Facing Up To Fatherhood

by Miranda Lee

  He’d arrived home, desperate to have done with it all before he went to bed and tried to get a decent night’s sleep for the first time since Friday. And what had happened? His mother was out and Tina wouldn’t talk to him.

  Who could blame him for insisting? A man could only take so much.

  And now look where his impatience had got him! In a bedroom with a scantily clad Tina. Hell, a near naked Tina, who was looking up at him in a way he’d thought she’d never look at him. Worse, she was actually touching him, her palms hot against the treacherous flesh he’d so desperately tried to calm and control under a long cold shower.

  For a few seconds he tried to struggle out from under the white-hot haze of desire which had instantly clouded his mind. But it was hard when she was so darned desirable-looking. That glorious black hair tumbled wildly over her bare shoulders. The hardened nipples outlined in pale blue silk. The wide, sensual mouth already parted in the most provocative way.

  What was he to do? Stop and try to work out what was going on here? Complain that she was the most contradictory, infuriating woman in the world? Refuse to touch her till she listened and agreed he wasn’t the rat she thought he was?

  With any other woman Dominic might have managed any of those courses of action. Easily. With this woman, however, he could not wait, or think straight. He had to touch her back right then and there, had to make love to her. Had to.

  These compulsive feelings were not accepted happily by Dominic. He still didn’t like his lack of control where Tina was concerned. Or the confusion she evoked in him. Even as he surrendered to the inevitable, he felt angry with himself.

  And her.

  Tina saw his eyes darken, then narrow. She knew what he was going to do. She didn’t need to be told.

  The knowledge electrified her.

  Yes, kiss me, she willed with a wild, wanton recklessness. Kiss me. Touch me. Do anything you want with me.

  Kicking the door shut behind him, he grasped her wrists in a less than gentle grip and wound them around behind her back, pulling downwards till her back arched almost painfully. She gasped, then watched, open-mouthed, as his head bent, not to her lips but to one of her silk-encased breasts.

  His lips parted and closed over the already erect peak, sucking on it, drawing it in deep before abruptly letting it go. By then the silk was soaked and the nipple throbbing. When he began licking and nibbling at it, Tina made mewing little sounds of pleasure.

  His head jerked up and he glowered down at her, a wild man with wild eyes. He let her wrists go and yanked the straps of the nightie off her shoulders, tugging it downwards till it pooled at her feet.

  She straightened and just stood there, naked, dazed.

  He stared at her for a long moment, before stripping himself just as quickly, Tina only having a brief glimpse of his impressive body before he scooped her up and carried her over to the bed, falling with her into its cool, downy depths.

  And then they were kissing and clawing at each other, tongues tangling, limbs entwining, hands frantically exploring. He groaned when her fingers brushed over the tip of his penis, then moaned when she returned to stroke the full length of him.

  He growled some kind of protest and took her wrists once more, locking them up above her head within a single iron grip. His other hand spread her legs, then zeroed in on what lay between them.

  Tina had never known anything as exciting, or as electric. Her head whipped from side to side between her captured arms, her heart racing like an express train. Sensation built upon sensation as those merciless fingers explored and probed, tantalised and tormented.

  ‘Please, oh, please,’ she whimpered, her body desperately wanting more, wanting him, not his hands. Her legs moved wider apart in the most wanton invitation.

  And then he was there, thrusting into her emptiness, satisfying her need to be filled, and fulfilled.

  Tina gasped at the force and power of his possession, then groaned when he began to move. Inspired by sheer instinct, she moved with him, meeting each forward surge with an upward lift of her hips. Heat built up in her body and she was panting as if she’d run up a thousand steps. A pressure was forming within her, a tightness gripping her chest. Her head was spinning and the air became thick and heavy.

  Tina was just thinking she might have a heart attack when suddenly something seemed to shatter inside her. Great grasping spasms came in waves, bringing with them flashes of blinding pleasure.

  Groaning, she clutched at a pillow and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. But his tortured cry sent them flying open again and she watched, her own chest heaving, while Dominic came, his back arching, his mouth grimacing in a mixture of agony and ecstasy. She felt his flesh pumping deep within her, felt the flood of heat, felt a satisfaction so deep that she feared nothing would stop her from wanting to experience this again and again and again.

  It was a very sobering thought.

  This was what had turned Sarah into a fool, she realised with a bitter dismay. This was what would turn her into a fool, she conceded.

  If she let it.

  If she let him.

  Dominic collapsed across her, exhausted. For a few moments he could not help but wallow in the sheer pleasure of it all, because nothing in his sexual experience could match what he and Tina had just shared.

  The moment he’d surged into her for the first time would live in his mind for ever. The mad mixture of erotic rapture and dark triumph. The glorious feel of his naked flesh fusing with hers. And then the actual climax itself, releasing him finally from the physical and emotional tension which had been building up in him since Friday.

  But any wallowing swiftly came to an end as reality intervened. Because, of course, he hadn’t used a condom. He’d thought of it briefly at one stage, but had swiftly pushed the impulse aside. He’d been too desperate to make love, too much out of control to stop.

  Dear God. What a mess he’d made of his vow to avoid Tina at all costs!

  Slowly, he levered himself up onto his elbows and looked down at her. When she looked back up at him with coldly contemptuous eyes he shuddered inside.

  ‘Glad to see you always use protection,’ she bit out.

  Dominic sighed, realising his credibility had just been shattered. Whatever he had to say about Sarah’s mystery boyfriend would be water off a duck’s back now. Even worse was the possibility that, this time, he might have conceived an unwanted child.

  His life since he’d met Tina, he realised wearily, was becoming very complicated indeed.

  ‘Is that going to be a big problem?’ he forced himself to ask in a reasonably calm voice.

  ‘Fortunately…no.’

  He could not disguise his relief. ‘Thank God. You’re on the pill, I presume?’

  She gave him another long, cold look. ‘That’s right,’ she snapped, then added tartly, ‘Unlike poor Sarah.’

  Dominic eyed her sharply, about to say something in his defence, then decided, Why bother? That particular problem would sort itself out when the DNA test came back. Then and only then would he tell her the truth as he saw it. Any earlier and he would just be wasting his breath.

  Meanwhile, what was he going to do about what had just happened?

  ‘We really do need to talk now, Tina,’ he said in all seriousness.

  ‘No, we don’t,’ she retorted, and rolled out from under him, ejecting him from her body so abruptly that he gasped in pain. He watched, stunned, while she snatched up a blue satin robe from the end of the bed and slid into it, wrapping it tightly around her naked body before looking at him again.

  ‘What’s to talk about?’ she threw at him defiantly while her dark eyes glittered and flashed. ‘So we had sex? Big deal. You wanted it. I wanted it. We had it. End of story.’

  Dominic was shocked how much her attitude hurt. If Shani had said the same thing, he would not have felt offended. He would have laughed.

  Instead, a fierce resentment fired his blood.

  How dared she redu
ce what they had just shared to nothing but sex? It might not have been love, but it had been more than two animals mindlessly mating. There was something emotional at work here, something complex and very, very human.

  ‘Don’t talk such rubbish!’ he snapped. ‘If that was your attitude then you would have let me have sex with you on Sarah’s bed last Friday night. Because you wanted it then, all right, as well. Instead, you stopped me. And rightly so. That would have been in very poor taste.’

  ‘And you think it’s not very poor taste for you to sleep with me after spending the weekend in another woman’s bed?’ she countered savagely.

  ‘I did no such thing,’ he grated out. ‘I went to Shani’s flat on Friday night but I left without sleeping with her. In fact, Shani and I have agreed to call it quits. I spent the weekend at a hotel. I found I couldn’t go to bed with another woman when it was you I wanted. Only you, Tina.’

  For a split second he saw something wonderful in her eyes. They lit up with amazement and pleasure and…

  But then the light died, replaced by an implacable coldness. ‘I’m sorry, Dominic,’ she said in chilling tones, ‘but I don’t believe you. Just as I don’t believe you used a condom with Sarah. I can only hope and pray you don’t make a habit of unsafe sex. Now I’m going to the bathroom, if you don’t mind.’

  He lay there on the rumpled bed, broodily waiting for her return, furious with her ongoing poor opinion of him. As the minutes ticked away he was seriously tempted to reveal the facts he’d learned over the weekend, even though he had no proof of what he’d been told. It was only hearsay.

  Still, if he could convince Tina he might not be Bonnie’s father, and that Sarah hadn’t come to him asking for help, then maybe…well, maybe…

  Well, maybe what, you jerk? the voice of male reason demanded testily. Surely you don’t want to go anywhere with this, do you?

  Serious self-irritation was beginning to set him.

  When Dominic heard the shower running at full bore, a different irritation surfaced to scrape over his already raw ego. She just couldn’t wait to wash him from her body, could she? As if he’d made her dirty or something.

  There’d been nothing dirty done here tonight in his opinion. It had been one darned special experience for both of them, and the sooner she recognised that the better! The sooner she recognised he wasn’t the womanising rat she thought he was the better too!

  She was ages in the bathroom, even after the shower had been turned off—so long, in fact, that he almost jumped up and banged on the door.

  He was about to do so when the door opened and she came in looking upset, the baby in her arms.

  ‘I woke her up with the shower,’ she explained, her face flushed. ‘I didn’t think. I’ll have to go and get her a bottle now. Do you think you could mind her for a minute while I run downstairs?’

  Recalling the last time she’d handed him the baby, Dominic experienced a brief moment of panic, but hid it well, hoping to redeem himself a little in Tina’s eyes.

  ‘Sure,’ he said breezily, and hauled himself up into a sitting position in the bed, popping a couple of pillows behind his back. ‘Bring her over here.’

  ‘Could you put some clothes on first, please?’ she said, glaring at him.

  He doubted a three-month-old baby would have minded his nudity, but thought it best not to point that out.

  Diving out of the bed, he retrieved his pyjama bottoms from the floor and dragged them on. Her sense of modesty hopefully satisfied, Dominic returned to his position on the bed before looking her way.

  ‘Ready,’ he said.

  She glowered at the amount of bare chest still showing, but didn’t say anything, merely sighed, walked over and handed him the baby. ‘I’ll try not to be too long,’ she said. ‘If she cries, then rock her, or walk her up and down and sing to her.’

  ‘Right,’ he said softly, remembering how the last time his deep voice had frightened the child. With a bit of luck, none of those things would be required, especially the singing bit. He was so tone deaf that he’d been offered bribes by his classmates not to sing at school concerts.

  As luck would have it, no sooner had Tina departed than the baby took one look at the big male face peering down at her and began to bawl. Dominic was not only walking in a flash, but rocking at the same time. That worked for a few seconds, till the little pink terror realised who it was doing the walking and rocking and let rip again.

  ‘No way I’m going to sing too,’ he told the crying but tearless infant. ‘I’m not much good at telling fairy stories either. They always say to talk about what you know, so here goes…’ And he launched into a description of his job.

  Dominic paused to draw breath a couple of minutes later, only then realising that the baby’s pretty pink mouth had stopped squawking. In fact her baby blue eyes were fixed on his in rapt attention, almost as though she’d been listening to every word he said, and was holding her breath waiting for more.

  ‘Well, blow me down,’ he whispered under his breath. ‘She likes hearing about business. Oh, what a smart girl you are,’ he crooned, relieved at having found a way to stop that nerve-scraping noise.

  ‘Now, the stockmarket is like a big international sports arena,’ he explained as he settled them both back on the bed, ‘where this very complex game is being played twenty-four hours a day, with thousands of different rules and pitfalls. But, oh, what fun once you master those rules and avoid those pitfalls. There’s nothing else like it in the world! Still, you have a lot to learn if you’re going to grow up and play that particular game, my girl. Now…where shall I begin?’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  TINA heard Bonnie start to cry just as she reached the bottom of the stairs, but she kept on going, her need to be away from that man far greater than any worry about the baby.

  A little crying wasn’t going to kill Bonnie. But staying in the same room as Dominic Hunter might just result in Tina killing him!

  Oh, the smugness of the man! The arrogance! And the insensitivity!

  Couldn’t he appreciate how she must feel, having gone to bed with him, of all men? Couldn’t he understand how this had to be affecting her pride, and her self-respect?

  Of course not, she realised angrily. Men like him didn’t think about a woman’s pride or self-respect. Women were just sex-objects to be toyed with, lied to, then discarded.

  What gall he had to claim he hadn’t been to bed with his girlfriend that weekend, that he’d broken up with this Shani because of her.

  Yeah, right! And the tooth fairy got engaged to Santa Claus this weekend as well!

  And then there was the matter of his not using protection, something he’d claimed he never, ever did. Okay, so maybe he did use a condom most of the time. He struck Tina as a normally intelligent and pragmatic individual who wouldn’t make a habit of sexual stupidity. But tonight proved his flesh could be as weak as the next man’s.

  Tina wondered what would have happened if she’d told him she wasn’t on the pill at all. Which she wasn’t. It might have almost been worth it just to see the look on his face!

  Actually, she hadn’t lied about that for his benefit but for her own. She hadn’t wanted to explain that you could set a clock by her cycle, that she knew her body like the back of her hand and that she was positive she’d ovulated over a week ago. If she were a betting person, she’d put a billion dollars on her period arriving around midday the following Saturday.

  No, there would be no baby from what had transpired up in that bedroom tonight. Thank God. Still, Tina found the thought appalling that if she’d met Dominic a week ago, right around the wrong time, she would still have gone to bed with him. She wouldn’t have given conception a moment’s thought, till after the event.

  Which brought her to the other reason she’d lied to him about being on the pill. She wanted him to think she was sexually active. No way did she want him finding out it had been a couple of years since her last sexual encounter, or that she’d only
ever had two very brief and unsuccessful affairs in her whole life. She wanted him to believe her claim that it had just been sex between them, and that he wasn’t anything special to her.

  Because he darned well wasn’t!

  He was just an…an…aberration. A perverse infatuation. For some weird and wonderful reason unbeknown to her, he turned her on in a big, big way. Now more than ever. She’d hardly been able to look at him in that bedroom a minute ago without wanting to touch him again. If only he’d put on the black silk dressing-gown as well, instead of just the pyjama bottoms. He’d left far too much exposed flesh for her needy, greedy gaze. She’d ached to run her hands over that magnificent chest again.

  Tina groaned as desire contracted her own stomach once more. Oh, why had she brought the baby in to him like that? Why?

  She’d thought she was using Bonnie as some kind of protection, to guard her from these dark desires. Instead, she now knew to her shame that nothing was going to protect her from this ungovernable lust. She would just have to endure it as best she could. Hide it as best she could.

  Men like him enjoyed having power over women. They probably revelled in being adored, and fawned over, and loved. In hindsight, she recalled a triumphant glint in his eyes when he’d had her spreadeagled before him. He’d liked it when she’d begged, then become annoyed when she’d left the bed so abruptly afterwards.

  Well, she wouldn’t beg the next time.

  Tina sucked in a sharp breath. The next time. She was already thinking of the next time. Dear Lord, what was happening to her?

  With a shaking hand she picked the bottle out of the simmering water and tested the temperature on her wrist. Warm enough, she decided. Time to go upstairs, sweep Bonnie out of Dominic’s too tempting arms and escape into the sanctuary of the baby’s room.

  With the bottle in hand, she was hurrying up the stairs when the surprise of silence upstairs slowed her step. Frowning, she listened, but there was no baby crying at all.

  Once she reached the top landing, however, she could hear voices coming through the slightly ajar doorway. No, not voices, she soon realised. One voice. Dominic’s, talking with expression, as though he were reading Bonnie a story.