Stranger from the Past & Proof of Their Sin

by Penny Jordan

  “We need to talk,” he said, stabbing security buttons beside the elevator panel. “In private, and uninterrupted.”

  “Are you out of your mind? Dragging me to your room is what started this!” Despite her apprehension, an irrepressible jolt of anticipation hit low in her belly. The unwanted receptiveness to his advances made her feel intensely vulnerable. For another long second, she couldn’t move, couldn’t look at him.

  “Throwing Charleston in my face right now is a mistake, I assure you,” he said dangerously. “How far along are you?”

  She set a tender hand on her waist, breathless with alarm. She was locked in a situation she should have been smart enough to avoid while sensual memories wouldn’t shake from her scattered mind. And she felt weak. It occurred to her how badly she had neglected this baby today, too preoccupied with facing Paolo to take care of herself and the growing life inside her.

  “You can do the math,” she murmured.

  “Three months since we were together, but I can see the weight gain starting. Is that why you slept with me? To disguise some married man’s bastard?”

  “Oh, stop it!” she spat. “Have I asked you to be a father?” After losing her own and suffering Gerald as a substitute, she’d concluded that father figures were overrated. Her grandmother had filled all the necessary parental roles just fine, thanks.

  Wanting to finish with him before her delicate hold over her control slipped completely, she paced into the lounge, bypassing the narrow aisle between the sofa and coffee table for the wider band of area behind the furniture. As she spun, her skirt billowed in a way her lungs couldn’t. She was aware of his scrutiny like a scientist behind a mirrored wall, watching a distressed animal seek escape from its cage.

  “Yes, people are going to notice soon that I’m pregnant,” she stated, trying to drag deeper breaths into her compressed lungs. “They’re going to speculate that it’s yours. I owed it to you to prepare you for that, so here I am.”

  “So you’re keeping it.” The words were flat and uninflected.

  It was an unexpected blow that winded her.

  “Of course I’m keeping it! I’ve waited years for a baby.” She tried to say it calmly, but she couldn’t help the residual fury over Ryan’s duplicity, letting her try to explain to his mother why they weren’t conceiving when he had privately known exactly why. “How can you suggest I not keep it? You’re Catholic. And don’t you dare ask if I slept with you to get pregnant. I’ll slap you, I swear I will. I thought I was infertile.”

  She spun again, still pacing, feeling like one of those little metal ducks quacking her way along the upper ledge of a carnival tent. Paolo’s laser gaze seemed to track her like the red dot of a sniper’s rifle while he weighed her words.

  “I know this baby looks like a disaster, but it’s a miracle.” Her agitation at having to explain without being able to explain kept her blood vessels tight, her muscles tense, her focus dim and narrow on the walls rushing by.

  “I’m willing to minimize the damage by leaving the country, but it’s going to come out, Paolo.” She’d managed to ignore her anxiety over that eventuality, but it threatened to overwhelm her as she spoke of it. Her feet moved quicker and she felt the walls closing in. Her mother’s shame and disappointment, Ryan’s mother’s horrified incomprehension... It would be a nightmare and Lauren didn’t even have her grandmother to stand by her.

  What she wanted, what she’d come here for, was rescue, she realized. Deep down, she had hoped for the same help and support he’d offered in Charleston.

  She wasn’t going to get it though. She really was alone in this.

  Eyes stinging at how inexorable it all was, Lauren made herself halt, growing aware that she was gasping breaths in, but was forgetting to let them out. A clammy sweat condensed on her skin and her vision faded to white. She was hyperventilating and even though she tried to make herself stop, panic at not tasting any oxygen stole her self-control, making her try harder to catch her breath.

  Paolo said her name in a sharp tone. She blindly looked to where she thought he was, but she couldn’t see him. Her hearing was muffled as though her ears were filling with water. She moved her lips, trying to tell him, trying...

  * * *

  Paolo had never seen anyone crumple like that and it stopped his heart. Somehow he kept her from hitting the floor, catching her in his arms while his knees took the brunt of the marble beneath the thin rug. Gathering up miles of silken fabric with a slender, limp shape inside, he pushed to his feet, heart pounding with dread as he deposited her on the sofa.

  Her color was ghastly. All he could think was that she was miscarrying when she’d just called her baby a miracle. He had an inkling of how devastating that sort of loss could be and couldn’t stomach it happening to her.

  Razor wire coiled in his chest, squeezing mercilessly as he fumbled his mobile from his pocket and tried with trembling hands to locate the number of the pediatric heart specialist sipping champagne in the Grand Ballroom.

  Lauren’s lashes fluttered before he found it. Her dazed eyes blinked open and something warm and lovely shone up at him before confusion clouded in. She automatically tried to sit up, but fell back quickly. Her breaths sounded like anxious gasps, frightening him.

  “I can’t breathe.” She reached for her back. “Open my dress.”

  “What?” Dio! He could kill her he was so terrified. Clattering his mobile onto the coffee table he rolled her into the sofa back and used both hands to release the tiny hook-and-eye closures down her back. There were a million of them and his fingers were big and clumsy. “I was trying to call a doctor. Are you in pain?”

  “No, I—”

  He overrode her with a string of curses as the panels of her dress peeled open to reveal a silken cord tied punishingly across her pale back. As he hurried to release the strings, he exposed a pattern of thin welts criss-crossing her satiny skin. “What in hell! The laces have nearly cut through to your ribs.”

  “It’s not that bad, is it? It doesn’t hurt.” She ran light fingers over the indents while her rib cage expanded and her body relaxed into softer lines. “I’m fine,” she dismissed on a long, easy sigh. “It was just a little tight.”

  “A little?” Appalled, he traced each mark, ensuring they were superficial enough to fade.

  Her spine made a subtle arch under his touch. Goose bumps rose across her flexing shoulder blades. Her reaction was so immediate and honest it sent a sexual zing through him, enticing him to slow his stroking into a deliberate caress. He recalled that her skin tasted exactly as smooth and creamy as it looked. The desire to bend and press kisses to her neck and shoulder until she moaned with need nearly overtook him.

  He forced himself to stand so he couldn’t touch her, mind reeling at how close a call that was. His body was shaking and his blood sizzling. “Why would you wear something so dangerous?” he charged.

  “Dangerous?” she repeated with a gurgle of humor. She rolled onto her back, hugging the loose front of the dress to breasts that remained invitingly plump against the amethyst edging. “Since when are gowns deadly?”

  Her smile invited him to join her in laughing at absurdity. Part of him wanted to let it happen. When she forgot to be shy, she was quite animated and fun.

  And sensual. Her eyes grew languorous as she gazed up at him. Her color was flowing back in a warm glow.

  “Shoes are regular serial killers, but dresses are harmless,” she teased.

  He couldn’t help the twitch of humor at the corner of his mouth. “I’ve seen dresses short enough to take a man down. Whiplash is a common occurrence.”

  Her smile grew. “I nearly died of embarrassment in a bathing suit once. True story.”

  “I would say nothing is safe, but that’s probably riskiest of all.”

  He’d taken it too far, his
voice lowering to an intimate tone as he pictured her naked. The irrepressible attraction between them rose like a ring of spitting fire, urging him to move closer to her. It took everything in him not to lower onto her and do exactly what he’d done the last time he’d been alone with her. They’d been completely naked, nothing between them, nothing.

  And it had been so wrong.

  He curled his hands into fists, refusing to let himself absorb the implications. “This isn’t funny, Lauren. None of this is the least bit funny.”

  Her mouth flinched in startled hurt at his return to recrimination. She threw her arm over her eyes to block him out and started to say, “I know, I’m s—” but flattened her lips to stop herself. “I was nervous, so I didn’t eat. That’s why I fainted.”

  “That was stupid!” His alarm for her climbed into the rafters. “I’ll order something. Are you on a special diet?” He was across the room with the hotel phone in his hand before her plea stopped him.

  “Paolo, don’t. Not here. Not like this.” She lowered her arm to reveal a disturbingly unguarded expression and nodded at her state of undress. She wasn’t taking this as lightly as she seemed. “Just pour me a glass of soda. Something with sugar, but no caffeine. And maybe a banana or one of those oranges? Then I’ll go back to my room and have a proper meal sent up.”

  He fetched what she’d asked for, assembling her micro-meal on the coffee table then standing by as she carefully sat up.

  The intensity of his tension struck him. He watched her pour and sip with a silent will for her to consume faster, like this was anti-venom she was taking in and her survival vitally important to him. The reality was, they were acquaintances through her husband. He didn’t know her well at all and couldn’t afford to trust her no matter how attracted to him she acted or how vulnerable she seemed.

  From day one she had thrown out those conflicting signals, seeming interested yet always turning to Ryan. She wasn’t the first woman to feed her ego by using one man’s attention to make another jealous, but she was the only one who had managed to both draw Paolo in and incite his green monster. Paolo refused to be treated as a plaything. It made him all the more certain she was setting him up in some way.

  “You need to get back to your party,” she murmured, carrying the icy glass of soda to her temple.

  “No one will miss me,” he countered, even though he was distantly aware of the same thing.

  “Isabella will,” she admonished. Then, keeping her face averted, asked, “Are you going to marry her?”

  He hesitated. This news of Lauren’s was more than even his lightning mind could process quickly, but he couldn’t turn his life upside down without thinking it through. It would be humiliating to believe her and discover he’d been tricked again. Best to stay the course until he had better evidence for a correction.

  “It would be a good match,” he said, hammering Isabella’s top qualities for both their benefits. “Her father is at the UN, her mother works with an international aid organization. Isabella understands life on the stage of global politics. Yes, I intend to marry her.”

  Lauren made a noise of acknowledgment that almost sounded like the gasp from an absorbed blow.

  Her reaction inexplicably caused invisible wires to pull him tighter than his tension already had him. A pike of misgiving speared through him and he instinctively wanted to rethink everything he’d just said.

  It was exactly the turmoil he wouldn’t allow her to put him through. He brushed aside the detour into self-doubt as she spoke again.

  “I didn’t hear anything about love. That was the problem with your first marriage, wasn’t it?” She kept her attention on the orange she was separating into sections, holding it well away from her gown.

  He stared at the top of her head, willing her to look up at him and dare to say that. At the same time, his gut twisted with guilt. It was true, he’d had very little affection for his ex, but she’d still managed to devastate him. It was one reason he was determined to pin his future on Isabella and not a woman he truly loved. To be betrayed was one thing, to love and be betrayed would be impossible to bear.

  “Love is for fools,” he muttered.

  With a snort of cynicism, Lauren chortled, “Ain’t that the truth.”

  Hearing her echo the sentiment irritated him. The way she had turned to him in Charleston had proved to him she wasn’t as devoted to Ryan as she’d portrayed through her marriage. This was further evidence she had scorned a man who had worshipped her.

  “I guess that makes Ryan a fool, marrying for love,” Paolo said scathingly.

  “Are you serious?” Her amber gaze flashed up like a splash of bourbon, stinging with hot-cold. “If he loved me so much, why did he spend all his time on the other side of the world taking insane chances with his life? He married me because I was raised to wait until I had a ring on my finger and he wanted bragging rights.”

  “A clever ploy on your part, seeing as his family is quite well off,” he shot back, while a flash of Ryan’s smug victor’s grin hit him square between the eyes. There could be some truth to her claim. He had another suspicion about his friend’s motives, one that was even less complimentary. They had always been competitive with each other, he and Ryan. It was usually good-natured, but there were times it had been cutthroat and Ryan had been in no doubt that Paolo found Lauren attractive.

  No doubt.

  “It wasn’t a ploy, it’s the truth,” Lauren bit out defensively, pulling Paolo’s thoughts from a dark place he rarely visited.

  It was a place of bitterness he barely understood because he never examined it, but it filled him with enough acrimony to challenge, “You married for sex then?”

  Disbelief dropped her jaw before her outrage fell away to wounded pride.

  Her stunned silence pricked his conscience. He almost began forming an apology for crossing a line, but a self-conscious flush flooded into her cheeks. She looked naked and culpable, but her expression carried an edge of defiance that gave him a tingle of premonition. He unconsciously braced himself.

  With her blush firmly in place, but a disconcertingly frank look sweeping over her, she sat straighter and said defiantly, “Perhaps I did marry for sex. I was curious and not confident enough to believe any other man would be interested, but I did love Ryan, in my immature way.”

  That was too much honesty. He looked away, wanting to refute what she was saying by pointing out he had been interested, but that would only muddy already dark waters. Immature he would accept, while the rest he held in reserve. He needed to view her as deceitful to keep his distance. Otherwise he’d have to believe everything she was saying about this baby she was carrying and where would that leave him? Not upholding the honor of his family name the way he’d sworn to do after so disgracing it with his ugly divorce.

  He would have to believe that when Lauren had woken him from the first sleep he’d had in forty-eight hours by sliding her caressing hand into his shirt, it had been from genuine desire, not ulterior motives.

  The pulse of desire that hit with that possibility was a sledgehammer straight into his gut, bathing him in heat. His hungry gaze moved restlessly to eat up the way her shorn head revealed her slender neck and the graceful slant of her nude shoulders. Her deshabille gave off a sexy, yet ingenuous appearance.

  Don’t fall for it, he cautioned himself, but couldn’t help thinking that no matter whose baby grew in her belly, she was still a woman without a husband to provide for her. She was susceptible and he was, at his core, a protective man.

  He was duty-bound to protect his family, though. And what did it matter whether she had married for love or not? She was also admitting to resentment that her husband had been away a lot. What she’d done during those long absences was very much up for scrutiny. Perhaps he should take her at her word that she wasn’t asking him to be a father, only wa
nted to warn him about an impending media storm.

  “Where are you planning to go?” he asked, hitching the knees of his pants as he sank into the sofa opposite her.

  “I told you. To my room.” She darted out her tongue to catch the juice from the orange that ran down her finger.

  She might as well have stroked that tongue where he’d feel it most. His loins were still pooled with simmering heat and he reacted as though she had licked him, the strain turning into an erection so swiftly, he stifled a grunt of pain. If he could have stood, he would have walked out on her.

  “You said you were leaving the country,” he reminded in a hostile clip that caused the brightness in her gaze to dim. Good. There was no room for sensuous picnics between them.

  “Italy,” she replied stiffly.

  He choked, certain he’d misheard. “Like hell you are. That’s my home.”

  “I’m sorry, do you own the entire country? The brochures didn’t say.” That sexy mouth had a quick motor behind it, didn’t it?

  “Did I misunderstand what you said about minimizing damage? Or do you only intend to be discreet where it affects your interests?” he asked.

  “It’s not like I’m going to call up your family and introduce myself! I want to look up my own, if you must know.”

  He leaned back, stretching his arms across the sofa so he wouldn’t lean forward and throttle her. A ferocious sensation accosted him each time he came back to her assertion that the baby was his, like poking an abscessed tooth with his tongue. He dismissed it, focusing on the more immediate problem.

  “This is the first I’ve heard that you have Italian relatives. Who are they? Where do they live?”

  “My mother’s father was Italian, not that she’d admit it.” She broke off a piece of banana and carefully nibbled. “My grandmother came home pregnant. Mom was her love child.”

  Lauren’s lashes flickered as her gaze dropped and her brows tugged together. He heard her thoughts. Her baby wasn’t a love child. What was it then? A mistake? The product of a one-night stand? His?