‘You would think so, wouldn’t you?’ Annie smiled a tight little smile. ‘But then, she’s always harboured an unnatural hatred of me. Now I know why, of course—’ she shrugged ‘—her being connected with you lot.’ It wasn’t said nicely and wasn’t meant to be. ‘But in openly despising me she got Todd’s back up.’
Slowly she turned to look coolly at him. ‘You see, if any good came out of the Alvarez scandal, then it was the way it brought Todd and me much closer together. He believed my version, you see, Mr DeSanquez. Against all the evidence your family and so-called friends stacked against me, he believed me, stood by me and tried his best to shield me from the worst of the flak the Press wanted to throw at me.
‘You could say we found each other,’ she likened whimsically. ‘And, in so doing, woe betide anyone who tries to come between us, because it will be at their peril—warn Susie,’ she added as a mere mocking aside.
‘You say you and Susie only share the eyes,’ she went on. ‘But you don’t. You share ruthlessly manipulative natures too. Like you she was willing to go to any lengths to get what she wanted,’ she explained, without acknowledging the sudden, angry flash in his eyes at that last insult. ‘But the day she challenged Todd to choose between me and herself she lost him.
‘He may love her,’ she conceded, ‘but he also despises her for trying that. Now, when I tell him about this little—charade she fixed up for me,’ she pointed out, ‘he’ll cut her right out of his life. And don’t take that statement lightly,’ she warned when scepticism lightened his eyes, ‘because just as you and Susie bear similar genes so does Todd to his father. He’ll do it for my sake, just as his father did it to me for his wife’s sake.’
‘And you?’ César questioned. ‘Do you possess that same streak in you?’
Do I? Annie paused to think about it. ‘I don’t know,’ she was forced to admit in the end. ‘It hasn’t been put to the test yet.’
‘Then maybe it is time that it was,’ he murmured. ‘The way I hear you, Hanson means all the world to you. Will you—cut him right out of your life for his own sake?’ he challenged silkily.
Annie frowned. ‘I don’t see the connection.’
He thrust his hands into the pockets of his loose-fitting trousers. ‘I still hold the final card, Angelica,’ he reminded her carefully. ‘And, bearing in mind your analysis of my character just now, it will do you well to remember my ability to use it. Nothing has changed, except, maybe, my opinion of you as a person,’ he allowed. ‘But the success of Cliché still hangs on the promise of my collaboration.’
An icy shiver slid down Annie’s spine. ‘I still don’t see what you’re getting at,’ she said warily.
His eyes were hard now, his expression grim. ‘You either keep to your side of our deal,’ he softly spelled out for her, ‘or I will withdraw my support at the eleventh hour, giving Hanson no chance to put something else in my place.’
Annie took a stunned step back. ‘You would still do that?’ she choked. ‘After everything I’ve just told you?’
His expression was bleak but firm. ‘Susie needs time to mend her relationship with Hanson,’ he stated grimly. ‘I promised her that time. That promise cannot be forfeited simply because you have pointed out to me what I already knew—that my family can be quite ruthless when they need to be.’ Narrowly his green gaze watched her. ‘The rise or decline of Hanson Publications remains firmly in your hands, Angelica. You stay here with me and everything runs smoothly. You insist on leaving and it all falls the other way.’
‘You bastard,’ she breathed. He was no better than his thankless family! Like them he was prepared to sacrifice her feelings as if they didn’t matter! ‘Last night counts for nothing—nothing at all to you!’
His eyes seemed to go black, the green blanked out by an emotion that Annie was too hurt and angry to interpret. ‘It counts,’ he granted roughly. ‘And indeed alters things slightly…’ His pause was deliberate and chilling. ‘I did not use protection last night, Angelica. And with hindsight I must presume that neither did you.’
Not slow at getting his meaning, she went so white that her eyes looked like huge dark pools in her horror-pinched face.
A nerve twitched in his jaw as he watched her, but his mouth remained firm with resolve. ‘Which leaves us with another—problem we may yet have to face,’ he went on. ‘Which is whether you are pregnant with my child and, if you are, what we are going to do about it.’
It was all too much. Shock upon shock over the last twenty-four hours, plus the added emotional wrench of her own recent trauma in allowing herself to open up to this man, had Annie swaying, the beauty of the new day fading around its edges until it encompassed only his grimly watchful face.
Pregnant? She shook her head on a laugh that came very close to hysteria. No, she would not so much as allow herself to consider that as a possibility. Fate would not be that cruel to her, surely?
‘It has to be acknowledged, Angelica,’ he murmured, as though her thoughts were written across her face for his exclusive benefit. ‘Children are not made in heaven, as I suspect you would prefer to believe. They are made by the ejaculation of male sperm into the female womb—a process we well and truly carried out last night.’
She flinched, his blunt, clinical description making her hands clutch at her stomach on a shudder of revulsion—an action that made a nerve twitch in his jaw again.
‘So what are you asking of me now?’ she demanded finally, the very quiver in her voice mirrored in the reactionary tremor of her body. ‘Visitation rights when this other farce with Todd is over? Or perhaps you want even more than that,’ she added bitterly, fingers lifting to comb her hair agitatedly away from her paste-white face. ‘Maybe you prefer to rip the thing from my damned womb before it can cause any more trouble for you!’
At that it was his turn to flinch, but if she gained any satisfaction from it she wasn’t aware. Her whole world seemed to have gone topsy-turvy, and she didn’t know what she was feeling any more.
‘Neither of those things,’ he denied. ‘I was, actually, about to suggest the only option I see open to us. Marriage,’ he announced. ‘I think you and I should get married, Angelica, and as soon as it can be arranged.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
HYSTERIA did take over now. Annie felt it rise like a lift out of a control from the very base of her feet until it burst free somewhere hot between the ears.
‘I don’t believe you’re real!’ she gasped out shrilly. ‘I really don’t believe you come from this planet at all!’ Her blue eyes stared at him through a glaze of utter incredulity. ‘I wouldn’t marry you if you got down on your knees and begged me to!’ she seared at him. ‘I wouldn’t even be standing here giving you this much of my time if you hadn’t incarcerated me on this bloody island of yours!
‘My God!’ she choked, a hand flying haphazardly up in the air then landing bewilderedly on the top of her head. ‘You’re sick, do you know that? You ought to see a doctor—the kind who looks inside your head to see what the hell went wrong with it to make you what you are! Or, better still,’ she rattled on furiously, ‘refer him to me and I’ll tell him exactly what’s wrong with you, César DeSanquez! You are the result of too much interbreeding from your vengeful Spanish side, that’s what you are!
‘Marriage? Babies?’ she shrieked. ‘I would rather rip this hypothetical child out of my womb myself than be party to bringing another of your kind into this w—!’
The stinging slap issued to the side of her face silenced her. The hands suddenly gripping her shoulders and pulling her hard against him made her gasp. The eyes, when she managed to focus on them, were aflash with rage. He looked bigger, darker, more alien than he’d ever managed to look before. And he was throbbing with enough barely leashed violence to knock her down to the ground if she so much as provoked him a fraction of an inch further.
‘You will take that back,’ he breathed furiously. ‘Every word of it. Every filthy, bitter word!’
/> ‘You go to hell,’ she whispered, shaking with a wild combination of fear and fury.
‘I am already there,’ he rasped, and dropped his mouth down onto hers.
And she couldn’t believe it but it was there—that strong and that quick!—a volcanic eruption of all those feelings that he had so brutally set free the night before!
With a whimpered groan of surrender she weakened at the knees, that tidal heat of wild pleasure sending her melting helplessly against him, jaw slackening, lips parting to allow him angry entry into her mouth.
When he stopped being angry and became aroused himself she wasn’t sure. But the kiss did change, turning to something deep and intense, his tongue coiling sensually with her own while his hands slackened their grip enough to slide caressingly beneath her top, shrouding her in fine, pleasurable shivers as he stroked with excruciating lightness across her fine white skin.
She groaned again, her body arching instinctively, and he encouraged her with the deep, drugging urgency of his kiss. Then one hand was moving to her behind, splaying and pressing, drawing her into the braced arch of his thighs where the pulsing evidence of his arousal throbbed through the thin covering of her shorts, shocking and exciting her with the blatant power of his need.
Then suddenly he was breaking the kiss on a fierce intake of air, whistling it in through his teeth as he threw his dark head back in an effort to snatch back control, muttering tight words in Spanish to himself while his hands maintained that pressure against his pulsing thighs.
‘No,’ he gritted tensely while she waited, panting, frightened, weirdly excited by this effect that she seemed to have on him. ‘No,’ he said again, sounding hoarse with desperation, then lowered his head and opened his eyes.
They were eyes she found herself drowning in—eyes the same colour as the glittering jade water further out in the bay, eyes that yearned and hated and fought a battle that held her in absolute thrall.
‘I will take you now, here on this rock in broad daylight, if I have to,’ he enunciated rawly through the trauma of emotion running rife within him. ‘And I will go on taking you until you agree to marry me, Angelica Lacey. Marry me and let me lock you away where you can never harm a child of mine. Do you understand?’
Understand? ‘And how do you think your wonderful family would react to that?’ she flashed bitterly back at him. ‘Their gallant knight marrying the enemy!’ She made a sound of scorn. ‘My God, your sister would die at the horror of it and Susie would expire with chagrin!’
‘And what do you think it will do to you if we do not marry?’ he flashed right back. ‘Or don’t you care that carrying a child without a wedding ring will only help to confirm the notorious Annie Lacey’s whoring ways?’
She went white, her hand snaking up to make vicious contact with his face—only it never made it. He caught her wrist in a manacle-like grip and held it suspended two inches from his cheek.
‘They see what they want to see,’ he quoted back at her quite ruthlessly. ‘And they will see a woman who eats, sleeps and lives for sex. They will probably decide that you could not even give the father a name!’
‘I could,’ she spat at him. ‘Yours! That wonderful genius Adamas, no less!’
‘And the moment you use my name I will slap a court order on you demanding all rights to my child on the grounds that you are not a fit person to take care of it!’ he vowed. ‘Who do you think will win in a court of law, Angelica?’ he challenged brutally. ‘The whore or the genius with the blameless past?’
‘My God—’ She swallowed tensely on the hot ball of fury blocking her throat. ‘Luis Alvarez has nothing on you, does he?’
That hit him on the raw, tightening that arrogant face until the tanned skin lay stretched taut across his lean cheeks. ‘I want your agreement,’ he bit out.
Annie gave a sound of angry bewilderment. ‘There may not even be a child!’ she cried. ‘So why the hell are we having this crazy confrontation?’
‘Because if there is,’ he clipped, ‘I want to be sure—damned sure—that no one will have cause to question its parentage. And with your track record—true or otherwise,’ he put in at the bitter flash from her eyes, ‘the poor child is destined to grow up being known only as Annie Lacey’s bastard! Is that what you want?’
She flinched, sickened to her very depths because no matter how she tried to refute that insult she could not and knew she could not. Annie Lacey’s reputation was set.
The tension she was maintaining in her captured wrist died along with the rest of her ability to fight, and her head lowered, the slow burn of wretched, self-contemptuous tears pressing against the backs of her eyes.
‘We could at least wait a couple of weeks to find out if it’s worth all of this grief!’ she choked out wretchedly.
But he was already shaking his dark head. ‘I want this child’s hapless beginnings to be blameless, Angelica,’ he stated grimly. ‘And if that means us taking a risk and marrying now then we will do it. For the child’s sake,’ he punctuated forcefully. ‘Not our own.’
‘Oh, God. I hate you,’ she whispered thickly. ‘I hate you so much!’
‘But you now see the sense in what I am saying,’ he insisted. The hand still holding her wrist aloft tightened its grip in a demand for the right reply.
She gave it anguishedly. ‘Yes—yes!’
His big, bronzed chest, gleaming in the sunshine beneath the loose fall of his open shirt, lifted and fell. ‘I will arrange for us to be married tomorrow on Pelican Island,’ he decided, ‘which is only a short flight away. Then we will come back here until we know for sure either way.’ Slowly he lowered her wrist to her side and released it.
‘Then?’ she prompted thickly. ‘What then?’
He shrugged, his beautiful broad shoulders shifting tensely beneath the thinnest cotton. ‘That decision will have to wait until we know the answer,’ he said, then turned and simply walked away.
* * *
The journey to Pelican Island was achieved in near silence. Annie sat quietly beside César as he played the controls, their sunglasses in place to protect their eyes from the bright sun.
They had barely spoken a word to each other during the last twenty-four hours. He hadn’t been around to talk to! Because a few minutes after he’d walked away from her on the beach he’d left the island, bringing the helicopter rising above the house then speeding off into the clear blue sky.
He had returned late, just as the sun had been dying out of a rich vermilion sky.
‘It is all arranged,’ he’d informed her when she’d eventually forced herself to go downstairs and face him over the dinner that Margarita had so carefully prepared. ‘We marry tomorrow afternoon on Pelican Island.’
‘I thought Pelican Island was private,’ she’d murmured, recognising the island’s name as a famous retreat for the rich and stressed-out.
‘It is leased,’ he’d corrected, ‘as my own island is. But because it possesses a hotel it is licensed to perform marriage services.’
Which had left her with nothing else to say. So they’d done their best to compliment Margarita’s delicious dinner of goujons of chicken followed by freshly caught snapper fish on a bed of fluffy aromatic rice.
During his absence she’d explored Hook-nose Bay, scrambling over rocks and soft silver sand, swimming for hours in the calm waters. That evening her skin had borne the healthy glow of a day’s unremitting sunshine—the high-factor lotion she’d found in the bathroom having protected her from the worst of the sun’s rays.
By dinnertime she had been tired—tired enough not to care what he thought of her silence or the fact that, other than by that one short burst of conversation, she had barely acknowledged his presence.
He wanted all of this, not her. She needed to make no effort to pretend otherwise, and oddly he had seemed to accept that, his green gaze straying occasionally to her closed face but without attempting to intrude on the self-absorbed shell that she had withdrawn behind.
She said nothing, but her fingers curled slightly in tense reaction where they rested on her lap.
‘I have also arranged for something—appropriate for you to wear,’ he added casually.
That brought her gaze to him. ‘What I’m wearing is more than suitable,’ she insisted, adding cynically, ‘it isn’t as though it’s going to be the wedding of the year, after all.’
‘I never implied it was,’ he agreed almost soothingly. ‘And you would look beautiful in whatever you chose to wear, be it sackcloth or that blue linen you have on now. But…’ He paused to make a slight adjustment to their flight, his movements deft with confidence as he realigned the helicopter with the bulk of land that she could see looming towards them. ‘This will not be a hole-and-corner wedding, Angelica,’ he said grimly. ‘It is important that it appears the happiest day in both our lives.’
Grin and bear it, in other words, she noted. Well, she was a professional, wasn’t she? An absolute expert at make-believe? ‘I won’t let you down.’
‘I know you won’t,’ he murmured quietly. But the tension between them was beginning to fizz again, and after a moment he sighed. ‘Angelica, I want you to believe me when I say I mean you no harm! I do this for your own sake. Your reputation will not stand another scandal!’ His eyes flicked to hers. ‘I am sorry if that offends you, but it is the truth and I think that you know it!’
‘Ah, I see.’ The first bubbles of anger began to ferment in the calm interior she had been so carefully maintaining. ‘So this is just another case of César DeSanquez being the gallant knight in action. How very altruistic of you,’ she said waspishly. ‘Remind me to thank you for it some time.’
‘I don’t look for your thanks,’ he snapped, but from the way his lean profile clenched she knew that she’d managed to hit him on the raw. ‘I am simply trying to tell you that you can trust me!’
The Morning After Page 10