LITMIR.BIZ

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had outraged him, encouraging his damaging determination to change her attitude. Meu Deus, after her outburst, he would scarcely be looking in that direction again, which meant that Vitale had won the bet outright and as the loser he would have to hand over his cherished sports car. Exasperation and growing annoyance gripped him. He would now be gone for weeks in any case.

       One last try...

      When he got back to London next month, what would he have to lose? He could attempt outright bribery, Zac decided with sudden savage cynicism...use the power of money to persuade for once in his life. Freddie had refused his first generous tip and then had just as swiftly changed her mind and accepted it, he recalled with a sceptical curl of his full sensual mouth. She would turn out to be like every other woman he had ever met: she would surrender for money. After all, she wasn’t working all day on her feet as a waitress for fun.

      * * *

      Freddie was having a dream about a man with eyes the colour of crushed ice, a wealth of silky blue-black hair and a full sensual mouth.

      It was a wonderful dream until a little hand shook her arm and a little voice said, ‘Bekfast? Auntie Fred...bekfast?’ while one warm little body pushed for space in her single bed and another warm little body crawled up over the top of her.

      With a groan, Freddie woke up and checked her alarm in case she had slept in. Some hope of that with her nephew and niece around, she thought ruefully, with three-year-old Eloise pinning her up against the wall and ten-month-old Jack lying on top of her in a happy baby sprawl.

      ‘You don’t lift Jack out of his cot,’ she told her niece for the tenth time. ‘He could get hurt. It’s not safe if I’m still asleep—’

      ‘You wake now,’ Eloise pointed out cheerfully as Freddie scrambled over her with Jack in her arms and went to change him.

      A vague recollection of her dream flushed her triangular face and her soft mouth tightened, her brown eyes sparkling with self-loathing. Loser alert, loser alert, she chanted inside her head in exasperation. Eloise and Jack’s father, Cruz, had been a very good-looking guy as well, beautifully dressed and polite, but he had turned out to be a terrifyingly violent drug dealer and a pimp. Her older sister, Lauren, had died of a drug overdose within days of Jack’s birth, utterly destroyed by the man she had loved, who had not only refused to acknowledge his children but had also so far escaped paying a single penny towards their support.

      Zac whatever-his-name-was might not be either beautifully dressed or polite, but he had been staying for weeks in the very expensive penthouse suite in the exclusive hotel where she worked in the bar and, although he had been gone for over a month now, the suite was apparently being held for his return. How the heck was he affording that when as far as she could see he didn’t engage in any normal form of work? He also mixed with some very flash, international, business-suited men. He was dubious and up to no good, of course he was, she told herself angrily, furious that the Brazilian had invaded her dreams. It had been bad enough, she acknowledged, when she’d had to see him every day in the bar. And now that he was gone, why hadn’t she completely forgotten about him?

      It was even more weird that he had shown such an interest in her in the first place, she reflected irritably. She had seen how attractive he was to women while she worked. Zac wasn’t a mere babe magnet, more a babe tornado. She had seen desperate women do everything but strip in front of him in an effort to gain his attention. They nudged up to him at the bar, tripped nearby, tried to strike up conversations and buy him drinks. And he acted as if they didn’t exist, behaving like a blind celibate monk in their radius. Weird and suspicious, right?

      After all, Freddie knew she wasn’t a show-stopper. She was way too undersized to be one. Barely five feet tall and slender, with only a very modest amount of curves. She had dark blonde hair that fell halfway to her waist and plain brown eyes. So why would a guy with Zac’s attributes chase a waitress unless he was a weirdo? Or some kind of user who assumed she would be stupid enough to fall for whatever nefarious purpose he had in mind? Well, no, Freddie had never been stupid and she knew how to look after herself, particularly after having spent years watching her late sister make the very worst decisions possible.

      Freddie made breakfast for the children quietly, striving not to wake up her aunt, Claire, who had come home in the early hours. Claire, her late mother’s youngest sister, was only six years older than twenty-two-year-old Freddie, so they had never had the traditional auntie/niece connection, being far too close in age for that, but they had always got on well. Even so, just at present Freddie was worried about the other woman’s mood. Claire was being evasive and quiet, not to mention going out a lot and using a babysitter without ever talking about where she was going. Freddie believed in respecting Claire’s privacy but, at the same time, she couldn’t help worrying herself sick that their little ‘family’ arrangement was somehow at risk.

      At Freddie’s instigation, Claire had applied to foster the kids after Freddie was turned down for the job. That had been after Lauren’s death when the welfare services had wanted to remove the kids from Freddie’s care and put them into a foster home with strangers. Freddie had been deemed too young and inexperienced to take charge of the children she had been looking after from birth—for that was the unlovely truth about her late sister’s parenting skills. Lauren’s world had had only two focuses: drugs and her violent, threatening boyfriend. Freddie had long been the only person available to care for Eloise and Jack while trying at the same time to dissuade her sister from her worst excesses.

      And there she had failed abysmally, she conceded sadly, having found it impossible either to get Lauren off drugs or to persuade her to break up with Cruz. Grief still filled her when she thought of the loving, light-hearted big sister she had grown up with and clung to in foster care. Their parents had died in a car crash when Freddie was ten and there had been no relatives willing to take them in. Five years older, Lauren had been more like a little substitute mother than a big sister, at least, until she had fallen under Cruz’s influence and every rule had been broken, every moral flouted, every evil permitted. Freddie had been stuck in the middle of all that horror from the day of Eloise’s birth, knowing that if she moved out her niece would be lucky to survive that chaotic household where only constant vigilance protected the weak and vulnerable. Claire had urged her to walk away and turn her back but she had loved Eloise too much to do that.

      So, when Claire had generously agreed to apply to be the kids’ foster carer even though she wasn’t really ‘a kiddy person’, as she put it, the agreement had been that Freddie would continue doing the lion’s share of the childcare. That meant that Freddie stayed home days to see to the children and worked nights in a bar, having readied the kids for bed before she left Claire’s tiny terraced home. Claire had confessed herself content to live off the foster-care payments but Freddie had had to find work to bring in some extra money.

      And during Zac’s stay at the hotel, his tips had virtually doubled Freddie’s earnings. He had routinely tossed her two fifty-pound notes every time she served him and the first time, aware of his personal interest, she had taken umbrage and tossed them back, telling him she wasn’t for sale, only to be ambushed by another waitress who had angrily reminded her that their tips went into a communal pot, so she had had to go back to Zac’s table and apologise and pick up the discarded notes.

      His unsought generosity had, however, reclothed Eloise and Jack, put some very nice meals on the table and now that little gold pile was almost gone it was time for a treat, she thought, determined to start being more positive and stop worrying about Claire, who, ultimately, would do what she wanted to do regardless of what anyone else wanted. Equally, why was she beating herself up about a stupid dream? Fantasies were harmless and, in the flesh, Zac was decidedly a fantasy, a traffic-stoppingly beautiful man whom women stood still to study until they recollected themselves and, blushing, moved on.

      Of course, Freddie had done worse several weeks earlier when she had lost her temper with Zac and then burst into floods of tears. The stress of two sleepless nights with Jack running a fever had smashed all her defences flat. Claire had been so irritable about his crying disturbing her sleep and Freddie had been so exhausted, she had simply cracked

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