by Trish Morey
It had frightened the hell out of him.
He’d done that to her. He’d used her like a punching bag to feed his own desperate need.
Mackenzi deserved better.
He stopped at traffic lights, waiting for the green light to cross, and still the rain came down, the truth of his thoughts finally sinking in. She didn’t deserve it—not to be treated like that. One day she would have had to find out about his plans for the hotel, that he could never change them. Maybe he might have even told her why. Not that anyone else would understand.
But he hadn’t had to do it that way. He hadn’t had to hurt her. And he was sure he had.
He remembered her face and that expression. The terror. The fear.
God, what had he done?
The lights changed, the green ‘walk’ signal lighting up at last, and Dante started to walk.
He let himself into the suite, peeled off his drenched topcoat and dropped his briefcase, aware but uncaring that he was trailing a puddle of water with every step. She wasn’t in the dining room, the plates still scattered on the table where he’d left them, her coffee untouched. The bedroom bore signs of frantic activity, clothes thrown into a suitcase, but the open wardrobe still full of the clothes she’d bought here.
He found her in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the bath and still in the robe. Her hair was a mess and she was blowing her nose, looking down at something in her other hand.
She looked up suddenly, and the cannon ball inside him careened wildly when he saw her eyes were red and puffy, like she’d been crying.
‘Dante! You’re back.’ She frowned, her hand whipping whatever it was she was holding out of sight. ‘What happened to you?’
But right now he was more interested in what she was hiding than answering her question, his reason for coming back already forgotten. ‘What the hell is that?’
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘I WAS…I was just packing,’ she said, standing now, still hiding whatever it was she had hidden now under her robe. Mackenzi made a play of picking up things from the counter and sticking them in her toiletries bag, but he swiped up the box and the unfolded sheet of print lying nearby, her frantic rescue actions too late to save them.
‘What is this?’ he said as the description on the box confirmed all his worst fears, the box now containing only one of the two tests listed in the contents. He looked at her. ‘What the hell are you doing with a pregnancy kit?’
Fight returned to her red-rimmed eyes and the set of her chin. ‘I was going to change the washers with it. What do you think I’m doing with it?’
‘Show me what’s in your hand.’
‘Why? It’s none of your business. You’ve already terminated my services. Again.’
‘Show me!’
She sniffed, her eyes now looking more uncertain, a quiver in her bottom lip betraying how close she must be again to tears as her hand reluctantly withdrew from under her robe. Shakily she held the test out towards him and he took it. The cannon ball in his gut grew larger until there was no room for even the air in his lungs.
‘Satisfied? That line means a negative result.’ But her voice sounded less than convincing, and the information on the box in bold print also contradicted what she was saying. He looked at her, not knowing what he felt except that something was terribly, terribly wrong.
‘You’re pregnant.’
Her face crumpled on a groan and she collapsed down onto the side of the bath once more, this time with her head in her hands. ‘Yes.’
The question that had been grating on his nerves ever since the possibility she was pregnant had entered his mind just had to be asked. ‘So whose baby is it?’
Her head snapped back up. ‘Whose baby do you think it is?’
‘You tell me. You’re the woman I found lying in wait for me in my bed. How do I know how many other beds you’ve taken to in your quest to get whatever you want?’
She turned and looked at him. ‘I wasn’t lying in wait for you that night, Dante. I was sleeping over in an empty bed because I’d worked late and had an early start the next morning. Nothing more.’
He shook his head, discounting her claims. If that was the truth then none of this would have happened, she would have run from his bed kicking and screaming. ‘What about your friend Richard?’
She laughed. Or it could have been a sob; he wasn’t sure. ‘Ancient history.’
‘But more likely than me. I’ve known you, what, three weeks? This thing doesn’t tell me how long you’ve been pregnant. How do I know it’s not months?’
She raised herself to as much height as she could muster in her bare feet and glared at him. ‘It’s your baby, Dante. A scan will soon confirm any dates, and if you need more a blood test later will give you all the proof you need. You’re the father, God help the poor child.’ And then she collected her toilet bag and pushed past him through the bedroom and into the living room.
He stood for a while as his mind grappled with the unfamiliar concept that someone might be carrying a child of his. From the vehemence of his words there emerged the tiny seed of possibility that it might be true—that it was true—and that seed gave birth to the idea that somehow this might even be a good thing. Mackenzi, pregnant with his child.
Not that it made any sense.
He tracked her movements across the floor, not understanding, finding her standing by the windows, her robe tightly tied at her waist and her arms crossed while her hair tumbled down her back in a riot of disarray. My God, he thought, even like this without a skerrick of make-up to mask her reddened eyes she was still beautiful. But still he didn’t understand. ‘You told me you were on the Pill.’
One hand came out beseechingly, her elbow still locked at her waist. ‘I was! I mean, I am, but I missed one…or two.’
‘How the hell did that happen?’
She screwed up her face, remembering. ‘That night I stayed at the hotel. I slept over some nights in the hotel when I was working late, but I’d taken my overnight bag out of my car and I’d left my pills at home. I missed one. I didn’t think it would matter, but then we left so quickly for Auckland that I forgot about it until the day after we arrived…’
‘Don’t give me that! You were lying there in wait for me the whole time and you can’t pretend you weren’t—not with the reception you gave me. And yet you still forgot to take two pills in a row? How careless was that?’
She abandoned any hope of convincing him she hadn’t been lying in wait for him that night and gestured instead towards the bedroom. ‘About as careless, I guess, as you forgetting to use protection when you jammed me up and took me against that wall in there. The same way you neglected to use a condom when you made love to me in the lift between floors three and twenty-three. People forget things, Dante, even you apparently!’
‘You should have told me.’
‘Would you have wanted me to tell you something like that? I don’t think so.’
Something in her words stuck in his craw. ‘You weren’t going to tell me about the baby either, were you? You were going to walk out of here without telling me.’
‘You told me you wanted me gone. I was only too happy to oblige.’
‘But you knew then, didn’t you? You knew you were pregnant. That’s what all that talk about our deal was about, wasn’t it?’
‘I wanted to know where I stood. You made that more than plain.’
‘But you didn’t tell me!’
‘And you didn’t deserve to know!’
He wheeled away. He’d been an utter bastard to her this morning, he knew it. But she’d known she was having his child and yet she hadn’t said a word, had kept the truth from him. She was no innocent herself!
‘So what are you planning to do?’
She gave a defeated shrug of her shoulders. ‘I don’t know. Go home. Get a job.’
‘How can you work?’
‘I’m not sick, Dante, just pregnant, and only just. And it’s early days, w
ho knows what might happen?’
‘You will not have an abortion!’
‘I meant that nature might take its course and decide that for itself.’
‘And what will you do after the child is born? How will you cope with a child and a job?’
‘I don’t know. But I will. And if worst comes to worst I guess there’s always the adoption route.’
‘No child of mine will be adopted out!’
The force of his reply took her by surprise. She hadn’t meant it, she’d been doing no more than thinking out loud, couldn’t he see that?
‘And who are you, telling me what to do?’
‘I won’t let you give this baby up!’
‘So now you care what I do when you practically threw me out this morning?’
‘I didn’t know then that you might be carrying my child.’
‘Am carrying your child,’ she corrected. ‘But believe what you like. I need to finish my packing. Meanwhile—’ she looked pointedly at the clock ‘—didn’t you have a meeting to attend? You might want to shower and change first, though, right now you look like something the cat dragged in.’
He growled and glanced at the time. Damn the meeting! This was more important. ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ he ordered. ‘And you’re certainly not flying, not until we’ve had you properly checked out.’
‘Forget it, Dante. I’ve had enough. I’m leaving, and you can’t stop me.’ She set off for the bedroom and he made a move to follow her when the phone rang, loud and insistent, and he knew they would be looking for him. But he had a job to do here, he had to keep Mackenzi from leaving, and he couldn’t trust her to stay if he wasn’t here.
The phone stopped ringing and when he got to the bedroom he saw why. Mackenzi looked at him, handset to ear. ‘Sorry, Stuart, I’m feeling off-colour and won’t make the meeting, but Dante’s just on his way.’
He fired his toughest glare at her as he pulled the handset out of her hand. ‘Quinn! Sorry to keep you waiting. We’ve had a bit of a crisis here this morning, but it’s all sorted out now.’
Mackenzi shot him daggers from across the room as she collected up the last of her paltry collection and dropped them in her case.
‘No, the doctor will be here shortly. But that’s not all that’s held me up this morning. Did she tell you our good news?’
Mackenzi stopped dead and looked up at him in horror, suddenly shaking her head desperately. He smiled back at her as Quinn urged him to spill the news. ‘It’s very exciting news, actually. Mackenzi’s just agreed to become my wife.’
‘What the hell were you thinking? Why did you tell him that?’ Mackenzi’s mind still reeled with the fallout from his announcement, her thought processes already all but shredded with the turmoil and emotion of the morning.
He shrugged, a look of victory turning his face smug as he started unbuttoning his drenched shirt, rifling through the wardrobe with his free hand for another. ‘It’s the perfect solution,’ he said. ‘The baby will have a mother and a father, and you won’t have to go out to work.’
‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’
He pulled the shirt over his head and dropped it on the carpet, where it landed with a dull slap. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘You haven’t asked me. And, even if you did, I’d say no. I won’t marry you, Dante. I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man left on earth.’
He straightened then and she almost wished he hadn’t, and for the very same reason she was glad he had. The muscles rippled under that broad, hard chest and drew her gaze and turned her thoughts to other times, to other more pleasurable activities. How was it that she’d ever believed she was frigid? She wrenched the tie around her waist tighter, pressing down on her own body’s reaction, wishing she had dressed when he had gone this morning rather than dissolving into tears and thinking pointless ‘what if?’s.
‘You seemed to enjoy being my mistress well enough.’
‘Marriage isn’t just about enjoyment, though, is it? It’s about love and respect and mutual desire to build something together. You’re not into building anything are you, Dante? Except for your own personal fortune, and then only so you can tear someone else’s down!’
He walked towards her, his torso a sculpture in motion, and she held her breath. She wanted a denial. She wanted him to say that he wanted to marry her for more than just the child they’d conceived between them. That he’d changed and that he’d come to love her, even just a little, and that he could learn to love her more over time. She wanted to know that her own newly discovered love was not in vain.
‘It won’t be a normal marriage,’ he said, turning her hopes to dust. Then he took the fingers of one hand and traced them down her cheek and along the line of her jaw. She closed her eyes and swallowed as his touch set her senses on fire, her nipples budding and pressing against the towelling robe. ‘But the experience we’ve already had together,’ he continued, ‘tells us it can be better than tolerable.’
Her breath hitched when his fingers ran down the slope of her neck, dipping further, transgressing the line between robe and flesh. She knew what they were telling her—that it would be worth marrying Dante for the sex alone. She almost believed them. Almost.
‘No,’ she said, gripping the neckline of her robe tightly together, another greater purpose occurring to her in a lightning bolt of inspiration. ‘If I’m to marry you, there has to be something in it for me.’
His hand curled around her neck and pulled her closer to him so she was nestled against his body, the scent of fresh rain and naked skin teasing her nostrils. ‘I’ll be more than enough for you, you know that.’
‘Maybe. But you get a child out of this marriage. I want something concrete too.’
He put his hands to her shoulders and pushed her away, watching her warily, his eyes narrowed. ‘So, what is it you want?’
‘For you to save Ashton House. Change your mind about destroying it and I’ll marry you. Otherwise, no deal.’
He laughed and let her go. ‘Sure. I promise to think about it.’
‘No way,’ she said. ‘That’s not how this deal works. The time for thinking is past. I want a cast-in-gold guarantee here. If I marry you, then Ashton House stays a going concern, and it never gets pulled down by you or any of your other cronies.’
‘And if I don’t agree?’
‘Then not only will I refuse to marry you, I’ll do my utmost to see you have as little as possible to do with your child.’
‘You won’t be able to stop me. Legally I can make you give me access.’ He strode to the wardrobe, took hold of his new shirt and pulled it off the hanger.
‘And why would you even want access? Unless you want to turn its mind toxic, so it ends up half-crazed just like its dear old dad?’ She shook her head. ‘No way. You’re not doing that to my child. And you can argue with me all you want but you’re going to have to fight me. Because there’s no way I’m agreeing to this marriage without your guarantee not to destroy Ashton House first.’
‘You expect me to agree to an ultimatum like that?’
‘It’s a simple choice,’ she told him, feeling suddenly emboldened, her heart pumping fast in her chest. ‘You can go on living in the past, or you can build a brand-new future of your own.’
Dante looked at her, his new shirt still in his hands, although the collar was starting to look mighty creased. She could see that for once she held the advantage, for once she had the upper hand, and she couldn’t help but also notice that he knew it too and hated the fact.
‘But you’ll marry me, in spite of all my obvious faults, of which there are clearly many, if I agree to save Ashton House?’
‘As simple as that,’ she said.
Mackenzi held her breath as he purposefully strode away, standing with hands on hips at the window, looking out over the cityscape below. She didn’t expect a quick decision; she knew that Dante would sooner agree to give her the moon and wouldn’t fail to come throug
h with it. But as the time ticked by she started to wonder if she hadn’t overplayed her hand. She knew how he felt about Ashton House, even though she would never understand his reasons why. How could an unplanned and unborn child, barely conceived, compete with Dante’s passion for destruction?
Finally he turned around and looked over at her. Even from here she could see the throbbing pulse in the cords of his neck and light sheen of perspiration lining his brow, and she knew what her request must have cost him. Through clenched teeth he managed the words, ‘I’ll do it. It’s a deal. But I have my conditions too.’
‘Which are?’
‘We’ll do this wedding my way.’ She opened her mouth to protest and he held up one hand to stall her. ‘Listen first. We get married as soon as legally possible, I assume that’s going to be at least four weeks. And I expect you’ll want this marriage to take place at Ashton House?’
She nodded. She’d been going to request it. It would mean so much to her parents and to her, even though she’d known she would be really pushing it with Dante. ‘If it’s at all available. And it’s not as if it had to be held on a weekend.’
‘Fine. Then I’ll have Adrian take care of all the details.’
‘Adrian? But—-’
‘That’s my condition. I don’t want you worrying about details. You concentrate on finding yourself a dress. He can take care of everything else.’
‘I think my mother might like some say in the arrangements,’ she ventured, wanting at least some input into the process. ‘Otherwise she’ll think this is an even stranger wedding.’
‘All right. I’ll make sure he liaises with your mother. Anything else?’
She blinked, her mind trying to catch up, stunned by the speed at which her bold challenge was fast becoming a reality. Her blood fizzed in the excitement of knowing how close she was to achieving her goal when all had looked lost—to saving Ashton House.
But there was another more selfish layer to her excitement than that. It was the certain knowledge that within a few weeks she would be wife to the man she secretly loved, when she became Mrs Dante Carrazzo.