by Tessa Radley
“Seven years.” Nick muttered, clearly reluctant to admit it.
“Did you love your wife?”
“That’s none of your business!”
Candace held his gaze bravely. “Of course it’s my business. I gave you both my baby on the assumption that Jennie was going to a loving family.” Her naïveté made her want to cry. She should’ve taken more care…
Rather than accept Jilly’s logical explanation that Nick wanted to pretend the baby was his wife’s, Candace should have insisted on meeting him. Instead, she’d been satisfied by a pile of newspaper and magazine cuttings—all of which had deified him as an eco-friendly tycoon. She’d let her worries be soothed.
Dumb.
Nick rose restlessly to his feet. “I did receive a call confirming that you’re Jennie’s birth mother. But you must be aware by now that I didn’t even know about your decision to give your baby up—you made that all by yourself.”
Pain stabbed at her. Then anger flared and she gave a snort of disgust. “You’re going to heap all the blame on me?”
“Don’t expect me to believe you did it out of the kindness of your heart. What was in it for you?” he badgered.
Candace bent her head and studied the rich colors of the Persian rug. Why was nothing ever simple? “In terms of New Zealand law, all I was entitled to recover were the expenses I incurred.”
Nick waved a dismissive hand. “I’m aware of that, but there are any number of ways around the legalities.”
At the cynical note in his voice Candace glanced sharply up at him. How could he suspect? She couldn’t read his expression, but his lips were curled into an unpleasant sneer.
“So what did my wife offer you for the gift of Jennie?” There was an icy inflection on the word gift. “What price did you put on your baby?”
It hadn’t been like that. “Nothing!”
Although that wasn’t strictly true. But the financial assistance had come later—once she and Jilly had become friends. That had made the arrangement acceptable, one of friendship.
It had been an unlikely friendship, but during her pregnancy Candace had grown to feel an incredible sympathy for Nick Valentine’s wife. Jilly had appeared to have everything most women dreamed of. A husband she adored. Plenty of friends. Yet she had seemed lonely, her life empty. The baby she’d wanted more than anything in the world had been an impossible dream…until Candace had come to her rescue.
“You’re sure?”
“Why do you think your wife would’ve had to pay me for a baby?” Candace countered desperately. “Are you so devoid of human kindness that you can’t believe it’s possible for anyone to be selfless?”
A strange expression crossed his face.
He came closer. Candace’s pulse picked up speed as he leaned forward and placed his hands on the sofa back, trapping her inside the curve of his arms. “Are you telling me you’re the real deal? A true angel?”
Her breath quickened. She couldn’t look away. “I’m no angel. I’m all too human.”
“Are you?” His gaze dropped to her mouth.
Candace’s heart thundered in her chest. She felt dazed, disoriented. “I’m just like a million other women out there,” she managed breathlessly.
“I don’t think so.” His head came closer still. “I must’ve met almost a million women in my life and you’re unlike anyone I’ve ever met.”
It hurt to breathe. “A million women?” she asked skeptically.
The side of his mouth kicked up. “Maybe that’s an exaggeration.”
“What’s so different about me?”
One hand dropped away from the sofa back to cup her cheek, his gaze intense. “I thought it was only Jennie who had skin as velvety as a Queen Anne peach.”
He hadn’t answered her. She didn’t press him. Maybe it was for the best not to know.
“Genetics.” Candace tried to laugh his intensity off. “My mother’s skin is soft, too.”
The back of his hand brushed down the side of her throat to the top button of the fine cotton-knit cardigan she’d donned with jeans after she’d hurriedly gotten out the bath, fearful he might make good on his threat to return.
His index finger rested on the pearly button, above the hollow between her breasts, and her breath quickened.
The button popped loose.
Candace’s heart stopped.
When Nick bent forward her lips parted. There was a moment before his mouth touched hers, a time when she could’ve told him to stop, that she didn’t want this awful complication. Candace didn’t utter a sound.
Instead, her eyelids fluttered down.
His lips were unexpectedly cool as he kissed her. Heat ignited, wild and raging. The hand on her jaw pressed her closer and the angle changed. Nick let out a hiss and his touch gentled, the kiss becoming increasingly intimate. Candace burrowed against him with small, hungry movements of a cat.
The pressure of the kiss deepened for a sharp instant, then eased. Candace opened her eyes.
Nick gazed down at the woman enfolded in his arms, shaken by the emotions that stormed through him.
Beneath his fingertips the cotton of her sweater was fine and delicate. He undid the next pearl button, heard her breath catch, and glanced down. The scalloped edge with its border of embroidered pink roses was almost too feminine against his square-tipped fingers. Her still-damp hair had been pulled back from her face with a hair tie, and from this angle he could see that she wasn’t wearing a smudge of makeup.
Yet she was breathtakingly beautiful—like the angel he’d imagined her to be the first time he’d seen her.
Her eyelashes fell again, shielding the misty eyes from his. The dark lashes lay against the fine-grained skin, a faint flush giving her face a warm glow that caused his breathing to falter. Swallowing, Nick undid a third button. She didn’t object. The sweater fell open, revealing the curves of her breasts.
His arousal was immediate.
Pushing the cotton knit off her shoulders, he watched her face. Her eyes remained shut. When he lowered his gaze to the skin he’d bared, he saw the prickles of arousal that had broken over her rose-flushed skin.
He suppressed a moan.
Nick dropped to his knees in front of the sofa and lowered his head to carefully tongue the dainty pink tip of the breast he’d exposed.
For a split second, time froze. There wasn’t a sound in the room. After a pulse beat in which Nick thought his heart might explode, Candace let out a gasp.
He licked again. Lightly. Insistently. Her head whipped back, and her hands dug into the leather of the sofa on either side of her thighs. Immediately he closed his lips over the tight nub and felt the shock of reaction that went through her. Pulling away, he pursed his lips and blew. The nipple hardened. She made a mewing sound and her hands tangled in his hair, pulling him back to her.
Nick’s head rushed down, his mouth wide, and he sucked her in.
This time her spine arched. Her breathing grew rapid, becoming harsh pants in the quiet of the study. Nick’s fingers were clumsy with haste as he opened the remaining buttons. Rising up, he parted the edges of the sweater. His chest seized tight as he gazed at the sleek skin, the full curves of her bare breasts.
“Ah…”
He wasn’t sure who’d broken the silence—him or her. His hands came up. Slowly, reverently, he framed the full ripeness of her breasts, the peaks popping hard. He bent his head toward the breast he hadn’t yet touched and laved it with long sweeps of his tongue.
She convulsed against his mouth, her body superbly responsive, even though her eyes were still screwed shut.
His breathing was harsh and erratic, loud in the cozy intimacy of the study. Releasing her breasts, Nick sat back on his heels and tore his shirt open.
Then, taking both her hands in his, he pressed them against his naked chest under his rumpled shirt.
“Touch me,” he commanded as her eyes shot open. “Feel my heart pounding.”
As she s
troked his chest, Nick was engulfed in the endless, misty depths. He felt himself sinking…drowning.
“Candace.”
She blinked. But instead of the spell breaking, she came to life. Her fingers feathered down beneath his shirt…across his stomach…until lightning forked through him. Nick swallowed, his mouth parched dry.
“I can’t think,” he muttered hoarsely. “All I can do is…feel.”
Sensation, wave on wave, broke over him as her fingertips swept lightly across his skin. His hands closed on her hips, the denim of her well-washed cotton jeans soft under his thumbs. Rising high on his knees in front of her, he yanked her off the sofa into his arms and hauled her up against him. Hard. He hugged her to him and claimed her mouth, and kissed her deeply.
When he’d finished, he loosened his arms a little until his hands rested on her shoulders. He sat back on his heels as they both gulped in air, their breathing audible in the overheated room.
“Wow.” She sounded awed.
Nick suddenly felt about thirty feet tall. He gave a husky half laugh and let his fingers caress the rounds of her shoulders where her sweater had fallen away to expose tempting creamy skin.
“Again?”
“I’m not sure I’ll survive if you keep kissing me like that,” she said honestly. “My knees are weak.”
“So what was it like with…him?”
The eyes that met him were wide and suddenly very, very wary. “Who?”
“Jennie’s father.”
She tore out of his arms with a force that caught him off guard. “Stop this, Nick. It’s not funny!”
Her reaction startled him. “Hey…”
Perhaps his morbid curiosity had freaked her out. But he’d wanted to know, dammit. A surge of unfamiliar possessiveness swept through him.
Hell, he couldn’t stop thinking about her—and he couldn’t remember when last he’d had the hots like this over a woman.
He’d certainly never felt this way about Jilly in the seven years’ famine that had been their marriage.
Candace was on her feet, rebuttoning the knit top, her color high, her gaze averted.
“Tell me about him.” Nick stood. “I need to know.”
She raised her head. Her mouth was set, her eyes flashed. “C’mon, Mr. Valentine. Stop playing games. You must know you’re Jennie’s father.”
Seven
Nick looked pole-axed.
“I need a Scotch,” he said, and crossed over to the liquor cabinet to pour two fingers of amber liquid into a heavy crystal glass. “Can I get you one, too?”
Candace shook her head and suppressed the instinctive urge to tell him that sugar water would be better for shock. Somehow she didn’t think Nick would appreciate it.
His hand closed around her wrist and he gently drew her down onto the couch beside him. “Now run that past me again.”
She simply wasn’t ready to confront the fact that she and this man who caused such an emotional response in her had made a child together.
A perfect, wonderful little girl.
Jennie…
A child Candace had no intention of leaving in his care, a child she wanted back…whatever it took.
But she was starting to suspect that Nick might not surrender Jennie so easily. And Candace was delaying the inevitable moment of confrontation, thinking about the best way to address it.
“Jennie is your child.” Candace’s stomach churned. “Your sperm was used for the IVF. And the DNA tests after her birth confirmed that you are her father.”
At the time she’d signed the surrogacy agreement, she’d been affronted by the clause requesting a DNA test before the baby was delivered to the Valentines. But she’d understood that the couple had wanted to be assured that the baby was Nick’s—not the child of some stranger she’d slept with.
“Frankly, I’m stunned that you believe Jennie is my child,” he finally admitted, not looking at her, “and more than a little skeptical.”
He hadn’t known. Her suspicion that he and Jilly had worked together to pull off the pretense of a lifetime had been off the mark. She’d been so sure he’d known that Jennie wasn’t Jilly’s baby, that for reasons of their own he and Jilly had wanted to keep that secret.
Now it appeared Nick really had believed Jennie was his wife’s child all along.
That stunned her.
Her attention shifted back to him as he ran his hands through his hair in a distracted manner. “I told you Jilly was pregnant—and my sister confirmed it.”
“But…” Candace’s voice trailed away.
He raised an eyebrow. “But?”
“Jilly couldn’t have children,” she said slowly.
“She told you that?”
Candace nodded, miserably conscious that every word was knocking the nails further into the coffin of her hopes. Oh, heavens, what had she done? Had she ruined her chances of securing custody of Jennie? “She said that the IVF wasn’t working—that her doctor had established that she’d been one of those unlucky women who undergo menopause very early.”
Nick blew out a pent-up breath. “Well, clearly my wife was lying to someone. She told me that the IVF had been successful. That she was pregnant.” There was a strange note in his voice. “I watched her pregnancy progress over nine months…even though I was away a lot of that time. Hell, she spent a fortune on designer maternity wear.”
“And, of course, you had no reason not to believe her.”
Nick shook his head. “I had my doubts, but not for the reason you think. You see, I thought Jilly had a lover.” His mouth kinked. “Someone who’d obviously been more successful at impregnating her than I had been.”
Nick hadn’t even believed Jennie was his child?
Candace suppressed the urge to howl with frustration at the injustice of it all. If she’d said nothing about him being Jennie’s father, maybe he would’ve been only too glad to relinquish custody of the baby to her.
It was enough to make Candace feel seriously sick with regret.
Yet it wouldn’t have been right. How could she have taken Jennie under false pretenses? Nick had been lied to enough already…
She drew a deep breath and said slowly, “That must’ve been hard to accept.”
“Somewhat.”
Normally the dry retort would’ve amused her, but Candace couldn’t bring herself to smile. Not now. Maybe not ever…if she’d destroyed her chance of getting Jennie back. Yet she couldn’t stop the flood of sympathy for Nick.
“So Jilly faked her pregnancy.”
“Faked her pregnancy?”
This was awkward. “Only you know for sure whether it was possible. I have heard of women who hate their bodies when they’re pregnant—don’t want anyone to see them naked, move into a separate room. If Jilly had been like that…” Candace could feel herself coloring. She didn’t want to be privy to this man’s personal life with his dead wife. The thought of him and Jilly together caused her stomach to sink.
“It’s possible,” he said tightly.
“Jilly flew with me to the clinic where the insemination was done.”
“You went to Namkhet Island?”
Candace nodded.
“Jilly said she was planning to be inseminated there. I consented to my sperm being used—and acted out the whole fiction. I even received bills,” he said. “I never knew that she’d traded places with you nor that she never intended to undergo any of the procedures there herself. In fact, I came to believe she’d taken her lover with her and replaced my sperm with his.”
“I can vouch that there was no lover.”
“So the bills I received for the IVF procedures were your bills, not Jilly’s as I assumed?”
Candace’s discomfort increased. “Yes—that was part of the arrangement.”
“Of course.” Nick’s mouth twisted. “There was also a bill for double accommodation and shared meals at the most glamorous resort on the island. Jilly told me she needed time alone to steel herself agains
t the very real possibility that the IVF might again not work. Once the hotel bill was forwarded to me for payment, I knew instantly that she’d lied to me.”
Candace felt sick. Clearly Nick had assumed Jilly had stayed there with her lover. “That was for me—I told Jilly it wasn’t necessary.” She hadn’t needed a luxury holiday to convince her that she was doing the right thing. She’d done it for Jilly and her husband who had no other way of getting the child they craved. “Jilly said it was important to her that she get to know me. It felt a little weird, but I told myself she wanted to make sure the surrogate she’d picked wasn’t a lunatic before she went through with the final insemination. I might’ve done the same thing in her place.”
Nick laughed without humor. “Receiving the bill was a relief. The worst of it all was I didn’t care that Jilly had taken a lover. I even hoped it might finally pave the way for a divorce.”
Poor Jilly.
What he’d told Candace gave her some insight into the relationship—or lack of relationship—between Jilly and Nick. It appeared they’d drifted apart…so separate they might as well have lived in different houses, on different continents. No wonder Jilly had been able to fake a pregnancy while arranging with a surrogate to create a baby her husband had known nothing about.
“That’s why you didn’t go to the island with her,” Candace said. “Because she convinced you she wanted time alone. And once you discovered she’d lied, it was easy to convince yourself that she had no intention of having your baby.”
He nodded.
Jilly had told her Nick had been too busy. She’d accepted it at the time, but now Candace found that she desperately wanted to hear Nick’s own version of how events had unfolded.
“But I never confronted her with it. We’d been through IVF before—several times. Unsuccessfully. Jilly told me I didn’t have to be there. That the frozen embryos and sperm would be forwarded by the specialist we’d been dealing with here in Auckland.”
He met her eyes. “I questioned how reputable the institution was—hell, I even did some checking. Everything seemed fine. There’d been some breakthroughs achieved, and I could understand why Jilly wanted to give it a try—why she thought it might be her last chance.” Nick rubbed the bridge of his nose. “To be honest, my first reaction was relief that she didn’t appear to want me along. Jilly could be very…” he paused “…demanding.”