She swallowed. “I need… to tell you something.”
“Yes?”
He waited, bracing for her to blurt out that she loved him, that she couldn’t live without him, that she wanted them to move in together, or some other such nonsense. He’d heard it all before.
Instead, she said, “I… I’m leaving you.” She licked her lips. “Resigning. Effective immediately.”
Relief rushed through him. Then…
Sharp regret.
Regret? Ridiculous. He was just surprised, that was all. And rather sorry to lose a competent secretary.
And yet…
He sat down heavily in his chair.
“I’m sorry to hear that. But I understand why you want to leave. I’ll write you a recommendation that will get you hired by any firm in the city.”
“No.” She shook her head. “You don’t understand. I don’t need your recommendation. I’m getting married.”
He stared at her, shocked.
“Married?” The center of his chest went cold. “When?”
“This afternoon.”
That soon? His hands tightened. “That’s fast.”
“I know.”
He took a long breath. All these months, she hadn’t been heartsick over him. He hadn’t hurt Ellie at all by seducing her. Since then, she’d just been distracted by a hot new romance. Diogo should have been glad.
But something like cold fury went through his body. For no good reason, he had the sudden urge to punch the man who would soon have Ellie Jensen in his bed every night, doing his bidding and moaning his name. Giving him her body…
He ground his jaw. “Who is he?”
Her posture went straight in her chair. “Do you really care?”
“No.” He clenched his jaw. “I don’t.”
She stared at him for a long moment.
“You really don’t, do you?” she whispered. She shook her head. “Women are interchangeable to you. Useful only for organizing your schedule, making your coffee or warming your bed.”
Warming his bed? If he’d followed his own desires, he could have had her in his bed every night for the last three months. Diogo tried to remember why he hadn’t. Something about being noble. He cursed under his breath. He should have just enjoyed her. Now he’d lost the chance—forever.
He’d been replaced so easily!
Diogo had never had the experience of being left by a woman he still desired. This was his reward for doing the right thing? To see his prize carried off by some other man?
He leaned forward in repressed fury, placing his fingers on his desk. “Useful, Miss Jensen? Hardly. Your distraction over your love affair has just caused me to lose the Trock deal—”
“I told you, call me Ellie!” she cried. “And I’m not finished!”
Feeling like a saint, he folded his arms and forced himself to wait.
She rose slowly to her feet. There was a sheen of tears in her eyes. She seemed to sway with emotion.
“I’m sorry about the Trock deal, Diogo. But there’s something you need to know.” She spoke so softly he could barely hear. “I’m… having a baby.”
The coldness in him spread, turning to ice. A baby?
Ellie was pregnant. With another man’s baby.
For a second, he couldn’t even breathe. He heard the echo of a woman’s voice long ago, pleading in Portuguese. “Will you marry me, Diogo? Will you?” And later, a man’s voice in the same language. “I’m afraid she’s dead, senhor. Beaten to death…“
“Diogo?”
Ellie’s voice brought him back to the present.
Pregnant. That certainly explained the weight gain and the pallor and all the time she’d been spending in the ladies’ lounge. She hadn’t been suffering tears of unrequited love. It had been morning sickness.
Pregnant. Ellie had been in bed with another man. Her legs had wrapped around his as she pulled him down on her naked body with an ecstatic cry of joy. How many times had they made love for her to get pregnant? Three times a week? Three times a day?
Anger rushed back in force, careening over the numb shock like raging water filling a dry riverbed. Ever since they’d returned from Rio, he’d been celibate as a monk, striving night and day to bring the Trock deal together. And while he’d been blaming himself for taking the poor, sweet, innocent girl’s virginity, she’d nonchalantly gone from his bed into a hot love affair with another man. As if her night with Diogo had been a mere stepping stone to bigger and better things.
She was pregnant.
Engaged.
And getting married in a hurry.
Suddenly, he saw the whole situation in a new light.
He sucked in his breath. He turned to face her, and his lip curved into a sneer.
“Ellie, you’ve got quite the act going, don’t you? Playing the part of a sweet, innocent girl. But when you realized that giving me your virginity wasn’t going to pay off, you quickly moved on to the next man, didn’t you? You accidentally got pregnant. I assume he’s very rich? Congratulations.”
Her jaw fell open. She stared up at him in shock, her eyes large and limpid and blue as a summer storm over the Atlantic.
“You think I got pregnant on purpose?” she whispered. “That I’d force a man to marry me with a baby?”
“I think you’re clever,” he said coldly. “All this time I’ve thought you were so different from the rest—but you’re just better at the game. Biskreta, you’re the most accomplished little actress I’ve ever met.”
“How can you even think that!”
“I’m just curious to know who the poor fool is,” he said ruthlessly. “Tell me. Who’s the idiot who got caught in your trap?”
He saw tears in her eyes. He steeled his heart against her fake tears, which she no doubt manufactured at will. He wouldn’t let her play him for a fool. Never again! For three months, he’d worried about her feelings. He’d even denied himself her bed because he’d been trying to protect her. And all along she’d just been angling for a diamond on her finger!
Her blue eyes glittered at him through a prism of tears.
“You think only an idiot would marry me?” she choked out.
“That’s right,” he said coolly. “Only a fool would marry a woman who deliberately trapped him with a pregnancy.”
The tears spilled over her lashes.
“Such a poised little actress,” he murmured acidly. “Such a fine performance.”
Looking up at him, she gave a harsh laugh, shaking her head through the tears. “You’ll never get a woman pregnant, will you, Diogo?” she bit out. “You’ve made sure of it!”
“Sim, it is true.” He bared his teeth in the semblance of a smile. “I’ve never met a woman I could trust longer than it takes to seduce her.”
She sucked in her breath.
“And that’s all you have to say to me?” she whispered. “After you seduced me and took my virginity? After three months of silence, you have nothing to say to me—but insults?”
An unwelcome shiver of emotion went through Diogo. He pushed the feeling aside. Ellie Jensen was a gold digger. It was ridiculous of him to be so surprised about it. The city was full of women who were just pretending to have a career while they tried to find a rich man.
“I do have one question,” he said acerbically. “Why are you still here in my office? You’ve quit your job without notice. Fine. You’ve become such a bad secretary, I’m glad to see you go. So why are you still here? Are you afraid your marriage bed will be unsatisfying, and you’re already angling to take a lover? Sorry, but I don’t date married women.”
She wiped her tears savagely. “You’re disgusting!”
“No, querida. That would be you. As my employee, I respected you. But I was wrong.” Wrong about so many things. First about Timothy Wright—now about Ellie. Suddenly weary, Diogo rubbed the back of his head. “Go, Ellie. Just go.”
She drew back, like an ominous dark cloud rolling against the earth before th
e storm.
“Don’t worry, Diogo,” she said softly. “You’ll never see me again.”
Her lovely blue eyes stabbed at him with accusation. He felt troubled in a way he couldn’t explain. But the moment was interrupted by a knock at the door. A security guard stood heavily in the doorway.
“Miss Alvarez called me, Mr. Serrador.”
“Yes. Show Miss Jensen out,” Diogo said, turning away. “Get out, Ellie. Good luck.”
“Good luck,” she repeated in a tight voice. “Goodbye.”
He looked up, but the door had already closed behind her. Alone in his office, he took a deep breath and leaned his head in his hands. He tried to work, but couldn’t. After an hour, he gave up. He called a gorgeous actress and asked her to lunch.
It was only halfway through his martini and steak that it occurred to him that Ellie’s child might be his.
CHAPTER TWO
IT WAS THE PERFECT day for a wedding.
As Ellie stepped out of the hired limousine, sweet-scented blossoms from the village’s cherry trees floated through the warm spring breeze, as lush and fragrant as her pink-and-green bouquet. She could hear the sound of birds singing in the cloudless blue sky, soaring high over the white clapboard church.
It was the perfect day to start her new life as a happy wife and mother-to-be. The perfect day to forget Diogo Serrador’s existence.
So why did she feel so miserable? Why had she cried for the last six hours straight, all across the Pennsylvania highway and through her hour at the hairstylist’s?
“Steady,” her grandmother said gruffly, taking her arm as they reached the doorway of the white church. Lilibeth’s gray, bushy eyebrows quivered as she looked up at her taller granddaughter. “Are you ready?”
“Yes,” Ellie muttered. But she wasn’t ready at all. She’d left Timothy eight messages on the trip from Manhattan, but he hadn’t answered his cell. He was likely getting in his last billable hours at his new, thriving private practice before they departed for their Aruba honeymoon.
Timothy was determined to be rich for her, he said. He didn’t believe Ellie when she said she didn’t need to be rich. All she wanted was to feel safe.
Safe, and to never have her heart broken again.
But she couldn’t marry Timothy without telling him she was pregnant. She couldn’t. She had to give him the option to back out of their marriage. Her hands tightened. Part of her even hoped he would back out…
“Careful—your flowers!” her grandmother protested.
“Sorry.” With every minute that passed, Ellie’s heart was pounding harder and faster. She was starting to feel dizzy. Her voice was a squeak as she said, “You promised you’d find Timothy first?”
“Are you really sure?” Lilibeth Conway squinted at her doubtfully. “It’s bad luck for a man to see his bride before the ceremony.”
“Please, Gran!”
Her grandmother sighed. “All right, all right. It’s your day.” She pushed her into a tiny antechamber inside the church, past the ushers and last few arriving guests. “Wait here.”
Ellie waited. And waited. She paced, staring out the tiny window.
In the distance, she saw the rolling hills and green forests. But it wasn’t all beautiful. She could see the stacks of the old, abandoned steel mill. The boarded-up storefronts. Flint, Pennsylvania, was only four hours from Manhattan by car, but felt like a world away.
She and Timothy had both grown up poor here. Returning this past Christmas as a wealthy lawyer, he’d been welcomed back to town like a hero. Timothy had already bought the nicest mansion in town and was fixing it up for her. He was spending money all over Flint, hiring carpenters and cleaners, sparing no expense. He would do anything, he’d told her, to make her love him. Anything.
But before they could marry, she had to tell him she was pregnant. Then let him decide if he still wanted to marry her.
Was it even fair to marry him like this? She took a deep breath. In spite of all his assurances that she would grow to love him, the idea of being his bride somehow felt… wrong.
But her instincts were plainly screwed up. Ellie’s short-lived affair with Diogo had proven that. The night Diogo had taken her in his arms in Rio, it had felt so right. When he’d kissed her on the street, amid the explosion of music and bright color, she’d felt truly alive for the first time in her life.
Passion was dangerous. She had to try to learn to make choices with her head, not her heart.
Taking care of her mother over her long years of illness, Ellie had spent many dark nights yearning for adventure in far-off lands. For the hot kisses of scandalous men. But Diogo’s hot embrace had seared her to the core. He’d arrogantly changed her whole life—and he didn’t even care.
She’d wanted to tell him the truth—but how could she? Even just knowing half of the truth, he’d assumed the worst about her, that she was a calculating gold digger who would use an innocent baby to trap a man into marriage. He’d coldly and cruelly insulted her.
He didn’t know her at all—and he never had!
“Ellie.” Timothy’s voice was muffled through the door, but she could still hear his affectionate exasperation. “Don’t you know we’ve got three hundred people waiting? What do you want to talk to me about?”
“Timothy.” Her whole body was still shaking from remembering what Diogo had said to her. She forced herself to take a deep breath. To steady her hands. She had to forget Diogo. She had to erase him from her mind completely and try to be glad that she would never see him again. She licked her dry lips. “Will you please come in here?”
“No—it’s bad luck!”
“That’s just a superstition!”
She heard him laugh. “It’s taken so long to convince you to marry me, I’m not taking any chances.”
Was she supposed to shout out her pregnancy confession through a door, to the shock of his ushers and the last guests walking into the church? “Please. I really, really need to talk to you!”
He paused. Then he spoke, and his voice glowed. “Whatever you have to say, I’m longing to hear it. Just wait a few minutes more, and you can tell me every day for the rest of our lives.”
Horrified, she realized he thought she finally meant to tell him she loved him. Her forehead broke out into a cold sweat. This was getting worse and worse. “Timothy, you don’t understand—”
“Wait,” he said firmly.
She had no choice.
“I’m pregnant!”
There was a pause. Then the door flung open.
Timothy’s pale, thin face was ghostly white—but he looked like he was breathing fire. He slammed the door closed behind him and grabbed her wrist.
“How is that possible,” he ground out, “when we have never slept together?”
His eyes were so hard through his wire-rimmed glasses, his face so wild and different from his usual placid expression, that she backed up a step.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “It was a mistake. I never meant to hurt you…”
“Who’s the man?” he demanded, his slender hand tightening around her wrist.
She shook her head desperately. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll never see him again.”
“Who is he?”
“You’re hurting me!”
He tossed her arm aside. “So that’s why you suddenly agreed to marry me? Because you were pregnant and your lover had deserted you?”
“No!”
“But you made a mistake if you planned to pass this baby off as mine,” he sneered. “Even I’m not stupid enough to believe you’re pregnant with my child, when you never let me touch you!”
“It was a mistake!” she cried. “The worst mistake of my life! I just found out I was pregnant this morning. I never intended to deceive you!”
“Right,” he said sarcastically. He ran his hand through his blond, thinning hair. “Sure.”
She watched him miserably. “I understand why you want to call off the wedding. It’s pro
bably for the best…”
He looked at her sharply. “What do you mean? I’m not calling anything off.”
“But…”
“You’re not backing out. Pregnant or not,” he said in a hard voice, “you’re going to marry me. Today.”
She swallowed. “And the baby—”
His lip curled. “I’ll take care of it.”
He threw the door back with a bang and stalked out.
Take care of it?
Timothy was willing to be her baby’s father?
He was truly willing to help her raise her child?
Dazed, she stumbled out of the room. She’d thought, really thought, he would call off the wedding. But he hadn’t—so that meant…
She was getting married. Right now. In just moments, she would be Timothy’s wife—for the rest of her life. She heard the string quartet finish Pachelbel’s “Canon in D major.” He’d spent a fortune on this wedding, inviting the whole town to see them wed like some kind of royal coronation. As if to force everyone who’d ever treated them badly to see them crowned king and queen of the town.
Lilibeth came toward Ellie, reaching up to kiss her cheek before pulling the gauzy veil over her face. “I couldn’t help but overhear!” she said joyfully, her lips pressing an air kiss of her signature orange lipstick. “Pregnant! Oh, Ellie, I’m so happy for you, my dear!”
Happy that Ellie was marrying a man she didn’t love?
Happy that the man she had loved was a selfish, critical, amoral bastard who didn’t deserve to be any baby’s father?
“But, Gran…” Ellie said softly. “I don’t love Timothy.”
Her grandmother’s eyes widened, then narrowed. “You will,” she said briskly. “You’re going to have his baby.”
The doors to the nave opened, and the wedding march rolled over her like a wave. People turned around in the pews, craning their heads to see her.
Standing alone at the end of the aisle, Ellie’s body trembled. Her wedding bouquet shook in her hands as if an earthquake moved beneath her feet.
“Walk,” her grandmother whispered with a smile, taking her arm.
Feeling numb, Ellie walked forward with Lilibeth at her side.
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