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crockery into one of the neatly labelled recycling boxes set beside the open stable door. Liam was sitting on a kitchen chair swinging his legs and patting the head of one of the dogs, a shaggy lurcher.
    The child’s dark hair was damp, his cherubic face shiny and clean. He looked wholesome and delicious. His father, who also had damp hair, did not look wholesome, but he did look delicious.
    Rampantly delicious, she decided, taking the opportunity while unobserved to work out what it was beside his startling male beauty that made her skin prickle when she looked at him—and she didn’t even like all that macho stuff! Miranda told herself that it was simple scientific curiosity that made her want to study him, though it was hard to call the hollow achy feeling in the pit of her stomach scientific.
    She swallowed to ease the tightness in her dry throat. She couldn’t think she was the only female whose brain shut down in his vicinity—presumably Gianni Fitzgerald produced a similar visceral response in any female with a pulse. Was it the Latin thing …? Half Italian, he’d said, but she could see precious little of the Celtic heritage he had claimed in his dark toned features. His dark hair slicked back from his broad brow was still wet. The sleek style emphasised the beautiful severity of his lean, hard-boned, classically proportioned face.
    Dressed casually in a loose-fitting black tee shirt—the loose cut did nothing to disguise the lean, muscular torso she knew it covered—and faded jeans that clung to his long, muscular thighs, he oozed a raw sexuality that had nothing to do with what he was wearing and everything to do with the man himself.
    As if feeling her gaze, Gianni turned his head. Caught staring at his bottom, Miranda lifted her chin to an angle of mute defiance and adopted a ‘so hang me’ expression that made his mouth quirk slightly at the corners as he tipped his head in silent acknowledgement of the gesture and allowed his dark, long-lashed eyes to travel in a slow, comprehensive sweep up from her toes until he reached her face.
    At this point their glances connected and Miranda, who had been enduring the scrutiny, glimpsed something that moved like silvered fire deep in his midnight-dark eyes.
    She could not define what she had seen, it had only been there for a fraction of a second, but her body wasn’t dealing in names. It reacted indiscriminately, sending a wave of scorching heat through her body.
    Whatever this man had, clothes were no protection, she mused as she tugged fretfully at the neck of her shirt, unwittingly loosing the top two mother-of-pearl buttons.
    Gianni’s eyes went to the deep vee of milk-pale smooth skin revealed, hardly what could be termed provocative, but his body responded with a disproportionate pulse of hunger that slammed through his body before concentrating in a hard ache of frustrated desire in his groin.
    He swallowed hard, annoyed by his lack of self-control, and tipped his head in exaggerated approval, resorting to strained banter in an effort to disguise his reaction while recognising an equally strong need to rationalise it.
    ‘I hardly recognised you with your clothes on,
cara
,’ he drawled, and watched the angry colour fly to her smooth cheeks.
    A man woke up next to a beautiful woman and the inevitable happened. It was no mystery, nothing more complicated than physical hunger, nothing a cold shower … another cold shower would not cure.
    Before Miranda could respond with a suitable degree of scorn to this worn-out cliché—it was always harder to deliver scorn when your face was the colour of a post box; this man was dangerous—Gianni’s attentions switched abruptly to his son.
    ‘No, stay where you are, Liam, until I check out the floor …’ The rest of the sentence was delivered in Italianand Miranda was fascinated to hear the child clearly as bilingual as his father, reply in the same tongue.
    Unexpected emotion tightened in Miranda’s throat