by Dani Collins
She wondered if that was why he had insisted they browse the gondola gift shop when they’d been enjoying their stolen day in Vancouver. He had bought her a crystal sun catcher and made a remark about her needing luck to catch any sun if she was moving to Vancouver, but he’d offered it as a housewarming gift anyway.
She had thanked him with a kiss that she still remembered as passionate enough to curl her toes. She had planned to put his gift in the baby’s room.
“Try this,” he coaxed, snapping her out of her reverie.
It was a flapperesque drop-waisted sleeveless dress with a sailor collar.
“I usually wear clothes that are more classic and conservative.” But she was almost always looking for something that could double as work wear, nothing that was purely for the pleasure of looking cute.
She tried it and, as she smoothed the dress down her hips, instantly felt more comfortable in this changing figure of hers.
“It suits you.” The admiration in Jun Li’s gaze made her even more conscious of her body. Of the fact she was bustier and had hips and he seemed to think that suited her, too.
Their gazes tangled. The way his gaze dropped to her mouth made her lips part and her breath stutter.
In the dark of his bed, he’d kissed her as though starving for her. His whole body had been taut against hers, his fingers digging into her buttocks as he rocked her world.
She watched the temptation fog his gaze. Her skin tightened. She licked her lips, anticipating the feel of his mouth crushing the tingles from her own.
If he had kissed her right then, demonstrating that he couldn’t resist her any more than she could resist him, it would have gone a long way to reassuring her that she hadn’t made a complete fool of herself last night.
But just as his hand came up and he looked ready to cup the side of her neck and kiss the daylights out of her, he stepped back and dropped his hand to his side.
“Almeida. Come in. Ivy, this is your stylist. I’ll wait upstairs.” He disappeared.
Almeida smiled knowingly as she touched a flat iron to Ivy’s hair and gave her a few swipes of makeup. Ivy tried to quell a blush that was both unrequited lust and anguished embarrassment that she couldn’t hide how she was reacting.
She came back upstairs to find Jun Li holding a meeting with a half dozen faces at the dining room table. He introduced her to everyone. One was his PA from last night, and another was a public relations person who came outside with them and photographed them sitting side by side on a wicker love seat with the lush garden wall as a backdrop.
“I thought we were calling Dad? Why is this happening?” she asked through a gritted-teeth smile.
“For the announcement.”
She snapped her head around. “I haven’t agreed to anything.”
“Not yet,” he allowed. “But when you do, the photographs will be ready.”
He was back to railroading her. Why? Because he’d seen how weak she was when he had almost kissed her? Or because of the way she’d behaved in the middle of the night?
Her hand curled into a fist beneath his. “You’re taking things for granted. Last night didn’t mean what you think it did.”
He lifted his hand from hers and jerked his head at the photographer. “Leave us.”
The photographer scurried away, and Ivy sat there with her face on fire, her flush stoked by fury and hurt and humiliation. A silence pulsed between them.
She could tell he was looking at her, but she refused to look at him. She stared into the stillness of the water.
“What exactly do you think I’m taking for granted?” he asked dangerously.
“That I’m going to marry you just because I—” She couldn’t say it. She had to clear a thickness from her throat in order to speak at all. “Last night was just...hormones.” She flicked a glance to ensure there weren’t any housekeepers or any of the other staff lurking and overhearing. This was humiliating enough. “It’s like I have an amplifier inside me. When I’m tired, I’m exhausted. When I’m hungry, I’m famished. I’m trying really hard to be rational over how things are going between us, but I’m fighting tears every second along with an urge to scream. That’s how pregnancy affects me. I’m emoting for two. You could have been anyone last night.” That was a blatant lie, but it felt like the only way she could save any face.
“Is that right?” He released a jagged, humorless laugh and set his arm behind her on the back of the love seat so he was angled toward her. He touched her chin, urging her to look at him. “Because if you’re telling me that pregnancy has made you so amorous you’ll wake a man up for sex and come apart before you’re even naked, you’d better believe I’m going to be the man in bed beside you.”
Her heart hitched and she wanted to pull away, but their stares were locked again, and his thumb was playing across her bottom lip, making it feel swollen and buzzing.
She saw the hungry wolf in him rising, but his nostrils flared, and his expression hardened.
“We’ll save it for our wedding night, though. Incentive,” he added in a drawl.
Again, she was struck by how easily he could take or leave her while she was ready to fall into his arms. She forced herself to drag forth her own dry chuckle.
“I won’t marry you for your money. You think I’m going to marry you for that? Good luck.”
His hand came back to the side of her face and his head swooped down. His mouth crashed over hers, not painfully, but devastating all the same. His lips swept untamed over hers again and again, exploding her world. He erased her mind of everything but him, exactly as he had from the first time he’d kissed her when they’d stood on a platform three thousand feet in the air.
Her response had nothing to do with her pregnancy. He built her up and tore her down and remade her in a matter of heartbeats. Made her his. Again. Still. Because she’d been his since the first time he’d raked his lips so tenderly across hers, whether she wanted to give herself to him or not.
As he drew away, she realized her hand was clenched around the strength of his wrist. Her lips clung to his, and her eyes felt too heavy to open. Breathing was something other people did because they didn’t know how wonderful it was to be smothered by his mouth.
A final touch of his lips to hers that was almost a peck of comfort. His voice was a rumble of masculine strength and suppressed desire.
“Yes, blossom, I do think you’ll marry for that.”
A wounded gasp left her before she could catch it back. His profile tightened slightly. Compunction? Something else that she couldn’t read because she was so angry, her eyes were blurring with unshed tears.
“Because I will,” he admitted in such a stark, impactful voice he nearly knocked her into the pool with it. “So let’s call your father and tell him our happy news.”
CHAPTER SIX
THEY CALLED HER father from Jun Li’s office, a sparsely furnished space with teak floors and a New Age desk that looked like the metal had poured off the one side to create its own support. A wall of locked glass protected some discreet filing cabinets along with rare books and a few small and likely priceless sculptures.
Despite what he’d said by the pool, Jun Li didn’t force the issue in front of her father. He sat beside her and let her do most of the talking.
Her father’s eyes welled with happiness at the baby news, and Ivy said she and Jun Li were still discussing how they would proceed. She promised to call him back soon.
As she set the phone aside, she couldn’t face the questions in Jun Li’s expression. She walked out to the pool, where she kicked off her slippers. She plopped down on the edge to dangle her feet in the water, trying to recalibrate. Trying to think.
But think about what? She knew what Jun Li expected her to do. She knew what her father expected. She knew what the whole world would expect once it was revealed she was carrying Tsa
i Jun Li’s baby. She knew what she would expect of herself if this was a hypothetical situation posed as a parlor game.
Reality was far more complex and arduous.
She was so deep in thought, she only distantly heard Jun Li say, “Do you see anything you like?”
His question didn’t make sense. A shadow unexpectedly descended in front of her face. It startled her so badly, she reflexively struck at whatever it was, sending it flying into the pool.
Sparkling droplets flashed as they scattered and rained into the water with soft plinks. Something square and flat landed on the surface and sat there like a boat that was taking on water.
“Apparently not.” Jun Li straightened and peeled his shirt up and off, blinding her with his tawny, muscled chest and small dark nipples and abs that were so perfectly defined, they were like stacked blocks of store-bought masculinity.
“What was that?”
“Rings.” He opened his belt and peeled himself down to his boxer briefs, stepping out of his slippers.
“Like...diamonds?” She looked with horror into the settling water to see glints of ice and gold sitting on the bottom of the pool. “Why would you stick them in my face like that?”
“Why would you throw them in the pool?” He took a breath and dived in without waiting for her answer. As he skimmed the bottom, his hands swept out a few times before he surfaced to grab the sinking tray.
He swam over to set the tray beside her. It still had a couple of rings stuck into its velvet slots. He poured several more into her hand.
“Is the jeweler still here? What if we don’t find them all?” She was so embarrassed.
“Are we looking for them?”
“Yes, I’m the spotter. You missed one over there.” She pointed to a shimmer of dark green.
He took another breath and made a second tour of the pool’s floor while she quietly goggled at the rings she was handling. The man certainly wasn’t afraid to be generous. All the stones looked to be at least three or four carats, not that she knew much about such things. There weren’t just diamonds, either. There were rubies and emeralds and sapphires. Their shapes ranged from round to square, heart-shaped to marquise, princess to pear. Many were haloed in smaller sparklers that also coated the platinum bands. All were as tasteful as they were extravagant.
Two more trips and she said, “That’s all the pockets filled. Should be all of them.”
“Good.” He hooked his elbow on the ledge beside her thigh. “I’ll ask again. Do you see anything you like? We can get something made if you prefer. You don’t have to, you know, throw them away.”
“I love how you act so accommodating while expecting me to do exactly what you want.” She pushed the tray back from the edge of the pool and tucked her palms together between her knees, scowling across the pool.
“Tell me what you think we should do, then. I’m all ears.”
She didn’t have any idea and he damned well knew it. His story this morning about living away from his parents for so many years had gotten to her. If she hadn’t had such a close relationship to her father when her mother had passed, she didn’t know how she would have survived.
Then there was the part where the sexual attraction between them seemed to be strong as ever.
I do think you’ll marry for that. Because I will.
She heaved an angry sigh. “Wanting to have sex with me and wanting to have a relationship with me are two different things. You didn’t call me back. You don’t want me. It’s very hard to commit my life to that.”
In the most obscenely effortless show of athletic strength and grace, he levered himself out of the pool and sat next to her in a swoosh of dripping water and gleaming, golden skin.
She swallowed and averted her eyes. “Don’t use sex to get your way,” she warned. “It’s beneath you.”
“That’s up for debate,” he said under his breath, bracing his hands on the ledge next to his splayed thighs. “Tell me about the man you were trying to forget when we made our baby.”
“What? No. Why?”
“Because you’re comparing me to him. I want to know if it’s a fair assessment.”
“I’m comparing the situation. You’re nothing like him.” For starters, sex with Jun Li nearly knocked her off the bed. With Bryant, it had been a lot of fumbling and her trying to be sexy and set a mood and winding up feeling as though she was faking the whole thing.
“He was your only lover besides me. Do I recall that correctly? There’s been no one since, if I was the only contender for paternity. What was his name?”
“Our previous relationships don’t matter. You said so,” she reminded him.
He kept his hard stare pinned on her, refusing to let her dodge or dissemble.
“Bryant,” she admitted in a mumble.
“You met at university?”
“High school. He was going into environmental science. I admired his principles.”
“Remind me to show you my wind farms.”
She rolled her eyes then dropped her gaze to the egg-beater swish of her feet in the water.
“He knew my mother,” she admitted. “Kind of. She was his orthodontist. And mine.” She automatically showed her teeth since telling people that detail about her mother always prompted a demand she prove it by showing off her perfect smile. “I liked being with someone who had a memory of her, even if it was only that.”
“I presumed you’d lost her since you only spoke about your father and said he’s remarrying. I’m sorry.”
“Thanks. I was sixteen. She was only forty-four. Struck by a car on a crosswalk on a rainy night.”
Ivy had thought she had learned to live with her grief until her breakup with Bryant had been all the harder for not having her mother’s shoulder to cry on. Then she had wished she could tell her about the surreal day she’d spent with Jun Li. Now she had a pregnancy she couldn’t share, and soon there would be a small face with traces of her mother in it. She was missing her more than ever.
“What happened to cause your breakup?” Jun Li’s attention sat like a weight on her. She sensed him holding very still as though gripped by a tension he didn’t want to reveal.
“Nothing,” she said ironically. “Many acts of nothing. Have you ever heard the expression that you only understand your life in reverse? When I look back, I see all the times where I should have cut and run, but at the time I had a vision of where we’d end up so I stuck it out, patiently waiting for that magical day to happen.”
“What kind of magic?”
“Marriage. Once we lost Mom, all I wanted was a family that was intact again. I felt like I couldn’t be happy again until I had that. It doesn’t make sense when I say it out loud, but it’s how I felt.”
“He didn’t want that?”
“No, but I didn’t see it. I thought other things were in our way, like education. We were pursuing different programs, so we went to different universities. We actually broke up, but neither of us saw anyone else, and we were always texting and calling. Pretty soon we were flying out to see one another. Except, when I look back, I see that he came to Vancouver to see his family. I was an afterthought.” A booty call.
“I expected to start our life together once we got our degrees, but a professor persuaded me to try for an opportunity in Hong Kong. Bryant said I should go for it because he wanted to get his master’s and would be away doing field research. Since I was working and he was still in school, I sent him money for things like textbooks and...” She felt like such an idiot. “In my mind, we were making sacrifices up front to ensure we had good careers ahead of us. We were building a strong foundation for our combined future.”
“Was he cheating on you?”
“I don’t want to sound even more naive than I already was, but I genuinely don’t think so. He borders on obsessive about his research. It’s fa
ir to say he had a mistress in that regard.” She quirked her mouth, dismissing how many hours of editorial work she’d put into his papers. How many times she had double-and triple-checked his data sets. “And I don’t think he was consciously using me. He’s just a self-involved person. I was a comfortable partner, out of the way, but available when he needed a sounding board or a cheerleader.”
She skipped over the part where Bryant had made endless excuses and canceled his trips to come see her in Hong Kong. How she couldn’t even count on him to call when he said he would. She was embarrassed by the way she’d clung to a vision that simply hadn’t existed.
“I thought it was the nature of commitment that sometimes you have bad times, and you have to stick it out until the better times come around. Then I tried to make the better times happen by taking a transfer to Toronto. It was actually a demotion, but I wanted to be with him. I wanted to start our life together.”
“He let you transfer before he told you that it wasn’t going to happen? What a jerk.”
“He was going away and needed someone to pay the bills for a couple of months, so yeah, that’s what he did. When he got back, I finally asked him point-blank if we were ever going to marry. He said he didn’t see it happening, so I moved out and started interviewing in Vancouver. I called Kevin while I was visiting Dad, thinking he might have some leads. He invited me to the party, I met you and now we’re here.”
Bryant’s rejection had been four months old when she had met Jun Li. It still felt fresh. She still held deep doubts in her appeal as a woman. In her ability to see what was real in a relationship. In the wisdom of trusting a man to have her best interests at heart.
“How is that situation similar to ours?” Jun Li asked with quiet challenge. “I want to marry you. I want to support you and keep our family intact.”
“You want me to arrange my life around yours. For your convenience. You don’t know me. You don’t want me.” She set the side of her hand against her breastbone, feeling the knife of that truth deep in her heart.