Bachelor Dad on Her Doorstep Read Online Free PDF

We…someone in town…we should’ve paid more attention, we should’ve sensed that—’
    He released her and swung away. She smelt like a wattle tree in full bloom—sweet and elusive. It was too much.
    When he glanced back at her, her eyes had filled with tears. She touched her fingers to her jaw where he’d held her. Bile rose up through him. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—’ He gestured futilely with his hand. ‘Did I hurt you?’
    ‘No.’
    She shook her head, her voice low, and he watched her push the tears down with the sheer force of her will…way down deep inside her like she used to do. Suddenly he felt older than his twenty-six years. He felt a hundred.
    ‘I’m sorry I doubted your integrity.’
    She issued her apology with characteristic sincerity and speed. He dragged a hand down his face. The Jaz of old might’ve been incapable of fidelity, but she’d been equally incapable of malice.
    If she’d asked him to forgive her eight years ago, he would have. In an instant.
    He shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘Am I rehired?’
    She straightened, moistened her lips and nodded. He didn’t know how he could tell, but this time the gesture was nervous.
    ‘You won’t find it hard coping with my presence around the place for the next fortnight?’ Some devil prompted him to ask.
    ‘Of course not!’
    He could tell that she was lying.
    ‘We’re both adults, aren’t we? What’s in the past is in the past.’
    He wanted to agree. He opened his mouth to do precisely that, but the words refused to come.
    Jaz glanced at him, moistened her lips again. ‘It’s going to take a fortnight? So long?’
    ‘Give or take a couple of days. And that’s working as fast as I can.’
    ‘I see.’
    He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets. ‘I’ll get back to work on that sign then, shall I?’
     
    The door clanged shut behind Connor with a finality that made Jaz want to burst into tears.
    Crazy. Ridiculous.
    Her knees shook so badly she thought she might fall. Very carefully, she lowered herself to the stool behind the counter. Being found slumped on the floor was not the look she was aiming for, not on her first day.
    Not on any day.
    She closed her eyes, dragged in a deep breath and tried to slow her pulse, quieten the blood pounding in her ears. She could do this. She could do this. She’d known her first meeting with Connor would be hard. She hadn’t expected to deal with him on her first day though.
    Hard? Ha! Try gruelling. Exhausting. Fraught.
    She hadn’t known she would still feel his pain as if it were her own. She hadn’t known her body would remember…everything. Or that it would sing and thrum just because he was near.
    She hadn’t known she’d yearn for it all again—their love, the rightness of being with him.
    Connor had shown her the magic of love, but he’d shown her the other side of love too—the blackness, the ugliness…the despair. It had turned her into another kind of person—an angry, destructive person. It had taken her a long time to conquer that darkness. She would never allow herself to become that person again. Never. And the only way she could guarantee that was by keeping Connor at arm’s length. Further, if possible.
    But it didn’t stop her watching him through the shop window as he worked on her sign.
    She opened the shop, she served customers, but that didn’t stop her noticing how efficiently he worked either, the completelack of fuss that accompanied his every movement. It reminded her of how he used to draw, of the times they’d take their charcoals and sketch pads to one of the lookouts.
    She’d sit on a rock hunched over her pad, intent on capturing every single detail of the view spread out before her, concentrating fiercely on all she saw. Connor would lean back against a tree, his sketch pad propped against one knee, charcoal lightly clasped, eyes half-closed, and his fingers would play across the page with seemingly no effort at all.
    Their high