There was a momentary pause during which Raine pictured her father scowling down at the receiver.
"Yes, well, I expect he'll try to contact you," he said stiffly. "I wanted you to be prepared."
"I appreciate the thought, but he's already here."
"The hell you say!" Her father cleared his throat again. "I beg your pardon, my dear. That man always did have an ability to make me forget my manners."
Raine sighed. "I know the feeling."
"Are you … all right?"
"I'm fine. 'Blooming,' according to my doctor."
"I'm glad to hear that, of course, but I was actually inquiring about your emotional well-being."
"It's fine, too." She stifled a sigh. "Don't worry. Dad. I'm sure Morgan has only stopped by to drop off the divorce papers."
"Don't count on it."
It was Morgan's voice that made the comment, prompting her to look toward the doorway where he stood, one shoulder propped against the jamb and his arms crossed over a wide chest now sheathed in a tight black T-shirt bearing the familiar logo of the news network.
Raine wondered if Morgan realized how shamelessly that network used his fame to its advantage, flashing his face on the television screen every night to keep the ratings up, whether he was scheduled for an appearance or not.
Glaring at her soon-to-be ex-husband, Raine said, "I've got to go, Dad."
"Go? Lorraine, wait. Shall I drive up there? I can leave within the hour."
"No need. But thanks for the thought."
"Are you sure you can handle this … development alone?"
"Perfectly sure. After all, I've been handling things alone for over ten years now. Nothing has changed."
She heard her father's distressed sigh come over the line. "Call me if you need me."
"I will," she promised before hanging up.
Sunlight slanted through the bay window looking out over the pocket herb garden that was her pride and joy. Gourmet cooking was one of her passions. Not that Morgan noticed. His preferences ran to greasy hamburgers and pork chops.
"Sounds like Arthur's still hovering."
His golden eyes were watchful, taking in more than they gave out. His jaw was shiny from a recent shave, and his shower-damp hair was slicked back from his forehead, giving him an austere look. Some of the fatigue had disappeared from his face, but his eyes were still bloodshot. Morgan never slept on planes, no matter how lengthy the flight. It was a matter of control, she suspected. An unwillingness to trust his fate to anyone else, no matter how skilled or experienced.
"You make hovering sound like a crime."
He straightened to amble toward the coffeemaker. "Do I?"
"Since Mom died, I'm all the family Dad has left."
"There is that."
Something in his voice had her wondering if he had thought himself included in the Connelly family. But of course, he had, she chided herself. Before her death five years ago, her mother had adored Morgan and considered him the son she'd never had. Her father had been more reserved toward the man he believed had callously seduced his daughter.
"I take it Arthur approves of the new man in your life?" He lifted the mug to his mouth and drank.
"What man?"
His eyes narrowed. "The father of your twin boys."
Raine felt panic run through her. She took a deep, slow breath and felt her control steady. "Dad has never met the father."
"Ashamed of the guy, are you?"
She stiffened. Why had she thought this would go smoothly? "No, I'm not ashamed."
"What's he like?" His voice was slanted toward indifference, but the man who'd asked the question radiated pain. And … loneliness?
Her mind blanked. Surely not. The great Morgan Paxton was a confirmed loner. A man who would rather burn in hell than attend a party. A man who refused to fit his life into anyone's else's parameters.
For a moment silence built between them. She tried to look away and couldn't. The weary man lounging so casually in her kitchen was even more of a stranger, someone she didn't know.
Perhaps she'd never truly known him, she realized, just as he'd never truly known her. She'd been so young when they'd met. So willing to fall in love. So eager to be loved in return. But a frenzied attraction of one body for another wasn't love.
She would do well to remember that.
"Why are you here, Morgan?" she asked, her throat tight.
"Now that's an interesting question. One that's not quite as simple as I anticipated."
Utterly motionless, he contemplated her with that same steady gaze familiar to millions of viewers worldwide. A patient predator waiting for the prey to move first.
"Let's just say I have four months' leave coming, and I intend to take it here."
"No!"
"I left my bags in the upstairs hall. Say the word and I'll move them into the master bedroom."
She fought down an image of his nude body cradling hers. "It doesn't bother you to sleep with a woman who's carrying another man's children?"
His eyes flashed fire. "Hell, yes, it bothers me! But not enough to walk away without a fight."
The panic that had ebbed surged again. And again, she beat it back. This was her house, her life.
"Read my lips, Morgan. N-o."
His mouth firmed. "Don't worry, honey. You won't even know I'm here."
"Exactly—because you won't be here."
The slow smile he gave her was off center and slightly sad. The smile of a man who'd been chasing answers with such single-minded determination, he hadn't realized he'd actually been running away from himself.
"Thanks for the coffee," he said before draining his cup. Turning his back to her, he rinsed the mug carefully before upending it in the drainer. "Wake me in an hour. I'm going to take a quick nap before dinner. Don't bother to cook. We'll go out."
Raine was still sputtering when he left the room.
Chapter 4
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She'd bought a new bed. A four-poster job that looked almost too fragile to support his weight. Piled against the headboard had been a half-dozen pillows in frilly cases. Fancy, feminine things that made Morgan edgy.
Is this where she'd conceived the babies now growing in her belly? he wondered, turning to his side.
The thought of her lying naked on tangled sheets, her glorious hair fanned over one of those lacy pillows, her legs spread eagerly while another man deposited his seed, made him sick to his stomach.
If this wasn't hell, it was damn close enough.
He closed his eyes and waited for the exhaustion humming in his head to override his dark thoughts. But his mind refused to settle. Instead, he kept seeing some nameless, faceless bastard making love to his wife.
Rage hovered just beneath the steel bands of his control, too volatile to be given freedom. Later, when he was rested, he would ask her why she'd cheated on him. Why she'd done the one thing he'd never believed possible for her to do—break her wedding vows.
He felt his back teeth grind together and consciously relaxed his jaw. Restless, he turned to his back, and then to his other side, uneasy in the strange bed.
He'd been known to fall asleep in the back of a lurching Jeep or on the floor of the equipment van taking the crew to some isolated location. It was simply a matter of discipline and concentration. Hell, he had plenty of both.
Maybe he was short on conventional education, but he wasn't ignorant. Hell no! He'd earned his GED in the army. He'd been damn proud of that piece of paper. Still carried it in his wallet as a matter of fact. While his buddies had been drinking themselves senseless in a seedy bar or trying to romance a freebie from a bar girl, he'd spent countless hours poring over a battered dictionary he'd bought in a secondhand store, patiently sounding out the words, memorizing the definitions, struggling to improve his sadly limited vocabulary.
He'd hated being ignorant, hated knowing the guys in his unit called him a stupid hillbilly. So he'd covered his pain with arrogance, s
lathering it on with a damn trowel. Swaggered and swore and volunteered for every dangerous, gut-busting mission. When he'd finished his tour in Vietnam, he'd volunteered to go back for another thirteen months.
He'd been as gung ho as they'd come, bent on proving himself to be as good as the next man and as single-minded about improving himself as his father had been about drinking. Now, these many years later, it was trendy to reinvent one's self, yet another fad like exotic coffee and imported cheese. Self-help gurus wrote books about it.
How to change your life in five easy steps.
Morgan released a long, weary breath. Lord, but he was tired.
Good thing he was used to the unexpected, he told himself as he eased to his back, then shoved one hand behind his head and stared up at the ceiling. Otherwise, he might have found himself damn depressed that Raine had turned to another man to help her through the grieving process.
From the glow on her face and the sexy roundness of her belly, he'd done a good job.
The bastard.
Something sharp and icy stirred inside him, like the blade of a skinning knife being slowly twisted. It wasn't a feeling he'd ever had before, so it took him a moment to realize he was flat-out jealous.
Raine was his, damn it. She'd been a virgin the first time they'd made love. His body had been the first one to breach hers. Lord, but she'd been tight and yet so wonderfully slick.
He still remembered how she'd clung to him, her eyes glazed with pleasure and her fingers kneading his shoulders like kitten claws. When she'd called his name at the moment of her first climax, he'd felt a thousand feet tall and as powerful as a king. In some mysterious way, he'd felt complete, as though something he'd lost had been restored.
Damn, but he needed to feel that again, he realized as he felt his body hardening. He'd always been a man of lusty appetites. For the food he'd missed as a half-starved kid. For excitement and acceptance. For love.
For Raine.
But first he was going to have to find a way to forgive her.
Her eyes burning with what felt suspiciously like sentimental tears, Raine stood at the doorway of her bedroom, watching Morgan sleep. Not in the guest room, as she'd directed. Oh, no, not Morgan. He'd sought out her bed instead, sprawling his large body across the comforter, his wealth of bronzed muscle outlined against a backdrop of deep purple softness, making her think of a languorous lion snoozing on a giant-size pillow.
A sense of yearning swept through her that set off warning bells.
Morgan. Here in her house. Her quiet, safe little world.
Peering through the gloom until her eyes adjusted, Raine could almost feel the heavy heat of him beside her, one of those thick, powerful arms slung over her waist.
Long before she could make out the details of his face, her traitorous memory conjured his visage in exact detail, tantalizing her in a way she couldn't define and resented with every fiber of her being. So what if he'd sought her bed, instead of sleeping in the guest room? So what if he resembled a tawny mountain cat too sated, or too worn-out to prowl? The fact was that he hadn't been in her bed when it had mattered, and now it was too late.
She was over him. Free. Emotionally, if not legally.
Detached.
Whatever she felt for him now was purely cerebral. A faint nostalgic attachment. And maybe a little compassion that he looked older. More somber. Even sad.
The crow's-feet around his eyes had deepened, and the frown lines bracketing his expressive mouth were more pronounced. The ravages of grief, she wondered, or the natural consequence of his months in the desert?
No matter. He was still a striking man. He'd told her once that he'd gotten his coloring from his mother, his height and build from his father. Early in their marriage she'd discovered that there were no pictures of him as a child. No lovingly preserved mementos tucked into a box for safekeeping. No memories to savor and share. Perhaps that's why he'd been fanatical about taking pictures of Mike.
He'd taken roll after roll of pictures whenever he'd come home, pictures she'd carefully tucked into a series of leather-bound scrapbooks. A record of their child's life. Eight years of memories, now lined up neatly on a shelf in the spare bedroom at the end of the hall.
A few months back, on the day she'd discovered she was pregnant again, she'd gone directly to the mall to buy an uncomplicated, but good-quality camera and two new scrapbooks, one for each of the babies tucked so snugly under her heart. In about two more months she would see their faces, feel their greedy little mouths suckling her breasts.
A wave of longing ran through her. She missed Mike so very much. His boisterous laughter, his wild shouts of happiness or dismay. The off-center smile he'd inherited from his father along with Morgan's inability to sit still for more than a few minutes at a time. The little-boy smell that was part grime, part peanut butter and always uniquely Mike.
Morgan had missed so many of the precious moments in their child's life. But then, that had been his choice, she reminded herself, hardening her heart. Just as it had been his choice to put his marriage second to his career on his list of priorities.
Now it was her turn to set the priorities. Her unborn twins came first, her need to be free of Morgan Paxton running a close second. No more part-time daddy. No more part-time husband.
She straightened her shoulders and groped desperately for her determination to feel unaffected, thinking even as she did that her wavering willpower offered precious little as armor against his masculine charisma.
A tawny mountain man, a fanciful publicist had once called him. Honey gold, his hair was thick and almost never more than finger-combed with streaks of sunlight threaded through the unruly strands, and his eyes were an amber brown that often looked golden against the deeply layered permanent tan of his angular face.
According to his bio, he'd been a raw-boned corporal in Vietnam assigned to guard a network news team when, accompanying a scouting patrol, they'd been ambushed. The reporter had been shot in midsentence, and while Morgan worked frantically to stanch the blood pouring from the man's severed artery, the camera had continued to roll.
When the patrol had returned to base, the cameraman had sent his film stateside, and Morgan's heroism had been shown in millions of homes that next night. A few days later another newsman had tracked him down for an interview, one of those inane "how did you feel when?" types. In this case, Morgan had been bluntly honest. He'd felt like hell watching men die. Though his language had been uncultured by educated standards, his innate integrity and decency had shone through, tapping into the psyche of the "common man." For all his rawness and awkwardness, Morgan had that precious intangible known as presence. In addition, the camera had loved his wild good looks, just as she did. Seductive was the only word to describe them, and viewers across the country had succumbed.
The most important viewer that night had been a network executive, Francis P. Weinhard, a revered member of an acclaimed group of journalists who'd emerged from WWII to remake broadcast news.
A man who'd started his career by sweeping the studio floor, he'd seen potential in Morgan and when Morgan's enlistment was up, Weinhard had offered himself as a mentor and teacher. Morgan had never had anyone believe in him before. He'd idolized Weinhard, more for his gruff kindness and faith than for his fame.
Weinhard had been relentless in his demands and teachings, drilling Morgan for endless hours on speech and diction and syntax. With his mentor's help, Morgan had acquired an air of confidence and assurance, yet there'd still been enough left of that impassioned, rough-edged soldier to captivate the viewers.
He'd started small, but it hadn't been long before he'd moved to Los Angeles, and then New York. After that, it had been straight to the top.
A shooting star.
He was still the best TV reporter she'd ever seen.
Sighing, Raine glanced at the clock. She'd fixed steaks and a salad. She should wake him so that he could eat before she threw him out.
For
all his years of traveling, Morgan invariably suffered from severe jet lag for a few days after a flight, no matter what remedy he'd tried. The only thing that worked was sleep. She knew from experience that if she woke him now, he would be groggy and disoriented and irritable at the precise instant she needed him to be rational and receptive. No, she would let him sleep. And then, when he was awake and alert, she would order him out of her house. For good, this time.
Morgan woke up stiff and sore, his senses annoyingly dull. His mouth tasted foul, and his head felt twice its normal size. For a moment he wondered why he was coming off of a two-day drunk, then realized it was just his usual jet-lag hangover. From the angle of the sunlight filtering through the skinny wooden blinds, he estimated the time to be early morning.
He yawned, then glanced at his watch. How many times had he changed the time on this trip? Six or seven? He'd lost track. He was, however, meticulous in always making sure his watch was accurate, so he knew it was 7:35, Pacific Daylight Time.
He was back in the good old U.S. of A. In Raine's cream-colored bedroom with its wild accents of regal color on the walls and furniture. In her bed with one of those fat coverlets she liked so much.
He turned his head to look for her, knowing even as he did that she wasn't in the room. He would know if she were. The tension riding his spine would be gone, and he would feel lazy and content. Settled.
Her scent was there, however—that roses-in-summer perfume she loved. He felt his body stirring and allowed himself a frustrated groan. This was definitely not the time to remember the soft, supple skin beneath the erotic scent. Or the lazy mornings he'd spent tasting every inch.
With a muffled groan, he pushed himself to a sitting position, then waited for his head to clear before getting to his feet. He needed a bathroom first and then coffee. A gallon would do for starters, he decided as he paused at the door to the hall to get his bearings.
The house was quiet, the sounds from beyond the outer walls muffled and indistinct. The blessed aroma of strong coffee drifted toward him from the direction of the kitchen. He heard water running. He felt a momentary disorientation before his gaze settled on the closed door across the hall.
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