by Trish Morey; Day Leclaire; Natalie Anderson; Brenda Jackson; Ann Voss Peterson
Thankfully, it was the last night. One formal reception and he could escape. He studded cufflinks through shirt cuffs, wondering if he really needed to be here, wondering how things were at home.
Wondering if he’d notice any changes in Angelina’s shape when he got back.
Angelina.
The name suited her so well. It hadn’t at first, when she’d been merely Angie. The name had seemed wrong to him then. But Angelina. That was her. Long limbed and lithe, her sun-kissed hair layered around her face, her lips wide and lush, her eyes so blue he was tempted to dive right into their depths.
A picture flashed into his mind. Angelina standing by the pool, her hands in her hair, her skin honey-gold from the sun and her breasts like an invitation. And lust speared into him again, just as it had that day, hot and hard.
Damn. He grabbed his jacket and frowned, wondering just when it was that he’d stopped thinking of her merely as an incubator and more as a woman? And why now, when he had an evening of dreariness right here to look forward to?
Maybe because you’ve never had any reason to look forward to going home before, said a small voice in his head. Because when Carla was there…
He shrugged the jacket on and just as easily shrugged those thoughts away. Carla was gone. Never again would he make that mistake. Never again would he fall for a woman who was so shallow.
Angelina wasn’t shallow. Angelina was there now. Angelina and his child.
And deciding he wasn’t really needed here wasn’t such a difficult decision to make at all.
The room was perfect. Almost perfect, Angie realised, as she noticed the row of teddy bears lining the floor instead of sitting atop the shelf that had been purpose-built for them. Darn, how had she missed them?
She snagged a bunch of teddies under one arm and dragged a nearby chair. The bears were an easy fix although the chair could do with being a few inches higher. She was up there on the chair, stretching high to place them. She loved the bears. She loved their faces, some hand-stitched, some machined, but all of them with some kind of expression. She loved them all.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
She turned too fast at the booming voice—he wasn’t supposed to be home yet—lost her balance and she and the remaining teddies went spinning into space.
He caught her, although crashing into someone as hard as Dominic, she figured, as the air was knocked from her lungs, was surely every bit as hard as crashing to the ground. ‘What kind of stupid idea was that?’
‘I’ll say.’ She found her feet, willing her breathing and her pulse back to normal. Not that that was likely given he still held her in his arms. ‘What on earth made you yell like that?’
‘You were up on the chair!’
‘I know. And I was perfectly fine until you barged in huffing more steam than a locomotive.’
‘But you were up on the chair!’
‘I was there, remember, safe as houses until you exploded onto the scene.’
‘Are you all right?’ He held her shoulders and looked her over. ‘Is the baby all right?’
‘The baby’s fine.’ It was her who was finding it difficult to breathe. His big hands were warm on her shoulders and did he realise his thumbs were stroking her skin and doing all sorts of weird things to her breathing, not to mention her nipples?
But it was good to see him. She drank him in. The dark, tousled hair, black-as-night eyes and chiselled jaw. And then he finished his inspection and looked into her eyes and she nearly melted. And it was all she could do to get out the words.
‘Welcome home.’
Her simple welcome was a balm to the soul. His hands shifted. Slowly, subtly as he looked at her, but inexorably towards the column of her throat. He sensed her breath hitch, he saw the fluttering heartbeat at her neck, watched her pupils dilate.
His fingers splayed in her hair as he drew her closer, steered her lips against his own and drank in her sweet essence as he kissed her long and deep. Welcome home. Oh, yeah. This was a welcome home.
Her taste was addictive. Irresistible. It wasn’t enough. He wanted all of her.
His hands brought her closer until her breasts met his chest and her bump met his aching hardness and he could find a way to say what he needed to say.
‘I want you,’ he told her. ‘I don’t know why. I know it’s probably wrong or immoral or unethical or all of the above, but I want you and I know that if I kiss you again there is no way I’m going to be able to stop without making love to every single part of you. And even if I don’t kiss you, it’s what I want.’
She made a small sound—a whimper—and he was afraid that she was halfway to raising an objection, telling him he was crazy and about to go running and screaming for the hills. But she didn’t pull away, made no attempt to go running screaming for the hills, her blue eyes looking up at him with what looked like wonder.
‘You’re beautiful,’ he whispered as he brought her forehead to his lips for a kiss. ‘Let me make love to you.’
She paused—a moment in time, she knew, had never felt so rich and agonizingly beautiful.
‘I’m afraid,’ she whispered, trembling into his arms.
He kissed her cheeks. Her eyes. Her nose.
So am I, he heard, the words coming from the cracks in the stone that was his heart. So am I.
But he said nothing. He just kissed her and swung her into his arms. Lust, he told himself, trying to reassure himself, plastering over the cracks while he carried her to his room next door. Pure animal lust.
Absolutely nothing to be afraid of.
He placed her reverentially on the bed. Along with Rosa’s cooking, his big bed was one of his favourite things when he came home from business trips. Now, with Angelina lying on the covers, her chest rapidly rising and falling, her cheeks pink, her hair like a golden halo against his dark cotton, the bed shot straight to the top of the list.
Oh, God.
He wanted to be able to go slow except he didn’t know if he could. He knelt down next to her and dipped his head, unable to resist the lure of that wide mouth and those parted lips, unable to stop himself from exploring her with one hand. The dip of her waist, the flare of her hip, the curving tightness of her belly. Everywhere his hands found magic, every part of her a joy, and when he cupped one breast, brushed one peaked nipple with his thumb and felt her mewl of pleasure in his mouth, he felt a primal surge of pride.
He loved the sundress she was wearing, loved that he could slide the fabric up her long, smooth legs, loved that he could take his hand all the way to the sweet curve of her behind with nothing to stop him on the long slide north to paradise. She shuddered into his mouth, trembled with want under his hands and arched into his touch.
Take it slow? She was killing him. His blood thundered in his veins as he found a zip, slid it down, manoeuvred her out of the dress and damn near came when he gazed down at her.
She was beautiful. Long limbs. Glorious breasts he would delight in liberating from a plain white bra, her breasts somehow turned into wicked temptation. And his baby stretching her belly.
He shrugged off his shirt and she shuddered as she watched hungrily and he knew she was on as tight a knife-edge as he was. And then he undid his trousers and he saw her eyes follow his hands and widen in an age-old feminine sign of approval as he kicked them away.
‘Dominic,’ she uttered breathlessly as his underwear joined them and he joined her back on the bed with a kiss that blew his mind. Skin against skin. Was there any better sensation in the world?
No, he decided, as he peeled her straps down her arms with his teeth and released her breasts to his gaze, his hands, his hot mouth. She cried out when he took their pebbled peaks between his lips; her hands clawed at him, clung to him, her need rivalling his own.
No, he decided, as his tongue trailed lower, to the swell of her belly. He put his lips to her bump, a kiss for the baby that grew beneath, a kiss for the woman who would give him this child.
No, he decided as he moved down the majesty of her ripening body, gently lowering her underwear from her hips, revealing her most secret place to his gaze, his hands at her thighs, stroking, relishing. No better feeling.
She moaned, a low soft moan that called to his inner beast and he dropped his head, parted her gently and supped on her. Her hands tangled in his hair, her body bucking, her gasps coming quick and fast as his tongue destroyed what defences she had left and laid waste to her.
And then she tensed under him, tensed for that sweet second, poised on the brink of the point of no return, before a flick of his tongue catapulted her over and she came apart in his mouth. And he somehow managed to smile under the weight of his own need for release. Somehow watching her come had been more satisfying than he’d imagined. He could wait.
She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. But oh, how she could feel! Every part of her was alight, every part of her sang with pleasure and then he joined her, his kiss deep and drugging, a kiss that tasted of him and tasted of her and the thought of that was enough to ignite her senses all over again.
‘I have to have you.’ The words sounded as if they’d been ground through his teeth. He splayed a hand over her belly. ‘I will try to be gentle.’
‘The baby is fine,’ she whispered. It is me who will get hurt. And the hurt would come, she knew. The hurt and the regret and the sorrow. But there was time for that later. A lifetime for sorrow. And right now there was no room for hurt. There was only time to feel.
‘You are so unbelievably sexy,’ he whispered, his lips against her breast, his tongue flicking at a nipple. His words stirred her, his voice husky and rich, brushing over her skin and senses like a velvet rasp. He was the magnificent one, broad-chested, lean and powerful, all muscle and corded strength, and he was calling her sexy?
And then she felt him. There.
He was so big. A momentary fear gripped her and held on tight. It had been a while. Months. And even then…
But then he pulled her into another of those kisses with that tongue that seemed to reach right in and rip her very soul from her body and she forgot everything except how to feel.
And how he made her feel.
He entered her in a thrust that made her gasp and sent her head driving back into the pillows, her back arching as her body stretched to accommodate him.
Time stood still while they lay joined. Fused.
And then he moaned above her, a low moan that sounded as if it had been ground through his teeth and spoke restraint that was being sorely tested, and slowly withdrew. She clung to him, desperate to keep him there, using all her muscles to contain him, the slide of his skin against hers a delicious friction, the feel of him poised once again at her entrance an exquisite torture.
She tilted her hips and he groaned again, this cry more desperate, his need matching her own, before he lunged into her, deeper this time, impossibly better.
She was gasping now, wild with need as he moved inside her, building the rhythm, his kisses pulling her deeper, his mouth hot and hungry, his big hands on her breasts, at her hips, setting her skin alight wherever he made contact.
Slick and hard, he filled her. Stretched her. Completed her.
Colours were her new friends. Colours that sparked behind her eyelids, colours that shot fireworks searing through her senses.
She could not come again. Somewhere in the vague recesses of her mind she knew that. Not twice in one night. It had never happened before. It couldn’t happen now. But still the colours flashed, the sensations mounted and denial slowly turned into a smouldering sense of wonderment, a rising tide of tension, a need that went beyond mere completion. A need that demanded his completion too.
He drove into her, his sculpted back slick beneath her hands, every muscle tight and taut with that skin straining, every last part of him focused and true, until the smoulder became a curling ripple of smoke that became a raging fire that sent clouds to obliterate the sun.
With one final thrust he set her alight, her senses exploding, shorting, fusing as she came. She burned up in the inferno he’d triggered inside her. She lost herself in the flames. And she wondered, vaguely, from a very, very long way away, if she would ever really find herself again.
Later, much later, she left him while he slept, lifted his arm from her body and eased herself away. It was late in the afternoon. Rosa would wonder why she wasn’t in the kitchen—if she came to the nursery looking and found her like this, Angie would never live it down. Worse, she couldn’t bear it if Dominic woke and she saw the resentment return to those dark eyes. She couldn’t bear to be there when he realised what a mistake he’d made.
For it was a mistake, she should know. From the moment of her conception her entire life had been based on mistakes.
An unplanned pregnancy, an ill-conceived wedding, a wrong embryo. A mistake had brought her to Dominic’s home and now another mistake had seen her fall into his bed.
When would she ever learn?
She located her clothes, slipped on her crumpled dress, smoothing it down her legs. She spared him one last lingering glance, admiring the sheer unadulterated magnificence of the man—this was one mistake that would haunt her for the rest of her life.
And fled.
She was gone, his bed empty when he woke and reached for her, hungry for her again. Her scent lingered on the pillow, fresh and feminine, taunting him in her absence as the soft light of dusk filtered through the curtains.
Just lust, he told himself, sinking back into the pillows. It was probably for the best that she had gone. It had probably saved them both some awkward moments.
Just sex.
He growled and pushed himself from the bed, striding to the bathroom.
Just sex? Was that how she saw it? She’d been molten in his hands. He’d taken her apart and put her together and taken her apart again. She hadn’t been faking it. He was too good at what he did not to recognise that.
And she’d just walked away.
Maybe it was better. Maybe she was right.
She was going to leave anyway.
Maybe it would make things less complicated.
He snapped on the shower, stepped in while the water was still cold and growled again as he put his face up into the spray.
But there were weeks to go before she left, he told himself, and he wasn’t done with lust just yet.
CHAPTER TEN
THE clinic was cool and welcoming as they entered, as only health practices could be. But it never ceased to amaze her that for a place promoting fertility, it managed to maintain such a sterile atmosphere.
Dominic walked stiffly by her side, his eyes still hidden under sunglasses, and Angie imagined his eyes beneath, unblinking and unforgiving.
But she could understand why his mood would suddenly darken, for this was the very same place that had offered her the option of getting rid of his child.
Maybe that was why he was here like a dark cloud to accompany her. Because he didn’t trust them. Welcome to the club, she thought, groaning a little, her bladder full to bursting point. If the clinic was running late, she might just explode right there in the waiting room.
But there was no waiting. Within ten minutes she was gowned up and lying on the examination table with towels strategically placed. Then her gown was pulled up and her belly exposed and gelled. The probe pressed into her swollen tummy, pressure she didn’t need, but she was distracted by Dominic by her side, the dark cloud vanquished, now looking agonisingly anxious as he was asked to be patient for a few minutes before the monitor could be turned.
Dominic patient? She smiled at the contradiction in terms, smiled at his furrowed brow and dark, worried eyes.
He really cares, she thought, as the man she’d thought a mountain looked achingly vulnerable and for a moment, just a moment, she wished he cared that way for her, not merely for the unborn child inside her.
And jealousy snaked its twisted way through her heart. For this was Carla’s baby he was concerned for. This was Carla’s baby he wanted—the baby she’d never been able to have. Carla—the woman he had loved and lost.
And so help her, but she was jealous of her. Jealous of a dead woman. What kind of woman was she?
Tears pricked at her eyes as she uttered a silent apology to the innocent child lying inside her. Whatever else happened, at least she had been able to do this for him. For them both. At least she had been able to give him Carla’s child.
‘Is everything all right?’ he asked, his patience wearing thin.
The radiographer smiled. ‘Everything looks perfect. Your baby is doing everything right. I’ll show you in a moment. Do you want to find out what sex it is?’
The question hung in the air, and beside her Dominic asked, ‘What do you think?’
The question was so unexpected, it winded her. He was asking her? She didn’t care, did she? She wasn’t supposed to care or have an opinion. It was a baby. That was all she needed or wanted to know. Besides, did it matter? Surely any child of Dominic’s would be a gift, boy or girl…
‘It’s your baby, Dominic. It’s your choice.’
And he looked down at her, his eyes studying her face, questioning. ‘No,’ he decided. ‘Don’t tell us.’
The doctor nodded and the radiographer swivelled the screen so they could see. Angie studied her feet. She’d found the six-week scan amazing. There was her baby, she’d thought, a tiny jelly bean with a heartbeat. She’d been fascinated by the tiny life, simultaneously racked with guilt that she had never really wanted a child, terrified at the thought she wouldn’t love it enough.
But the baby had never been hers and it had been a strange, sweet relief she’d felt to discover that. Escape.
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