A Secret Until Now

by Kim Lawrence

  In a fever of need she only distantly registered him sliding her panties down over her hips, gasping but not resisting as he parted her legs. She moaned low in her throat, pushing against his hand as he slid his fingers between her legs, parting the swollen and incredibly sensitive folds, making her pant and gasp as he rhythmically stroked the swollen flesh. Her gasps turned to deep feral moans as he touched the tight nub at her core and her body lifted off the bed.

  ‘You like that?’

  She nodded. It made her dizzy to look into his burning eyes but she knew that the trust required to let him touch her went way beyond the merely physical. She had a connection with this man who was the father of her child, and that made it neither shocking nor shameful.

  She lifted her head and kissed him back hungrily, no longer even attempting to retain control. She didn’t want control; she wanted wild and elemental. She wanted Alex, wanted to be devoured, absorbed, to become one with him.

  ‘I want you too!’

  Had she spoken out loud?

  ‘Hell, I haven’t been able to think straight,’ he groaned, ‘since I saw that photo of you.’ Holding her eyes with his as they lay side by side, he took her hand and curled her fingers around his hard, smooth shaft. ‘That’s how much I want you, Angel,’ he slurred thickly.

  He felt so good, and his half-closed eyes gleamed feverishly bright as she touched him. His expression turned raw and predatory and aroused her more than she had imagined possible.

  Her lips parted as he lowered his mouth to hers, the deep, probing kiss draining her, sending her deeper and deeper into a vortex of sensation. As he moved over her she reached down and guided him into her, holding his gaze until that last moment when he slid thick and hard inside her.

  Her eyes squeezed closed as every cell of her being focused on the feeling. She heard herself gasp.

  ‘Oh, please!’ As they began to move together his hands anchored her hips to the bed and she wrapped her long thighs tightly around him. Breathless, Angel moved with him, her sweat-slicked skin gliding and sliding against his. Their gasps and cries merged into one as their bodies came together, until she gave herself up to the firestorm of wild sensation that rocked her body.

  As she began to float back down to earth Angel felt light. The secret burdens she had carried all her life were gone. She had slain her demons, she wasn’t her mother—she loved him.

  She lay in the dark, appreciating what had happened to her, not being afraid of it any more than she was afraid of her own heartbeat. He was as much a part of her as that. That he didn’t feel the same way, that he couldn’t, made her sad, but it also made her determined to extract every last atom of pleasure from the moment.

  There were more moments during the night, less urgent, less bruisingly raw perhaps, but each one more shatteringly sensual than the last.

  * * *

  Angel woke feeling cold. The sheet was crumpled on the floor and Alex was lying on the other side of the bed. He woke as she shuffled across the bed and shivered as she pushed closer to the warmth of his body. Streaks of light had appeared along the wide horizon where the sea met the sky. It would soon be morning and what then...?

  She shivered again and felt her chest tighten with an emotion she identified as loneliness. How crazy. She wasn’t alone—she had Jas. A sigh hissed from her lips.

  ‘Are you cold?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said, her voice muffled against his shoulders. He threw his arm across her and it lay big and heavy and reassuring across her shoulders. She liked the feel of his hair-roughened thigh against her smooth leg.

  Don’t get to like it too much, Angel, the voice in her head advised. Turning a deaf ear to that voice, she focused on the fingers that were moving in slow, lazy, circular movements across her belly.

  Then the hand stilled and she sensed the tension in his body. ‘What is that?’

  She shivered, this time with pleasure as the heel of his hand rested on the sensitive mound of her pubic bone, though he ran his thumb along the thin white line not quite obscured by the soft fuzz of curls at the apex of her long legs.

  ‘Complications during labour. I had an emergency C-section.’

  He felt as if a hand had reached into his chest. So much had happened to her that he was responsible for and he’d been totally oblivious.

  ‘You could have died?’ Guilt rose like bile in his throat. What had he been doing at the time? Driving a fast car? Signing off on a deal and congratulating himself? Enjoying technically perfect sex with a beautiful woman...?

  There had been nothing technical about last night. Raw, explosive, elemental—yes; as addictive as a narcotic—definitely! He knew now why he had gone to such lengths to bring her back into his life. He’d been trying to recapture this feeling, this emotional connection that only a single one-night stand had given him.

  ‘If I’d been living in a Third World country possibly, but I wasn’t. It was all routine.’ And scary as hell.

  He didn’t believe a word of it. He had taken her innocence and got her pregnant. A prince among men, that’s you, Alex told himself.

  ‘You were alone?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Your mother was with you?’

  The suggestion drew a chortle of laughter from Angel.

  ‘I thought maybe having a baby would have brought you together.’

  Her hands curled over his. Drawing his fingers to her lips, she kissed them, then his mouth. Some breathless moment later she admitted with a laugh, ‘Being old enough to be a grandmother is a crime my mother has still not forgiven me for. I’m not even sure what country she was in when I gave birth. She bores easily.’

  He said a word that sounded vicious.

  ‘Will you teach me to swear in Russian? That sounds really satisfying.’

  ‘If you teach me to make love in Italian, cara.’

  ‘It works for me.’

  ‘Tell me you weren’t alone when you gave birth.’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ she said, hearing the guilt in his request. ‘My friend, Clara.’ Who despite her very good intentions had spent the first few hours of Angel’s forty-eight-hour labour flirting with a young doctor, and when things had started happening had fainted away gracefully. While the labour had gone disastrously wrong, Clara was being diagnosed with concussion and even got admitted overnight. Angel had been her maid of honour when her friend had married the handsome young obstetrician six months later.

  ‘And my brother flew back from Dubai as soon as he got the news I was in labour. Jas arrived a month early, so he was there to hold her before I came around.’ According to the midwives he had worn a trench in the floor walking up and down, waiting for her to recover from the anaesthetic.

  That should have been me. The thought surfaced, the strength of it taking him by surprise. He should have held his baby, and now he never would. His loss, not hers. It was obvious that Angel put her child above all else.

  She omitted a few details from her potted history, such as that she’d come around in a high-dependency unit, or that her first recollection when she had surfaced from the anaesthetic had been hearing her forceful sibling who had no doubt bullied the information out of the doctor asking him if he was sure she would never be able to have children in the future.

  ‘Is there no hope? IVF...?’

  ‘Not impossible but extremely unlikely,’ had been the medic’s response. ‘Would you like me to tell the father...? Or will you...?’

  ‘If I ever find the scum who did this to her I’ll do better than that! I’ll make sure he doesn’t do this to any other woman! Is she awake yet?’

  Angel, who had closed her eyes and pretended to be unconscious, had almost immediately drifted back into a drug-induced slumber.

  But when she’d woken she had remembered the conversation she
had overheard, which had helped when Cesare had broken the news to her later; she had been able to make it easier for him by responding calmly as she’d told him honestly that she was fine. When she’d been discharged a few days later everyone had considered her to be coping remarkably well, though Angel had been unable to dispel the feeling that they were waiting for her to fall apart.

  When they’d realised she wasn’t going to—it had taken a while—it had been a relief that everyone had stopped walking on eggshells around her and she could get on with looking after her baby. She had happily left the anger to her brother, who had deduced with no help or confirmation from her that the father was married.

  She had genuinely believed she was all right until that morning six months down the line when she had been folding away the clothes that Jasmine had outgrown, smoothing the fabric of a hand-knitted, exquisite, tiny newborn cardigan that it was hard to believe her robust bouncing daughter had ever fitted into. The reality had hit her with no warning.... Why was she storing the tiny garment so carefully in layers of tissue and lavender bags for the future? There would be no brother or sister to wear it.

  No more babies.

  The tears had begun to leak from her eyes, silently at first, then had come the muffled sobs and finally the awful wrenching wails. A lot later she had dried her eyes and the next day had delivered all the baby clothes to the local charity shop, reminding herself sternly that she had a precious child and many people were not that lucky.

  She had not thought of it since, but now she realised that she had needed to cry, needed to mourn a future that was lost, she thought sadly. But she had done her mourning and moved on; now she was getting on with her life.

  Had Alex? Was he still mourning the future with his wife that had been denied him?

  ‘Was your wife ill a long time?’

  She felt him stiffen a moment before he rolled away from her. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I know mourning is a very personal process.’ She reached out to stroke his back before taking a deep breath and beginning tentatively, ‘My friend had grief counselling when her—’

  ‘I don’t need a grief counselor. I have you. You were right—I have been eaten with guilt because I buried my grief in anonymous sex. I’m not proud of it but you helped me see...I have moved on, Angel. The question is,’ he said quietly, ‘have you?’

  In the space of a heartbeat Angel experienced the disorientating sensation of a total role reversal. One second she was feeling supportive and understanding, the next she was the one being asked to face her demons, and it was too soon.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ANGEL HAD LAIN with her eyes closed, pretending to be asleep, as she heard him getting dressed. But when she heard Alex moving around in the other room she got up. She didn’t want him to leave without doing something to close the distance that had opened up between them.

  Belting her robe, she walked quietly into the adjoining room. Alex, who hadn’t heard her, was holding the photo of Jasmine in the silver frame. It was the expression she saw etched on his face in the brief moment before he realised she was there that swung it—the longing mixed with pain that vanished the moment he knew he was not alone.

  Swallowing the lump of emotion in her throat and ignoring the small voice in her head that told her she’d live to regret opening this door, she responded to his cautious good morning with, ‘You can see Jas.’

  He went rigid for a moment, his face a total blank, then he smiled and tipped his head. ‘Good.’

  ‘If you agree that when and how to tell her who you are is my call.’

  Slowly he nodded. ‘That seems fair.’

  Angel expelled a deep sigh and hoped like hell once more that this was going to work out.... She had to make it work. ‘Right, I’ll make arrangements. Another thing I think that—no!’ She backed away shaking her head, one arm extended as if to fend him off as he approached, the gleam in his eyes sending her nervous system into meltdown. ‘Don’t!’

  His fingers that had moved to loosen the knot on her robe stopped; he was frustrated but not alarmed. He bent his head towards her. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Wrong, yes, she thought, that was the right word. He’d been the wrong man at the wrong time for all the wrong reasons.

  ‘I can’t.’

  The furrow on his brow smoothed. ‘You have an early call? That’s a pity,’ he murmured, thinking it was a disaster! Unable to stop himself, he dropped his eyes to the thrusting profile of her nipples. He had never wanted a woman as much as he did Angel. It was a struggle to present a casual attitude about this delay when every cell in his body was pumped and primed to peel back the layer of silk and explore the even silkier delights beneath.

  ‘I don’t have an early call. I mean... What I mean...’ She stopped, squeezed her eyes closed and groaned. ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she pleaded.

  ‘Like what?’

  His display of innocence drew a growl of frustration from Angel. ‘Like you’re...’

  ‘Thinking about making love to you...?’

  When wasn’t he?

  His eyes narrowed as he struggled to contain a flicker of shock. Sex no longer came with a big guilt trip. It had become a normal part of his life again, but it was not something that occupied his thoughts exclusively. Or it hadn’t been until Angel had come back into his life.

  This frank translation made her flush and press a hand to her heaving chest.

  ‘I can’t focus!’ she choked. ‘I’m trying to tell you we can’t...ever do...’ she jerked her head in the direction of the open bedroom door where the tumbled bedclothes were visible ‘...that.’

  ‘That?’

  She lifted her chin and responded to his taunt with an unintentionally loud reply. ‘Sex. That’s part of the deal. If you want to be part of Jas’s life then we have to get our act together.’ She expelled a breath. It was over with; she had said it. This was the point where the tension was meant to flow from her body. She had told herself she’d feel better once she got this over with, but she didn’t.

  ‘You just lost me.’

  She struggled to preserve her calmness, aware in the face of this pretence of ignorance that with his steel-trap mind he got the point half an hour before most people. ‘A child needs continuity...security.’

  What she did not need was a constant stream of ‘uncles’ at the breakfast table; she did not need slammed doors, raised voices, dramas played out at volume at all hours of the day and night; she did not need spurned lovers who turned nasty or even the ones that turned pathetic.

  ‘You expect me to argue with that?’

  ‘I put Jas’s needs ahead of my own,’ she said quietly.

  There might not be a definitive rule book that told you how to be a good mother—Angel had discovered everyone had to work it out for themselves, and there were times when she frankly got it wrong and worried about just how much mothering skills were down to genes—but at least she knew how not to be a bad mother, or at least an uninterested one.

  Growing up, she would have settled for her mother remembering once in a while that she had children! Her beautiful and erratic parent had lived her life exactly as she had wanted and her children had been the ones who had done the adapting.

  ‘And you need me.’

  The smug insertion proved to Angel that they were still not on the same page. ‘This isn’t about your ego,’ she flared, tightening the belt on her robe, thus unwittingly causing the neckline to gape.

  Jaw clenched, Alex dragged his gaze off the heaving contours of her bosom and the effort made his tone abrupt.

  ‘Then what is it...?’ He stopped as the penny belatedly dropped. He could see where this was going.

  ‘You mean you want to get married?’

  The cynic in him was not surprised. It was not the first time a woman ha
d looked at him as prospective husband material. He was normally alert to the subtle signs that signalled attempts to manoeuvre him into matrimony, but he hadn’t seen this one coming. For some reason, neither could he summon up his well-rehearsed smile, the one that softened his harsh response.

  And none of the women he had let down gently had been the mother of his child.

  His eyes narrowed. That made a difference. And now that he thought of it, was it such a bad idea from a purely practical point of view? Of course he was old-fashioned enough to prefer to be the one making the proposal, but Angel’s horrified exclamation suddenly cut into his stream of thought.

  ‘M-marry? Of course not!’

  The unmitigated horror in her voice was reflected on her face. It seemed he could always rely on Angel to deliver a kick to his ego.

  ‘That would be ridiculous.’ She gave a laugh, wincing when her effort to convince him she was neither crazy nor an idiot made her sound both. ‘I’m not wife material, believe me.’

  ‘What, parents getting married?’ His jaw clenched as he resisted the childish impulse to inform her that there were more than a few women who would not consider the idea of being his bride a nightmare. ‘Hell, yes, you’re right, crazy...that would never catch on,’ he drawled, swinging away from her, his feet silent on the floor as he stalked towards the window. He reminded her of a caged tiger on a short leash as he traversed the room.

  ‘Please, this is not a joke,’ she reproached to his retreating back.

  He spun back, spearing the fingers of both hands deep into his hair as he rocked back on his heels. ‘Sorry.’

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘Thanks for that sincerity.’

  ‘I’m sincere—sincerely tired of this ridiculous discussion.’ His sarcasm made Angel clench her teeth. ‘Just tell me what is bothering—’

  ‘My pretty little head?’ she jumped in, glaring.