Aware of movement to her right, Sophie swung around in time to see a figure unfolding from the bench beneath the window box outside her living room. Even in the dusk of early evening, she recognized him. There were conceivably several hundred thousand men in the world possessed of a similar long-legged, lean-hipped, masculine grace, but only one who could make her heart sprint so unevenly that she felt as if the earth was falling away beneath her feet, taking with it every last particle of her hard-won peace and acceptance.
Dominic picked up his jacket, which he’d used as a pillow, and looping it over his thumb, slung it over his shoulder. “So,” he drawled in the same honey-rich voice that had haunted her dreams, “you’re finally home. I was beginning to think I was going to have to sleep out here.”
As a lover’s greeting, it fell distinctly short of romantic. Dark, provocative tone notwithstanding, he sounded peeved rather than relieved. That alone should have been enough to send up red-alert flags and remind Sophie that, with him, disenchantment always followed brief euphoria.
To her dismay, however, the old molten hunger surged up within her, all the more ravaging for its hiatus. The urge to run to him, to know just one more time the feel of his arms around her, the beat of his heart beneath her cheek, tore at her.
Forcibly restraining herself from any such action, she asked frigidly, “What do you want, Dominic?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“If it were, I wouldn’t have asked.”
He swore long and colorfully.
When he stopped to draw breath, she said with a marvelous facsimile of composure, “How charming! You’ve obviously lost none of your skill at profanity since the last occasion I elected to distance myself from you when, as I recall, you were equally vulgar.”
“Perhaps,” he replied, thunderheads roiling through his voice, “because then, as now, you saw fit to try my patience beyond human endurance. This disappearing act you’re so fond of pulling when you decide things aren’t going quite the way you think they should is wearing thin, Sophie, particularly when there’s no reason for it.”
If he’d hoped to prick the fragile balloon of her self-control, he’d chosen the right way to go about it. “The way I see it, I had reasons to spare when Barbara Wexler came waltzing in your front door, crowing about carrying your baby,” Sophie exploded. “With your prodigious capabilities, you could start your own sperm bank!”
After a moment’s stunned silence, he burst out laughing, great hooting guffaws that had him doubled over. Sophie wanted very badly to scratch out his eyes, to kick him where it would do the most damage. But he’d made her feel foolish enough already; she wouldn’t allow him to goad her into diminishing herself further.
“I’m so glad I’ve afforded you a little entertainment,” she said, marching past him and thrusting open the front door. “I would hate to think you’d come all this way for nothing.”
A gentleman would have taken the hint and left, but all the trappings to the contrary, Dominic Winter clearly was no gentleman. Before she could slam the door closed in his face, he’d shouldered his way into her tiny living room. “I came all this way to bring you home, Sophie,” he declared, “and I have no intention of leaving without you.”
“Then you really have wasted your time because I have no intention of going anywhere with you. I like it here. I am happy here. And I intend to stay here for as long as it pleases me.”
He rolled his shoulders in a shrug and lowered his lashes to a sultry half-mast. “Hope you’ve got room enough in the bed for me, then,” he purred.
Tamping down the unconscionable flash of delight that remark produced, Sophie snapped, “Stop playing games, Dominic! I’m serious.”
His amusement vanished. “For once we’re on the same plane, then, because I’m serious, too. We were supposed to be married over a month ago and instead what do you do? Sneak off the minute my back’s turned and leave behind a two-line note that more or less tells me to kiss off and have a nice life.”
Baffled, she stared at him. If she didn’t know better, she’d almost be persuaded that he’d missed her. “I thought you’d be grateful I’d gone so quietly without making a fuss. After all, we both know I have no place in your life now that Barbara’s back.”
Shaking his head from side to side and rolling his eyes, he expelled a long, frustrated breath. “You’re turning out to be one pack of trouble with your propensity for jumping to wrong conclusions, do you know that? You had no reason to run off, no reason at all.”
She had thought herself resigned to losing him, had mapped out a future that, of necessity, didn’t include him. Yet, at his words, a tiny flame of hope flickered to life. Doing her best to snuff it out before it brought her more pain than she could possibly bear, she affected a nonchalance she was far from feeling and said, “Well, it beat being asked to leave. Or did you expect me to sit quietly in my room and wait to be formally dismissed?” She laughed, a ragged, miserable effort that proved nothing except that her control was teetering on the brink of annihilation. “Sorry, Dominic, that’s just not my style!”
“Are you so certain that’s how things would have turned out, Sophie?”
“Oh, yes,” she sighed, sudden weariness swamping her. “Just as I’m certain the only reason you’re here now is to tell me that since you’ve got your hands full with Barbara and the baby she’s expecting, I can come out of hiding and do what I wanted from the first without fear of interference from you.”
“And what is it that you wanted?” he inquired softly.
“To be free to bring up my child without having to sell my soul first.”
“I see. Well, if by that you think I’m about to simply turn my back—”
“Oh, I’m sure you’ll try to sweeten rejection by offering to compensate the understudy.”
“You’re pushing your luck, Sophie,” he warned, his tone soft and dangerous.
“Really?” Ignoring the inner voice of caution, she stared him in the eye and plowed on rashly, “Are you or are you not the man who once pointed out to me that money could buy anything? And what’s a little payoff between...?”
“Friends?” he suggested when she floundered to a halt. “Enemies?” He moved closer, trapping her between the fireplace and the overstuffed armchair next to it. “Or were you thinking more along the lines of ‘lovers’?”
“You and Barbara were lovers,” she said, wincing at the pain of the admission. “You never really wanted me.”
She’d touched a nerve, no doubt about it. Anger tinted his eyes, sharpening their sultry jade to emerald fire, and for a brief instant she thought he might shake her. “Then what in the blue blazes did you think I had in mind when I asked you to marry me?” he roared, looming over her and dwarfing the room with his sheer presence.
The effort of pretending she didn’t care a rap about him, when just seeing him again was tearing her apart, defeated her. If the only way she could be rid of him was to tell him the truth, then so be it.
“You didn’t ask me,” she said dully. “You suggested it was the right and logical thing to do, which led me to understand that your principles were involved but not your heart. And I wanted your heart. All of it. After all, I gave you mine.”
The thundering silence of his response to that insane disclosure seemed to last a small eternity and was so much worse than anything else he could have offered. Disbelief, amusement, scorn—those she could have defined and dealt with, but not his tacit agreement that, indeed, he had never pledged himself to her for any but the most expedient of reasons.
Abruptly, she slipped past him. “Excuse me, please,” she muttered, tossing the words over her shoulder as she disappeared into the sanctuary of her kitchen. “I left a casserole in the oven and I think I smell it burning.”
He did not at first follow her, for which she was grateful. If he had a single sensitive bone in his body, he’d leave while her back was turned and spare them both the embarrassment of trying to gloss over her
unforgivable lapse.
Wrenching open the oven door, she hauled out the casserole and discovered she hadn’t told a complete lie in order to escape him. The beef ribs she’d put in to bake that morning badly needed basting if they were to be edible. Yet all the time that she busied herself with the task, her attention remained focused on the man she could hear wandering around her living room, and she knew to the second when he came to lean in the kitchen doorway and watch her at work.
Suddenly clumsy, she burned herself on the ovenproof dish. “Damn,” she muttered, snatching back her hand and sucking at the painful spot on her thumb.
He was beside her in a flash. “That’s not going to do much good.” He reached over her shoulder to the sink and turned on the cold water. “Hold your hand under here instead. It’ll reduce the burning.”
But only in her thumb, she thought, and that was the least disturbing thing that ailed her. The fire in her cheeks and that other, more subtle heat that had flickered into life at his touch flared with renewed savagery. The kitchen was small enough at the best of times, but with him at her back, it verged on the claustrophobic.
“I can manage,” she insisted, and attempted to fend him off with a backward thrust of her elbow.
But he was as solidly immovable as the proverbial mountain. Holding her hand firmly under the stream of water, he brought his mouth close to her ear and said softly, “Did you really give me your heart, Sophie?”
“I suppose so—temporarily. But I soon realized I’d made a dreadful mistake, so I took it back again.”
He turned off the water and reached for the towel hanging from a hook on the wall. Turning her around, he very carefully dried her hand, then tipped up her chin so that she had no choice but to meet his gaze. “Are you sure?” he asked.
Quickly, before he saw in them the pain she couldn’t hide, she closed her eyes. “Please, Dominic,” she begged, her defenses crumbling into ruins, “don’t do this. Please, say what you came to say and then just go. I really am very tired and don’t think I can take much more today.”
She felt his fingertips at her jaw, tracing its length from her earlobe to her lower lip. “And tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that? What about them, Sophie? What about the future you and I had planned?”
“It died,” she said dully, the tears seeping between her lashes, “the day Barbara showed up alive. And if you don’t want to spell it all out for me because you think it’s too cruel, then I’ll say it for you. I was only ever second best and you had no reason to settle for that when the real love of your life came back. So go home, Dominic. Go back to your wife and leave me alone.”
He caught the tears and swept them aside with the ball of his thumb. “Listen to me, you blind, willful creature,” he commanded softly. “Barbara is not my wife, nor will she ever be. She and I are finished. We have been finished for quite some time.”
They should have been the most reassuring words in the world. A month ago, a week even, Sophie would have sold her soul to hear them, yet now that they were hers to treasure, she looked for the conditions attached, the ones that would dash her hopes to pieces and send her spiraling back into the darkness from which she’d only recently begun to emerge.
“Because you thought she was dead,” she said. “Now that you know she’s alive, though—”
“It makes no difference, Sophie. Even if she was the same woman I once asked to marry me, I’m not the same man.”
“But you loved her.”
“I thought I did. I realize now I was mistaken.”
Of all the questions to which she sought answers, the only one she ached to ask at that moment was, Why? Because you love me? But she was teetering again on that emotional tightrope, with despair on the one side waiting to engulf her, and she dared not take the chance of falling the wrong way. “And how does Barbara—?”
With fatal tenderness, he cupped her face in his two hands and pressed his thumbs to her mouth, sealing it closed. “Tomorrow, sweet Sophie, I’ll explain everything,” he whispered fiercely. “But for tonight, will you please just trust me enough to believe that I will never again allow anything or anyone to come between us? I flew halfway around the world and badgered your family into telling me where to find you because what I most want to do is set things right between us. And I’d like to begin with this.”
His thumbs slid away to make room for his mouth. Threading his fingers through her hair and imprisoning her head so that she couldn’t turn aside, he kissed one corner of her mouth and then the other. He kissed her eyelids and her nose, and then came back to her mouth. He drew his tongue in a sweet, damp line over her lower lip, banishing all the long, empty hours of missing him.
Yet it was her fault, not his, that things quickly escalated to a raging wildfire. He didn’t push for more than she was prepared to give; he showed her every way he knew how that he was content to savor each delicious second without rushing ahead to the next. But his touch triggered an explosion within her that decimated every instinct for self-preservation she’d ever harbored.
She melted against him, ignoring the reasons for their estrangement, past caring that the higher she flew toward paradise, the harder she’d fall if it eluded her. Yes, she’d been hurt, and angry, and disappointed, but that was yesterday and this... oh, this was now, and closer to heaven than she’d ever thought to find herself again!
She closed her eyes, luxuriating in the scent and warmth of him. Her mouth softened in tacit connivance, letting him know that she would give anything and everything he chose to ask of her.
Shamelessly, she angled against him, wedging her thigh between both of his, there where he was most vulnerable to seduction. Her hands tugged his shirt free of his trousers and burrowed beneath it to search out the smooth planes of his back.
The consequences were instantaneous and irrevocable. A tremor shook him as though a thousand demons battered at him, urging him simply to take her there and then, between stove and sink, and to hell with the finer points of protocol.
He deepened the kiss, clouding her mind to any other perception but the certain knowledge that she needed him, hard and imperative inside her, claiming her body just as he’d long ago claimed her soul.
“What about the casserole?” he murmured on a strangled breath.
“To hell with the casserole,” she said, then felt her heart spill over with all the love she’d tried so hard to contain when, with unwavering purpose, he swept her up in his arms and swung toward the narrow staircase opposite the front door.
Apart from a small bathroom, the upper story of the house consisted of only one room with a windowed alcove at the far end that she’d planned to turn into a nursery, and a floor that sloped unevenly toward the east.
The bed, an ancient, carved affair never designed to accommodate more than one person at a time, groaned audibly beneath the combined weight of two. But it served the purpose. With desire raging at fever pitch between them, a canvas army cot would have served the purpose.
He shed his clothes with impressive speed, but for the first time, he undressed her at delicious leisure, stripping away each item with dedicated control. Sophie felt the air of the April night cool on her naked flesh, then Dominic’s hands charting her contours in mute fascination at the changes he found there.
“Wait,” he begged when she tried to pull him down on top of her and reached out an arm to the bedside lamp. “Let me see you first.” Rose-tinted light flooded the room, illuminating every inch of her to his absorbed gaze. “You are beautiful,” he marveled, tracing a line from her breast to her softly rounded abdomen and resting his palm there.
The baby rolled over accommodatingly and kicked an acknowledgment. The pupils of Dominic’s eyes flared, narrowing the irises to bands of dark, opaque green.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” he breathed. “The little devil knows me! I had no idea—” he shook his head wonderingly “—no idea what to expect. I’ve never... this is all new to me.”
&nbs
p; Helpless to prevent it, Sophie found her memory rewinding with chilling accuracy to another time two months before. Guess what, darling. Miracle of miracles, I’m pregnant! We’re going to have a baby, Dom!
New? How could it all be new?
“Sophie?” Dominic touched her cheek. “Where have you gone?”
It was unfair to let the same old ghost displace her once again. Unfair and unthinkable. He had said Barbara was out of his life, that it was she, Sophie, who mattered.
“Nowhere,” she whispered, sliding her hand from his ribs to his navel. Made bold by the rasping intake of his breath, she touched him, closing her fingers possessively around him in sultry emulation of intimacy. “I’m right here where I most want to be.”
Sweat beaded his brow. “Just once,” he said, holding himself very still, “I wanted to make love to you slowly...all night long...and kiss every inch of you....”
She tilted up her hips, nudging at his flesh with her own.
He slipped his finger between her thighs. “I wanted to watch the flush steal over your skin when I touched you here...like this... and told you things I should have told you long before now....”
She looked at him, all dusky in the lamplight, with the sheen of vitality that marked everything about him glowing in his eyes, and the need that had started to build from the minute he first touched her overflowed in a pool of molten heat, driven by hunger and the superstitious certainty that they’d be tempting fate to delay things any longer. As if only by joining their bodies in glorious defiance could they deflect any mischief the gods rained down on them.
“Dominic, please,” she begged on a fractured cry. “The talking can wait... but I can’t!”
CHAPTER EIGHT
HIS passion had never been more unreserved, his tenderness more profound, nor her response more intense. They achieved a harmony that night that surpassed the mortal and joined ranks with the divine. As if all those obstacles that once had seemed so insurmountable had been wiped away.
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