by Lynne Graham
The door beside him clicked open and then the one beside her. She climbed out onto a well-lit driveway fronting an ultra-modern villa of quite astonishing size. The cool night air hit her hard and she felt slightly dizzy. A large glass of wine topped up by champagne had been too much for her system, she acknowledged heavily. Alcohol always hit her hard.
‘We’ll discuss this indoors,’ Jax ground out impatiently. ‘Come on…’
How had she got herself into this situation? Lucy asked herself with angry self-loathing. She didn’t know where she was and had no idea how to get home again. She should have kicked up a major fuss when Jax had lifted her out of her chair at the bar but she had let him get away with it sooner than cause a public scene. In certain moods, Jax was as unstoppable as a juggernaut. He didn’t care what anybody thought. The only opinion he cared for was his own.
‘I want a taxi home,’ she informed him. ‘Right now…’
‘I thought you were dying to tell me about the assault on the yacht,’ Jax murmured, shooting her a politely enquiring appraisal that she immediately distrusted.
Lucy hovered uncertainly, noting the security team standing around and the older woman waiting to greet them at the front door. Compressing her lips, she forced herself to follow Jax, carefully picking her path up the steps into the contemporary hall. The preponderance of mirrors and multiple reflections confused her and she didn’t object when Jax rested a light hand on her back to guide her into a huge reception room furnished with sofas and monochromatic modern art works.
‘Assault…yacht,’ Jax prodded expectantly. ‘When did this happen?’
‘About two weeks after I last saw you in Spain—’
‘I had already left the country by then. Tell me what happened.’
‘I went looking for you and I was told you weren’t on board the Sea Queen—’
‘Which was true.’
‘The crew member that dealt with me was horrible. He called me names and manhandled me—’
Jax had fallen very still. ‘In what way were you “manhandled”?’
‘I said that I wasn’t willing to leave until I was given a phone number or an address where I could contact you. Maybe that was foolish,’ Lucy muttered ruefully. ‘Anyway, this big bald guy got really aggressive and called me a whore and just dragged me across the deck and pushed me down the gangway. I fell at the foot, bloodied my knees and my elbows and nobody helped me. And someone had called the marina security to escort me away and they accused me of trespassing in a restricted area. It was hideous.’
A frown line had drawn his fine ebony brows together. ‘I refuse to credit that any member of the crew would be so rough with a woman—’
Lucy bridled. ‘Well, believe it…it happened!’
‘Nor can I accept that there was verbal abuse. But I can confirm that you would not have been given my phone number or address because I left that instruction,’ he admitted grimly.
‘Why was that necessary? What did you think I was going to do?’ Lucy framed in an angry rush. ‘Spring a terrorist attack on you? Turn into a stalker?’
‘I didn’t want you making a nuisance of yourself,’ Jax advanced flatly, turning away from her for an instant, memories interfering with his thoughts.
What she had made him feel had been too intense. In the aftermath of his discovery of her true nature, he had overreacted, he acknowledged with hindsight, stepping back and instinctively protecting himself from further exposure to her. It had seemed imperative that he neither speak to her nor see her again.
‘I can’t understand why you went to the yacht or why you tried to contact me again,’ he said drily, swinging back to her with his brain fixed firmly in the present.
Bitter recriminations bubbled on Lucy’s lips and she swallowed them back because she didn’t want to make an announcement about Bella in the midst of a heated dispute. And Jax might be poised in front of her as ice cool and expressionless as a glacier but the atmosphere felt combustible and the tension was horrendous.
‘Obviously I tried to contact you…but you simply vanished. I didn’t hear from you again. Most people would seek an explanation—’
‘There was a very obvious explanation. I’d grown bored,’ Jax murmured with derision.
‘Sometimes you are a very nasty piece of work,’ Lucy mumbled shakily, appalled that he could throw that humiliating statement in her face.
‘Put your cards on the table, koukla mou. And maybe I will too.’
‘I don’t know what you’re getting at—’
‘Stop acting like a poor little victim—stop faking it,’ Jax urged with stark impatience. ‘You told me a lot of lies back then—’
‘No, I didn’t!’ Lucy broke in furiously.
Exasperation gripped Jax. She was moving agitatedly round the room, luminous blue eyes fixed intently to him. The floor lamp behind her turned that pale dress almost transparent, clearly delineating the rounded swell of her small, succulent breasts and the shadowy outline of her pink areolae. He went hard, his reaction instantaneous.
‘What lies?’ Lucy demanded hotly, watching the fluid movement of his long, lithe body as he paced the tiled floor in front of her.
He was so beautiful he still took her breath away. It wasn’t merely his lean, strong face and stunning green eyes. Jax simply radiated masculine power from the aggressive angle of his arrogant head to the square swing of his wide shoulders and the decisive gait of his long, muscular legs. She was so busy staring, so busy drinking him in with greedy eyes that she couldn’t concentrate. A prickling sensation assailed her nipples and tightened them into hard little nubs while a sliding, pulsing warmth began low in her pelvis.
‘What lies?’ she mumbled afresh, her brain in a fog.
Throbbing with arousal, Jax compressed his sculpted lips. He was done with conversation. Lucy would verbally twist and turn and prevaricate and embellish and evade until he was ready to strangle her. And why was he even bothering? He didn’t ever travel an emotional road with women these days. He wasn’t interested in their motivations and their deepest secrets. He kept it simple, straight. So, why wasn’t he being straight with himself? He hadn’t brought Lucy home to talk to her, had he? His mouth quirked into a flashing sardonic smile as he studied her.
It was the bad-boy smile Lucy had seen Jax wear a dozen times in glossy photos. It wasn’t the smile that had once made her heart jump and fill to overflowing with love. It was a dark edgy smile with a sensual hint of threat in it.
A forbidden tingle of anticipation infiltrated what remained of her defences. She took a sudden step back, struggling to keep her distance and stay in control. But Jax reached out a hand and closed it round hers in a sudden movement, pulling her to him before she could back off. He wrapped both arms round her, lifting her easily off her feet to hoist her high against him.
It was a decisive moment and she knew it, knew she should push her hands down on his shoulders to force him to put her down and release her. But nothing was ever that simple for Lucy when it came to Jax. As he brought her down he nuzzled against her neck, dark stubble scratching her tender skin, and a shudder of awareness powerful enough to leave her dizzy enveloped her. The scent of his cologne laced with clean, husky male flared her nostrils; he smelled so unbelievably good she wanted to bury her nose in his hair. Her hands went round his neck and for a split second as he worked his erotic path towards her parted lips she clung like a limpet.
Just one kiss, she bargained with herself, just one, but the man who had once seduced her with kisses had no intention of breaking his perfect track record. He always knew what she wanted and he gave it to her, all the seething passion he had taught her to crave. He kissed her and she went up in flames. Her body flared into shocking awareness and suddenly burned back to almost painful life with every plunging thrust of his tongue. She gasped and quivered, filled with all the hunger she had suppressed.
He brought her down on a firm but yielding surface and her head fell back as he wrenche
d down her dress to squeeze a straining pink nipple between his fingertips, swiftly following it up as she arched up to him in response with the warm sucking pull of his mouth. It was as if a river of liquid fire ran down through her to engulf her feminine core. A strangled moan of excitement was torn from her as his mouth traced a fiery path down over her twisting body, long, lean fingers clenching on a slender thigh.
And just then she wondered how he had contrived that skin-to-skin contact and the answer shook her so much that she yanked herself violently free and rolled off the sofa, hitting her hip painfully hard in the fall. Her dress fell round her knees. Tears of pain and mortification in her eyes, she got onto her knees and, with great difficulty, clumsily and awkwardly hauled her dress back up over her exposed body, shame roaring through her in long agonising waves.
‘Thee mou…’ Jax began rawly.
‘I want a taxi home. This is not going any further,’ Lucy swore breathlessly, unable to even make herself look at him.
Jax wanted to break something. Instead he breathed in very deep. Lucy hadn’t changed. She had to have all the ducks in line before she would fire. Two years ago, that simple process of withholding sex had worked on him but he was no longer that suggestible, Jax told himself with fierce conviction. Yet when he touched her, she owned him, he recognised, unnerved by that realisation.
As she struggled with a singular lack of dignity or cool to refasten the difficult ties on her slender shoulders, Lucy’s hatred of Jax rose like a tide of poison inside her. Ten seconds and he had had her half naked, nothing but a pair of knickers standing between her and total nudity. She had been a pushover. Maybe she was so starved of sex she did need a man in her life, she decided, her eyes stinging with hot, angry tears. But that man would not be Jax Antonakos.
‘The limo will take you back home,’ Jax told her flatly. ‘That is if you really want to leave.’
‘It’s my turn to do the walking away,’ Lucy framed gruffly, loathing coursing through her slight body in such powerful waves that she trembled with it. ‘I wish I’d done it two years ago. What were you planning on happening? Another session of unprotected sex? Haven’t you ever had consequences from that?’
‘What the hell are you trying to imply?’ Jax demanded in a raw undertone.
Lucy flung her head back, all fired up on adrenalin and resentment and bitterness. ‘When you got bored and dumped me,’ she told him shakily, ‘you left me pregnant—’
CHAPTER FOUR
JAX HAD FALLEN very still. ‘That’s not possible—’
‘Why? Are you infertile?’ Lucy shot back at him, unimpressed. ‘I don’t think so because we have a child, Jax. A little girl, who’s fifteen months old.’
Jax stared back at her in rampant disbelief, hard lines settling between his nose and mouth, his handsome bone structure drawn stark and taut. ‘Impossible,’ he said again, green eyes brilliant with outraged denial.
‘That last week we were together you had sex with me in a changing-room cubicle and you didn’t take precautions,’ Lucy reminded him angrily. ‘Why do you think I tried so hard to get in touch with you that I got thrown off the yacht? I needed help.’
Shock ensured that Jax’s brain continued to rebel and tell him that what she was saying was totally and absolutely impossible but his memory was infinitely more accurate. He knew he had taken that risk and had thought nothing of it at the time, indeed revelling in the reality that not even the thin layer of a condom separated him from her. He also realised in that moment that if she was telling him the truth, he had very probably made the biggest, messiest mistake of his life.
Panic hurtled through Lucy when she saw the shrewd dawning of genuine concern in his glittering green eyes. What had she done? Throwing it at him like that? Oh, my goodness, what had she done? Dully she recognised that she had been hitting back at him the only way she knew how. Needing to shock and hurt him as he had once shocked and hurt her with his rejection. But she knew instantly that she should not have used Bella like a weapon against him.
‘This has to be discussed,’ Jax intoned in a driven undertone.
‘Not tonight. I want to go home,’ Lucy breathed tightly. ‘Right now.’
‘You can’t tell me I could be a father and then—’
‘Yes, I can,’ Lucy incised fiercely. ‘I can do whatever I like just as you do whatever you like. And it’s not a question of “could be a father”. Bella is yours because I’ve never been with anyone else!’
Jax knew that was a lie for he had seen her cheat on him with his own eyes but DNA testing would provide proof neither of them could refute. He was appalled by the idea that he could have unwittingly had a child with a woman who not only lied and cheated but also had a criminal record. Even his parents’ numerous unsuccessful marriages and affairs paled beside such a development. And the existence of an illegitimate Antonakos heir would send his father through the roof.
‘I want to see the child,’ Jax told her doggedly.
Lucy lost all her hectic colour. ‘No.’
‘If that child is half mine, you don’t get to say no. I’ll call in the family legal team,’ Jax warned her without skipping a beat. ‘Who looks after her when you’re at work?’
That reference to lawyers and the reality that she was a working mum made a cold, hollow sensation of fear spread inside Lucy’s tummy. ‘My stepmother,’ she told him, struggling to suppress the defiance rising inside her because a mood of conciliation struck her as being far more sensible in the circumstances.
‘I’ll call in with you tomorrow and we’ll take care of the necessities,’ Jax breathed coldly as he strode out to the hall. ‘I need your address—’
‘No.’ The sense of being trapped built up inside Lucy until she felt almost suffocated by it. She had told him about Bella. She had done it in a recklessly provocative way too, absolutely the worst way to give Jax bad news. As volatile as he was, he didn’t need the encouragement. And she had no doubt at all that learning that he was a father was very bad news on his terms because from the instant the concept had set in, Jax had turned icy-cold and businesslike. Now, however, Lucy recognised that she had to deal with the fallout from her impulsive decision and that would entail finally telling Kreon and Iola the truth.
‘If you come in the morning I’ll be there,’ Lucy conceded abruptly. ‘I usually only work evenings. My father and stepmother have a funeral to attend, so they won’t be at home.’
Jax demanded the address and then stood poised in the doorway of his home watching her clamber into the limousine outside. Lucy tore her gaze from his forbidding stance and told herself that she had only done what had had to be done. He had the right to know about Bella. It was his own fault that he hadn’t found out about his daughter sooner. Maybe he wouldn’t want anything to do with their child, Lucy reasoned with sudden hope that that might be the case. And then she felt horribly guilty because she knew how much it hurt not to have a father and she didn’t want her daughter to suffer the same way.
Yet when she looked back to her affair with Jax she could never have believed that they would have ended up so bitterly opposed. That night after the yacht party, Jax had sought her out and insisted on seeing her back to her room at the bar.
‘You are over twenty-one?’ he had checked. ‘I don’t get involved with anyone younger than that.’
‘I’m twenty-three,’ Lucy had lied instantly, adding on four years to her age, determined to make that all important grade for him.
He had told her he would pick her up for dinner the following evening. She had told him she was working.
‘Take a night off,’ Jax had urged.
‘I can’t afford to,’ she had argued.
‘I’ll cover the cost of it,’ Jax had declared.
‘But then you’d be paying for my time and I couldn’t agree to that—’
‘You’re very difficult,’ Jax had condemned.
‘And you don’t understand how to take no for an answer.’
; ‘I want to see you again,’ Jax had proclaimed impatiently.
‘I’m free Thursday night.’
‘I don’t want to wait that long.’
‘All right. You can see me at midnight tomorrow when I finish my shift…unless that’s too late for you?’
‘No, that will do.’
‘But know upfront I’m not spending the night with you, so if that’s what you’re expecting, just forget about me,’ she had warned him staunchly.
Lucy had learned to be blunt with men. She thought of it as managing their expectations. She had gone out with so many men who had simply assumed that she would sleep with them at the end of the night and who had reacted badly to a refusal. But her body was the one element in her world that Lucy had always felt was truly hers and until she finally met someone who could make her want him enough to move beyond that she had no intention of sharing her body with anyone. She genuinely hadn’t expected Jax to be any different and she had slowly learned her mistake until saying no to Jax had become painful because she hadn’t been able to control her own hunger.
‘You’re too defensive. Not every guy is out to nail you—’
‘You mean you’re not?’ Lucy had exclaimed in surprise.
‘I can see that trying to be smooth and seductive with you will be a huge challenge,’ Jax had laughed, flashing her a highly amused smile.
And she had started falling for him that very night because that glorious charismatic smile of his had stopped her in her tracks and left her short of breath. She had met him the following night, sharing tapas and a couple of drinks with him in an upmarket bar. But sadly, she had dropped off to sleep in the middle of the conversation, bone tired from being on her feet serving all day. He had shaken her awake and taken her home without even attempting to kiss her, confiding that yawns weren’t sexy. He had put his phone number in her phone while she slept and the next day he began texting her, first letting her know that he would be out of the country for a couple of days, then arranging to see her on her next free night.
