The Paternity Proposition

by Merline Lovelace

  Funny, she thought as she fired back with Patterson, Roberts and Grisham. Most couples shared these tidbits of knowledge over several days or weeks of casual give-and-take. Usually before they tore off each other’s clothes and acquired an even more intimate knowledge.

  Her glance dropped like an anchor. The birthmark she now remembered with blazing clarity had almost been hidden by Alex’s thatch of dark gold pubic hair. Julie had discovered it by accident when she’d slithered down his sweaty body and…

  “Your turn.”

  She brought her head up with a snap. “Huh?”

  “Movies. Top three.”

  “Aviator, Top Gun, Independence Day.”

  “Why am I not surprised, Flygirl?”

  “Okay, smartass. Name yours.”

  The back-and-forth on top threes carried them off the interstate, through the city streets, and up to the penthouse. Alex leaned a forearm against the jamb and waited while she keyed the guest suite door.

  “Sure you don’t want to go out to eat?”

  Hell no, she wasn’t sure. Not when he leaned so close she could pick up the faint tang of shirt starch and healthy male sweat.

  “I’m sure.”

  He searched her face. Whatever he saw there had him backing off. Dust and grime and the cottonwood fluff in her hair, most likely.

  “I have a conference call with our Czech office that will eat up most of tomorrow morning. How about I get Blake to go over some of the legalities of our merger with you then? I’ll meet you afterward for lunch.”

  “That’ll work.”

  “Okay.”

  He tipped her face to his and covered her mouth. Easily. Naturally. No pressure at all, other than the fireball that exploded in Julie’s belly. Then, damn him, he gave her the early night she’d asked for.

  “Later, Bartlett.”

  She delivered a series of mental kicks in the butt as she headed for the bathroom, shedding her clothes as she went. A long, cool, pulsing shower doused most of the fire his careless kiss had generated. An ice cold beer soaked the residue. The ashes were just about stone-cold dead when the front door buzzer sounded. Frowning, Julie secured the towel turbaned around her hair and the belt to the inch-thick terry cloth robe DI provided its guests before padding barefoot to the door.

  Alex stood in the hall, his damp hair glistening dark gold, a clean shirt hanging open above jeans slung low on his hip, and a pizza box balanced high on one palm.

  “It’s later,” he announced. “And there’s no charge for delivery.”

  She warred with her better self for as long as it took him to stroll in and deposit the pizza on the coffee table. When he turned and let loose with one of his crooked grins, she gave up the struggle.

  Slamming the door, she stalked across the room, smacked her palms against his just-shaved cheeks, dragged his head down, and locked her mouth on his.

  Seven

  Julie’s first thought was that he tasted every bit as delicious as he had last night. Her second, that the man exhibited a take-charge attitude she might object to in other circumstances. A mere heartbeat or two after she’d covered his mouth with hers, he morphed from kissee to kisser.

  She couldn’t summon a single objection at the moment, however. Not one. On the contrary, the swift torque of his muscles as he crushed her against his chest sent an atavistic thrill through every inch of her. He was the elemental male. Strong, confident, eager to leap into the fray, more than ready to take what she offered.

  His arm tightened around her waist. His stance widened. He used his free hand to tug the towel away from her hair and raked his fingers through the still-wet mass, anchoring her head for the controlled mayhem he wreaked on her lips. With her height and stubbornly independent nature, Julie couldn’t remember ever feeling dominated. By anyone! Nor would she ever have imagined she would enjoy the sensation. But something deep and primal in her reveled in Alex’s fast, hot surge of testosterone. Like every female of every species, she’d instinctively sought a mate who could match her in every way that counted.

  Scratch that. Mate wasn’t the right noun. Not as humans defined it, anyway. That term implied some kind of commitment beyond the purely sexual. And…

  Oh, hell! Like she gave a hoot about semantics when Alex’s tongue had worked past her teeth and his body had gone iron hard? Her senses spiraling almost out of control, Julie locked her arms around his neck. She’d barely gotten a grip before he bent and swooped her up in his arms.

  “I was going to wait until after the pizza to make my move,” he confessed, his voice low and rough.

  “We’ll make that dessert,” she promised.

  “But first,” Alex murmured as he deposited her feet beside the bed and reached for the sash of DI’s luxuriant terry cloth robe, “we’ll treat ourselves to a six-course banquet.”

  “Six courses?” She had to grin. “Pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you, Bubba?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  He yanked on the sash, let the robe fall open. If the hunger rampaging through Julie hadn’t already puckered her nipples, the air-conditioned chill that hit them at that point would have done the trick. Then, of course, there were Alex’s busy, busy hands.

  He used them to tug the robe off her shoulders and down to her elbows. She was naked underneath, a fact he seemed to deeply appreciate. A growl sounded low in his throat. His eyes went laser blue.

  “Now you,” she said on a husky note.

  She dragged off his unbuttoned shirt, tossed it aside, and splayed her hands on his lean, tanned torso. Golden chest hair tickled her palms. Warm skin and hard muscle played havoc with her senses. She let her hands glide down. Slowly, so slowly. Found the snap to his jeans. Then the zipper. Felt the size and urgency of his erection against her palm.

  The feel of him generated a brief moment of sanity. She remembered the last time she’d touched him like this. Remembered how big he’d been, how rock hard and throbbing, before her eager fingers had helped his roll down the condom…one of several they’d gone through that night.

  As if reading her mind, he dug into the front pocket of his jeans and produced a handful of foil packets. “I told you I was using the pizza to soften you up before I made my move. I came prepared.”

  “So I see.”

  Another all too vivid memory surfaced. Those little suckers weren’t foolproof, as she’d reminded herself during those tense days after she’d discovered she was late. She’d kicked herself over and over again for trusting her future to a little scrap of latex and went back on birth control pills immediately. She was on them now, although condoms were still a good idea for that extra layer of protection from life’s other unpleasantnesses.

  “I also see you weren’t kidding about that six-course banquet,” she drawled, eyeing the half-dozen or so packets he tossed on the table beside the bed.

  “A man can only hope.”

  Grinning, he heeled off his shoes and shucked his jeans. His shorts followed. Julie had only a moment to admire the perfect symmetry of tanned skin and taut muscle before he took her horizontal on the king-size bed. In a flash, the hunger Julie had banked during those few moments of banter came roaring back to life. Mouth and hands greedy, she gave herself up to the feast that was Alex.

  Her soaring senses recorded the faint, leathery-lime scent of the aftershave he’d slapped on after his shower. Her fingers danced over slick muscle and bumpy spine. One of her knees slipped between his, and the soft prickle of his hair made the skin of her sensitive inner thighs tingle.

  Every touch, every taste made her crave more. As the heat rose, she realized the hunger he stirred in her now was different from the lust he’d generated the first time they’d met. They’d barely gotten past first names then. She’d been attracted by his gorgeously packaged exterior and flat-out seduced by his smile. She’d had no grasp of the man behind the smile. Hadn’t looked beyond his broad shoulders and handsome face.

  Now…

  Now he’d shown her
glimpses of a complex, compelling personality. Smart, funny, authoritative. Maybe a little too authoritative at times. As when he’d all but blackmailed her into spending this week in the city. She couldn’t work up much of a mad about it at the moment, though. Not with Alex nipping at the cords in her neck. And contorting to reach her breasts. And tormenting one aching nipple with his tongue and teeth.

  “God, you’re beautiful,” he breathed against her skin. “All silky smooth and soft in just the right places.”

  Beautiful she wasn’t. Julie knew that. But why disillusion the man by pointing out her many blemishes? Speaking of which....

  She got a leg under her and rolled until she tipped Alex onto his back. Then it was her turn to nip and kiss and otherwise work her way down his long, muscled length. She found what she was looking for on the lower plane of his belly, just above his groin.

  “I remembered this,” she murmured, dropping a kiss on the small birthmark.

  A thought occurred. She raised her head to find Alex regarding her through a screen of gold-tipped lashes.

  “Just out of curiosity, does Blake have a matching birthmark?”

  His mouth quirked. “Damned if I know.”

  “Your mother didn’t put you both in the tub at the same time when you were kids? You never compared, er, endowments as boys?”

  “Sure we did. We just didn’t get all that up close and personal in our comparisons. Now if you’re finished with your examination…”

  He reached for one of the foil packets and tore it open. When he was sheathed, Julie rolled with him again, welcoming him eagerly him into her body.

  And into her heart. She had time for that one, fleeting thought as her pulse accelerated. Alex filled her. Rocked with her. Took them both to the edge and back again. She locked her calves around his and rode the wild, surging waves, her mouth and her hand as urgent as his.

  She thought she was ready for the climax. Fully expected it to leave her limp. What she didn’t expect was that it would arch her back and rip a ragged groan from the back of her throat that seemed to go on forever. She was still riding the crest when Alex gave a low, strangled grunt and thrust into her a final time.

  The pizza was cold, the cheese congealed when they finally got around to it several hours later. They’d worked up such an appetite by then, however, that Julie would have downed hers half cold and blobby. But Alex coaxed her out of bed and into her robe. Re-bundled, she sat at the kitchen counter while he put the pizza in the oven and poured them both cold beers.

  “This is good,” she muttered after downing a big bite of a reheated slice. “Very good.”

  “We aim to please,” he said around his own bite.

  Julie couldn’t resist. Her eyes dancing, she fed his ego. “You did. Believe me, you did.”

  When he treated her to a smug grin, her heart tripped.

  Uh-oh! She could love this man. Already did, a little. She had no clue what she would do about it, though. Nothing right now, except scarf down pizza and beer and almost mewl with pleasure when he finished his share and started to nibble on her instead.

  The rest of the night proved as pleasurable as the first part.

  Boneless with pleasure and totally depleted, Julie finally fell asleep in Alex’s arms. She barely stirred when he eased out of bed just after dawn the next morning. She did manage to surface for a few groggy moments when he brushed aside her tangled hair to drop a kiss on her nape.

  “Call Blake when you’re ready to go over those contracts. I’ll leave his number by the phone.”

  She buried her face in the pillow. “Unnngh.”

  “And don’t forget, we’re doing dinner tonight at my mother’s.”

  “Double unnngh.”

  Just moments after she heard the front door close, she was out again.

  She met with Blake in his office a little past 9 a.m. He had coffee waiting, thank God, and a draft of the contracts merging Agro-Air into Dalton International’s vast conglomerate. If Alex had mentioned to his brother that he and Julie had picked up last night where they’d left off a year ago, Blake gave no sign of it.

  “The terms are pretty much as Alex described to you and your partners.”

  He sat next to her on the hunter-green leather sofa grouped with matching armchairs in one L of his office and spread the contracts on a brass-and-glass coffee table. She caught a whiff of his aftershave, a more subtle scent than Alex’s leathery lime. The rest of him was more conservative, too. Pleated charcoal slacks, gleaming black leather belt, button down shirt, Italian tie. The spiffy look went with the framed law degree she’d spotted on the wall behind his desk.

  “We’re prepared to purchase a used Lane AT-602 that should allow you to double your current business base. We’ll also have our engineers look at ways to increase spread capacity.”

  “Alex has already done that. I met with them yesterday. I have to say I was impressed with what Lisa Wu and her partner have come up with in such a short time.”

  His mouth tipped in a smile so similar to his brother’s that Julie did a double take. The personalities were definitely different but unless they were standing side by side, the physical similarities made it tough keeping them separate and distinct.

  “Lisa’s a great new hire,” Blake agreed. “We snatched her right out from under the nose of Haliburton. Back to the contracts… As noted here, DI will take fifty percent of Agro-Air’s profits until we’ve recouped the cost of the initial aircraft, after which we’ll negotiate a profit-share percentage for the purchase of additional aircraft. As for the design and possible manufacture of a new application system, we’ll bear the R&D costs. Agro-Air will provide technical input and flight testing. Is that what you and Alex agreed to?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Good. Why don’t you take this copy of the contract with you? We can arrange a formal signing once your partners have had a chance to review and approve the clauses.”

  Before she made any move to take the papers, she took a final swig of coffee. Carefully, she replaced the cup in its saucer and eased into the issue that had been bugging her since she wrapped several strands of hair around Alex’s shirt button.

  “Did your brother tell you that I volunteered a DNA sample the first night I got here?”

  “He did.”

  “Well?”

  “I appreciate you being up front with us, Julie.” His mouth quirked. “But I sure hate to strike you off our list. I was really hoping our search would end with you.”

  “I know. You’re all anxious to ascertain Molly’s heritage.”

  “We are, certainly. But you miss my meaning. I was hoping you specifically were the one.”

  “Me specifically? Why?”

  “You’re just what Alex needs. Someone smart, independent, more than able to give as good as she gets.”

  “Guilty as charged,” she said, flattered by his assessment but secretly wishing he’d tacked on a few of the adjectives she would have used to describe the women she’d studied clinging to Alex’s arm in the society photographs. Like glamorous. Sultry. Sophisticated.

  Then again, Alex had called her beautiful last night. He’d been up to his eyeballs in lust at the time, she reminded herself ruefully. Still…

  “Alex indicated I was the last possible on his list. What about you, Blake? Don’t you have any viable candidates left on yours?”

  “No.”

  A shadow darkened his eyes, come and gone so quickly she almost missed it.

  “You do!” she exclaimed. “You’ve still got a possible on your list.”

  He smoothed his palms down his thighs. Slowly. Deliberately.

  “C’mon, Blake. Give! Why haven’t you gone after her?”

  “She’s dead, Julie. She died some months before Molly was born.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. Me, too.”

  He rolled his shoulders as if to dislodge an unwelcome burden and forced a smile. “So you understand why I’m no mor
e eager than Alex to have Mother sharpening her claws again. Molly’s distracted her.”

  “Still, I feel like a fraud for not telling her that I’m out of the baby stakes.”

  “Good Lord!” A look of acute dismay crossed Blake’s face. “If you have an ounce of kindness in your heart, don’t! Tell her, I mean. As long as she thinks you’re a viable candidate, she’ll lay off Alex and me.”

  “Oh. Right. In the meantime, she continues to consider me several rungs lower than a whore for jumping into bed with your brother and refusing to accept the consequences of my slutty behavior.”

  He had the grace to look chagrined. “I didn’t say Alex and I were clean in all this. If you knew what Delilah’s put us through the past few years, though, you wouldn’t resent granting us this small period of relative peace.”

  “I hesitate to state the obvious. But you and Alex are fully grown males well past the age of consent.”

  “You’re right.” Laughing, he spread both hands and hunched his shoulders in a gesture of surrender. “I don’t know how it was in your family, but I can tell you this. Alex and I learned early on you can only stand up to an F-5 tornado like Mom for so long without getting blown off the planet.”

  A point Julie kept front and center in her mind when she and Alex arrived at Delilah’s place that evening. The ubiquitous Louis answered the door, bowed, and informed them madam was on the upper terrace.

  “Upper terrace?” Julie murmured to Alex. “Didn’t your mom bill this as a backyard cookout?”

  “Well,” he said as he escorted her down the hall and through a set of wide double doors, “we’re cooking out and this is the backyard.”

  “Right,” she muttered, sweeping her gaze over the landscaped terraces that stair-stepped down to a gorgeously tiled swimming pool adorned with marble statues. “We should all have backyards like this.”

  A wrought-iron pergola interwoven in honeysuckle vines provided relief from the early evening sun. Their rich, sweet scent perfumed air cooled by a refreshing mist released at intervals from hidden nozzles. As Julie drank in the scene, her hostess emerged from inside the house. She had to admit Delilah looked almost human in a loose cotton blouse and well-worn jeans that emphasized her trim figure. She’d done her hair back in a fat braid that swished almost girlishly as she crossed the patio to greet them.