The Texas Tycoon’s Christmas Baby

by Brenda Harlen

  So she lowered herself onto the edge of the mattress and prompted him with a smile and a crook of her finger. “Then why don’t you bring some of that enthusiasm over here?”

  He stripped away his clothes, then came to join her on the wide bed. He curled his hand over her shoulder, and the warmth of his palm against her bare skin sent shivers of excitement dancing through her veins. His gaze dropped to her mouth, and her lips parted, anticipating, wanting.

  But he didn’t kiss her, and though she was disappointed, she wasn’t surprised. Kissing was an intimacy he wouldn’t allow himself, not now, when he was so intent on making a point. This wasn’t about feeling close and connected. It was about sex—raw and uncensored. He wasn’t going to pretty it up with soft words or gentle touches.

  But she didn’t need it to be anything more than what it was: primitive, elemental, real.

  He tangled his hand in her hair, pulling her head back. Then he feasted on her throat, using his lips and tongue and teeth to drive her to distraction. She fell back on the mattress, dragged him with her, arching in response to the fast and impatient stroke of his hands over her quivering flesh.

  His teeth scraped over her collarbone, his tongue swirled around one peaked nipple, then the other. Her breath was coming in short, fast bursts now, as she fought to draw air into her lungs while the world spun around her.

  She cried out in shocked pleasure as the fierce suckling of her breast sent her tumbling off the edge of the first sharp peak of pleasure. Then finally, his mouth came down on hers, hot and hungry, giving nothing while demanding everything.

  She let him take and take, and she gave, freely and openly. She held nothing back and offered up everything that was in her heart.

  He drove into her, hard and deep and she cried out again, as fresh waves of pleasure crashed over her. She wrapped herself around him, arms and legs holding on to him through the storm of dizzying pleasure.

  And then, unexpectedly, his kiss softened, his hands gentled, his strokes slowed. There was no more taking or giving, but sharing. Two bodies joined together, moving together, loving together. And it felt so right, so good, so perfect.

  The physical aspect of their relationship had always been spectacular. True, her experience was limited, but she’d heard enough complaints from other women to know she’d been fortunate in choosing a first lover who was so considerate of her needs, who ensured her pleasure before taking his own.

  But this…this was beyond spectacular. It was beyond anything she’d ever imagined.

  Penny closed her eyes so that he wouldn’t see the tears of joy that filled them. Yes, this was what she’d wanted: to truly join together with him—to make love with the man she loved.

  She gasped and shuddered and clung while her body tightened around him, and gloried in the pulsing release of his body into hers.

  Penny lay motionless beneath him for a long while, afraid to move, afraid to burst the fragile bubble of happiness that surrounded her. Making love with Jason had been an experience that transcended all others. And she didn’t believe for one minute that he could make love to her the way he’d just made love to her unless he was in love with her, at least a little.

  Of course, that didn’t mean he was comfortable with his feelings, or willing to admit them, as he proved when he rolled away from her and off of the bed. She blinked back a rush of tears as he picked his clothes up off of the floor and began putting them back on. She didn’t know why he was fighting so hard to deny what was between them—or how long she could continue to bang her head against the walls he kept building to keep her out.

  “At least that puts your annulment argument to rest,” she said, keeping her tone light.

  He paused in the buttoning of his shirt to glance over at her. “Is that what this was really about?”

  “You know what this was really about.”

  He didn’t say anything as he fastened his belt, then turned to face the mirror to straighten the collar of his shirt.

  Apparently, she was going to have to bang her head once more.

  “I love you, Jason.”

  He stood for a moment with his back to her, though she caught his gaze in the mirror, and the anguish in his eyes tore at her heart.

  But all he said was, “Damn you.”

  Then he stormed out of the room.

  Penny stared at the empty doorway for a long time, as if she could will him to come back. But a few minutes later, she heard the click of the lock and knew he’d not just left the bedroom and the apartment, he’d left her.

  She pulled her knees up and hugged them tight against her chest, where her heart was breaking wide-open.

  When Jason left Penny in his bed, he didn’t know where he planned to go, he only knew he couldn’t stay. He wouldn’t let himself be sucked into her fantasy. Because that’s what love was—an illusion at best, and usually only a temporary one.

  “I love you, Jason.”

  Well, he hadn’t asked her to love him. And he sure as hell hadn’t wanted to love her.

  And he didn’t.

  She was his wife, the woman carrying his babies, and he fully intended to make a home with her and live together as a family. But he absolutely was not going to fall in love with her.

  Too late.

  He ignored the taunting voice in the back of his mind, refused to believe it. Nothing had changed between them. Making love with her didn’t change anything. Because he’d fallen in love with her long before he’d made love with her again.

  And while falling in love sounded easy, like a leisurely descent through the clouds in a hot-air balloon, the reality, at least for Jason, was different. More like a jump from a plane at fifteen thousand feet without a parachute, the realization of his feelings slamming into him with the force of hitting the ground.

  He had no idea how or when it had happened. Obviously sometime between their meeting at the Harcourt-Ellsworth wedding and their own. But it had taken the physical act of lovemaking for him to realize it. The shared intimacy had broken through all that remained of the barriers around his heart. He simply couldn’t continue to hold out against her. She was so soft and warm and giving, and he was helpless to resist her.

  But old habits die hard, and he wasn’t ready to admit that he could or did need anyone else to make his life complete. After all, he was perfectly happy with his life before Penny came along, and he could be just as happy again without her.

  So why was he feeling so miserable? And how was he going to be a father to their babies if he walked out on their marriage before they were even born?

  They were questions he didn’t know how to answer, or maybe he didn’t want to accept the answers. At least not yet.

  Until he figured it out, he opted to stay at the office where he had a spare shirt in the closet and a couch almost long enough to stretch out on. He had everything he needed—except the softhearted, green-eyed woman who had somehow stolen his heart.

  What he didn’t think he had—and certainly hadn’t expected—was a secretary who returned at ten o’clock that night and caught him trying to stretch out on the couch in his office.

  “Don’t you have a bed at home?” Barb asked him.

  Jason glared at her. “What are you doing back here?”

  “I forgot to water the plants.”

  “That’s not in your job description.”

  “Neither is dispensing marital advice, but apparently I have to do that, too.”

  “Thanks, but I don’t need any advice.”

  “If that was true, you wouldn’t be sleeping on a couch in your office.”

  “Okay, what’s your advice?” Jason asked, figuring, the sooner she said what she wanted to, the sooner she would be gone.

  “Take your sorry ass home.”

  He frowned. “That’s your advice?”

  “I never claimed to be Dr. Phil.”

  “And what makes you think I have anything to be sorry for?”

  “You’re the one who got kic
ked out of your home.”

  “She didn’t kick me out.” Of course, he hadn’t stuck around long enough to give her the chance. Instead, he’d run away like the coward he was.

  “Then there’s no reason you can’t go back,” Barb said, logically.

  No reason, except that he’d done exactly what he’d promised himself he wouldn’t do—he’d fallen in love with the woman he married.

  He wasn’t a man who was easily fazed. He knew how to keep his cool in the face of a crisis. He’d handled the news of Penny’s pregnancy; he’d coped with the surprise that she was carrying twins. Yet the realization that he’d fallen in love had sent him into a complete tailspin.

  But Jason knew it wasn’t really the loving that scared him—it was the possibility that he could lose Penny as he’d lost Kara so many years before.

  He didn’t come home that night or the next.

  Penny could have called Jason on his cell or at the office, but she didn’t think there was any point. She’d said everything she needed to say, and so had he.

  Once again she’d been a fool.

  The first night he was gone, she cried. She cried for herself, for Jason, for everything they might have had together. She cried until she was sure there were no tears left inside of her. The next day she wallowed in misery and self-pity until a question began to tug at her mind.

  If Jason didn’t care about her, if her feelings meant nothing to him, why was he running scared? Because, after two days, she realized that was exactly what he was doing.

  Well, she wasn’t going to chase after him. She’d given him her heart, she was determined to at least hold on to her pride.

  She felt a flutter of something in her tummy, like the brush of butterfly wings. Then it came again, and she sucked in a breath as realization stirred along with the babies inside her. Her hand moved instinctively to her belly, her palm splayed protectively over the tiny lives growing in her womb.

  Okay, so there were bigger things at stake than her pride.

  But the way she figured it, he had to come home sometime, and she would be there when he did. Beyond that, she didn’t really have a plan.

  Having Devon McCord as a father taught her that the path of least resistance was unquestioning obedience. As a child, she’d done what she was told to do when she was told to do it. As an adult, she’d had to make a conscious effort to break that pattern.

  Jason had never tried to tell her what to do. He’d never made her feel as if she was incapable of making her own decisions. The only doubts she had came from within herself. Doubts that had been planted by her father’s criticisms and were nurtured by her own efforts to avoid conflict.

  But this time, she wasn’t going to sit back and accept whatever came her way. She was going to take control of her life and her future.

  The first step was moving out of the guest room. Because she wasn’t a guest—this was her home, too, and it was past time she started acting as if she was living there instead of just visiting.

  For the most part, she did like Jason’s penthouse the way it was. The room she was least fond of, however, was the master bedroom. The walls were a dark green, the furniture was teak, the bedding and window coverings a deep burgundy. While everything coordinated nicely, it was a little dark for her tastes. And if she was going to be sleeping in there—and she planned on it—she would need to make some changes.

  She bought a can of sage-colored paint and painted only one wall—the longest one behind the bed. Of course, she had to call building maintenance to get someone to move the bed for her—she wouldn’t attempt to move a king-size bed on her own, even if she wasn’t pregnant. Then she added new bedding and window coverings in a light tan color, keeping the burgundy and green throw pillows for color, and hung some sepia-tone prints in oversize frames on the dark walls.

  When it was done, she fell into bed, exhausted.

  Her last thought before she fell asleep was that she would tackle the nursery tomorrow.

  Jason was staring bleary-eyed at the quarterly report on his computer screen when the phone buzzed, not realizing that he was half-asleep until the noise jolted him awake. Three days had passed since he’d walked out on Penny—and so had three endless, sleepless nights.

  He reached for the receiver with one hand and his coffee mug with the other. “Yeah.”

  “Lindsay Conners is on line two.”

  “Who?” He lifted the mug to his lips, grimaced when he swallowed a mouthful of cold coffee. He must have been dozing longer than he’d realized for his coffee to have chilled so much.

  “She said if you didn’t recognize the name to tell you that she’s the mother of the baby who spit up on your suit.”

  The fog around his brain cleared. “Oh. Right. Thanks, Barb.”

  She disconnected and he picked up line two.

  Five minutes later, he was sitting across from Lindsay in the café in the lobby.

  She was, he noted with surprise, alone. “No kids today?”

  She smiled, looking a lot more relaxed than the last time he’d seen her. “No. They’re being taken care of by…a friend.”

  “Are you here about a job? Because I can contact Margaret in HR and…” His words trailed off as she shook her head.

  “No, I’m not looking for a job. I just wanted to stop by and thank you for being so kind to me that day on the plane, and for making me remember that there are still some nice guys in the world.”

  “You didn’t need to come over here for that.”

  “I did,” she insisted. “Because when I finally got home that day, and finally got the kids settled, I started thinking about another nice guy, one I hadn’t spoken to in a lot of years. Long story short—I’m moving to Alaska.”

  He wasn’t sure if she’d omitted a lot of information or if his sleep-deprived brain was failing to make a logical connection. “You’re moving to Alaska…because I held your baby on the plane?”

  She laughed. “Because you made me remember Ethan—the man I should have married. Except that I was twenty years old when he proposed and afraid of everything I would miss out on if I tied myself down at that point in my life. So, instead of taking everything that he offered, I turned away.

  “Six years later, when I was a little more mature and experienced, I met Brian. Maybe he wasn’t the love of my life, but he was the man I was with at the time I was ready to get married and have a family. By the time I realized I never loved him the way I’d loved Ethan—and that he never loved me, either—we had one baby and another on the way.

  “I don’t regret the years we had together,” she said. “Because despite everything else, I ended up with two wonderful kids. But when Brian left, I went through the whole gamut of emotions. I was stunned, hurt, angry, sad. But mostly I was afraid. Afraid that I would never stop hurting, and never have the courage to open up my heart again.

  “And then I called Ethan and we talked. I hadn’t seen or heard from him in almost fifteen years, but our conversation wasn’t in any way awkward or uncomfortable. We talked again the next night, and the night after that, and finally he said, ‘Lindsay, are you going to come to me or do I have to come down to Texas to get you?’ And I knew that he would do it, because even after fifteen years, he still loves me. And I still love him.

  “So that’s why I’m taking my kids and moving to Alaska, which is a heck of a lot scarier than anything I faced when I was twenty,” she admitted. “But I’ve finally realized that not everyone gets second chances, and I’m not going to let this one pass me by.”

  “Well then, I’ll wish you luck,” Jason said to her.

  Lindsay laughed. “I don’t need luck, because this time I’ve got love on my side.”

  He pondered that comment long after she’d gone, long after he’d let another cup of coffee grow cold, and he marveled at the courage of a woman who had lost so much and was willing to risk it all again. For love.

  He’d been in love before. His feelings for Kara had been real—certa
inly more real than anything he’d ever experienced to that point in his life—but they weren’t nearly as deep or as strong as what he felt for Penny.

  And after three days away from her, he realized that he’d been using his grief over Kara’s death as a shield against loving Penny—and not very effectively. Maybe loving Penny was a risk, but it wasn’t as if he had a choice in the matter. Not telling her how he felt certainly hadn’t stopped the feelings from growing.

  He went back up to his office, marched past his secretary’s desk without saying a word, grabbed his coat and his briefcase and walked back out again.

  “It’s the middle of the day,” Barb said. “Where are you going?”

  “Home,” he said simply, and felt as if an enormous weight had lifted off of his chest.

  She huffed out a breath. “Well, it’s about time.”

  Jason followed the pulsing beat of a Van Halen song toward the spare bedroom, and with every step he took, his heart pounded harder against his ribs. He didn’t know if Penny was even speaking to him, but at least she was still here. It wasn’t until he opened the door of his penthouse and heard the music that he acknowledged the fear, buried deep inside his heart, that he might already be too late, that she might already be gone.

  Instead, she was standing on a stepladder, painting the trim around the window, and he just stood for a moment, watching her. She turned to dip her brush in the can of paint and spotted him there.

  The paintbrush slipped out of her hand, bounced off a step on the ladder, then against her thigh, before landing on the ground. Jason crossed the room to pick it up carefully by the handle and set it on the tray.

  “Good thing you put down drop cloths,” he said.

  Penny didn’t seem to know what to say. She just stared at him with a mixture of hope and wariness in her beautiful green eyes.

  He reached for the rag she’d been using, found a clean corner, and started to rub the streak of butter yellow paint on her leg.

  She swallowed. “You’ll get, uh, paint on your suit.”