Resisting The Italian Single Dad

Her gaze shifted back up to Max. His eyes were closed. Was he asleep too? Carly sank further into her chair and tried to ignore just how attracted she was to him. He was a client. She was here to do a job.

Carly knew only too well how workplace romances derailed life. Her parents had once owned an accountancy practice…until her mother had fallen for one of their clients. Carly, then aged eleven, could still remember to this day the elation that had shone in her mum’s eyes when she had spoken every evening at the dinner table about her new client. She had relayed with awe the details of his holiday home in Sardinia, his corporate jaunts to sports events and conferences in exotic locations. How devoted to and proud he was of his three high-achieving and beautiful daughters. How miserable his ex-wife had made him.

All this her mum would recount with great animation, her voice bright, which only emphasised the dislike that settled on her features when Carly’s father would interrupt with some story of his own.

Carly had been devastated when her parents split but she had held out hope—after all, her dad promised that she could stay with him at weekends and she was gaining three sisters. Carly had always wanted siblings. But with the business collapsing amidst a bitter divorce, her dad had left England for a new life in New Zealand where his sister lived. And Carly’s three new sisters, all much older than her, showed little interest in her on their visits home from university other than to make it clear that they considered her nothing other than a nuisance who would never be welcomed into their tight circle. They idolised their father and jealously guarded their relationship with him.

Carly shivered. The air temperature in the cabin had dropped. She smiled as Isabella snuffled, turned her cheek into her father’s chest and sighed. Carly’s throat tightened at the sight of Max’s strong forearm lying so protectively around Isabella’s tiny waist.

Then Max stirred, his head shifting to the left. But he continued to sleep, his chest rising and falling regularly. Even sitting four feet away, Carly could see the long dark length of his eyelashes. His eyebrows were thick and expressive; his nose was at a perfect angle to complement his high cheekbones; his chiselled jawline travelled down in a perfectly defined curve from his ears to end in a cleft chin that gave his face a devastating beauty.

Standing, she tiptoed across the cabin and picked up a lemon-coloured wool throw from the lounge sofa. Tucking the blanket around Isabella, she pulled back, lifted her eyes and looked straight into Max’s gaze.

‘You think of everything.’ His voice was low, croaky from tiredness. And so, so sexy. Her feet curled in her trainers. Her stomach did a little flip. She was not going to blush. She was going to brazen this out.

She inhaled a scent that reminded her of the summer she had gone Interrailing as a student and camped in a Croatian forest next to the Adriatic—sea mist and earthy pine combining to produce a potent sense of vitality and adventure. ‘All part of the service.’

He raised an eyebrow.

She stepped back. ‘Can I get you anything else?’

His lips twitched. He nodded to the table behind her. ‘My phone.’

‘Not until Isabella wakes.’

Carly sat back in her chair. Aware of his gaze on her, she picked up the magazine and tried to develop an interest in a berry favoured by sub-Saharan goat herders.

‘Are you sure that sleeping like this won’t teach her bad habits?’

She dropped the magazine. ‘Isabella needs to feel secure with you. This will teach her that you will spend time holding her, comforting her when she needs it. Being with her, responding to her needs—this is the starting basis of developing good sleeping technique. In the next few days hopefully you will start to appreciate that.’ She leant towards him, determined that he understood the main message of her sleeping technique—that parents learn to allow themselves to be tender with their children and themselves. ‘We all need physical touch. We all need to have someone hug us and tell us that everything is going to be okay.’

His expression hardened. A tense silence settled between them.

Confused, Carly stared at him, slowly realising what she had said. ‘I’m sorry—that was insensitive of me. With your wife—’

He interrupted her with a quick shake of his head. ‘It’s okay.’

Carly’s gaze shifted down to Isabella, her arms suddenly aching with the desire to hold her. ‘Trust me on this, Isabella won’t want your cuddles in a few years’ time…and when she’s a teenager she won’t even want to know you. So you should enjoy it while you can.’

His gaze dropped down to consider Isabella for a moment before he asked in a low voice, ‘Were you like that with your dad when you were a teenager?’

‘My dad moved to New Zealand when I was twelve. I didn’t get the chance to…’

‘You miss him?’

Carly’s heart fell. She spoke to her dad occasionally but there was so much time and distance between them now that their relationship just consisted of the polite conversation of assuring one another that all was well in their lives, and a hollowness when she ended the call that would stay with her for hours. ‘Sometimes.’

‘Have you other family?’

There was a gentleness to his tone that stirred unexpected emotion in her—a loneliness, a longing for a family of her own that she was usually so good at burying. ‘No—my mum remarried. It was messy.’ She gave a shrug, trying to dredge up her usual acceptance of her situation but there was something about Max’s intelligent gaze that was stopping her doing so. ‘I’m not close to my mum and her new family, but I have good friends, people I trained with. We all live close to one another in London.’

‘Were you going away with them this weekend?’ He paused for a moment. ‘With a boyfriend perhaps?’

‘Six of us were heading away together…all friends.’

He nodded to her answer and shifted the arm that was resting on Isabella. ‘Thank you for agreeing to come with us this weekend. I realise it was a lot to ask of you.’

She studied him for a moment, thrown by the sincerity of his tone, the restrained pride in his expression. Maybe he was different from her stepfather, who would always somehow twist everything he did for people, whether they wanted it or not, into the fact that he was doing that person a favour. He had insisted that Carly attend boarding school and signed her up for endless residential courses during half-terms and summer holidays. He had claimed that he wanted her to be more adventurous, more ambitious, more accomplished, just like his daughters. The unspoken truth was that he hadn’t wanted Carly around.

She nodded in acknowledgement to his thanks and said, ‘Most of the parents who come to me find it difficult to talk about their child not sleeping. They think they should instinctively know how to get their child to sleep, that they are somehow failing as a parent. Which of course is not true. The parents I meet are doing their best in their individual circumstances. I try to help them see and understand that…to learn to be tender with themselves.’

Carly laughed when Max’s smooth forehead creased at her last sentence. ‘You don’t like that expression “be tender with themselves”?’ she asked.

‘I can’t see any man buying into it.’

‘You’d be surprised.’

He shifted in his seat, his expression sceptical. ‘Is this going to work?’

‘If you allow it to—if you give it the time and patience needed.’

‘You think I’m impatient?’

‘I get the feeling that you like to be on the move a lot. With children you need to slow down, to connect with them.’

He looked down at Isabella and shook his head. ‘With this firecracker I’ve no option the way she clings to me.’

There was such weariness to his voice. Understanding the positives in Isabella’s personality might help him in dealing with his daughter. ‘At least you know that Isabella will fight for what she wants—she’s determined. It will stand her in good stead in life, having that strength of character.’

For a long while he stared at her, considering what she had said. ‘I hadn’t thought of it that way… I guess you could be right. Do you want children of your own some day?’

Carly smiled at his question, while inside it felt like a soft swift pinch to her heart. She had envisioned herself and Robert having children quickly; they had even spoken about trying to have a baby soon after they married. ‘Some day hopefully I will. I love being with children. Before I set up my sleep consultancy business I was a Montessori teacher, but I have to meet the right person first.’

‘That hasn’t happened yet?’

Carly paused, a heavy weight lodging in her chest. ‘I thought it had. A few years back I was due to marry. But three weeks before the wedding my ex broke it off.’

Emotion continuing to whirl in her chest, Carly grabbed the magazine and again pretended to read it.

‘I’m sorry.’

Carly nodded but refused to look up from the magazine, hating how exposed, how humiliated she felt having told him. She flicked through the pages of the magazine, trying to understand why the publishers thought their readers would be interested in the weight gain of a soap-opera actress. Hadn’t they heard about emotional eating? Carly might have binned her wedding cake but that hadn’t stopped her from eating her own body weight in ice cream and her favourite comfort food, Brazil nuts, in the weeks that followed. It had taken her months to return to her normal weight. A weight that wasn’t particularly impressive in the first place. But Carly had long ago accepted that her body would never be lean, no matter how much she dieted or exercised.

‘Tell me about your ex—what happened?’

‘I’d prefer not to.’

‘It clearly upsets you.’