‘Stop exaggerating. Besides, I’d have a job…’
‘For how long?’ He looked at her long and thoughtfully, then dropped his eyes in a rare display of embarrassment. ‘You can’t afford anywhere really decent, not yet from what you’ve told me, and Mats, I’d love to help out, but there’s a little problem there…’
‘I wasn’t asking you to.’ But her curiosity had been piqued. ‘Little problem…?’
‘Your bloke’s not the only one who’s going to be a daddy.’ Frankie’s face was radiant and apologetic at the same time. ‘Truth is, Mats, I was seeing someone before we broke up. Girl called Shannon. I hated myself for two-timing you and I know I took it out on you but I couldn’t ask you to leave. I’m really sorry, Mats.’ He sighed heavily and threaded his hair with his fingers. ‘But she’s moved in and somehow I don’t think she’d like it if I was to offer a room to my ex.’
Surprise, belated hurt and pleasure for him because he was so obviously pleased with himself rushed through her. Pleasure won and she instinctively went to him and wrapped her arms around him, warmly aware of the affection they had once shared before time had eroded it.
And his arms folded gratefully around her at roughly the same time as a key was inserted into the front door and Dominic strode into the apartment.
CHAPTER TEN
‘WHAT the hell is going on?’
Mattie and Frankie sprang apart like guilty lovers and underneath the dismay she felt a tide of joy that he was back. Even though his face was thunderously angry as he stormed towards them.
Frankie had jumped off the stool and was looking at Dominic with his hands in his pockets and his face wearing a bullish expression that Mattie recognised. He had never once raised his hands to her but he had been involved in enough bar-room brawls for her to know when he was tensing up for a fist fight.
The knowledge that he would lose to the powerful man glowering at him was enough to make her position herself very squarely between them.
‘Nothing’s going on, Dominic,’ she said coolly. She had never seen him like this. Murderously angry.
‘You’re Frankie, are you? Well, if you want to stay in one piece then I suggest you clear out of my apartment before I throw you down all four flights of stairs.’
‘Try it, mate.’ But his voice sounded less confident than the words suggested. ‘I was just going, as it happens.’
‘Did you ask him over?’ Dominic’s brilliant black eyes focused on Mattie’s white face and she nodded. He looked past her to where Frankie was still doing a good impression of a man who wasn’t going to be pushed around even though his eyes were flitting anxiously to his discarded bomber jacket. ‘Get out. Now. And don’t even think of ever coming back here because you won’t be invited a second time. Will he, Mattie?’
Mattie found herself just nodding, and by the time her senses had returned to normal Frankie had gone and Dominic was staring at her with blazing eyes from across the width of the sitting room. At which point she flared into anger.
‘Did you have to act like a thug?’ were the first words she could think of, which galvanised him into immediate action and had him standing inches away from her in the matter of a few seconds.
‘He should be grateful I didn’t break his neck!’ Dominic grated, glaring savagely down at her. ‘What the hell were you thinking, asking your ex-boyfriend over here? While the cat’s away the mice will play? Couldn’t wait to see the back of me so that you could pick the phone up and invite him around?’
Assailed by a tirade of accusations that made such little sense when added together, Mattie just remained silent and stared in bewilderment at Dominic, who threw her one last, scathing look before disappearing towards his bedroom.
Remaining where she was did not constitute an option. She found herself half tripping in his wake and reached the bedroom door as he was in the process of divesting himself of his shirt, which he proceeded to tear off his back and hurl onto the bed.
‘I thought you were going to be away,’ she said, mesmerised by the flexing of muscles in his shoulders as he moved. When he turned to face her, she hurriedly looked up and adopted her crispest I-will-not-be-bossed-around-by-you expression.
‘Well, sorry to disappoint you, darling.’
‘I know what you’re thinking, Dominic…’
‘I know what my eyes told me.’ He unbuckled his belt and pulled it smoothly through the loops of his trousers, then it joined the discarded shirt.
‘This is exactly why we can’t get married!’
‘And why would that be? Because you wouldn’t be able to keep your hands off your ex-lover?’
‘Because you’re an arrogant swine!’
‘I don’t consider it arrogant to expect you not to invite old lovers into my apartment!’
‘I…I needed someone to talk to.’
‘You can talk to me!’ Dominic bellowed. Every word leaving his mouth was wrong. He knew it and he couldn’t help himself. She would never know what it had taken not to lunge at that loser and beat him to a pulp. Just seeing them with their arms around one another had been like a physical blow to the gut.
He was heading towards the bathroom. Now he stopped, turned around and said with savage grimness, ‘Talk! You want to talk—well, talk!’
‘Not when you’re like this, in this mood.’ Mattie turned her head away and he groaned softly as he saw the glimmer of tears. To walk away now would be the end of them. He knew it just as he knew that the end of them would be the end of him so he took a deep breath and walked towards her, expecting her to push him back, prepared to subdue her until she was willing just to let him hold her.
Instead, Mattie turned into him with a sigh of weary defeat and buried her head against his bare chest. She could hear his heart beating like a drum and when she put her palm flat against him she could feel it as well.
‘I’m not in a mood.’ He curled his fingers into her hair and pressed her against him. ‘Correction. I am in a mood. I’m in a foul mood because I can’t stand the thought of you having anything to do with that man. I can’t stand the thought of you thinking of him, I can’t stand the thought of you seeing him and I definitely can’t stand the sight of finding you wrapped up in his arms.’
‘Because you’re jealous?’
Dominic gave a ragged laugh. ‘Me? Jealous? Of someone like Frankie? Did you notice the way he started backing off when he thought I might go for him? Did you? He knew I could thrash him in seconds.’ He smouldered for a while and then muttered savagely, ‘But to answer your question, yes, I was.’
Mattie felt her heart melt as she acknowledged how much it would have taken for a man like Dominic to admit to that weakness. Except it didn’t sound like weakness to her. In fact, it made her mind take flight and this time she couldn’t bring it back down with prosaic internal lectures about common sense and cool, hard reason.
She wriggled free of him and stared up into his eyes. ‘What are you trying to say, Dominic?’
‘Nothing.’ He turned away, his face darkly flushed.
‘Oh, right. I had hoped…’ Her head drooped and she walked towards the bed and sat down.
‘Hoped? What…?’ Dominic prompted, following her but, instead of sitting next to her, standing over her and seeming to hover. ‘You were saying…?’ he insisted, until Mattie raised her eyes to his.
‘I don’t love Frankie, in case you were afraid of that.’
Dominic half smiled foolishly, looked away, looked back at her. ‘Of course you don’t,’ he swaggered in a way that made her want to smile.
‘Which doesn’t mean that I approve of your behaviour, although…I guess I understand. I shouldn’t have asked him over. It was stupid of me.’ She idly plucked at the duvet cover and sighed.
‘He shouldn’t have come.’ She didn’t love Frankie. He felt like a kid in a toy shop suddenly given a fistful of dollars. ‘I suppose he was gutted when you told him about my baby?’
‘The opposite, actually. Because
he’s going to be a father too.’ Mattie lay down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling with her hands behind her head. ‘He’d been having an affair for the last few months we were together.’
‘The bastard,’ Dominic growled, wondering how any sane man could have an affair when he was blessed with the fabulous woman stretched out in front of him. Then he issued a silent prayer to his rival that he hadn’t felt that way about her after all.
Now he did sit on the bed. ‘And did you mind?’
‘Mind? That he’d been playing around behind my back? I wish he’d had the courage to tell me at the time, but no, I didn’t mind. I was glad that he’d found someone, actually. Glad that he wasn’t going to look at our relationship in retrospect through rose-tinted spectacles, because I know I don’t.’
‘Don’t you?’ He hesitated and then said, the words dragged out of him, ‘Are you sure?’
Mattie propped herself up against the pillows, crossed her legs and looked at him with a slow smile.
She was tired of playing games. She might scare him but she would show her cards because she knew now that what he felt wasn’t just lust. He really liked her. He would never have admitted to his jealousy if he hadn’t. And from liking could easily grow love. Couldn’t it?
‘There’s something I want to say to you.’ Her voice shook slightly and she found that she just couldn’t bear the way he was staring at her so intently. His body had stilled.
‘What?’ Dominic heard himself whisper.
‘When we first met…well, when you first approached me…no…I’m not saying this the way I want to…’
‘You don’t have to say anything,’ Dominic said roughly, scared that what she was going to say he would not want to hear. ‘Just…just marry me. We can talk after.’ Begging at this point. What kind of a man was he? He should have a demand in his voice, instead of this half-baked pleading he could hear.
‘All right.’
The silence stretched between them like electricity, but before he could break it Mattie held up her hand to ward off what he had to say and breathed in deeply.
‘Not because I don’t think I have any choice. I do. Whatever you say, we could have a child and remain unmarried. No, I’ll marry you, Dominic, because…’ At this point her resolve began to falter.
‘Because?’ he prompted huskily.
‘Because in any marriage, whatever you say, there has to be love, and I love you. Somewhere along the line, you broke down my barriers and I fell in love. I love you enough for the two of us and if that means that my heart gets broken, then so be it. I just can’t fight any more.’ She’d said it. Mattie closed her eyes on a sigh and lay back down with her legs still crossed.
She felt him edge towards her, but she was too afraid to open her eyes and look at him. ‘I’ll understand if you want to reconsider your marriage proposal, though,’ she said unevenly.
‘Could you…could you repeat what you just said?’
‘You can change your mind about the marriage thing.’
‘No, not that bit. The other bit.’
Now Mattie did open her eyes to sneak a look at him, to find him grinning at her like the cat that had got the cream.
‘It’s not funny,’ she said dubiously, afraid to believe what her heart was telling her she should believe. Her heart, as she had learnt from experience, was not to be trusted.
‘Yes. Yes, it is funny. It’s very funny because…’ He was still smiling like an idiot when he reached to touch her cheek with one finger. ‘Because I came back here tonight to tell you the very same thing.’
Mattie wondered whether she had heard properly. ‘You love me? As in…love? As in…in love…or just maybe like a lot?’
‘As in the big thing. The big thing I’ve managed to successfully avoid all my life.’ He lowered his head towards her and kissed her, a long, lingering kiss that seemed to last forever. ‘I got to the airport and I thought, dammit, no way was I going to hop on a plane and disappear for four days. I kept thinking that I would get back to find that you’d disappeared, that I’d managed to frighten off the one woman in the world I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.’
‘You did?’ Mattie sank happily into the pillows. Now that he had started talking, she didn’t want him to stop. She framed his beautiful face with her hands and drew him down to her. Practically fully dressed on a bed with him! A first. ‘You thought that?’
Dominic raised one wry eyebrow and then shifted so that he was propped up and looking down at her. ‘You don’t want to hear the workings of my mind,’ he murmured, giving her mouth little kisses.
‘Oh, but I do! I’ve just spent so long thinking that the only thing you wanted from me was my body…’
‘I admit that was the initial pull.’ He shot her one of those slow, dangerous smiles that could make an iceberg melt. ‘I’d been in a hellish relationship. When I saw you at the club, I was bowled over. In fact, I’d never had such a powerful feeling that I needed to make contact with a woman, wanted to have her. When you didn’t respond the way I thought you would, instead of just shrugging and walking away I felt as if I was driven to pursue.’
‘My poor Dominic. Feeling driven to pursue a woman must have been a shock.’
‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’ Dominic teased. ‘Do you like the thought of knowing that I’m utterly in your power?’
Mattie nodded lazily and smiled at him. ‘It’s a two-way thing,’ she murmured.
‘Oh, I know that.’ She was just wearing a baggy cotton jumper and he continued looking at her as he divested her of the garment. ‘No bra.’ He cupped one of her breasts with his hands, then spread his fingers possessively over her stomach. ‘I’m glad I didn’t know that when I saw you wrapped up with your ex. I really would have sent him flying down those stairs.’
‘And he wouldn’t have deserved it.’ Mattie coiled her arms around his neck and arched a little so that her nipples rubbed against his chest. ‘I think he was a little floored by my emotional outpouring…’
‘When you told him that you loved me?’ Dominic asked with a trace of smugness in his voice that made her want to laugh. ‘That he meant nothing to you? That I was the only man you had ever really loved…?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Good.’ With one hand he began tugging down her track-suit bottoms and she aided him by wriggling her legs free.
‘And you’re not upset about the baby?’
‘Upset?’ Dominic laughed with amusement at how inaccurate she was. ‘I was overjoyed. You were pregnant and that gave me the perfect excuse for getting you to marry me. I figured that once we were married I would be able to make you see that it was the best thing you could ever have done.’
‘I never suspected. I thought you were just taking responsibility and I was unwanted baggage that you felt duty bound to throw into the equation.’
‘Little idiot.’
Mattie didn’t quite know at what point they divested themselves of the rest of their clothes. She just knew that when they made love there was a sweetness and a feeling of utter happiness underneath the soaring passion.
And afterwards, with this new knowledge between them, they were able to pick up the thread of their conversation again.
‘I never meant to manipulate you when I got you that job, you know,’ Dominic murmured, one hand lying possessively on her breast, the other arm tucked beneath her head. ‘I think I loved you then and yes, I admit I wanted you out of that house, away from that man, but I also fiercely believed that you could do the job. And then telling you what I’d done became more and more difficult, the more involved and dependent I got on you.’
‘Dependent?’ His words were music to her ears.
‘Totally dependent. I went from being a man who couldn’t stand the thought of a woman thinking she could influence me, to someone who was enraged because the one woman I had told I wanted with no strings attached took me at my word. I wanted you to be possessive with me because I was
getting more and more possessive about you.’
‘Good,’ Mattie murmured with rapturous satisfaction. She slid her hand, very possessively, over his taut stomach and then down to where his proud manhood told her that she excited him as much as he excited her.
Dominic, repeating her action, felt her honeyed moistness on his fingers and he rubbed her just gently enough to make her squirm.
‘I take it it’s all right for us to be…doing this…? Making love won’t harm the baby, will it…?’
‘Oh, I think we’re perfectly safe making love as often as we like.’ Her breathing quickened in response to his sliding fingers and she moaned softly under her breath. ‘Our beautiful baby will be born into a house filled with love. What could be better?’
Alexander Dominic Drecos was indeed born into love and he must have sensed it because he was the happiest of babies. Raven-haired and dark-eyed, he was the spitting image of his proud father and at eight months was crawling energetically around his nursery.
Their wedding had been a quiet affair, with none of the usual tentative ice-breaking necessary between the two sets of parents because Mattie’s pregnancy was talking point enough, as was the excited long-range planning for the christening, which had taken place in Greece. Frankie and his girlfriend had come, with Dominic’s blessing, as had Harry and a couple of the girls from the club Mattie had remained in contact with. And Dominic’s country house, where they were now living, was large enough to more than accommodate Mattie’s parents whenever they came up to visit. Which in turn provided them with the occasional opportunity to have a wicked weekend away in the London apartment.
Which, consequently, was where they were now, sprawled in the king-sized bed, replete after a languorous session of lovemaking that had begun at six, when they had returned from a hectic day’s shopping, and had only been interrupted by the necessity to eat the Thai take-away that had been delivered to their door.
On these occasional weekends away, she had been amused to find that Dominic was more anxious about Alexander than she was. Now he was frowningly contemplating the possibility of an accident because his son’s crawling had no respect for breakable objects, fragile items of furniture that had not been designed to be crashed into or doors that could unwittingly be opened unexpectedly against the head of an exploring infant.
The Greek Tycoon's Secret Child Page 16
