by Dani Collins
Innocent’s Pregnancy Revelation
When billionaire Ben Barsi met gorgeous, innocent geologist, Henriqua Lopez, he had no idea she was the woman who would throw his life into chaos. Five months after their affair ended in scandal, Henriqua crashes back into his life during a society wedding. The fire between them is as hot as ever, but Ben refuses to let his guard down around this enticing woman again. Until Henriqua reveals her biggest secret yet—she’s pregnant with his baby!
Copyright © 2019 by Dani Collins
Chapter 1:
As if he hadn’t suffered enough humiliation lately, Ben Barsi was forced to endure a pity-offer of a job. The suggestion he take control of the American arm of a European corporation, with a focus on developing new markets for specialized metals, smelled heavily of familial interference served with a side of love and obligation on both sides.
“Did Rozi put you up to this?” Ben asked his new cousin-in-law, Viktor Rohan. He tracked his gaze to the man’s bride, Rozi, glowing as she chatted to their grandmamma. “You realize I’ve been fined twice my net worth by the securities commission for fraud?” He had narrowly avoided jail time.
“I’m aware.” Viktor gave a circumspect nod. “But Rozi believes in your innocence. That’s enough for me.”
“It’s still a terrible business decision. I’ve researched you enough to know you don’t make terrible decisions.” Ben tilted a meaningful stare at the man, letting him know he might be bruised by recent events, but he wasn’t beaten. He looked out for his family, especially his favorite cousins when they suddenly decided to marry tycoons from afar.
At least Gisella was only going to San Francisco with Kaine Michaels. Viktor was stealing Rozi to Budapest. Their grandparents had been born there, but the rest of them were American and tightly knit enough that Rozi’s absence would be deeply felt.
“I would view it as a personal favor if you would consider it.” Viktor glanced toward his new wife. His stark features grew surprisingly tender. “I’m embarrassed I wasn’t more supportive when Rozi first learned of your troubles. Her pregnancy hasn’t been easy. I should have done what I could to ease her mind.” His gaze came back, clear of sentiment, all business. “You’re not an idiot. I’ve researched you enough to know that. This will work in the long run.”
Ben would become an idiot if he refused. He was broke and had nearly ruined his entire family. He couldn’t afford pride. Gizi was marrying the man who had nearly been destroyed by Ben’s misplaced trust. That man, Kaine, had magnanimously bailed out Barsi on Fifth, saving the jewelry store that Ben’s grandparents had founded. Now Viktor was extending a hand that could pull Ben back onto solid footing.
“I’ll think about it,” Ben conceded, hoping his grandmother’s wise words to him when all of this started, “This too shall pass,” would prove true.
For the moment, Eszti Barsi looked happy, surrounded by her extensive family. He hated himself for disappointing her. For jeopardizing all she’d sacrificed and worked to build. He silently vowed he wouldn’t cause her another moment of concern.
Which was when his gaze was caught by a new arrival.
Something ajar within him settled back into place as he took in her auburn hair shifting in loose waves around her sweetheart face. Big, innocent brown eyes searched the wedding reception. Perfect white teeth caught at her plump bottom lip. Her coral cocktail dress hugged her breasts, even more lush than he recalled, and draped to midway down the tops of her smooth thighs, teasing him with memories of having those long legs locked around his waist, both of them lost to indescribable pleasure.
“Who is that?” he heard Viktor ask at a distance.
The instrument of my downfall.
“An uninvited guest,” Ben said through gritted teeth. “Excuse me while I evict her.”
Chapter 2:
Henriqua Lopez was still nursing sore ribs and terror that she would miscarry her unexpected, but no less wanted, baby. She might not be in a great position, given the circumstances—penniless, likely to be arrested and having made an enemy of the baby’s father wasn’t a great environment in which to raise a child—but she couldn’t bring herself to regret her pregnancy.
Adrenaline urged her to run. Again. It wasn’t the best coping strategy, but it worked in the short term. There was no running from the baby growing inside her, though. And she was out of places to run to. This was her last resort. A terrible gamble, but one she would take so her baby didn’t wind up as powerless as she was.
As she scanned the hotel’s elegant reception room filled with fifty-odd guests in their Sunday best, her gaze crashed into the one pair of dark brown eyes she’d hoped to avoid.
Damn this eye-catching dress. Her tall frame meant she’d only just begun to show despite entering her fifth month of pregnancy. The empire waist disguised her small bump very well, but the color was a neon sign.
She told herself not to let his notice distract her from her mission, but she was held motionless as they stared at one another. Despite the distance across the room, his glower went into her like a hot knife. It twisted, bringing a flex of agony into her throat while the rest of her swelled with yearning at the sight of him. She drank in his height and dark hair, his wide, clean-shaven jaw and searingly handsome features. Each detail was memorized and pocketed greedily to be recalled and cherished later.
Because a clock was ticking in her head.
She dragged her gaze across the room again. Zeroed in on the elderly woman holding court on a sofa. She was a picture of old-world elegance. A woman, Ben had told her with affection, who loved unconditionally. She had an unfailing sense of duty to her children and grandchildren. By the accounts of Ben’s downfall online, she even stood by her blood no matter what terrible crime they appeared to have committed.
Did she know Ben hadn’t salted those mineral samples himself? That his lover had played an unknowing part?
Henriqua should have walked away the first day of their dig in Bogotá, when Ben had mentioned Vincent. Her stepfather tainted everything he touched. He had turned her mother against her, leaving her to die without reconciling with her daughter. Henriqua had worked unfailingly to earn top marks at school, yet Vincent, a professor at her university, had left an impression with her fellow students that her top grades were favoritism on his part. He’d even taken credit for her budding geological career.
She had never imagined he could stoop to felony, though, and setting up others to take the blame. What a nightmare.
Henriqua started toward Eszti Barsi, as anxious to clear Ben’s name in the old woman’s eyes as she was to beg for help.
A firm hand grasped her arm right where Vincent had wrenched it as he threw her to the floor a few days ago.
The bruises sang with pain, but Henriqua didn’t flinch as she turned.
“Don’t touch me,” she said, shaking off Ben’s touch. It hurt. The bruises hurt and so did rebuffing him. His touch still thrilled her despite the scathing way he wiped his hand against his trousers, as though she was something dirty.
She turned away, determined to reach Eszti.
“Henriqua.” His tone, so glacial and implacable, paralyzed her feet and caused a tremor of acute emotion to shiver through her. “Leave now or I’ll call the police.”
Chapter 3:
“I need to speak to your grandmother.” Henriqua glanced warily at the phone he held.
The sheer audacity of this woman shouldn’t be able to astonish him, not after she seduced him, set him up for the type of swindle that had men thrown from helicopters, then escaped to Sout
h America. If she possessed a single ounce of sense, she would have stayed there.
“That will never happen,” he assured her, not yet dialing and not sure why. “Approach her and I will remove you myself.” He was dying for an excuse to get his hands on her, palm still hot from the brief contact with her upper arm.
He pulled up his lawyer’s number. Not the police. Not the investigators who had put him through the wringer for weeks. Not even a signal for hotel security. Why? His lawyer would tell him to report to the investigators that she was in the country.
“It’s important, Ben.” The slight tremble in her lashes and the faint quaver in her voice fanned some deeply buried part of him, a place he had allowed her to breach once. He wasn’t stupid enough to let her do it again.
“It is,” he agreed, using the tone he reserved for off-grid thugs who thought they could threaten an American because he was away from the comforts of home. “This is my family. You’ve caused enough damage.”
He caught his cousin Gizi looking over with a frown. She knew every socialite in New York, especially the ones who would have the nerve to crash a wedding.
“Do you hate me?” Henriqua asked, braced, yet there was a glimmer of desperate hope in her deceptively appealing eyes.
“Yes,” he said without hesitation, even though the word had barbs that caught in his throat.
“You’ll never forgive me,” she said, voice fading now while her gaze remained fixed on him.
“I will not.” His stomach felt full of wet cement.
A shadow of anguish passed over her expression. She nodded understanding. “I’m prepared to testify on your behalf.”
“What I need is a confession, darling. You’re a day late and several million dollars short. I’d say the thought counts, but it really doesn’t.”
“There are mitigating factors.” She reached as though to adjust her glasses even though she wasn’t wearing them. She turned it into a skim of her hair that was equally awkward since her hair wasn’t twisted into its usual knot. It was loose. The way it was when they made love. “Things your grandmother should hear.”
Rozi, the bride, was rising from the sofa and speaking to Viktor, both of them looking this way.
“Nothing, absolutely nothing, could come out of your mouth that would make me think you have any right to speak to me, let alone a cherished member of my family.”
She gave him a look that seemed to turn the floor to water beneath his feet. Her voice hit his ears from a distance.
“I’m pregnant.”
Chapter 4:
Ben’s head snapped back as if she’d punched him.
“It’s yours,” Henriqua said before the cynicism in his flinty gaze could form into words that would be more brutal than any beating Vincent delivered.
Ben’s pupils seemed to flare into black suns. As he started to speak, a woman appeared beside him. She was tall, gorgeous and comfortable enough to drape a familiar hand on Ben’s shoulder.
“Who’s your special guest, Benny?”
Oh dear God. Henriqua had thought the harm Vincent had inflicted on the man she loved had been too painful to bear. Running from Ben had nearly killed her, but none of that pain compared to the idea of him with another woman. It took everything in her to hold her spongy knees strong and swallow back a keening cry of betrayal.
“Key,” he said through his teeth, holding out a palm.
With a small falter of surprise, the woman unclipped her clutch. Her rings flashed as she handed over a card.
“P-two,” she said with a helpful smile and a curious once-over from Henriqua’s freestyle hair to her uncomfortable, thrift store shoes.
Ben snatched up Henriqua’s hand and dragged her after him. She stumbled in his wake, dazed by relief. He couldn’t be sharing a room with that woman if he hadn’t known which one it was.
“How?” Ben growled as the elevator doors closed behind them. His scent, a mixture of bottled aftershave and male pheromones, civilization and wilderness, worked their usual magic on her, making her knees weak.
“What do you mean, ‘how’? You seduced me.” Exactly as he was doing right now, simply by standing next to her. “We didn’t use protection.”
“The only time we didn’t use a condom, I pulled out.”
“Perhaps we should have studied biology instead of geology.” She tugged her cuff down to hide the blue shadow on her wrist. “I can’t explain it except to assure you it’s true.” For now.
He gave her a death-ray glare as he held the door for her, then followed her down the hall, opening the door to an expansive suite.
Henriqua had never seen anything like it, but barely took it in, so tense that she was gripping her elbows to keep herself together. She moved to the window and perused the view of Central Park fading into dusk.
“Drink?” he offered from behind the wet bar.
She half turned and smoothed her hand down the front of her dress, outlining her bump.
He sucked in a breath. “You’re keeping it, then.”
She didn’t answer. Couldn’t. Helplessness clogged her throat and she dropped her hands to her sides as she faced the window again.
Behind her, a bottle went onto the marble of the bar top with a loud clunk.
“What kind of sadist are you? You came all this way to tell me you’re pregnant so you could tell me you’re not carrying it to term?”
Henriqua rubbed at the tension between her brows. Her stomach felt as though she’d ingested radioactive acid.
“I’m going to have it,” she managed to say.
“But you’re not going to keep it? You think I’m going to let you give it up for adoption?” His voice was quiet, yet thick with outrage.
She instinctively braced for a blow as she admitted, “I want your grandmother to take it.”
Chapter 5:
Ben clinked ice into a glass, added a splash of scotch and set the cut crystal bottle onto the marble with enough force that both should have fractured. Ice hit his teeth as he shot two fingers in one swallow.
“I don’t know how you can still surprise me,” he hissed past the burn, pouring again. “My grandmother is eighty-one years old. How am I not the logical person to ask if you don’t want to raise our baby?”
“You hate me,” she flung herself around to say. “You just said so.”
He couldn’t look at her and only threw the next shot into the back of his throat.
“Your grandmother won’t blame the baby for my mistakes.” The scrape in Henriqua’s voice skinned him alive. “She’ll ensure someone loves it.”
“That’s important to you?” He tried for scathing, wanting to disguise that she had managed to pry past the veneer of hatred he was desperately trying to keep in place. Of course he would love his child. He had thought he loved her.
Until she betrayed him.
She turned back to the window.
He stole the moment to run his hand down his face, trying to gather his composure.
Pregnant. He could hardly comprehend it.
He came from a big, supportive family, one that meant a wife and children had always been something he imagined having, but in the “someday” category, when his company could be run from America so he wouldn’t be an absent husband and father.
Finding a woman who also loved hiking into remote locations to bag samples of dirt had pushed him to believe “someday” was closer than he thought.
But now he didn’t even have a rented flat to his name. His grandmother had offered him the use of her winter unit in Florida and his only employment prospect was the job his cousin’s new husband was offering to smooth over a spat with his wife.
Ben wasn’t in a position to provide for a family right now.
Of course, the reason he was in such dire straits was that woman, right there. The one pregnant with his child. He ought to question whether it was his, but he didn’t. On the contrary, when she had revealed that swelling in her middle, his only reaction had been an ir
resistible desire to touch her. Feel his child within her.
Their child.
“I didn’t think my situation could be more impossible,” he muttered. “Yet, here you are. Why—?” He cut himself off, deciding it didn’t matter why she didn’t want the baby, only that he claim it.
“I’m afraid for it,” she murmured so softly he almost didn’t hear her.
All the hairs on his body stood up. “Why?”
“Vincent wants to kill me. Once he realizes I have this—” She opened her purse and took out a handful of folded pages. “He’ll be even more determined.”
Chapter 6:
Vincent,” Ben repeated. “Your stepfather?”
He stayed skeptical, aware she was very capable of conning him, but even though she’d always seemed frank about her poverty-stricken childhood in Bogotá and her stubborn struggle to become a geologist, she had always glossed over mentions of her stepfather.
Ben moved across to take the pages, searching her expression for truth, lies, motives. Remorse.
All he saw was heart-catching beauty. She wore no makeup, no scent of hair products or perfume. Her dress was definitely off-the-rack, but looked couture on a body that he knew from extensive personal mapping possessed more curves than a mountain highway.
He returned his gaze to the shimmer of red gold in her hair. The sensual sweep of her lower lip had captivated him from their first meeting. That mouth and her accented, pillow talk voice as she had asked him how he had come to be a geologist.
“The family business?” she had guessed.
Hanging around Barsi on Fifth had sparked his early interest in precious metals and gems, but the jewelry store was window dressing to some extent. The back rooms were where the real money was made. Gold and other commodities made for a diverse portfolio. Ben had seen the potential in offering opportunities at the literal ground level. Family money and their network of Manhattan contacts had ensured the company he’d started after earning his degree, Barsi Minerals, became lucrative and successful.
