by Dani Collins
Was he surprised? Not at all.
He sat very still, allowing this information to filter like a cool breeze through the events of the last two and a half days. She had upended his equilibrium from the moment she had appeared like a sprite out of thin air, chatting up his driver, then turning her charm on him, shoving her way into his car and teasing out his most deeply regressed memories.
“I didn’t skip it on purpose. I’m not trying to trick you into marriage or support or something. You had me arrested.”
“I did not want or direct that you be arrested. Believe that,” he ordered, hackles rising. He was many things, but not someone who sent innocents to jail.
She snorted, gaze trying to reflect pithy disdain, but there was a lingering shadow of injury beneath.
Even so, he held her stare with a hard one of his own, daring her to accuse him one more time of putting her in a cell. She looked away first, flinching.
“Your girlfriend did, then,” she allowed in a low voice. “Either way, I would have taken the pill if the arrest hadn’t happened. I intended to. I wanted to.” She was wringing her hands beneath the edge of the table again.
Whether her seemingly tortured conscience was real or not didn’t concern him, which was odd. This news certainly shouldn’t be sending pulses of possibility shooting into his brain because, virginity notwithstanding, she wasn’t as innocent as she appeared. Hell, he was still convinced their lovemaking had been an attempt to persuade him to give up the earring.
She hadn’t pressed her right to it, though. She’d left in a whirl of scorn the other night, which he had seen as another screen of deceit once he discovered the earring was missing.
Finding it gone hadn’t surprised him one iota. Nevertheless, even as he’d been snapping out terse orders to call the police and question the staff, something in him had grasped with satisfaction at having an excuse to see her again.
Then he’d learned she hadn’t taken the earring. That had surprised him. He had gladly eschewed his tightly scheduled meetings and other deadlines to free her from a cell and fly her here. He had installed her in his personal refuge, seizing the chance to spend more time with her, wanting to get to the bottom of exactly what kind of woman she was.
She had ignored him all night, worrying him a little, she had slept so long, but he’d caught up on some of the work he’d shirked. He’d also spent a good portion of the evening brooding on her hurt as she had stormed out the other night. On the blame and anguish she’d expressed at being arrested.
He had almost convinced himself he had misjudged her. As he sat here, eating delicious food that she had prepared for him, he had been trying to find words to apologize for Trudi’s behavior.
Now this.
But where was the alarm he ought to feel at what had to be a premeditated, underhanded plan? Where was his outrage?
It was eclipsed by a Neanderthal response that reveled in the idea of his seed taking root in her, binding her to him. He barely knew her and certainly didn’t trust her, but barbarism rose as a possessive force inside him, still drunk on their erotic experience and longing to repeat it. He had to push past the blind haze and force his mind to the civilized, rational reaction.
“If you’re pregnant with my baby, would you keep it?”
Flashes of emotion sparked out of her expression in the myriad shades of her opal—shock that he had asked such a forthright question, daunted fear, fault and culpability along with something more helpless, then a more contemplative look that softened to tender yearning.
That vulnerable array of feelings shouldn’t captivate him, but it did. It shook the reinforced walls inside him, leaving veins of hairline fractures.
“I would want my child, yes.” Her words rang with emotion, seeming to come straight from her heart.
He smiled faintly, distantly aware of his own heart pounding like a sledgehammer in heavy thwacks behind his breastbone. “But mine?”
“I don’t understand what you’re asking. This isn’t arbitrary. It’s not like I don’t care who I make a baby with.”
“No, of course not.” He reached for his coffee.
“Are you suggesting I would only want your baby because you’re wealthy? That I slept with you intending this?”
“Why else?” He kept having flashes of that moment when he’d first thrust into her, the way she had clamped so tightly to him, her gasp of distress turning to a dreamy sigh that had inspired profound protectiveness in him. Deep, misguided possessiveness still gripped him even as he was convinced she was entrapping him.
Her mouth opened in soundless outrage.
“I was carried away by passion. Something I’d never felt before.” She searched his expression as if looking for an echo of the same thing in him.
He quickly closed himself against revealing how exceptional the experience had been for him. Sexual intimacy should never be confused as something more profound. He knew that.
As he kept his thoughts and feelings hidden behind a stoic mask, her expression faded into anxiety of exposure and a flinch of hurt that made his heart lurch.
“Why did you sleep with me?” she challenged with an angry hair flip, glints of agony still evident behind her eyes. “I was handy and willing? At least I was attracted to you. Was,” she repeated flatly, rising and snatching up her dishes.
Her insult was pure face saving and his ego was not that fragile, but he was compelled to catch at her wrist, not letting her swing away with her handful of plates.
“You were mindless with pleasure? That’s what you want me to believe?”
He found himself wanting to believe it.
Her mouth trembled with persecution before she brought her chin up in defiance.
“You were the experienced one and didn’t put on a condom. Go ahead and act like I’m some coldhearted hustler, but that makes you a dupe. Is that what you are?”
That one did land with a sting. He had been a sucker once and vowed never to let it happen to him again.
He found himself rising reflexively to grasp her tense jaw in a finger and thumb, splaying his fingertips against the soft flesh in her throat where her pulse throbbed.
“Pure passion? That’s what you want me to believe? Let’s test that, shall we?”
Her pupils dilated.
He might have thought it fear, but she made no move to step away or brush him off. She stood in his light hold as if transfixed by his touch. He could practically taste the pheromones rising off her skin, interacting with his own primal signals, eroding his control.
He gave in to the draw and covered her mouth with his, inundated at the first touch with earthy, poetic sensations of crushed rose petals, mountain air and the unique, hot flavor in the caverns of her mouth.
He moved closer, caressed the back of her neck to encourage her to arch into him while his other hand found her breast. Her nipple beaded hard enough to thrust against his palm through her bra and shirt. He massaged lazily, swallowing her shaken sigh, while the haze of lust encroached further, urging him to have her again. Fully. Now.
She started to twine an arm around his neck, dropping the dishes as she did. One clipped his elbow before they both landed with a shatter. Pieces of crockery hit his leg.
Rozi gasped and leaped back.
He was in rubber-soled slippers. She was barefoot. He quickly caught her up to keep her from stepping on any of the jagged edges and pivoted to sit her on the end of the counter. Snatching up a paper towel, he wiped the jam off her foot and ensured both were uninjured.
“I’m fine,” she said, curling her toes against his grip on her arches, picking her feet out of his grip and trying to slide to the floor again.
He set a hand on her thigh. “Stay there,” he ordered, then found the broom and dustpan to gather the mess.
“I slept with you because I was reckless and impulsive and stupid,” she
said from her perch. “But I won’t make it worse by doing it again.”
Her voice lost a lot of power as he flashed her a glance, blood still hot with lust. The receptive flick of her tongue against his and the pebbled nipple against his palm were still imprinted on his flesh.
“No?”
* * *
Rozi couldn’t hold his gaze. She cleared her throat and her palms hurt where she gripped the lip of marble she sat upon.
“I wasn’t trying to make your baby. I’ll walk to the village as soon as we’re finished playing ‘the floor is lava’ and get the pill.”
“It’s called the morning after pill because you’re supposed to take it the morning after. We’re long past that,” he said flatly. “You already told me what your decision would be if there turns out to be a baby.”
“That doesn’t mean I want to be...pregnant.” She tried to take hold of the agitation thinning her voice. Tried not to panic. “I won’t be accused of scheming to make this happen, Viktor. You’re the one who—”
“I know what I’ve done.” He cut her off with a tone that was so decisive and flat it made her sit very still, as though the first tremor of an earthquake had her unconsciously bracing for the bigger shakes to come. “I was reckless,” he stated with self-castigation. “I know better than to take undue risks with my health and with...this.”
He jerked his head to the ceiling, indicating his house on the hill that stood as a symbol of all that he was and oversaw.
“I won’t shirk my responsibility again.” He shook the mess off the dustpan into the wastebasket, then washed his hands.
Part of her wanted him to take the blame for this, but premonition of disaster went through her at his words. When he held out his hands so she could steady herself on his arms, she dropped to her feet. But even as her fingertips dug into his muscles, she understood there to be as much cage as support in these iron-hard arms.
She couldn’t breathe and had to strain to speak.
“We were both reckless,” she said. “This...” She flicked her fingertips at her middle. “Doesn’t have to become your responsibility.”
“Don’t be naive, Rozi.” The way he spoke her nickname was a disconcerting mix of the way her family lovingly shortened it and his own thickly accented, unique appropriation of the two syllables. It was comforting and familiar, yet sexy and gruff.
Disarming.
Or maybe it was simply that her emotions were growing heightened as she sensed her grip on her life slipping away and falling under his firm, ruthless control.
“I’m not naive. I’m from New York,” she protested.
“I’m sure you’re very worldly in many ways,” he scoffed. “But even if we got you a pill before the end of today, we would still have to wait out the result. So let’s wait.”
“Are you out of your mind? Then I really might repeat my grandmother’s life, raising a child alone in New York.” She waved a hand in a direction that might be west. She was too disoriented to have any sense of space and time right now.
“You wouldn’t go back to America,” he said, voice so commanding, her ears rang. “If you’re pregnant, you’ll stay here. And marry me.”
CHAPTER SIX
“MY LIFE IS in New York,” Rozalia argued a short while later, after she finished tidying the kitchen and they moved into the lounge. “My flight home is Friday. My uncle expects me back at work Monday.”
“You’ll have to change those arrangements, stay here until we know. When would you normally expect...” He glanced at her abdomen.
“My ‘woman’s time’?” she provided facetiously. Why were men so flummoxed by something that was so normal? “In about...” She cleared her throat and folded her arms defensively, remorseful as she admitted, “Ten or twelve days.”
As timing went, they had taken a risk at precisely the optimal time to conceive.
That’s probably why she’d slept with him. Her ovaries had been bursting with fertility. One whiff of his high-grade testosterone and her inner cavewoman had taken control of her senses, throwing her into bed with him.
She could still feel his muscled thighs pushing hers apart, his weight and heat and burning kisses. She had felt so elemental and raw, yet safe. That had been the startling part—that she had been profoundly vulnerable, but not frightened or alone. He had been with her, holding her, joining her as the very power of life had overtaken them. She had believed he was glorying in that wondrous place with her. A place where they expressed themselves with their whole bodies, arching and feeling, bonding and shattering in unison.
Her lack of experience had obviously elevated the experience into more than it was. She was still behaving like a callow virgin because she was still reacting to him. Their kiss in the kitchen had had her forgetting that she held plates. Now, to her mortification, thinking of their lovemaking caused perspiration to break out on her upper lip. It took everything she had to disguise that her body was readying for him all over again, heating from the middle out with sweet, receptive tingles.
“Convenient,” he said, making her grossly self-conscious until she realized he was doing the math on their timing.
“Exactly the reason I don’t want to ‘wait and see.’” She flicked a hand at his thinly veiled accusation. “I was a virgin. I was arrested. You brought me here where I have no options, but you keep accusing me of being the one playing the oldest trick in the book. I don’t want to be tied to someone who thinks that’s what kind of person I am.”
He made an impatient noise and clicked on a lamp against a gloom that gathered as clouds thickened beyond the windows.
“I don’t want to believe I was weak-headed enough to let you take advantage of me, but your motives don’t matter. I made an error in judgment by having unprotected sex. I can’t turn my back on the potential consequences of that. So you stay here with me until we know where we stand.”
“You’re really prepared to marry someone you don’t trust?”
“I don’t trust anyone. Don’t take it personally.”
“Okay. How about someone you barely respect?”
“I hold you in higher regard than Trudi,” he said with a curl of his lip.
“There’s a high bar. I’m flattered,” she dismissed scathingly.
“What do you want, Rozalia?” He sounded as though he was barely holding on to his patience. “I’m willing to do the honorable thing. I don’t understand why you’re upset about it.”
“Because I don’t want to face what my grandmother faced! That’s why I was still a virgin, okay? Because my cousin and I agreed we wouldn’t sleep with anyone until we were sure we had a future with whoever it was.” Until they believed they were in love.
“I’ve said we’ll marry.”
“That’s not a future!”
“How is it not? It sounds as though you grew up on a shoestring. This would be a very advantageous marriage for you.” He sounded insulted.
“And that is why we don’t have a future! You think I’m here to better myself and I’m not. What did I do to make you think I’m so driven by self-interest?”
“Aside from the possible pregnancy?”
She threw up a hand in vexation and looked to the door.
“Everyone is driven by self-interest,” he said, quiet and harsh. “Every acquaintance asks for a professional favor. The most devoted and trusted employees are motivated by a generous salary, nothing else. Even my own mother expects me to elevate her social position with my marriage. It doesn’t make sense that you gave up your virginity for an orgasm.”
“I happen to think that’s a best-case scenario for anyone’s first time,” she shot back. “What did you want from me? Sexier moves? A color TV? What’s the real issue here, Viktor? That you think I brought more to our transaction and you don’t know how to square it off?”
His cheek ticked.
“Oh, my God.” She faltered. “That’s it, isn’t it? Listen, I gave you my virginity because I wanted to. Enjoy that gift. There are no shoestrings attached. But understand that I’ve spent most of my life getting to where I am professionally. Taking my place in the back of the family shop is all I ever wanted. My family is far too important to me to risk on purpose. Of course I would stay here and raise my baby with its father if that happened. Of course I would. But do you think I want to lose what I have? That I want to raise my baby away from my m-mom?”
The sheer magnitude of what they were discussing struck her. She bit her lips and looked to the window, aware that her entire life hung, like this house, off the edge of a cliff. She blinked a sudden sting from her eyes. Her voice turned into a thick scrape in the back of her throat.
“I’m not standing here dreaming of how to spend your money, Viktor. I’m terrified I’ve blown up my life in a way I can’t fix.”
She was starting to feel as trapped as she had been in that holding cell. Behind the throb in her breastbone, her heart was palpitating as she mentally searched for the path back to her life in America. To the safe arms of people who loved her.
Into the harrowing silence, his phone buzzed. He glanced at it. “My mother. I need to speak to her.” He lifted his head to rake her with his gaze. “I’ll take my call, you make yours.”
To change her travel arrangements, he meant.
He disappeared into his study before she could say anything more.
* * *
Viktor endured a contentious conversation with his mother. She was “deeply concerned” that he was spending time with the American girl who had caused unseemly press coverage, attaching an investigation by the police to the family name.
Viktor pointed out that Trudi’s machinations had been the reason the police had entered their hallowed gates. “If you would prefer I make that public, Mother, I will.”
She hadn’t been ready to back down, arguing against him entertaining Rozalia at his chalet. “If Trudi isn’t right for you, there is a lovely young woman—”