Contract Wedding, Expectant Bride

by Yvonne Lindsay

  His eyes dropped again to her swollen belly and he felt a shocking pull of shame that he’d missed so much of what she’d been through so far in her pregnancy. He’d abandoned her right when she needed him most—and when she most deserved his care and attention. Instead, he’d sent her away. Away to face the death of her sister. Away from the country he knew she loved. Away to prepare to face parenthood on her own. He’d never fully forgive himself...but she was a far kinder person than him. Dare he hope that she might forgive him?

  The elevator shuddered to a halt and the doors slowly opened onto the top floor. While the building was old and the hallway narrow, it was fitted with well-chosen fixtures that spoke of a bygone era. The sound of their footsteps on the black marble floor echoed against maple panels lining the walls. Ottavia led Rocco to a door and inserted her key. She pushed open the door and gestured for him to follow her inside. He looked around as he crossed the threshold. The apartment was small and yet it was simply but beautifully furnished and had high ceilings and deep windows facing toward Union Square West.

  “You have made a lovely home.”

  “Don’t bother with small talk, Your Majesty. Get to the point of what you want to say and then leave.”

  He put the groceries down on a covered dining table and turned to face her.

  “I thought we’d agreed you would call me Rocco.”

  “And as I recall, you reminded me of your station at our last meeting and emphatically instructed me otherwise,” she said bitterly.

  This wasn’t going quite how he’d hoped.

  “Please, Ottavia, can we forget about that night for just a moment? I really would like to talk.”

  She sighed and shrugged her coat off her shoulders and threw it over the back of a chair before she walked over to a well-stuffed sofa and sat down.

  “So talk.”

  “You’re not exactly making this easy for me.”

  She arched one brow and he ducked his head in acknowledgment of the cynicism he saw reflected in her eyes. He didn’t deserve easy. He’d come prepared to grovel and it was about time he started.

  “Get to the point. Why are you here?” she sounded tired and he noticed the shadows under her eyes. Guilt smote his heart that he should be the cause of it all.

  “I want to ask you for another chance.”

  “With a liar? A woman of no morals? Wow, you really must be scraping the bottom of the barrel in your hunt for a suitable wife who can deliver the requisite baby on time. Or wait—is it that you’ve run out of time and you’re prepared to make do with me, after all?”

  Her words flayed him, as he deserved, but as they sunk in he realized that she didn’t know that he no longer needed a wife to remain on the Erminian throne.

  “There have been changes in Erminia. A lot has happened since you left.”

  “And I should care about that, why exactly?”

  “Because it means I know you were telling me the truth. And because I’m also aware of how badly I treated you. I want to make amends, if you’ll let me.”

  “Amends?” Her eyebrow shot up again. “Do I look like I need you to make amends? As you can see, I am quite self-sufficient. I have no need of your amends, Sire.”

  * * *

  Ottavia forced herself to harden her heart to the stricken look that crossed Rocco’s face. Right now it was all she could do to hold herself together. But seeing him again—here—was almost more than she could take. She had encased her broken heart behind a frozen wall of silence. The words she wished she could speak would forever remain silent. She would not be used. Not by him or by anyone else like him, ever again.

  Hadn’t she sworn before to protect herself and her heart at all times? And yet, with him, she’d cast aside every vow she’d made to keep herself safe—all because she’d believed she could trust him. She would not make that mistake again.

  She dragged in a breath. “You may be a king, but as far as I am concerned you are no different from any other man. You speak of amends but you only seek to use me, to satisfy your own needs without a care for my own.”

  “I came here because I know I made a terrible mistake and because I know how badly I hurt you—how completely I betrayed your trust in me. I want to heal that hurt. I want to take you home.”

  “To do what? To birth your child and watch from afar as other people raise it in your image? I don’t think so. As you can see I have a home and I am not beholden to anyone. I live my life, on my terms, just the way I want.”

  “And does it make no difference to you to discover that I no longer need to marry? That the threat against my position on the throne has been averted and that the old succession law has been thrown out and erased completely while the people who conspired against me have been thrown in jail?”

  Ottavia listened in silence as he explained what had happened with Sonja Novak and her son. As he spoke the general’s name an all too familiar sense of revulsion filled her anew at what he’d almost done to her.

  She was unable to speak initially. Her mind was too busy assimilating everything he’d told her, turning it all around in her mind. She drew in a breath, then another and forced herself to look at him—to take in the lines of strain that bracketed his beautiful mouth, to see the tension in his golden gaze.

  “I have only ever had sex with two men in my life. You, and the man who raped me.”

  She saw the flare of rage in his expression, saw how he struggled to tamp it down.

  “I believe you. The man who attacked you is paying now for his brutality in a maximum security prison.”

  Ottavia blinked in surprise. “You did that?”

  “I had to. I would have killed him if I could, but apparently we have laws against that. More’s the pity.”

  His words left her confused but she pushed her bewilderment aside. It didn’t matter now. Nothing did.

  “Do you know what it meant to me to give myself to you that first time?” she said quietly. “I didn’t just give you my body. I gave you every part of me.”

  “It was a priceless gift. I understand that now.”

  His voice was deep and filled with emotion. But she couldn’t allow herself to be swayed by that. She had to press on.

  “And then you threw it back at me. Despite what we’d shared, despite what I’d told you afterward, you chose not to believe me. Have you any idea how that felt?”

  “And I’m sorry, Ottavia. So incredibly sorry.”

  “And then you rejected our baby.”

  For her, that had been the biggest betrayal of all. She stood and wrapped her arms around her tummy, protecting the growing life inside her. The son he’d so cavalierly rejected.

  “I have been an ass, I know that. I beg your forgiveness, Ottavia. Please, I will never take another’s word over yours again.”

  She stared at him, every cell in her body urging her to absolve him of the wrongs he’d wrought. To forget the pain she’d endured, the loneliness she’d felt since he’d had her escorted away from the one place in her life where she’d felt a true sense of belonging. From him. But the words wouldn’t quite get past the lump of pain that was nestled deep in her heart.

  “Can I ask you at least if I can have some access to the baby? Can he or she at least be permitted to know their birthright?”

  “He,” she corrected him. “Your child is a son.”

  Rocco’s face was a myriad of pain and joy melded into one. “And will you allow him to know me?”

  She started to shake her head but then changed her mind and gave a small nod. She’d known all too well what it was like to grow up without a father’s love.

  It would be unnecessarily cruel to deny her son the chance to know his father—and there had been enough cruelty already. She loved them both—her son and her king. But did Rocco love her? He hadn
’t said as much. He’d come here filled with remorse and promises to make amends, but she didn’t want those kinds of promises. She didn’t want to be bound to a man purely because she bore his child.

  Faced with her silence, Rocco stood.

  “Thank you. I should leave now,” he said brokenly. “I treated you abominably and there is no recourse for that. I am so sorry for what I have done to you, but I will never be sorry for having known you or for the gift of your trust that you gave me even though I used it so poorly. I see that what I have said changes nothing and, in fact, as you quite rightly pointed out, there is nothing I can offer you.”

  Ottavia swallowed against the knot in her throat, blinked hard against the burn in her eyes as Rocco began to walk toward her front door. His hand was on the latch. If she said nothing now they would become strangers who shared a child. What they’d had, what they might have had, would all be gone forever. This was it—her last chance to tell him how she felt, her last chance to ask him if he felt the same for her. The words were thick and heavy on her tongue.

  “Wait!”

  Rocco turned to face her. Already there was a deep emptiness in his eyes—as if hope had been extinguished forever.

  “There is one thing you can offer me,” she said walking toward him.

  She stopped when she was no more than a foot away.

  “And that is?” he asked, his voice devoid of warmth.

  “You could offer me your heart.”

  “It’s already yours, Ottavia. It has been since the moment I saw you on the back stairs with little Gina in your arms and I realized that everything about you was what I wanted in my life.”

  The tears that had threatened before began to roll down her cheeks at his words. He loved her? He truly loved her? She struggled to find some presence of mind to reply in the rush of longing that bloomed in her mind.

  “Then I think it’s only fair to tell you that I love you, too. It would be foolish, don’t you think, for us to live in different countries?”

  Life surged back into his eyes and his lips pulled into a smile. “I agree, my courtesan. Where do you propose that we live?”

  She smiled through her tears. “Where you are happiest, of course, my king.”

  “That would be wherever you are, my love. But it might make things simpler if we were to stay in Erminia, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, I think that would work quite well.”

  “And will you marry me, Ottavia? Will you become my queen and help me rule Erminia and return it to greatness?”

  A surge of elation burst inside her. He loved her. He didn’t have to marry her and yet he offered her his heart and his future, anyway. Their future—theirs and their children’s.

  “You didn’t say please,” she responded with a teasing smile of her own.

  “Please?” He smiled in return.

  “Nothing would give me more pleasure. Yes, I will marry you. I will be your queen, your wife, your lover and the mother of your children.”

  Rocco reached for her and pulled her into his arms. The gentle bulk of her pregnancy made their embrace a little awkward but nothing had ever fit so right, she thought, as she lifted her face to his and, with her kiss, pledged her love and fidelity to the only man who’d ever deserved it. And she knew, deep in her heart, that they’d weather the future together and that they’d all live happily ever after.

  * * * * *

  Pick up the first COURTESAN BRIDES novel, ARRANGED MARRIAGE, BEDROOM SECRETS, and these other emotional and sensual stories from USA TODAY bestselling author Yvonne Lindsay:

  WANTING WHAT SHE CAN’T HAVE

  THE CHILD THEY DIDN’T EXPECT

  THE WEDDING BARGAIN

  THE WIFE HE COULDN’T FORGET.

  Available now from Harlequin Desire!

  Keep reading for an excerpt from THE CEO DADDY NEXT DOOR by Karen Booth.

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  The CEO Daddy Next Door

  by Karen Booth

  One

  Pure exasperation rushed from Ashley George’s lips when she closed her apartment door and spotted Marcus Chambers waiting for the elevator.

  “I suppose you’d like me to hold the lift.” Marcus’s rich British accent and unflinching delivery made the statement far more annoying. He knew she was headed downstairs. Unless she was going to descend eleven flights of their Manhattan apartment building in under five minutes while wearing a pencil skirt and four-inch heels, she’d need the elevator.

  She sucked in a deep breath and breezed past him as she stepped onboard. Her long blond locks were given a swish for good measure.

  “First floor?” he asked.

  She dug her fingernails into her palms. Two seconds in the same space and he was already on her last nerve. “We both know we’re going to the same meeting. Being cute about it won’t help.”

  He straightened the jacket of his charcoal-gray suit, folded his hands before him and looked straight ahead at the doors. “A gentleman is never cute.”

  Cute was definitely an undersell in Marcus Chambers’s case. Ridiculously handsome, yes. Which was too bad, because he was also a grump of epic proportions. Whatever made him that way had to be genetics or a product of his past. Otherwise, he seemed to have everything—money, a primo apartment at a prestigious address on the Upper West Side, enough good looks for a lifetime and—although Ashley had seen Lila only in passing—a beautiful baby girl.

  “I wouldn’t be in this elevator at all if you’d stop complaining to the building board,” Ashley replied.

  He cleared his throat. “And I wouldn’t have to complain if you’d hire a competent contractor to finish your renovations. I’m tired of living in chaos.” He glanced over his shoulder and dismissed her with a flash of his piercing green eyes. “Chaos seems to follow you wherever you go.”

  Ashley pursed her lips. He wasn’t entirely wrong. Considering the things he’d witnessed, her life probably looked like a tornado with nine lives. She was always in a rush, often juggling her phone while many of the million things going through her head managed to leak out of her mouth. Sure, there had been problems with the renovations to her apartment. Sometimes things didn’t go smoothly. She
did her best to keep things on track and really, he hadn’t even tried to be more understanding.

  She sighed and leaned against the elevator wall, stealing another eyeful of him. If he underwent a personality transplant or at least learned to take a deep breath, he might be perfect—strong jaw with a devilishly square chin, close-cut scruff along his jaw, thick head of mahogany brown hair. Her vision dipped lower and she shuddered as images of his glorious chest and astounding abs flashed in her head. She hadn’t been lucky enough to see his torso live and in person, but she’d unearthed photos of him on the internet. He was one of Britain’s most eligible bachelors, as billed in a charity calendar full of hunky guys. A bachelor raising a baby—divorce was a terrible thing.

  Somewhere in the world was a true match for this stunning-on-the-outside, stodgy-on-the-inside man. Ashley believed that about everyone. It wasn’t a made-for-TV act she put on for her reality show, her namesake, Manhattan Matchmaker. True love and soul mates were real, just as real as the things in life everyone feared—broken hearts, family illnesses, life-or-death obligations.

  Ashley still believed she’d find her own match someday, but after getting dumped before Thanksgiving by the guy she’d thought was “the one,” she’d decided to take a year off from dating. Focus on herself in the context of “me,” not “we.” She hadn’t lasted long. Marcus had moved in during the first few days of January, he asked her out a week after they’d met, and she’d stupidly said yes. That night three months ago had done nothing but prove her thesis: she had no business being with a man right now. She didn’t trust her instincts when it came to love, at least not where her own heart was concerned. Not after the heartbreak of James. And her life was indeed chaos.

  Marcus moved his head to the side as if working out a kink in his neck. A waft of his aftershave settled on her, its effect on her as unavoidable as the heat of a South Carolina summer. Damn. He even smelled good—warm and masculine, just like the finest bourbon, peculiar since Marcus was CEO of his family-owned gin distillery.