The Boss's Baby Affair

by Tessa Radley

  “DNA doesn’t lie.” Candace spoke into the silence that simmered after his sister’s departure. “A birth certificate can be tampered with.”

  Annoyance rose within Nick. “Are you accusing me of tampering with the system?”

  Candace muttered something about money talking, and Nick could feel his anger growing. She was boxing him into a corner, forcing him into a place where he was going to have to agree to the test to expose her as a fraud.

  Yet watching her, her head bent over the baby’s, caused his anger to dissipate. Only the raw throb of betrayal remained. He wanted her…hell, he’d been growing to like her. The combination had been so seductively powerful, so consuming, he’d been ready to open himself to her…more than he ever had to any other woman.

  A sense of emptiness filled him. Why had she done it? Candace didn’t appear unstable. In fact, she seemed heart-wrenchingly attached to Jennie. Nick abandoned his musing. What did it matter what her motivation was?

  The test would prove her a liar. Conclusively. And then he would sever all ties with no looking back.

  The house was still when the darkness of midnight was broken by the silver streak of light pouring through the crack of the opening door.

  Nick moved restlessly.

  She came to him, floating soundlessly across the carpet like a wraith in the night. He shifted, and miraculously she was beside him, naked, eager. Her mouth covered his. Hunger rose swift and sharp. He needed this. And she understood.

  He took her mouth, plundered it. His fingers sank into her shoulders, holding her captive. She shifted against him with one of those little catlike moves he’d seen her do, and his body went crazy.

  He forgot how long it had been…

  He forgot that she was a fraud he was determined to expose. He forgot everything except that he had a woman in his bed, a woman he wanted with an unfamiliar desperation.

  She twisted beneath him. A silent lover, no sighs or moans split the night. Her legs tangled with his. He grasped her thighs, pushed them apart and sank between them into the moist, waiting heat of her.

  His spine arched, his body driving.

  Gasping, Nick opened his eyes, blind to everything except the excruciating need that pumped through him as his seed spilled.

  A band of bright light fell across the bed from the open door of the en suite. Nick tensed. He reached out a hand. The bed was empty. He groped further, his fingers encountering cool, smooth sheets. Not fabric rumpled by passion.

  Where the hell had she gone?

  He rolled over onto his stomach, burying his face in the silk fabric, his sleep-numbed brain trying to make sense of what the hell had happened. The sheet smelled of soap and lavender; no hint of her spicy, slightly exotic fragrance lingered. The only softness a plump abandoned feather pillow, damp and crumpled.

  He swore viciously.

  More asleep than awake, he swung his legs out and stumbled from the bed to the bathroom. In the shower cubicle, he turned the faucets on and let the force of the cold water crash over his overheated body.

  He refused to yield to the desire that still raged through him. He told himself it had all been an illusion, nothing but a cruel trick played on him by his starved libido. No woman could ever be as good as a man’s desperate fantasy.

  Not even Candace…

  Six

  His arms folded behind his head, Nick leaned back in the leather chair behind the walnut desk in the study that was his only retreat in a house Jilly had created and furnished with help from an expensive design team. It was Tuesday evening, and Candace was still living in his home.

  He hadn’t figured out what her motivation was for lying about being Jennie’s mother—nor had she given up on her insistence that she was.

  The other thing that hadn’t changed was that he still craved her with a hunger that made absolutely no sense. Nick couldn’t believe he was fantasizing about a woman whom he should be kicking out.

  The past few days had been hell.

  Every now and then a flash of that crazy dream would creep insidiously into his brain before he could banish it. Traitor.

  First thing yesterday morning Nick had ordered Busby to drive Jennie and Candace to his doctor, where the swabs for DNA tests had been taken.

  Candace had shown no surprise when he’d bowed out, inventing a meeting to attend. Yet while being thankful that she wasn’t suspicious of his reasons for absenting himself, Nick couldn’t help feeling that he’d given Candace more ammunition for her belief that he was an unfit father for Jennie.

  But he’d been eager to avoid questions about why he wouldn’t give a sample. A call to his doctor had satisfied Nick that it wasn’t necessary. Buccal samples taken from Candace and Jennie by mouth swabs would be sufficient to establish with certainty that Candace wasn’t, in fact, Jennie’s mother. Even though his doctor had suggested that the result would be more conclusive had his DNA been available to be matched, Nick had chosen to ignore that advice.

  Now, with the samples taken and the results from the diagnostic laboratory fast-tracked and due any minute, Nick had been tensing every time his cell phone beeped.

  He couldn’t make up his mind what he wanted more: for Candace’s claim to be true, proving she hadn’t lied, or for it to be false so that he could be rid of her, once and for all.

  Without a shadow of a doubt, Nick knew which would be the easier solution to deal with. Getting Candace out of Jennie’s life—out of his own—and returning to the even keel of his existence was what they both needed.

  So why did that leave him feeling so…flat?

  Nick stared sightlessly at the two antique botanical watercolors that flanked the study door. They’d belonged to Henry. Instead of selling them, the old man had insisted on gifting them to Nick. Usually the pictures gave him an immense sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.

  But today all he could think of was Candace. Of how she’d disrupted his life and turned his world upside down. He wasn’t going to allow her to unravel Jennie’s world, too.

  When he’d called his assistant yesterday morning to tell her he wouldn’t be in for the day, there’d been utter silence on the other side of the line before Pauline had asked if he was ill. Only then did Nick realize that in all the years Pauline had worked for him he’d never taken a day off—the only time he didn’t go in to work was when he was out of the country on business trips. Hell, he hadn’t even taken time off for a honeymoon after he’d married Jilly. Much to his new bride’s tearful dismay.

  But there’d been no need for a honeymoon and all the trappings of romance. He’d been nothing more than his bride’s bought husband—and he hadn’t intended to prop up the pretense with a fake honeymoon.

  Jilly’s expectations had been suffocating. She’d wanted a pet. A husband who came when she crooked her finger, who mated on demand—one she could trot out and show off to her friends. Her attempts to domesticate him had had the effect of driving him away to seek his freedom in the corporate corridors she avoided and the boxing gym she despised.

  Despite his romantic surname, Jilly had made a horrible mistake. He’d never been cut out to be the trophy husband she’d mistakenly believed she could groom him to be.

  The phone rang.

  Nick rocked forward in the chair and picked up the hand-set.

  Within seconds his hands were clenched around the instrument in a stranglehold. “Almost a hundred percent likelihood that she is Jennie’s biological mother!” he exclaimed. “How is that possible?”

  The laboratory didn’t have an explanation—other than the unwelcome suggestion that Candace was, in fact, Jennie’s mother.

  Nick wanted—needed—answers. And there was only one person alive who was able to provide them.

  Grim-faced, he ended the call, rose from his desk and strode toward the door.

  Candace was in the bath, when the door to the en suite flew open to reveal the tall, male frame of Nick Valentine. One look into his blazing eyes and her objection
s to his uninvited presence died.

  Nick was in a towering rage.

  His eyes were a scorching shade of black, his mouth pinched into a tight line. His fury made him look twice his normal size—which was already substantial.

  Candace swallowed. Then moistened her lips nervously as his angry gaze skimmed the bits of her wet, naked body that weren’t hidden by the mounds of bubbles from the baby wash she’d snitched from the nursery. One hasty downward glance, following in the wake of the burning trail his eyes had left, revealed rosy tips peaked to hard nubs. Even as she instinctively covered her breasts with her hands, she knew her last-ditch attempt at modesty was futile.

  She found her voice. “Get out!”

  The flags of livid, burning color high on his cheekbones told her he wasn’t immune to her nakedness. Strangely enough that knowledge gave her the confidence she needed to sit upright in the bath.

  If he wanted to ogle, let him damn well look.

  Candace was pretty sure her body would hold no surprises that he hadn’t seen before. And she would have another reason to detest him when he feasted his eyes on her.

  But instead of leering, Nick retreated to the doorjamb. “Get dressed,” he muttered, jerking his eyes back up to hers, his color high. “I want to talk to you.”

  “It will have to wait until I’ve finished my soak.”

  Two long strides across the expanse of polished black-slate tiles and he was looming over her. “This can’t wait.”

  The bathroom that had seemed so decadently glamorous only minutes earlier was now suffocatingly intimate.

  “I want you out of here.” Candace hoped she didn’t sound as shaky as she felt. “You’re my employer and I’m entitled to some privacy.”

  When Nick bent forward, Candace tensed, snapping, “Do you want me to file a suit for sexual harassment?”

  Then her breath rushed out her lungs as he scooped her out of the bath. Shocked by his action, she stared up at him. He was plastered against her, the water from her body streaming down his shirt. Their gazes clashed. Beneath his anger she detected a maelstrom of other pent-up emotions—heat and turbulence and a host of indefinable nuances that were impossible to read.

  Candace decided the wisest course of action right now might be silence. Nick looked fit to explode.

  He stepped back, grabbed a towel and wrapped it around her, pushing the edges into her nerveless hands.

  “No harassment, see?” he snarled.

  His actions had paralyzed Candace. “You can’t just walk in here and—”

  “This is my house. I can do exactly as I please. You have ten minutes—that should give you time to dry yourself off and change.” Over his shoulder he tossed, “Don’t make me come and fetch you. I’ll be waiting for you in my study.”

  Nick halted outside Candace’s closed bedroom door, his head in turmoil.

  His ordered existence had been turned inside out. All that he’d thought was true…wasn’t. And the only person who could give him the answers he sought was naked, only one flimsy wall separating them.

  God.

  Nick broke into a sweat all over again as the unwanted memory of the pearlescent gleam of Candace’s wet, naked flesh flashed through his mind. He’d been tempted to strip off his clothing and get naked with her. Only her timely reminder that he was her employer had stopped him.

  It had been hard enough to keep his imagination reined in before; now that he’d actually seen what previously he’d only fantasized about, his body was going into overdrive.

  Yet everything had been complicated by the incomprehensible discovery he’d made. Candace wasn’t his daughter’s nanny…nurse, he amended. Candace was Jennie’s mother.

  Nick didn’t understand it. The situation was too surreal to absorb. How had Jilly come to have Jennie? And what had happened to the baby his wife had been carrying? The baby who had been created at the Namkhet Island clinic.

  He’d watched Jilly’s body changing. Every time he returned from an overseas trip sourcing products, or returned from a visit to one of the cross-country garden centers, her pregnancy had advanced. The baby had been born while he was overseas.

  Had there been a switch? So where was Jilly’s baby? Or had the baby died? Was there something wrong with it? Where was it? And then when had Jilly arranged for Candace to be impregnated? Or had Candace already been pregnant and sold her child?

  That was the scenario he liked least of all.

  But Nick was struggling to make sense of it all. His feet had carried him outside the nursery. Softly he pushed the door open and went in.

  Jennie was lying in her crib, in some kind of white jumpsuit with pink ears on the hood.

  Nick found himself grinning down at her, and for the first time since the unwelcome call from his doctor, the coiled tension that had him strung tighter than a bow started to unwind.

  “Ears…?” He shook his head. “Who on earth designed ears for the top of a baby’s head? You’re not a rabbit!”

  Jennie flapped her arms, and Nick could’ve sworn her eyes gleamed with humor. He bent close to her and whispered, “I never understood why Jilly was so desperate for a baby—” Nick broke off and gulped “—until I met you.”

  It was a life-changing admission.

  Only now, almost too late, was he coming to realize how much Jennie meant to him. He’d resented her. She’d underlined the emptiness in his life: the wrong wife, the wrong life. It had taken the realization that he might lose the baby to realize that he wanted another chance.

  Fine time for that to happen.

  He gazed down at the baby. The fluffy ears atop her round head made her look incredibly cute. Her mouth moved and she blew a raspberry, then her face broke into a smile.

  A wave of emotion swamped Nick. Only one thing was certain. Jennie wasn’t his. He’d known it when Jilly had stopped all the talk about their baby. Even though he’d never called her on it, and maintained the fiction that the IVF had been successful—with his sperm. So how had he allowed this to happen? How could this little imp have crawled into the empty space in his heart?

  Naturally, Candace wanted Jennie back. What mother wouldn’t?

  A tight chill settled over him.

  Well, he wasn’t going to make it easy.

  For whatever reason, Candace had chosen to give Jennie up. She might regret her decision, but she’d made it, she’d signed a surrogacy agreement and he could find the document and make sure she stuck with whatever terms it entailed. He was sure Jilly would’ve adopted Jennie…he’d need to check whether he could’ve been included in the adoption without his knowledge.

  But Jennie had been living with him for the past six months and Candace hadn’t shown any interest in the baby during that time. No court would ignore that.

  A premonition of the battle to come flashed before his eyes. He’d find out all the facts, get top legal advice. As far as he was concerned, he had as much right to the baby as Candace. More, in his mind. Then there was the fact that he’d been misled…made to believe the baby was his wife’s child. Surely that would carry weight, too?

  Because he wasn’t about to give Jennie up. Not without a fight.

  Candace would have to live with the choice she had made.

  Nick’s study was a surprise.

  Candace hadn’t been inside Nick’s private domain before, and it was a total departure from the highly polished and reflective black-white-and-acid-yellow decor of the rest of the house.

  This space was welcoming…

  Homey.

  Under normal circumstances the deep-brown leather sofas would’ve invited her to sink down, and the rows of books on the wooden shelves would’ve tempted her to browse between the covers. But now the sight of Nick standing with his back to her—arms akimbo, looking out the window into the darkness beyond—caused her stomach to knot. She was all too conscious of the huge divide between them. She was a nurse, a working woman, accustomed to long shifts; he was a millionaire, a man with a fortu
ne at his command.

  But what did it matter that he wore three-hundred-dollar jeans while hers had cost thirty dollars at Kmart? Or that his loafers were made of the finest Italian leather, whereas her slippers had come out of the supermarket bargain box? What did wealth matter when it came to love?

  He swung around. His face was sterner than she’d ever seen it. “I have some questions I want answered.” He gestured to the nearest sofa. “Sit down.”

  Candace perched on the edge and her strung-out nerves almost gave out. She pulled herself together. “I assume you wanted to see me because you have the test results and you’ve discovered that I was telling you the truth—and now you’re ready to apologize to me.”

  Nick made a choking sound. “Apologize?”

  “You’ve been treating me like I was some lowlife liar instead of the Good Samaritan who agreed to help you and your wife.”

  “Hang on a mo—”

  “Jilly told me you were both undyingly grateful for a chance to have a baby.” Candace flinched as the word undyingly hovered between them.

  Before she could say sorry for her tactless word choice, he’d settled himself on the other end of the sofa she was on, and Candace reminded herself that Nick Valentine’s own behavior in this mess was certainly less than laudable.

  “Jilly was—”

  “—delightful.” Candace glared sideways at him. “You should’ve taken a leaf out your wife’s book. In all the months I was pregnant you never once came to visit.”

  His face went blank. “Why the hell should I have come to visit you?”

  “To say thank you for the enormous gift I gave you both.” Her throat thickened and she felt like she was about to cry. Damned if she would. “But no, your work was too damn important.”

  “Wait, I didn’t know—”

  “How long were you married?” She wasn’t interested in what he thought, didn’t want to hear his justifications. When he didn’t answer she repeated, “How long?”