LITMIR.BIZ

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shirt and trousers he looked too damnably attractive for her unsettled state of mind.

      ‘Good morning, Regan,’ he chided her softly, stooping over her shoulder in the process of pushing in her chair, his open jacket brushing the short sleeve of her cherry-red shift dress.

      She clenched her teeth on a smile. ‘Good morning,’ she parroted. She accepted Alice’s offer of freshly squeezed orange juice and a dish of sliced fresh fruit in yogurt and looked around the table.

      She had been so preoccupied with her effort not to react to Joshua that she had barely registered anyone else in the room, and now she felt a shock of recognition as she stared into a pair of familiar light brown eyes, gazing at her from across the table over the top of a tall stack of buttermilk pancakes.

      He smirked at her surprise. ‘Hi.’

      ‘Hello, Ryan,’ she blurted. ‘Were you at the party last night? I didn’t see you.’

      ‘Nah—I have exams starting on Monday, I had to swot.’

      In the act of reseating himself beside the youth, Joshua snapped up his head. ‘You two know each other?’

      ‘Sort of,’ hedged Regan, praying that the sly humour that had entered the young man’s eyes didn’t mean he was going to rat on her for the pleasure of seeing an adult squirm. Today he had his hair slicked back into a neat ponytail and was wearing a brown T-shirt that made him look even more like a beanpole.

      ‘We ran into each other yesterday and had a bit of a chat, didn’t we, Ryan?’ Her eyes silently begged him to play it casual.

      ‘So, did you see any more of those birds?’ he said loudly.

      Sir Frank frowned. ‘There’s no need to shout, lad, we’re not deaf.’

      ‘Sorry, but I thought Regan was hard of hearing.’ Ryan’s eyes were owlishly innocent behind his wire glasses.

      The wretch! Regan gave him a speaking look which he returned with a pious grin as he stuffed another pancake in his mouth.

      ‘Why on earth should you think that?’ asked Hazel.

      Ryan moved his thin shoulders up and down, pointing to his bulging cheeks to explain why he couldn’t answer.

      ‘He must have misunderstood something I said,’ Regan supplied hurriedly, ‘We were bird-watching, so we were whispering—’

      ‘Bird-watching?’ Joshua’s eyebrows shot up. He looked sceptically at the young man munching innocently at his side. ‘Since when have you taken up such a tame hobby, Ryan? I thought Cyberspace ruled your life. Although I suppose staring at native flora and fauna could be considered an advance on staring at a computer screen all day. At least it gets you out in the fresh air.’

      ‘Nothing’s tame to a young, enquiring mind,’ Regan objected at his disparaging sarcasm. If he was going to be a father he needed to buck his ideas up. ‘I think children should always be encouraged to find everything interesting and not be stuck with labels that inhibit them from wanting to learn…’

      Ryan gulped down his pancake to protest. ‘I’m not a child.’

      ‘I was speaking generally. Whether you’re five, fifteen or fifty, you’re still someone’s child,’ she countered, dipping her spoon into her fruit.

      ‘Yes, but not a child. A child is someone between the ages of birth and puberty,’ he argued.

      She recalled his water-dripping-on-stone technique of wearing her down from the previous day.

      ‘According to the dictionary, a child is also a human offspring—’ she persisted.

      ‘But not in the first meaning of the word,’ he interrupted stubbornly. ‘I bet if you looked it up you’d find my meaning listed before yours.’

      ‘Don’t take that bet,’ came Joshua’s dry advice.

      ‘I wasn’t going to,’ dismissed Regan. ‘OK,’ she told Ryan, finding it amazingly easy to sink to his level, ‘you win—you’re far too boringly pedantic to be a mere child. You have to be at least ninety before you get to drive other people crazy by arguing endlessly over such irritating trivia with such single-minded intensity.’ She smiled at him sweetly. ‘I guess that puts you somewhere in your second childhood.’

      Ryan thought about that for a moment, his eyes narrowing behind the round rims of his glasses in a way that struck a faint chord of uncomfortable resonance in Regan’s brain.

      ‘You kept arguing, too…’

      ‘That’s because I was right, but I showed my maturity by letting you win in deference to your mental age. When I was a child, I was taught to respect my elders…’

      She tilted up her nose at him and he grinned, attacking his pancakes again. ‘You didn’t let me win.’

      ‘If you say so, dear,’ she said, in the indulgent, forgiving tone that she knew men—both young and old—hated to hear.

      Ryan opened his mouth.

      ‘Give it up, Son. Women are genetically programmed to have the last word. They can never bear to allow a man to feel that he’s won an argument.’

      ‘But, Dad…you told me never to give up on a fight when I believe I’m in the right!’

      Son? Dad?

      Regan’s spoon clattered to her plate, splattering fruitjuice and yoghurt over the pale yellow tablecloth.

      ‘He—You—You’re father and son?’ she said stupidly, dabbing at the tablecloth with her napkin in order to disguise her shaking hands.

      Her eyes darted from face to face, suddenly seeing the echo of the boy in the man and the foreshadowing of the man in the boy…the similar angle of their cheekbones, the narrow, intelligent temples, the strong line of their noses.

      Joshua’s eyes narrowed, exactly as his son’s had a few moments earlier. She must have been blind not to have seen it before!

      ‘I thought you said that you and Ryan had talked?’

      ‘Yes, but not about you!’ He had been the single subject she had been desperate to avoid.

      An unholy amusement filtered across his face as enlightenment dawned. ‘Let me guess…you didn’t realise who he was because you never got around to exchanging surnames? Seems to be a habit of yours…’

      Regan seethed as he picked up his cup of black coffee and took a leisurely sip.

      ‘You mean it’s just what happened when you and Regan met the first time?’ chuckled Hazel, who had been following the conversation with lively interest. ‘A case of like father, like son!’

      Flustered violet eyes clashed with thunderstruck grey as they shared a moment of mutual consternation. Visions of their torrid sexual encounter danced between them.

      ‘God, I hope not,’ muttered Joshua fervently, and Regan knew that she was going to blush as Ryan sat up in his chair, his precocious antennae twitching at the silent interaction. She quickly cast around for an innocuous change of subject.

      ‘So…where’s Chris this morning?’ she asked.

      Bad choice. Hazel’s eyes lowered as she thoughtfully stirred a lump of sugar into her tea and Sir Frank stared out of the window and made a gruff remark on the blustery day.

      ‘Still sleeping off last night,’ said Joshua. ‘Why? Were you hoping to see him?’

      ‘No—oh, no…I just wondered, that’s all.’ In her haste to disassociate herself from the question she allowed Alice to persuade her to a salmon cake she didn’t really want. ‘If he’s a doctor I suppose he must work very hard…’ She trailed off, seeing that she had only compounded her error as Joshua’s expression

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