Men Made in America Mega-Bundle

by Gayle Wilson, Marie Ferrarella, Jennifer Greene, Annette Broadrick, Judith Arnold, Rita Herron, Anne Stuart, Diana Palmer, Elizabeth Bevarly, Patricia Rosemoor, Emilie Richards

  His jaw tautened as he studied her. “Do you have anything you can take for it?”

  She did, but she didn’t like using the tablets. She was afraid they might harm the baby, despite all the assurances by the doctor and the pharmacist that they wouldn’t.

  “I don’t like taking pills,” she said quietly.

  “Do you like throwing up?” he returned.

  She turned in the seat, and her blue eyes shot sparks at him. “I hate Yankees,” she said coldly.

  He held that mutinous gaze. “That isn’t what you said the night before Grandmother’s surgery,” he said, his voice as soft and dark as velvet.

  Her eyes closed. She didn’t like remembering. She reached down for her purse and took one of the tablets from the folder. She had to make sure he didn’t see that folder, because it stated in large letters that the pills were for nausea in the early stages of pregnancy. She took the coffee the stewardess had poured her and sipped a little of it with the pill.

  “You look odd,” Worth said after a minute.

  “I lost my lunch,” she said curtly, “how do you expect me to look? I’d walked down on the beach hoping the breeze would settle my stomach. And no sooner did I turn around than I saw you, and it started churning all over again.”

  He actually smiled, although it was reluctantly and just a twitch of his wide mouth. But his eyes searched over her as if he wanted to memorize how she looked.

  “My God, it seems like years since I’ve seen you,” he said under his breath.

  “Does it? I’d hoped that it would be years before I saw you again,” she said waspishly. “Light-years.”

  He sighed angrily and lit a cigarette.

  “Do you mind?” she challenged. “I’m sick enough as it is!”

  He hesitated, but only a second, before he ground it out. “You’re making this damned difficult.”

  “So are you. I’m sorry about Jeanette. I love her, too. But I can’t spend my life in Chicago, and especially not near you! I hate you!”

  He didn’t move a muscle. He seemed to stop breathing. His hand went blindly to a magazine in the pocket at the back of the seat ahead. He took it out, crossed his long legs and began to read as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

  She leaned back against her own seat with tears stinging her eyes. She was sick and lonely and afraid. What would she do if he realized what was wrong with her? What would she tell Jeanette? She couldn’t ever remember feeling so helpless. And he didn’t even care. That was what hurt the most. He didn’t even care.

  If she could have seen the blank, dark eyes that were staring so unseeingly at the pages of that magazine, she might have changed her mind. They held a kind of torment that would have intensified her tears.

  Hours later, he was pulling his own Mercedes up at the door of the house. Beside him, Amelia was tired and almost asleep from the combination of the pills and the long journey. All she wanted was to lie down, but Worth wasn’t going to allow that, she knew.

  She’d been so unhappy when she said goodbye to Jeanette. Now he was going to put them both through it again. How could she leave a second time?

  He got out her suitcase and closed the trunk lid. “Here,” he said, tossing her overnight case toward her, “make yourself useful.”

  She deliberately let it fall, afraid that the strain of trying to catch it might hurt the baby. It crashed onto the steps and bottles shattered. She stared at it blankly.

  “Well, my God, excuse me,” he said curtly, bending to lift it. “I didn’t realize you were too weak to lift a case. Open the door, then.”

  She did that, and she never looked at him.

  “There’s just one other thing,” he said, pausing with her in the hall, and his eyes were threatening, cold. “Don’t get any ideas about staying longer than it takes to get her on her feet again. I don’t want you here. The sooner you’re out of my life for good, the happier I’ll be. You were a sweet diversion that night, but I’ve had my fill. I don’t want you, in any way, now.”

  “That works both ways,” she said in a ghostly whisper.

  He led her down the hall, pausing at the door of his grandmother’s room. “Go ahead. I’ll put your bags in your room.”

  She opened the door, and Jeanette looked up from the bed. She looked ten years older, haggard, weak, pale as death.

  “Oh, Jeanette,” Amelia whispered tearfully. She ran to the bed, and the old lady held out her thin arms.

  “Dear girl,” the quavering voice whispered back. “My dear girl, I’ve missed you so much! Did he drag you back, is that why you’re here? And how are you? The trip must have been terrible for you.”

  “I was sick half the way here,” Amelia whispered. Her head nestled beside the silvery one on the crisp pillow cover. “But now I’m glad I came. What’s happened to you?”

  “I have no appetite,” Jeanette said wearily. “No will to live. I told you before you left, dear, I can’t see the future anymore.”

  “But you must,” Amelia said. She sank down on the bed beside the withered little body and held the thin hand. “Worth is home now.”

  “Yes, he is,” came the grudging reply. “About ten minutes a day, he’s home. And when he’s here, he roars around like a train, and curses the servants…. I don’t know what happened while he was gone, but he’s changed dreadfully.”

  “What about the nurse you were going to hire?” Amelia chided gently.

  Jeanette pursed her lips and made a rude sound. “I hate nurses.” She glanced up at the younger girl. “I missed you. We had a lot of fun together.”

  “Yes, I missed you, too,” Amelia said with a soft smile. “But I don’t know how I’m going to manage being here until he thinks I’ve worked out enough of my time. I’m afraid he’ll notice.”

  “You could just tell him, you know,” Jeanette suggested. She sighed, as if talking was an effort. “He’d understand. It isn’t completely your fault, the man has to take some of the blame. It isn’t easy to get pregnant without help, you know, even Worth would realize that.”

  “Pregnant?”

  The man in the open doorway had turned a pasty shade, his tan eclipsed. His dark eyes went homing to Amelia’s body, and he stared at her while wheels clicked over in his head. Amelia could almost see them turning. Her nausea, the loose clothing, the way she’d dodged that bag he tossed her, her unwillingness to come with him on the plane. His eyes closed. His face hardened.

  “Oh, sweet God,” he whispered, shaken. “And I forced you to come here, putting the child at risk. What have I done?”

  Eleven

  Amelia stared at him with conflicting emotions. He looked devastated by what he’d learned so unexpectedly, but how did he feel about the baby? Trapped, angry, contemptuous, afraid…how? Her big blue eyes watched him closely, like a hunter trying to find a sign in a dark forest. But when his eyes opened again, they were as blank as a piece of paper. He simply looked at her, and looked and looked, as if he’d only just met her.

  “I’m sorry,” Amelia whispered unsteadily. “I didn’t want to come back, you know. If you hadn’t insisted, you’d never have found out.”

  His face contorted. “My God, is that why you left?”

  “Of course it’s why she left,” Jeanette broke in, glaring at him, and her voice was stronger than it had been since Amelia walked into the room. The elderly woman dragged herself upright in her frilly pink bedjacket and fixed a scalding eye on her grandson, who was still looking as if he’d been shot. “She knew you had a low opinion of her, Worth, she was afraid that you’d hold her in contempt if you knew. She swore me to secrecy before she left.”

  Amelia had to struggle for the right words. She shifted restlessly on the bed. “I’ve told your grandmother that the father doesn’t know,” she told Worth, making it sound as if the father was some shadowy person because she didn’t want to betray him. Her eyes pleaded with him to go along with the fiction, not to upset his grandmother with such a personal scandal. “I do
n’t want him to know. It’s my baby. I’ll have it and raise it and love it, all by myself.”

  “You will not,” Jeanette said haughtily. “You’ll stay here and I’ll help you. And if Worth doesn’t like it, he can move out,” she added with a sharp glance at the frozen features of her grandson. “A child around the place might keep me alive for years and years. I love children.”

  Worth finally jerked away from the door frame and came into the room. He stared down at Amelia with eyes so dark they seemed like black marbles. He ran a rough hand through his thick, straight hair, so that it fell roguishly onto his broad forehead. He looked so big, and Amelia knew so well the touch of his skin, the strength in those hard muscles. She dropped her eyes to the bed, so that the memories wouldn’t have to torment her.

  “Amazing,” Worth said quietly, “that you’d try to protect me, after the way I’ve treated you.”

  He dropped down in the chair beside the bed, staring at Amelia while Jeanette glanced from one set face to the other and frowned.

  He took Amelia’s free hand in his, feeling its coldness. His dark eyes went to meet his grandmother’s. “There’s something I have to confess,” he said gently. “The man she’s trying so hard to protect is me. I went to her for comfort the night before your surgery, Grandmother, and out of misplaced generosity, she gave everything I asked for. The baby is mine.”

  Amelia looked up at him, pained. “Oh, Worth,” she whispered. “I’m sorry!”

  His fingers contracted around hers. “It takes two,” he said, his voice deep and rough.

  Jeanette’s face was glowing, her lifeless eyes suddenly sparkling, a happy dancing blue as she caught her breath. “The baby is my great-grandchild?” she asked delightedly.

  “I’m afraid so,” Worth returned with faint humor. His dark eyes searched Amelia’s shamed ones. “There isn’t the remotest possibility that the baby could have been fathered by anyone else.”

  Amelia’s lips trembled. She lowered tear-filled eyes to her lap and saw the tears splatter onto his hair-covered wrist.

  “Don’t,” he whispered. He produced a handkerchief and dried her eyes. “Don’t. Everything is going to be all right now.”

  “Of course it is, my dear,” Jeanette said gently. She reached out and stroked Amelia’s long, disheveled hair. “Worth and I will take care of you. A baby,” she sighed, dreamy-eyed now, so different from the defeated-looking woman she’d been only minutes before. And then it hit her. “But, my God, Worth, you aren’t married!”

  “We will be within the week,” he said imperturbably. He got up, sticking his hands in his pockets to study Amelia. “And don’t argue,” he told the young woman, who’d just opened her mouth to protest. “If you do, I swear I’ll call that photographer who snapped you in the trench coat out here, and I’ll give him a Pulitzer-prizewinning shot! And then I’ll mail a copy to your parents, Amy. I mean it. You’re marrying me, whether you like it or not.”

  “Damn you!” Amelia fumed at him.

  “So that’s how you got her to come back with you,” Jeanette murmured dryly as she studied her grandson. “You threatened to tell her parents what you’d done, didn’t you?”

  “It was the only way to get her here,” he confessed on a heavy sigh. “I saw history repeating itself,” he said gruffly, turning away, and Amelia and Jeanette exchanged knowing glances. He went to the window and smoothed back the curtain. “It’s funny,” he said, laughing bitterly. “I can do cost estimates in my head, I can beat out competitors on contracts, I can put up enormous skyscrapers. But when it comes to people, I just can’t seem to read character.” He turned slowly, his eyes dark with regret as they touched Amelia’s face and body. “Amy, I said some horrible things to you today. I hope eventually you may be able to forgive me for them. And for what I’ve done to you. If it’s any consolation, I’m no happier than you are about the situation.”

  So he didn’t want the baby, she thought. Well, it was what she already knew, wasn’t it? She felt old.

  “Why don’t you go and lie down?” Jeanette told her gently. “I’m better already. I daresay I’ll eat a monstrous supper now that I have so much to anticipate. I can knit, did you know? I’ll make the most precious little booties and caps. Make her lie down, Worth,” she told her grandson. “She needs lots of rest now. And send Baxter in here, I want him to go to town and get me some yarn.” She frowned. “We’ll need to put wedding announcements in the papers, and Amy must call her parents….”

  Worth gestured Amelia out into the hall while Jeanette was still talking and closed the door behind them.

  Amelia quickly moved away from him and went to the guest room. Her eyes fell when she saw the bed, and all the memories came flooding back of the last time he’d been in here with her.

  Her bags had been put on luggage racks, the only indication of occupation. She smelled perfume and knew it must be from a broken bottle in her cosmetics case.

  “I’ll buy you some more toiletries,” Worth said as her eyes went to the square case. “I’m sorry I tossed the case to you like that. I didn’t know you were pregnant or I’d never have done it.”

  “Don’t bother handling me with kid gloves,” she said shortly. She sat down on the bed and with a long breath stretched out, dangling her feet over the side. “I’m so tired,” she whispered. Her eyes closed.

  “Tired and sick and upset, all of it my fault,” he said quietly. He bent and took off her sandals before he pulled a quilted pink coverlet over her legs.

  Unexpectedly, he sat down beside her, and her eyes flew open, wide and a little frightened.

  “I won’t hurt you,” he said gently. His hand eased down to her tangled hair and smoothed it away from her face. “I’m sorry. About everything.”

  Her eyes closed so that he wouldn’t see the tears. She could manage if he’d been angry, but that unexpected tenderness got to her. “I tried to keep you from finding out,” she whispered brokenly.

  His hand stilled. “Yes, I know.” His fingers touched her lips. “Open your eyes, Amy.”

  She did, and found him staring at her with an expression she couldn’t quite explain.

  “Why didn’t you want me to know about the baby?” he asked gently.

  He didn’t seem angry now; only curious. It calmed her a little.

  “Because,” she began, her fingers restlessly pleating the coverlet, “I didn’t know how you’d react, or even if you’d believe it was yours.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” he asked. “How could it be someone else’s?”

  “You might have accused me of sneaking around,” she muttered.

  “Sure. With who, Baxter?”

  Her lips made a thin line.

  He smiled slowly. Accusing eyes, mutinous mouth, exquisite color in her face. He studied her mouth. “You’ve given Grandmother a new lease on life. Now she has something to look forward to.”

  “Yes, I saw that,” she said. Her eyes fell to his chest. “At least somebody’s happy about it.”

  “Aren’t you?” he asked gently, and tilted her chin. He searched her eyes. “Don’t you want the baby?”

  “Of course I want it, but you don’t!”

  His heavy eyebrows went straight up. “I don’t?”

  “You didn’t want commitment, remember?” she shot at him, dragging herself into a sitting position to glare at him. “No strings, you said, just a sweet interlude, you said!”

  “And I thought you’d only pitied me, and that’s why you gave yourself.”

  “I pitied myself, for being so stupid and—”

  He bent forward and stopped her mouth by placing his against it. She started to draw away, but his hand slid behind her neck and kept her there.

  “No,” he whispered. “Sit still.”

  Her fingers went to his hand. “Worth, don’t, please….”

  But his mouth coaxed and teased, and before she could find the willpower to resist him, the old magic was beginning to take her over. She felt her
mouth softening, opening to the warm persuasion of his. She felt his tongue teasing the inside of her lips, probing further, felt his hands suddenly reach for her and bring her into a warm, fervent embrace.

  “Oh, Worth,” she moaned, half protest, half pleasure. Her arms enfolded him, her mouth returned the hungry pressure of his. And the whole world seemed to spin away.

  “My baby,” he whispered against her lips, easing her back down on the bed. “You’re carrying my baby….”

  The thought seemed to inspire him to even greater efforts. She drowned in warm, hungry kisses, arched her body to hands that were gentle and slow and expert on her swollen breasts. Her eyes opened as he lifted his head, and she felt a breeze and realized that he’d opened her dress all the way down the front. He was looking at her, seeing the subtle changes that even the early days of pregnancy had made to her slender body.

  “Very pretty,” he whispered with a purely masculine smile, the conquering male surveying his conquest and liking the visible evidence of it. “Your breasts are bigger.”

  “They’re swollen,” she said shyly.

  “This is darker.” His fingers traced around the hard nipple. His eyes dropped to the slight swell of her abdomen above the pink bikini briefs she was wearing.

  He hesitated before he reached down to touch it, as if he was afraid he might hurt her. He looked up into her eyes with a question in his own as his hand slowly flattened over his child.

  “My God,” he breathed, searching her face. “I never connected lovemaking with this,” he confessed. “I never even considered that a baby might come of it.”

  “Men don’t, do they?” she asked gently. “Did you think women got them from the garden, under leaves?”

  He smiled back. “No.”

  His face was tender now, not accusing or cold, and she warmed to that tenderness.

  “I’m sorry I left so quickly,” she said. “Jeanette promised to get a nurse, and I was so frightened….”

  His eyes narrowed. “I can imagine,” he replied. He bent and kissed her forehead, so gently. “I’d gone off like a timber wolf to lick my wounds. I thought I could get over you, so I didn’t ask to speak to you when I phoned. I’m sorry about that. You could have told me if things hadn’t been so strained between us.”