Pregnancy of Revenge

by Jacqueline Baird

  Charlie looked around. The furniture was an eclectic mix of traditional and modern but it was the paintings that caught her attention. She recognized a Matisse and two Monets.

  'At last we are alone.' Jake swept her up in his arms and carried her up the stairs. Her shoes fell off and she tightened her grip around his neck with a startled, 'Oh!'

  'One less item to remove.' Jake gave her a wicked grin and they both burst out laughing as he walked into the mas­ter bedroom.

  With less than his usual grace, he stumbled over her suit­cases already deposited in the bedroom. 'Don't you dare drop me,' Charlie commanded, still laughing.

  'Never,' Jake responded with an abashed grin. Their eyes met and the laughter stopped.

  Slowly he lowered her to her feet, and her eyes widened fractionally as he touched a gentle finger to her lips and traced the upper outline, and then the lower curve. Incredibly she suddenly felt nervous. She had slept with Jake countless times, but this time was different.

  Jake's eyes didn't leave hers as he stepped back and shrugged off his jacket and tie. Then, with slow, deliberate movements, he removed the rest of his clothes until he was standing before her, tall and broad-shouldered with bronzed skin sheathing hard-backed muscle and sinew and wearing only white silk briefs that did little to hide his arousal. Warm colour tinged her cheeks, and for a long moment she simply stared, the sexual tension simmering between them.

  'No need to be nervous, Charlotte,' Jake said, accurately reading her mind, and closed the distance between them. 'Have I told you today you look beautiful,cara? He asked softly as he lowered his head down to hers.

  Warmth flooded her body and became a pulsing heat ashe slid her jacket from her shoulders, and a moan sounded in her throat at the touch of his mouth on her own.

  His hands skimmed her breasts, and down her thighs, and in one fluid movement the raw silk dress slid down to pool at her feet leaving her naked except for delicate white lace French panties.

  Jake stepped back, the better to appreciate her lush shapely body tantalizingly enhanced by the pearl choker and the seductively cut lace panties. Her breasts were fuller, her stomach where his child lay still flat.

  'I feel as if I have waited a lifetime to see you like this.'

  It was incomprehensible, but Charlie, who had the con­fidence to do anything, was suddenly plagued by self-doubt as Jake's dark, obsessive gaze roamed intently over her. He was so perfect, tall and golden, and she wanted to be perfect for him, but she was pregnant and it was over seven weeks since they had been together. Her breasts were fuller, not so firm, and Jake was used to perfection: his house, his art. Her eyes flicked past him in a brief panicky movement and she saw the picture on the wall behind him. It was a Gauguin, an island woman with long black hair, and it re­minded her of another painting and Diego's comment about Anna.

  Jake's hands reached for her and settled on her waist.

  'Who was Anna?' She murmured the thought even as her eyes were drawn back to meet smoldering black and the uninhibited desire, the raw hunger she saw there ignited a fire deep in her belly.

  But as she swayed towards him his head reared back, his fingers digging into her waist almost to the point of pain in a knee-jerk reaction to her question. 'Where the hell did that come from?' he ground out harshly.

  It was nothing,' she said quickly. 'I caught sight of the painting on the wall and it reminded me of the painting you bought and something Diego said today.'

  Jake's face hardened, but his hands eased slightly on her waist. 'Diego has a big mouth. Whatever he said, forget it, and drop the subject.'

  If the command had not been so curtly delivered Charlie might have done so, but his strange attitude made her all the more determined to get to the bottom of the mystery.

  Before she could lose her nerve she said, 'Diego thought you and I might have met earlier, because she was my fa­ther's lover and also a friend of yours. He actually thought Anna might have introduced us.' Drawing in a shaky breath, she asked the question she had wanted to avoid. 'Was she an ex-lover of yours?'

  'Dio, no.' Jake was angry, ridiculously angry, and he had no right to be. Her question was ill-timed, but perfectly valid. Unfortunately, the subject of Anna aroused conflicting emotions inside him: the loyalty he owed to the Lasios, the guilt he could not quite dismiss, and the frustration he felt that his wife of a few hours was looking at him with puzzled rather than passion-filled eyes.

  Flattening her hands on his shoulders, she tilted back her head. 'Then why won't you tell me who she was?'

  'You know who she was,' he said with a harsh laugh that was no laugh at all. 'She was the lover of your lecherous father, and over twenty years his junior. Now let's forget her, and concentrate on us.' He pulled her hard against him. 'This is our wedding night, and arguing with you was not what I had in mind.'

  He was being evasive, but he was also right. A few sec­onds of feminine insecurity and she had ruined the mood. Why hadn't she kept her mouth shut? Because she was cu­rious about the mysterious Anna of the portrait. She sighed, answering her own question.

  'I'd like to think that was a sigh for me, for sex,' Jake said dryly. 'But I rather think it is frustration of another sort: your insatiable curiosity about a certain painting.'

  He had read her mind and she flushed a little, but there was no point in denying it.

  He shrugged his broad shoulders, his austerely handsome face suddenly devoid of all expression. 'You want the truth? Why not? According to all the marriage pundits, it's the way to go for a good marriage and so far ours appears to be going nowhere fast.' His voice was sardonic. 'Anna was my foster-sister, and I loved her. I was there when she was born, I watched her grow into a beautiful young woman, and I saw her destroyed by your father. She imagined herself in love with him and for two years she thought he was going to marry her.'

  Charlie paled as the full import of his words sank in. The relief she had felt that Anna had never been Jake's lover vanished as she realised the truth was much worse. An ex- lover could be forgotten, but a sister never.

  When she had met Jake he'd told her the painting was the only one he wanted. Not surprising if, as Diego had said, Anna had died recently. She remembered the look in the girl's eyes. And she remembered the glazed look in Jake's when he'd looked at it. How he must have hated to see her exposed like that...

  A host of moments with Jake spun in the whirlpool of her mind, and began to assume a different meaning. Their first night together. She recalled his coldness after they had made love, his questioning her as to what she thought about an older man taking a young woman as a lover. Naively she had thought he was referring to the twelve-year gap between them. Now she realized he must have been thinking of her father.

  She caught her breath in shock. 'My God! You hated my father.' She stared at him in horror. 'I'm right, aren't I?'

  'I never met him, but, yes, I hated him.' Jake slid a lean hand around her waist. 'But don't let it bother you.' His voice was almost mocking. 'The man is dead, as is Anna. And you are my wife.' His other hand stroked down her throat and deftly unfastened the choker so it fell unheeded to the floor before trailing lower to cup her breast, a thumb testing the hardening peak. 'And we have wasted enough time already.'

  'No.' She tried to deny him, but her treacherous flesh was already craving more. 'Let go of me,' she said jaggedly in an atmosphere suddenly raw with sexual tension. 'We need to talk.'

  'What you need is very evident.' His dark eyes slanted down to her naked breast, where the rigid tip was a real give-away, then back to her face. His mouth touched hers, very lightly. 'And it certainly isn't talk. It is me, cara.'

  The arrogance of his comment and the truth of it mortified her and inflamed her temper at one and the same time. He admitted he hated her father and in the next breath expected her to fall into his arms. His conceit was monumental, and, twisting out of his hold, she took a hasty step back and crossed her arms defensively over her aching breasts.

 
She was an intelligent woman, and with hindsight sud­denly a lot of little things he had said made sense. While she had been driven by an all-consuming desire, even love, for Jake straight into his bed, she was now forced to ques­tion what had been his real motivation. The day they had gone to the museum, he had joked about his motivation, and the answer, she saw now, had been enigmatic.

  Closing her eyes for a moment, she slowly fought to achieve a semblance of self-control, then, opening them again, she flicked a glance at his hard, handsome face.

  'No, Jake, what I need from you is the truth,' she said, proud of her ability to control the tremor in her voice, even though inside she was shaking like a leaf. 'Why did you ask Ted to introduce you to me at the gallery? Surely if you hated my father so much I must have been the last person you would want to know?' Her mouth was dry as she waited for his response.

  'I was curious to see what kind of daughter a man who had so little respect for women had produced. But what does it matter now?' He shrugged. 'We are married and have the future to look forward to.'

  She saw the familiar shuttered look in his eyes that pro­tected his deepest thoughts, and knew he was not telling her the whole truth. But she was achingly aware of how much she loved him. Her wedding night was fast turning into a nightmare, not what she wanted at all. Jake was right, none of it mattered any more, and she unfolded her arms and took a tentative step towards him.

  'I am sorry about your sister, Jake.' She swallowed hard. The words were inadequate, she knew. 'No one knows bet­ter than me what a womanizing rogue my father was. And if Anna loved him it must have been terrible for her when he died. I know how I felt, and I know the hurt you must have felt when Anna died. What can I say?'

  Slowly his eyes drifted over her—assessing eyes that did not betray a flicker of warmth. Not the reaction she had expected for her sympathy. 'Nothing, nothing at all,' he finally drawled. His arm once more slipped around her waist, and with his free hand he tilted her head back. 'It has already been said.' And the sizzling scorn in the black eyes that clashed with hers sent a shiver of fear snaking down her spine. 'Your father sent Anna away and we both know why. So you can drop the mock sympathy.' Hismouth twisted in a hard, humorless smile. 'You refused to meet her.'

  For a split second Charlie was convinced she had heard wrong. But his dark eyes held contempt and the immobility of his hard features told her she had not.

  'I refused to meet her?' she parroted. When she had vis­ited her dad for a couple of weeks three months before his death, he had told her he was between lovers. Not that she'd believed him; it had been his standard response for years in his misguided attempt to protect Charlie from his women. But Jake had a different view. Why, she had no idea.

  'Anna told me everything. Your father sent her away be­cause his bitch of a daughter insisted upon it. Apparently the girl was arriving for a holiday and she was so selfish she refused to share her father with his lover. Brave of you to admit it, I suppose,' Jake allowed dryly.

  'I can't believe what you're saying!' Charlie shook her head free of his controlling fingers, her mind sifting the information Jake had given her with lightning speed. The full horror of what he implied chilled her to the bone, the conclusion unmistakable. The relationship between her fa­ther and Anna was immaterial. Jake, her lover, her husband, thought she was a selfish bitch.

  'No,' she murmured, briefly closing her eyes, Jake could not possibly believe that of her. She opened them again; her stunned gaze met his. 'I loved my father, but—' She was going to explain it was her father who never allowed her to meet his lovers, not the other way around.

  'But, as they say, the rest is history,' Jake cut in mock­ingly. 'Your father died—if he hadn't I would have de­stroyed him myself—and Anna crashed her car into a tree a few months later and followed him to the grave. But on the upside you made a lot of money, so it's not all doomand gloom. Now forget it. The past is past. It is the present that concerns me.'

  The past shapes the future. Charlie had read that some­where, and Jake's throwaway comments that he would have destroyed her father given the chance, and about the money he thought she'd made by his death, made her sick to her stomach. But she had to hear the truth from his mouth, how­ever much it hurt. She had been blinded by love for far too long.

  She tried to pull free of him, but he tightened his arm around her waist and she refused to demean herself by strug­gling. 'Given you thought I was not just a selfish bitch, but greedy as well...' her voice was flat and toneless, and she wondered how it was possible for her skin to burn at the contact with his while an icy chill built up inside her '... tell me again why you asked Ted to introduce us. The truth, this time.'

  The muscles in his jaw tightened for an instant, and then his chiseled features relaxed, and his dark eyes gleamed with a hint of self-deprecatory humor as they meshed with hers. 'Truthfully? Because Anna had given me the impres­sion Summerville's daughter was a child. When Ted told me you were a businesswoman who had sanctioned the ex­hibition, I wanted to meet you. What I could forgive in a child, I could not forgive in an adult, and I admit revenge did cross my mind. Poetic justice, if you like. But to be honest, I took one look at you and wanted you, cara. Still do.'

  Revenge was such an ugly word, and such an ugly emo­tion, and at first Charlie did not want to believe what she was hearing. But as it sank in she was horrified at his co­lossal confidence, his despicable arrogance—that he would assume she was such a pushover that she would accept such an explanation and continue as though nothing had hap­pened. She swallowed hard. 'Why did you ask me to marry you?' She had to know the worst.

  'You are carrying my child, Charlotte.' His free hand slipped to her stomach and rested there.

  Tears of anger and pain stung her eyes, and she fought them back, achingly aware of his strong, near-naked body touching her own from chest to thigh, but also finally aware—on her wedding night, of all nights—that Jake didn't love her, never had, and probably never would.

  She wanted to scream and yell her pain to the world as her heart shattered into a million pieces. But she didn't. Instead the chill inside her grew until a blessed numbness froze the pain and she said, in a voice that seemed to come from a long way off, 'And to think when you proposed, I asked you if you loved me, and you lied and said yes.'

  'As I remember you asked if I was marrying you because you were pregnant or because I loved you, and I answered yes, I adored you.' His unreadable eyes swept her carefully controlled features, a smile as insincere as any she had seen curving his beautiful mouth. 'How you interpreted my re­sponse was up to you.'

  'A question of semantics,' she mocked hollowly, and dragged her gaze from his. The revelations this evening had cut her to the bone. But she could not betray her weakness. She had to be strong, not just for herself but also for her child. With a proud tilt of her head she looked at him coldly, her voice displaying no trace of emotion as she said, 'Be honest, Jake, you don't love me. All I ever was to you was a body to enjoy while you fed your sick need for revenge, but unfortunately I got pregnant.'

  'You're wrong. I no longer have any need for revenge, and as for enjoying your body...' His dark eyes gleamed with sardonic humor. 'So far I am not having much luck, but that is about to change.'

  His dark head bent and she saw it in his eyes, felt it in the tightening grip of his hands, and she knew he was going to kiss her. Belatedly Charlie lifted her own hands and shoved against his chest. 'No.' She struggled frantically, her hands curling into fists, and she punched him on the chest- anywhere she could reach. 'No, no!' she cried.

  His mouth silenced hers and the possessive passion of his kiss and the sudden heated response that arced through her completely shamed her. Charlie tore her mouth from his and struck out wildly, but with his superior height and strength he simply swept her up in his arms, and deposited her sur­prisingly gently on the bed.

  Lashing out with her feet, Charlie scrambled up into a sitting position. 'Don't you touch me, don't y
ou dare,' she yelled. 'And you can take your damn ring!' she cried, twist­ing desperately at the wedding band on her finger.

  Rage tore through Jake and, leaning over her, he grasped her hands in one of his before she could remove the ring from her finger. 'Leave it, Charlotte!' he roared. And as he saw the hurt and fury in her eyes he froze.

  What the hell was he doing? Drawing a deep, shuddering breath, he let go of her hands and straightened up. He could not argue with her. She was upset, and she was pregnant.

  Frustration riding him, he stared down at her, his eyes raking over her body: the high, full breasts, the narrow waist and the gentle rounded curves of her hips; the transparent scrap of lace she was wearing doing little to hide the shadow of her femininity... No, he could not go there. Abruptly he raised his eyes to her face. She was looking at him as if he had developed two horns and a tail, and it was his own damned fault. Whichever marriage expert had recommended absolute truth needed their head read. If he had not been so out of his mind with sexual hunger for Charlotte, he might have had the sense to keep his mouth shut.

  But he wouldn't be in this unenviable position if someone else had kept his mouth shut, he thought bitterly, silently cursing Diego for mentioning Anna and ruining his wedding night. He had burned the damned painting weeks ago. He didn't care about revenge; he didn't care about anything except Charlotte, he realised with shock. His stunned gaze roved over her flushed face, he saw the defiance in her gor­geous eyes, and felt a sharp pang of regret for the loss of her unfeigned adoration. And a frustrated fury he could barely control.

  'The only thing I want to leave is you.' Charlotte slotted the words into the lengthening silence. Jake took a step closer. His dark eyes narrowed to angry slits, and she drew in a stunned, slightly unsteady breath.

  'You are not going anywhere.' His face was a taut mask of rigidly controlled rage. 'But I will leave.' For one heart- stopping moment she thought he meant for good. 'We will talk about this in the morning.' Dipping down, he retrieved something from the floor and flung it at her. 'When hope­fully you remember why you wore that today, and grow up.' And spinning on his heel, he left, slamming the door behind him.