Read Online The Rancher's Adopted Family by Barbara Hannay - Free Book Online

under the water to wash away the possibility of tears. She had to be strong, to remember that she’d come here for this—to allow Bella and her father to meet—and she was pleased they were getting on so well. He’d accepted that Amy was Bella’s guardian and she had to have faith in her decisions and in her instincts that told her Seth Reardon could be trusted.
    Even so, the few days that she would spend here suddenly felt like a dangerously long stretch of time.
     
    ‘Everything’s so different and exotic here,’ Amy said later, waving her hand to the view of the terraced hillside and the bright blue sea framed by a tangle of rainforest jungle. ‘I find it hard to believe that I’m still in Australia. I feel as if I’ve crossed hemispheres.’
    ‘In a way you have.’ Seth sent her a slow smile, aware that it was becoming a habit, this smiling at Amy. It was highly likely that, between them, she and Bella had made him smile more times in the past twenty-four hours than he had in the past twelve months.
    He said, ‘Weren’t you telling me yesterday that Serenity is as far from Melbourne as London is from Moscow?’
    She turned to him, giving him the full benefit of her warm chocolate eyes, and he was very glad he’d suggested that they take this time to sit on the veranda, drinking coffee after lunch, while Bella napped.
    ‘It must have been quite a culture shock for you to move all the way from Sydney to here,’ she said earnestly. ‘You were only twelve. That’s smack on the edge of adolescence, when everything looms larger than life.’
    ‘Actually, I think the fact that everything was so different here helped me,’ he said. ‘I was overawed by this place, but I thought it was incredibly exciting, and myuncle kept me busy from first thing in the morning till I fell into bed at night. He turned my life into an adventure. I’m sure I’d have found it much harder to get over my father’s death if I’d stayed in Sydney.’
    Surprised that he’d told Amy so much, he reached for his coffee cup and drank deeply.
    Her face was soft with sympathy, as if she was picturing how it had been for him. ‘It can’t have been easy though, when you didn’t have a mother.’
    From force of habit, Seth brushed her comment aside. He had no intention of explaining about his mother. She was a subject he never talked about. There was no reason to discuss her.
    But Amy had hooked her elbow over the arm of her chair and she was leaning towards him, watching him with her complete attention. Two small lines of worry drew her brows low and her brown eyes were rounded with concern, her pink lips parted. Seth found himself wanting to lean closer, too, to kiss those soft, inviting lips, to kiss away that frown.
    It would be so easy.
    So incredibly satisfying.
    And…totally inappropriate. She hadn’t come here for a fling.
    All day he’d been struggling to blank out the picture of Amy this morning in her flimsy cotton nightdress. He tried not to think about the soft round outline of her breasts, the smooth skin of her shoulders, the tapering curve of her waist.
    But Amy was different from Rachel. Seth knew she hadn’t been planning seduction, and he could have sworn that she hadn’t even noticed when her wrap slipped from her shoulders.
    There’d been no flirting in the pool today either. But, heaven help him, he could still see the back view of her as she climbed the pool ladder. World-class legs. Lovely behind. Movements so graceful and feminine he couldn’t help but stare.
    Damn it , the very fact that Amy’s sexiness was unintentional, and the knowledge that she wasn’t trying to seduce him, made his desire for her all the stronger.
    But he shouldn’t have been checking her out. Just as he shouldn’t be thinking about kissing her now.
    He couldn’t afford to start an affair with little Bella’s guardian when he knew that it could never go anywhere. The child needed stability in her life, and he’d learned