The Millionaire and the Pregnant Pauper

by Christie Ridgway

  “What are you telling me, Beth?” He tried to stop himself from touching her. But his hand reached out and stroked her soft, feathery hair.

  She didn’t move away. “I don’t know. The truth, I guess. I can’t forget that first kiss.”

  That was it. Michael slid down the arm of the sofa and scooped Beth up in his arms. No more talk. Her face turned his way, his face came down. His chin bumped her forehead, brushed by her nose. Her breath puffed against his cheek.

  Lips finally found lips.

  Her taste exploded on his tongue. He thrust it inside her hot mouth, he couldn’t wait. She opened for him, opened wide her arms around him.

  Stucco by Beth. Yes. He wanted her warm touch all over his skin.

  He thrust his tongue into her mouth again and then hers followed more slowly back into his mouth. He sucked on her tongue. She went rigid in his arms, moaned.

  His pulse was hammering in all the right places. He ran his tongue down her neck to see if her pulse beat as fast. She moaned again, and he drew her tighter against him.

  Her bottom rubbed against his lap and he groaned his pleasure against her ear.

  She tasted sweet everywhere. He sucked on her ears, kissed her temples, let the heat of desire dictate the next place to explore until her small hands cupped his cheeks and made him take her mouth again.

  His tongue thrust, withdrew, thrust, withdrew, the action foreshadowing what he would do with that other part of his body later. Soon.

  Her breasts. In the thrill of her mouth, the smooth skin of her face, he’d forgotten how much he wanted to touch them. Slowly, so not to scare her off, he trailed his fingers from her waist toward her heart. He laid his hand there, in the center, felt the poundpound-pound against his palm. Burying his face in her hair, he breathed in her scent, breathed in Beth, and then moved his hand to cover one breast.

  At the touch, his thighs, his knees, his shoulders— hell, his knuckles—went rigid. Full, lush, lusty breast. Beneath her shirt, her bra, the nipple was already hard and peaked.

  “Michael?”

  He ignored the question because desire hoarsened her voice and he knew what she was asking for. He brushed his thumb against her nipple and the breast swelled into his palm and her body arched higher, pulling away from his lap and then sinking back down against his hardness.

  The room was airless.

  But he let his lungs suffer and his hand found its way beneath her shirt. The skin over her ribs was hot and she lifted again off his lap as he found her bra. The fingers of his free hand trembled. But the exploring hand moved firmly, surely, to pull down the fabric of her bra and expose her hot skin and hard nipple to his touch.

  Her deep sound of desire made his blood burn.

  How badly, incredibly, wholly he wanted her made his head spin.

  He pressed into her mouth with his tongue and pressed his palm against the heated center of her breast.

  “Beth,” he said, rubbing his thumb back and forth across her nipple. “Come to bed with me. I want you naked. I want you mine.”

  Her eyes opened. Even in the darkness he could see her bottom lip was wet from his latest kiss. “Michael—”

  He could hear reality enter her voice. She wriggled a bit and he knew he’d pulled her from the daze of desire.

  Sensations rushed crazily from his body to his brain, as if they knew there might be little time. The weight of her against the hardness of his lap. Her soft hair tickling his neck. The nipple budding against his fingers. “I want you naked in my bed,” he said again, because he was afraid she would say no.

  “No, Michael.”

  He closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see her moving away. She did, and his hand fell off her breast and she climbed out of his lap.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He grit his teeth. “That was my line.”

  “I didn’t mean to lead you somewhere—”

  “I’m not blaming you.”

  She rubbed her hands through her hair, tousling it even more than he had. Soft, it had slipped between his fingers with erotic promise.

  “We obviously have a, um, thing for each other,” Beth finally said.

  A thing.

  “And I don’t know exactly what is right or wrong about it. But, um, about going to bed together…”

  His blood reheated at those words in her mouth. He wanted to, right now. Any instant she said. “Tell me I didn’t hear that but,” he said.

  Her smile filled her voice. “Bu-u-u-t, I don’t have a doctor’s okay to do anything, um, physical yet.”

  “Oh.”

  “You know, after having a baby—”

  Oh. “I get it.” His brain did, anyway. Now if only the rest of his body would. He shifted on the couch, trying to get comfortable. “But can I tell my ego that otherwise…?”

  “Oh, Michael.” She laughed, that soft giggle she’d let out in the cab of the truck that had done him in the first time. “You can tell your ego that your kisses and your…touch are great.”

  His blood went on simmer again. “So the ego and I might be invited back sometime?”

  “Oh, Michael,” she said again. This time no giggle. He missed it. He knew what else was coming. “That.wouldn’t be smart, would it?” she said.

  Considering how they were married only temporarily, for convenience? No.

  Considering how this thing between them stirred up so fast, so hot?

  No.

  7

  Keeping away from Michael could qualify Beth for Mensa. Even ten days after that night on the couch Beth knew it was the smart move. But ten days was 240 hours of sharing a small house with a man who left behind each morning his scent in the shower, hot coffee on the counter, and a hungry, backward look stamped on her memory.

  And ten days equalled ten nights like this one, both of them around the rickety table in the tiny kitchen. Tea and coffee steaming from mugs.

  But she was making the situation work fairly well. Make that kind-of-okay. Really, it was getting harder and harder to remember just how intelligent it was to stay away from Michael. But she had to avoid the temptation of his easy charm, his touch, at all costs. Because the opposite would cost too much.

  Michael’s best friend Elijah was helping. Maybe the tension was getting to Michael, too, because Elijah had showed up the past two evenings, and they’d both greeted him with desperate enthusiasm, as if his presence could single-handedly cut the tense atmosphere just as she cut the cheesecake she’d made that day.

  “Chocolate?” Elijah boomed. “My favorite.”

  Beth spun toward him, his plate in her hand. Michael, also up from the table, turned toward her with a fistful of forks. To avoid a fork in the arm or cheesecake to his chest, Beth swung the plate away to the side. Michael did the same with the utensils. Their momentum bumped them, body to body.

  Her nerve endings flared like sparklers.

  The same heat glittered in Michael’s eyes.

  What would it hurt to touch him?

  He took a deep breath and his chest expanded against her breasts.

  Who would it hurt to touch him?

  In answer, Mischa started fussing from the bedroom. Cheeks burning, Beth stepped around Michael and plunked Elijah’s cheesecake in front of him. The walk down the hall and changing Mischa’s diaper gave her enough time to recall her willpower. She had more than herself to think about. Michael didn’t want family ties and that was what she and Mischa were—a family.

  She just had to forget the seductive power of Michael’s touch and remember the divisive power of their differences.

  With Mischa in her arms, she returned to the kitchen to find the two men reminiscing over past Valentine’s Day parties, apparently a Wentworth family tradition.

  “Evelyn’s-sugar cookies,” Elijah said. “And the kissing closet. Isn’t that what we called it? I caught you there with my date when we were fifteen.”

  Michael laughed. “Only because you’d sent my girl one of those lacy,
racy Valentine cards.”

  Beth slid into the empty chair between the two men and picked up her fork. Mischa started a halfhearted fuss that made it hard to hear the men razzing each other. She didn’t mind. Holiday talk wasn’t her favorite. The Thurston Home for Girls had done okay with the biggies—Thanksgiving and Christmas—but smaller holidays went by with little fuss. No egg dying or Easter Bunny. Construction paper costumes for Halloween instead of the princess gear of dressup shoes and rhinestone tiaras that she’d dreamed were worn by litte girls in real houses with a real mommy and daddy.

  “And what did you do on Valentine’s Day, Beth?” Elijah pitched his voice over Mischa’s snuffling. “Play spin the bottle with the boys?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know how to play that game.” How wide was the gulf between her and the men! They’d been sharing cookies and kisses with girls in froufrou party dresses, while she’d been sharing a room and a wardrobe with five other orphans.

  Suddenly Michael leaned over and plucked the fussing baby out of her arms. Mischa quieted, entranced by the new face above his. “No spin the bottle?” he said, smiling down at the baby. “We might need to do something about that, Beth.”

  The tease in his voice tickled down her spine. She could almost imagine it, imagine being fifteen and her heart pounding in her throat and Michael moving closer for a kiss.

  “Post office, then,” Elijah said, grinning. “We played an elaborate version of it once. Stacks of valentines. The postmaster would pick one from the girl’s pile and one from the boy’s pile…”

  Beth’s imagination took over again. The Wentworth house. The wobbly heels of teenage pumps clicking against the marble hallway. Her fingers trembling as she opened the envelope with his handwriting on the front.

  Her breathlessness made her wary. What a fantasy. She shook her head to dispel it. “Nope,” she said. “No post office, either.”

  Elijah frowned. “You’re from California, right? They got some other tradition besides cupids, kissing games and mushy valentines?”

  Elijah could have no way of knowing how different her traditions had been. But it was good to remind herself of them. Of where she came from and of how far Michael was out of her league. “I grew up in a girl’s group home in Los Angeles,” she said. “For orphans.”

  Poor Elijah paled. “Oh. Uh. Sorry—”

  “It’s okay.” Beth smiled. It was good for Michael to hear it, for her to remind herself of the gulf between them. “I don’t remember celebrating Valentine’s Day at all.”

  Beside her, Michael shifted, and one of his hard thighs pressed against hers. She scooted away a bit, and his leg followed.

  “You didn’t celebrate at school?” Michael was studying Mischa’s face, one finger absently stroking the baby’s cheek.

  Beth shook her head. “We weren’t in a good section of town. The orphanage was next door to a shelter for homeless families. Our classes were actually in a building on the shelter property.”

  Elijah grimaced. “Not exactly a party school, huh?”

  Beth smiled again. “Not exactly.” How she’d grown up hadn’t hurt so much as it had just seemed…empty.

  “Evelyn has a thing for Valentine’s Day,” Michael said. “Since I was a little kid, she’d start weeks before planning the party.”

  The gray-haired housekeeper a romantic at heart? The thought made Beth smile.

  Michael was looking at her. “She’d spread out stacks of pink and red paper. Those white doilies. Glue and sequins and pens. Jack would roll his eyes and run out of the house with a football. Josie would cooperate, making card after card for her friends and her teachers.”

  “I remember that,” Elijah said. “I’d use all those stickers and stuff. Made my mom cry every year when she opened hers.”

  Beth met Michael’s gaze. See? See how far apart we are? The privileged boy who was served cookies on a silver platter and presented with valentines handmade of lace. The orphan with the downtown L.A. childhood, not empty of care, but empty of…caring.

  They were so far apart, see? But the thought was hard to hold on to when his dark eyes wouldn’t let hers go. When her child had fallen asleep against his wide chest. When his leg pressed firmly against hers, insisting that she see him as a man, not a past.

  “No,” she whispered.

  He didn’t blink. “No, what, honey?”

  Michael’s large palm cradled her son’s head, and she could feel the touch herself, soothing, comforting, holding her close to him.

  “I never made any valentines. Not once, do you understand?” She could feel Elijah looking at her, too, but she couldn’t stop talking. Michael had to understand how little they had in common. Nothing that would rationalize even one more kiss.

  His thigh was already hard against hers, but now his hand found hers, too. Under the table he laced fingers with her, gripping her hand with unhesitating strength.

  “I never made valentines either, honey.” Michael’s voice rumbled slowly, in that Oklahoma drawl. “Well, just one every year, though I never gave it away.”

  Beth couldn’t breathe. Michael wasn’t getting it. He obviously didn’t want to fight against the thing between them anymore. Why wouldn’t he acknowledge how far, achingly far, they were apart?

  God, men were dense.

  “Don’t you want to know who I made my one valentine for?” he asked softly.

  She shook her head. She didn’t want to know. She only wanted him to let go of her hand and then acknowledge that they had nothing in common. Nothing.

  He spoke anyway. “I made a valentine for my parents. Like you, the ones I never met and never knew.”

  Michael had let her run off. Last night he’d let her take the baby from him and hightail it back to her room, like some unready filly scenting a stud.

  Elijah had cocked an eyebrow. “Gonna hurt her?”

  That had made him mad. “No!”

  “You thinkin’ here?”

  “Don’t go cowboy on me, Elijah.”

  Elijah’s other eyebrow had raised then, too. “It’s not cowboy to want to protect a woman.”

  Michael watched the knuckles on his fists turn white. “She has my name.”

  “For a reason,” Elijah had said calmly. “Don’t make it for a price.”

  Michael sighed and pushed open the front door. He’d come home for lunch because remembering Elijah’s words made him feel guilty and because Beth hadn’t been able to even look at him this morning.

  “Beth!” He’d offer her freedom. Let her off the hook if she wanted it. Maybe he’d even insist they end the marriage now.

  Nobody was home. For an instant, panic. Had she run off already? But then, no. The baby’s infant carrier sat in its place in the kitchen. The basket of baby toys in a corner of the den.

  On the counter a scribbled note: “Dr. Scudder, 11:30.”

  Was Beth sick? Mischa?

  House to town should have taken twenty-five minutes. Michael made it in seventeen. And found the offices of Dr. Scudder, family practitioner, closed for lunch.

  Damn.

  The panic rose again, then turned to anger after he called the hospital and determined neither Beth nor Mischa was a patient there. “I don’t want to feel like this,” he muttered. The whole point of the marriage was not to feel like this, not to feel as if he were responsible to anyone.

  It was time to end the thing.

  Two blocks down he found her car, but no sign of her. Two blocks more and he had to force himself not to run. Where was she? He wanted to find Beth and get the wheels moving to dissolve the marriage.

  The bakery.

  He walked quickly, certain she’d be there. Through the window he could see the place was busy. Apparently the month of February brought out the sweet tooth in people. An elaborately iced heart cake in the display case made him think of the conversation from the night before. Beth’s childhood. No spin the bottle, no post office. No valentines.

  She should have had a v
alentine.

  And he should have his head examined. It was divorce time, not party time.

  Bells on the door jangled as he went inside. His gaze ran over the customers, counterhelp. No Beth.

  Double damn. He gritted his teeth. Maybe the owners, Bea and Millie, knew where to find her. He sucked in a breath, and the delicious bakery smell hit him hard, and harder hitting was the instant memory of his marriage proposal. Beth’s surprised face, her damp skin, all tangled up in that bakery smell that had permeated the upstairs apartment.

  No wonder the memory was so sweet.

  At the bakery counter, Millie, Bea and another woman were waiting on three lines of customers. He could have called out his question, but for some odd reason he didn’t want people to know he was looking for his wife.

  Or maybe that he had lost track of her.

  It only took two breaths before he was spotted in the bakery. Two employees of Wentworth Oil, clerks in the accounting department, passed by him with white sacks. Both paused to ask him about the ranch, his marriage, if he missed Wentworth Oil.

  Fine, fine, not a bit

  The sound of his voice made Lily Baker turn around, two people ahead of him in line.

  “Michael.” She said it in that flirtatious way she had, with an experienced smile that said it was he she’d been waiting all day to encounter.

  “Lily.” He nodded. Usually Lily’s wide eyes and chest-out posture made him chuckle, but today it only seemed false and forced.

  She let the persons between them take her place in line and moved too close to Michael. “Having a bad day? You look grumpy.”

  He took a lungful of her sophisticated perfume. “I’m fine.” He tried to smile and took a quick step back.

  She put a hand on his forearm. Her nails were expertly shaped and painted to a high gloss. “You don’t seem like the old Michael. Where’s your smile? Where’s the fun?”

  He lifted higher the corners of his lips. “I don’t know what you mean.” Over her teased hairdo he watched the transactions at the counter. If only they’d move faster. He needed to talk to Beth now, when ending the marriage seemed so much the right thing to do.