, twisted brow told a complicated story. ‘I’ve tried to tell myself that blood is proof of life, not death, but she was very anxious – all the time over all the years that we tried. I couldn’t…’
She wasn’t sure what he couldn’t do. It almost sounded as though he meant he justcouldn’t.
‘Ecco,’ he said suddenly, straightening and reaching for the little bottle of oil. ‘Let me help you.’ It sounded like a request.
While she finished cleaning the wound, he cut a section of plaster and added the oil. Dropping to his knees, he lifted her foot into his lap and carefully pressed the dressing over the wound, smoothing down the edges.
With the clenched expression on his face, his confession suspended between them, Toni’s heart seemed to forget its usual rhythm. His hand on her calf was firm but gentle. When he glanced up at her, his hair fell into his eyes, making her remember the wash of gratification when he’d touched her face at the beach.
She was here to relax, to enjoy ‘me’ time, whatever that meant. But her thoughts, when they weren’t occupied with parenting paradoxes, were filled with him.
That curl over his forehead was too much to resist. She lifted a hand to brush it aside, to feel the remnants of sunshine and seawater and the warmth of his skin on her fingertips – to see his wary blue eyes turn soft at the affection.
But he was too quick. He snatched her hand, holding it for a moment, his thumb pressed into her palm. ‘I left her. I couldn’t take it and I left her. I told you I ran away, remember?’
Had she forgotten? In this haze of attraction and bad ideas, she’d been ready to excuse him. But he wouldn’t let her. He was issuing his warning – his deterrent.
