Jordan, Penny

by Second Time Loving2

  'Daniel.' Her hand went to her chest and her heart started to pound. 'What...? How did you ...?'

  She stared at him in disbelief, dropping the skirt she was holding. He was standing in the doorway to her bedroom, looking both agonisingly familiar and yet in so many ways unfamiliar and unknown, in the dark formality of the business suit in which he looked as completely at home as he had done in his worn jeans.

  Something about him was different though. His face was thinner, older somehow, his eyes darker, shadowed, as though he had endured recent suffering.

  'I should have guessed you'd do this, shouldn't I?' he demanded, ignoring her questions. 'You seem to make a habit of running away. Hardly flattering ... What is it you're running from, Angelica? Me or yourself?'

  She couldn't stop staring at him, greedily drinking in each tiny detail, aching to be able to go up to him and touch him, just to reassure herself that he actually was real. His angry words barely impinged on her awareness. Daniel here. Daniel actually here.

  'Where exactly are you going?'

  Where was she going? She frowned as she looked away from him. His unexpected presence in her suite had momentarily thrown her off guard. She couldn't allow him to guess the truth.

  'I'm not feeling very well,' she lied. 'I-I've-decided to go home. The conference wasn't a good idea anyway. I should have cancelled and let Paul come instead. Once he takes over from me--'

  'You're letting someone else take over the company.' Daniel was frowning now.

  'Yes. Yes.'

  'Why?' He shot the question at her, and then abruptly his face changed, becoming so hard and menacing that she actually felt a tiny thrill of fear.

  'You lied to me, didn't you? You're pregnant, aren't you? You're having my child. Well, that does it. You're marrying me, Angelica, whether you like it or not. A child needs a father, and if it means keeping you chained to my side from now until I can get a special licence, you are going to marry me. My child isn't going to grow up without knowing me. I don't care how modern that might be.'

  Angelica sank down on to the bed, too shocked to conceal her feelings.

  'What is it? What's wrong?' Daniel demanded urgently, when he saw the tears spring to her eyes.

  She shook her head, too overcome to respond, and then gasped as she felt his hands on her shoulders, shaking her gently, tenderly almost.

  'My love, I'm sorry if I frightened you, but you must see it for yourself ... You can't deprive our child of its right to know both its parents.'

  She swallowed painfully, and told him huskily, 'Daniel, there isn't going to be any child.'

  He released her immediately, the look on his face so bitter, so filled with pain that she almost reached out and touched him, but then she was glad she had not done so when he accused, 'You did that. You destroyed our child.'

  For a moment she couldn't believe what she'd heard. She stood up and pushed past him, her own anger matching his as she told him fiercely, 'You're wrong, Daniel. More wrong than you can possibly believe. If I had conceived your child .. .' She swallowed back the words which would have told him how much that child would have meant to her and how much he meant to her and said unsteadily instead, 'What I was trying to tell you was that there never has been any child.'

  'Then why are you giving up the company? Why did you run away from me just now?'

  She wanted to lie to him, to make some easy excuse, but the words locked in her throat. She had suffered too many shocks to be able to think straight, never mind manufacture convincing lies.

  'I thought it was best,' she managed eventually. 'I thought it was best for both of us. That you wouldn't want to see me.'

  'That I wouldn't want to see you? My God, woman ... You run away from me in the middle of the night, after the most perfect loving I've ever known. You disappear completely without trace. Your secretary refuses to tell me where you are. Tom can't be contacted because he's out of the country-c-or at least he was. Thank God he returned in time to tell me you'd be coming here, or doubtless I'd still be trying to track you down. I'd even got to the stage of actually thinking I was going to have to storm that damned office of yours.

  'I repeat, you run away from me, and you keep on running and you have the gall to accuse me of not wanting to see you. Be honest with me, Angelica,' he demanded roughly, 'I've got to know. Did that afternoon-do I mean anything to you, anything at all?'

  Without waiting for her response, he turned round so that she could only see his back, his bunched shoulders set with defeat and something elsethat made her heart twist painfully inside her.

  'I told myself I wouldn't push you. That you needed time to get over Giles properly, that I wouldn't panic you into rejecting me before you'd had a chance to get to know me, to, or so I hoped, come to feel just a tenth of what I feel for you in return, and then I went and blew it all, didn't I? Then I went and messed the whole thing up by letting you know well and truly how much I cared, how desperately I love you--'

  Angelica couldn't believe what she was hearing. 'You love me?' she interrupted him shakily.

  He turned round and looked at her, saying self-mockingly, 'No, of course I don't. I always make love the way I made love to you. . . I always lose control like that, I always need to be with someone so much that I cancel meetings and alter schedules, just so that I can rush back to her, I always pester secretaries, and ring up strangers demanding addresses, I always get myself on to conferences I've no business attending. Of course I love you, you fool. But I'm the one who's the fool, aren't I? I can't go on like this. I have to know. Is there any possibility that you could come to love me? I know you want me.' He saw her face and smiled gently at her. 'No, don't deny it. And don't feel ashamed of it either. There's nothing to be ashamed of in natural, healthy desire, but I want more than your desire, my angel ...I want your love-all of it.'

  'You've got it,' Angelica told him huskily, and felt the tears burn her eyes as she saw the way her words transformed him.

  'You mean that-you really mean it?' he demanded thickly, taking hold of her. 'Oh, my God, if you're lying to me .. .'

  'I'm not-that's why I left, because I knew I loved you, and I was terrified of betraying it to you. I was so convinced that you couldn't love me, that you only felt compassion for me, pity.'

  'After the way we'd just made love?' he demanded wryly.

  She flushed a little and reminded him, 'I'd nothing to compare your lovemaking with. I thought ... Well, you said it had been a long time.' She discovered that she was blushing and laughing a little herself when he touched her hot face with one forefinger, caressing her overheated skin.

  'Abstinence had nothing to do with the way I reacted to you, nothing at all.'

  His mouth was unbearably close to her lips. She only needed to move a fraction of an inch, less than that, to feel its familiar heat. She stroked its male outline with the tip of her tongue and whispered lovingly to him, 'I wanted to conceive your child. I told myself that if I couldn't have you, then at least having your child would mean I had a part of you ... How could you think I could ever have destroyed that kind of gift?'

  'How could you ever think I didn't love you? We've both been fools. If we'd been honest with one another from the start ... If I'd told you how I felt about you, but I thought it was too soon. When you told me about Giles, you were so determined not to allow yourself to love another man, I thought it was going to take me months to break down the barriers you'd built up around yourself.'

  'When in reality they'd already crumbled and I was hopelessly in love with you.'

  'You concealed it very well.'

  He kissed her slowly and deeply,making her tremble with need and move closer to his body, seeking the familiar heat of its arousal, and sighing softly under his kiss when she found it.

  'I can't believe you deliberately invited yourself on to this conference just to see me,' she told him huskily minutes later.

  'Well, you'd better.'

  He was kissing her again.

/>   'I'm surprised they had a spare place, and a spare room-it was pretty heavily booked.'

  'Mmm. They didn't-have a spare room, that is-but when I explained to them I'd be sharing your room and booked us both this suite .. .'

  'You booked this suite?' She broke free of his kiss and stared at him in disbelief.

  'Mmm.'

  He leaned forward and started to nibble the sensitive cord in her neck, sending her thoughts into chaotic disorder.

  'You were so sure of me, then,' she protested.

  'No, just so desperate that I was determined that somehow or other I'd manage to get you on your own, somewhere where you couldn't run away from me. If necessary I'd have spent the night on the sofa. If necessary I still will,' he added gravely, cupping her face with his hands and looking down into her eyes. 'I want you forever, Angelica, not just for the space of a few brief nights.'

  She was trembling beneath his hands, knowing that he was speaking the truth. 'It seems a shame to waste such a wonderful bed,' she told him shyly ...

  'Yes, it does, doesn't it? Do you know that when I initially envisaged making love to you I wanted it to be in a room like this ... rich and luxurious, with the kind of bed that's just made for lovers. I wanted to take my time with you, to make love to you slowly and lingeringly so that for the rest of our lives you'd know how much you mean to me. Instead .. .'

  'Instead, nothing,' Angelica told him fiercely. 'What happened between us was wonderful, open and natural, instinctive and somehow totally right ... Even when I thought that you didn't love me, I knew that physically you had loved me, that what we'd shared had been special, if only in the physical sense, and I certainly don't regret a second of it. Well, at least not now. I did regret the fact that, even though I'd lied to you, I hadn't conceived.'

  'Mmm. I think after tonight we'd better get married just as soon as it can be arranged. We can make pressure of mutual business commitments our excuse,' he told her quietly, frowning. 'You mustn't think that I'm going to expect or want you to give up running your father's company, unless you want to. I've sold out my controlling interest in my business. I'm still based in Cardiff, but I'm quite prepared to tell my parent company that I've changed my mind about staying on as MD, and looking for a job in London instead .. .'

  Angelica shook her head. 'No. I've come to realise that the company was only important to me as a duty, a responsibility. I want time to spend with you, with our children. I'd already decided to ask Paul if he'd like to take over for me. What I'd really like is a house in the country, somewhere with a bit of land, perhaps even close to the sea.'

  'Mmm. What I'd like right now is to take you to bed and make love to you, just to make sure you're actually real, that this isn't just something I'm imagining.'

  It was a long, long time later when Angelica suddenly remembered the conference. Snuggled in Daniel's arms, she asked him sleepily, 'Do you think they'll have missed us?'

  'Not anything like as much as missed you these last weeks. If you ever run away from me again .. .'

  'I won't,' she assured him softly, and then kissed him gently.

  He kissed her back, not gently at all, and as she felt her body quicken with renewed pleasure she gave mental thanks to the wondrous powers of fate for bringing them so miraculously together, for knowing how perfect they were going to be for one another.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN