Children of Destiny Books 1-3 (Texas: Children of Destiny Book 9)

by Ann Major

  “You don’t know how hard I’ve tried to forget everything about you,” she said bitterly.

  “No harder than I’ve tried. There was a time—before Jack’s funeral—that I thought I’d succeeded. Now I know I never will. What happened to us? Why won’t you tell me?”

  Because the answers to those questions could destroy too many lives, she thought.

  “Do you know what’s bothered me the most all these years?” he asked.

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “When you found out you were pregnant, you didn’t come to me.”

  She would have told him, if she had been pregnant.

  Amy was suddenly terribly afraid. In the empty chasm of silence, her heart thundered violently.

  She heard a sound like a door shutting softly near Lorrie’s room. Had she only imagined it?

  Amy couldn’t look at Nick. She couldn’t face him. He found her too easy to read.

  “I never understood that,” he continued. “You’d always been so open with me. Everything was fine between us until I went away to Berkeley at the end of the summer. You were supposed to come, too, but you didn’t. I didn’t know what to think. Why did you promise to come as soon as you finished your job as lifeguard if you never meant to? Why didn’t you call? Why didn’t you come? All you would say was that you’d changed your mind. Why haven’t you ever been willing to tell me what happened?”

  At first she hadn’t wanted to hear anything he had to say, but later, when she’d known for certain about the baby, she’d wanted to. She’d almost gone to him that once, and that mistake had nearly cost her everything. She watched the waves roll against the distant beach and shivered.

  If Nick ever discovered that the mother of her son was not Amy but the immature Lorrie, it would hurt Lorrie, and he might find a way to take Triple from her.

  “Amy?”

  She wanted to turn to him, to tell him everything, but that was something she could never do.

  Long ago she’d decided that her only defense with him was silence.

  There was only the sound of the surf. And the frightened shuddering of her heart.

  At last he spoke again. “When I came back to L.A. to find you, you and Lorrie were gone. No one would tell me where. It wasn’t until a year later that Sebastian had a few too many beers after a hard race and accidentally let the cat out of the bag. He told me you had a ten-month-old baby and that he’d been helping you. He let me have it right there in the Riviera Yacht Club bar, practically accusing me of getting you pregnant, of abandoning you. He demanded to know when I was going to make things right between us.”

  Dear Sebastian, she thought. How could he have known that telling Nick was the worst possible thing he could have done?

  “I came to you at once, of course. I’ll never forget the look of hate in your eyes when you opened the door with Triple in your arms and saw that it was me. We’d been so careful, it had never occurred to me you might get pregnant. When I asked you if the baby was mine, you didn’t have to say anything. The truth was in your eyes. By then you’d already graduated from UCLA with honors on the scholarships Sebastian had helped you get. He’d hired you, so you had no use for me. I know you would have thrown me out, if I hadn’t forced my way into the house. Why?”

  Amy’s eyes were glittering. She spoke softly. “Because it was over between us. I didn’t love you anymore. I just wanted you out of my life.”

  “But there was more to it than that. I felt it in my gut, just as I feel it now. I can’t live like this anymore—not knowing what went wrong. I want a real marriage.”

  “Then you should have married someone else.”

  “But I loved you. And you were the mother of my child. No other woman could have given me that.”

  She flinched, and her face went even whiter than the moon. Again, her nails scored the railing. “Even so, it was wrong of you to force me to marry you,” she managed quietly.

  “You should have known I couldn’t let Triple grow up illegitimate the way I did—nameless, feeling like he didn’t fit in anywhere. He had to know he had a father who loved him—as well as his mother.”

  It would be so easy to believe his pretty words. Too easy. It was more difficult to remember how he’d gone away to Berkeley, how he’d called only once to ask her why she hadn’t come, how casually he’d seemed to accept her change of plans, how indifferent he’d been until he’d found out about Triple. Perhaps, in his way, he did love her, but her way was not so casual and never so cruel.

  “It’s over.” A sob caught in her throat. “We’re not alike. We don’t have the same values. It’s been over for years.”

  He laughed in the darkness. “That’s what you keep telling me. At the moment I can think of only one way to convince you that you’re wrong.”

  He touched her, and she shivered. “What are you so afraid of?” His fingers ran lightly down her body, reaching inside her terry wrapper and leaving in their wake a quicksilver, tingling awareness of him.

  She could have stopped him if he’d been savage, but he wasn’t. He was infinitely gentle, and his gentleness beguiled her. She wanted him so much. There was a look in his eyes she’d seen there before, an urgency, a wanting, a desperation. Only tonight his determination burned more fiercely than it ever had in the past.

  She felt hot, keenly alive, and in that moment everything that stood between them was as nothing. There were only the years of loneliness and the promise of passion; only her dark need and the desire to quell it so she could feel whole.

  He pulled her into his arms, his male hardness pressing into her thighs. His hand slid over her body, caressing her. She moaned softly as she felt herself succumbing to the powerful force of his magnetism. He coiled a black length of her loose hair between his fingers and held her face so close she could feel the warmth of his breath tickle the skin above her mouth.

  “You’ve haunted me,” he muttered in a strange harsh voice. “You’ll never know how many times I’ve imagined you, heavy with my child, desperate and alone. I will never forgive myself for that. Never. Let me make it up to you and to Triple. Give us a chance. Maybe you don’t love me now, but for God’s sake, give us a chance. I’ll be good to you—I swear!”

  She felt a rush of guilt. But he kissed her, and there was ferocity in him that she had never known. His lips sought to draw her into the vortex of his passion. His kisses seemed to go on endlessly. Her arms encircled his neck. She felt the thunder of his heart as a piercing wild hunger swept through them both.

  The moonlight glinted off the water; the salt smell of the ocean enveloped them.

  His lips left her mouth, and she felt their heat as he trailed kisses over her cheek into the smooth downy softness of her hairline.

  A cool breeze came off the water. When she laid her head against his chest, her raven hair streamed over his shoulders like a silken veil, wrapping around his bare throat. She caught his clean musky scent, and the slow ache that began in the middle of her belly seemed to spread throughout her body.

  He pushed the edges of her robe aside, and only thin flannel separated his exploring hands from her body as he caressed her soft belly. His hands slid upward ever so slowly. She heard the catch of his indrawn breath as he found the soft velvet mounds of her breasts and fondled them until their fleshy tips hardened.

  “Oh, Amy,” he groaned, his callused palms seeking and exploring the warm, yearning womanliness of her.

  She sighed and plunged her hands into the glorious thickness of his hair, pulling his face and mouth closer again, wanting nothing more than to be consumed by the white heat of his frenzied kisses, by his velvet torrid caresses.

  His touch alone was splendor and beauty. Never had she wanted any other man. She was glad of the darkness, glad that there was nothing to distract her from the warm, live contact of his mouth against her skin, of his body pressed into hers. He was beauty. And she was beauty. And the whirl of emotion he aroused was beauty.

  He continued t
o kiss her in that mad, wonderful intimate way until she was breathless, until some new nakedness deep within her stirred, and she knew she was opening herself to him again, surrendering not only her body but her soul.

  Along with the passion came the sweetness of her love for him, that same dangerous sweetness that had seduced her so many years before. Only she wasn’t the naive girl she’d been then. She was a woman who’d known not only the full force of love, but the terrible pain of betrayal.

  Her world was spinning out of control. There was only Nick, and her love, and in that moment the wrongness of loving him didn’t matter anymore.

  A soft moan of pleasure was rising in her throat as he led her toward her bedroom door. She had to open her eyes to find her way. Dimly, far beneath them, Amy became aware of a fluttery movement on the beach. A woman with golden hair was walking aimlessly along the water’s edge. She was bundled in white furs against the chill, but filmy white skirts swirled around her slender ankles. Rhinestone slippers dangled from her fingers.

  The thought flickered in the back of Amy’s mind that it was odd for a woman in an evening gown to do such a thing on such a cold night—even in Malibu. She focused her attention on the woman. The wind swept the girl’s hair back from a fragile face.

  Lorrie! Only Lorrie would do such a thing! Lorrie must have come home. She must have seen them on the balcony together. She had been frightened. Amy realized how extremely upset Lorrie must be to go near the water.

  An image from the past rose in Amy’s mind: that golden hair matted in seaweed, that delicate face lying white and lifeless in the roiling surf, that body limp and frozen as it was stirred by the waves. “My fault...” Amy whispered dully, remembering the agony of that night. “My fault…”

  Lorrie must have come home tonight and somehow discovered that Nick was here. Amy saw it all so clearly. Lorrie hadn’t been able to deal with his presence in the house. She probably thought that Amy had wanted him here, that she’d even asked him here. Lorrie had felt lost and confused. Whenever she felt threatened she went down to the water. It was something she’d done ever since the tragic boating accident, once with near fatal consequences.

  Amy pushed anxiously against Nick’s shoulders. “You have to stop,” she whispered, panic in her low tone. “I can’t... I just can’t.”

  “What?” His hands on her body tightened. Then he let her go. She could feel his eyes, intense, questioning.

  She turned, ashamed that she’d come so close to losing control. Her life and the life of her family had been shattered twice—once by death, once by love. Both times she’d felt terrified by the feeling that there were no rules, no control, that she was helpless to change her destiny.

  Never again.

  Once she’d made the mistake of loving the same man her sister had loved, and she’d nearly wrecked all of their lives.

  She couldn’t allow Nick to destroy them all over again.

  From some deep reserve of inner strength, she summoned the willpower to push him away.

  She leaned against the railing feeling dazed and breathless.

  All he had to do was touch her again, and she would have been lost.

  But he didn’t touch her. For a long moment they stared at one another. His face was dark, closed, but the blazing passion in his eyes jolted through her and left her shaken.

  “Amy.” Nick’s voice was low and charged with emotion.

  “If you force me tonight, I swear I’ll never forgive you,” she whispered.

  He expelled a long breath of angry frustration. “So what’s new?” But he backed away from her, widening the distance between them in order to resist the impulse to drag her into his arms again. “Why?” he demanded hoarsely. “Why? I’m not leaving until I know.”

  Lorrie was standing directly beneath them in the shadows. Amy looked from her sister to Nick.

  “Why are you so determined to torture me with these questions?” came Amy’s sobbing cry. “By making love to me?”

  “I don’t want to torture you. I want to love you.”

  “No.” She shook her head. The pain splintering through her body was too great to be borne. “You never loved me. You don’t even know the meaning of that emotion. You don’t love. You only make love,” she said, weeping angrily. “And I dislike you because you aren’t the man I believed in! Do you understand? I’ve disliked you for that for years!”

  She was shaking, and her eyes felt hot. Amy Browning never, never, screamed at people. She never cried. Only Nick could shatter the shield of bitter control she hid behind.

  Only Nick.

  She turned to run. His hand gripped her shoulder to stop her.

  “You don’t dislike me,” he taunted softly. His fingers cut into her flesh. “You love me.”

  She twisted out of his reach and dashed toward the door to her room, slamming it and bolting it once she was inside.

  His fist pounded against the glass, but she refused to let him in.

  “Go away!” she moaned.

  If she opened the door, there would be no stopping him. Wrong! There would be no stopping herself.

  She sagged against the wall and hugged her body with her arms. Slowly she sank to the floor and wept bitterly.

  For the man she still wanted despite everything.

  For the man she must never let herself have.

  Six

  Amy awoke the next morning feeling even more exhausted than when she’d collapsed on her bed the night before. After she showered, she took great pains to make up her face, attempting to conceal the black circles beneath her eyes. She braided her hair and wound the braids into a sedate knot at the nape of her neck. Then she put on her most severely tailored black suit, a shapeless garment she knew Nick would hate, and headed for the kitchen hoping to drink a cup of coffee before she had to face either him or Lorrie.

  On her way she discovered Lorrie’s door ajar. Amy pushed it open, calling to her sister softly, but Lorrie was gone. Her bed hadn’t even been slept in. Wondering where Lorrie might have spent the night, Amy felt a fresh tug of guilt for having let Nick reenter their lives and cause problems.

  Even if Amy could forgive Nick, he would never be accepted by Lorrie. Lorrie had been changed by that night with Nick, and Amy’s deep protective feelings for her sister had been outraged. The last thing she wanted to do now was to hurt her. Amy wished that she’d had the strength to go to Lorrie last night and talk to her, but she hadn’t been able to.

  Amy closed Lorrie’s door and hoped that Nick wasn’t up, that he hadn’t gone down to the kitchen yet.

  But he was already there, lounging in one of her kitchen chairs, drinking her coffee, and reading her paper. Again he wore the blue dress shirt that made his eyes so dazzling. Only this morning, he’d added a navy silk tie.

  Sections of newspaper were scattered carelessly across the counters, the table and the chairs. No man messed up a newspaper more thoroughly than Nick.

  He was reading the business section, her favorite part of the paper.

  He glanced up. She wanted to run. Instead she endured his smile and his sardonic, “Good morning,” as if it were the most natural thing in the world for the two of them to share a kitchen.

  She felt the cynical blaze of his eyes as he appraised her from the top of her shining black head to the pointed tips of her unfashionable shoes. He let his eyes linger appreciatively in all the wrong places until she flushed. She took a cup down from the cabinet.

  He smiled again. “That’s got to be the ugliest dress you own.”

  “I put it on just for you,” she retorted.

  “I don’t doubt you.” He chuckled. “The urge to rip clothes from your body has never been stronger.’’

  Her cup rattled against the stone counter top. “You wouldn’t dare!”

  Once again his winning grin flashed across his dark face. “Don’t tempt me,” he murmured, leaning toward her, his brilliant eyes recklessly touching her mouth, her breasts, her thighs. Why couldn’t
he be at least a little bit ashamed of his lusty appetites? But no—he continued to watch her from across the kitchen with eyes that devoured her.

  Flames of confusion engulfed her. The white-tiled walls seemed to close in and suffocate her.

  Why had she never noticed before how tiny her kitchen was? Or was it that it only seemed so, with his virile presence in the center of it? He dominated the room like a giant golden spider, happy to have discovered some hapless creature tangled in its web. Where was Apolonia anyway?

  Flustered, Amy poured herself a cup of coffee.

  “You obviously woke up on the wrong side of the bed,” he said, his smile broadening.

  She found his insolence and cheerfulness maddening. “And whose fault is that?”

  “Yours entirely, darling. I offered. You refused. Next time...”

  “There won’t be a next time!” she snapped. “And I’m not in the mood for this sort of conversation.”

  “But I am. I can’t stand a woman who sulks over breakfast. “I’m determined to cheer you up.”

  “You’re not doing a very good job.”

  “Then I’ll have to try harder.” His blue eyes danced in merciless merriment.

  “Please, just leave me alone.”

  “That’s the last thing I intend to do,” taunted his soft, well-modulated voice.

  She snatched the business section from him and attempted to read an article, but the words ran together in a blur of tiny black print. She was too vividly aware of that indolent male sprawl of arms and legs across the table, of those avid eyes watching every move she made with excessive male interest.

  Finally she put the paper down and scowled at him. “I can’t concentrate with you staring at me like that.”

  “There’s nothing of interest,” he said mildly. His gaze fell to her heaving breasts. “In the paper, I mean.”

  “This house is too small for the two of us,” she whispered feverishly.