Jerome was marvellous at it, Megan had to admit. There was a gentleness about him she had never seen before.
‘Megan’s turn, Megan’s turn!’ the children began to chant.
She swallowed hard, feeling strong young hands pulling her forward. Jerome looked at her with a start of surprise as the children abandoned her before him.
Were Santas supposed to have that sensual warmth in their eyes? She didn’t think so.
‘Would you like to sit on my knee and tell me what you’d like for Christmas?’ he invited softly.
She blushed. ‘I don’t think so,’ she shook her head.
‘But you must.’ He pulled her down on to his knee, the children giggling at them. Jerome’s hand rested just below her breast, his eyes even warmer this close to. ‘What would you like, Megan?’ he prompted.
She was breathing hard, her heart suddenly melting. ‘You,’ she revealed achingly.
She could feel him tense. ‘Me?’ he repeated tautly.
‘Yes,’ she confirmed longingly.
‘You want me in your stocking on Christmas morning?’ he persisted uncertainly.
Megan was mesmerised by the fire burning in his eyes. ‘I had somewhere a bit more comfortable in mind,’ she murmured throatily.
‘Then you’ve got me.’ He stood up, pushing her off his lap. ‘Serve the food, Mrs Reece,’ he said softly. ‘Megan and I will be upstairs if it all gets too much for you.’
Megan allowed herself to be dragged up the stairs, wondering if she had gone completely insane. As soon as she had seen him again the past hadn’t seemed to matter; his sensitivity and love towards the children showed her what a truly kind man he was.
‘Wait here while I get these things off.’ He pushed her forcibly down on his bed before going into the adjoining bathroom.
All Megan’s uncertainty returned once she was alone. What was she doing here? Nothing had changed, nothing ever could change the fact that Jerome merely wanted to sleep with her. She stood up, hurrying to the door.
‘Oh no, you don’t!’ Jerome swung her round, pulling her against the muscled tautness of his body, his only clothing a blue towelling robe. ‘You aren’t going anywhere,’ he told her huskily.
‘I must.’ She daren’t look at him. ‘It was a mistake, all a mistake.’
‘The only mistake is that I should have done this sooner.’ His dark head swooped and he claimed her mouth in the sweetest, most drugging kiss they had ever shared. ‘Megan …’ he probed her lips apart. ‘Megan, I love you,’ he groaned.
She stiffened. ‘Love …?’
‘What’s the matter?’ His eyes darkened with pain. ‘Don’t you believe me?’
She frowned at the gauntness of him, at the air of weary defeat that seemed to surround him. ‘Rome—’
He sighed. ‘You don’t believe me. I do love you, Megan, I’ve always loved you. Why do you think every man who came near you suddenly became a threat? Why do you think I reacted so violently to finding Roddy at the hotel with you? Believe me, I don’t usually fight over women.’
‘Is that why you left me with him, because you love me?’ she scorned bitterly.
‘I didn’t leave you with him, you left with him.’
‘You told me to go,’ she accused.
‘I told Roddy to go,’ he corrected. ‘When I got back to the suite you’d gone too. Why did you go to London with me if you loved Roddy?’ he sounded agonised.
‘I didn’t love him. At the end I felt sorry for him, but I never loved him.’
‘At the hospital—’
‘There’s no point in bringing up the past, it isn’t going to help matters. Roddy had the mistaken idea that I had a secret passion for him. I didn’t.’
‘You didn’t love him?’
‘No.’
‘You don’t love him now?’
‘Not you too! No, I don’t love him. But I’m sorry he died. It was my fault—he was trying to save me.’
‘Thank God he succeeded!’ Jerome shuddered. ‘If you’d died I would have wanted to die too.’
‘Rome …’ she gasped in disbelief.
‘I would. But I can’t understand this—you and Roddy were always whispering together about something.’
‘Well, it certainly wasn’t the fact that we loved each other.’ Megan looked away.
He frowned. ‘You once told me there was someone else in his life, someone he didn’t want me to know about. I—My God, Patsy Jones! It was her, wasn’t it? That was why you suddenly seemed very involved with the Jones family.’
‘It was just spite on Roddy’s part,’ she hastened to excuse. ‘He thought it would make me jealous. His love for me was—obsessive.’ She still shuddered when she thought of it.
‘Like his father’s for my mother,’ Jerome said quietly. ‘He was like that about her. It finally got to the stage where she couldn’t stand it any more, and she left him. Frank committed suicide.’
‘Oh, my God!’ she groaned.
‘Yes,’ Jerome sighed. ‘My mother never got over it. But you will,’ he said fiercely. ‘I’ll make sure of that.’
‘Roddy didn’t crash on purpose,’ she insisted. ‘It was an accident.’
‘And I went through hell because of it,’ he moaned. ‘I seem to have been going through one kind of hell or another ever since I first met you. I’ve been terrified, suspicious, of every man who comes near you. I reached the point of no return with you a long time ago, both physically and mentally.’
‘But you left me to Roddy.’ She couldn’t hold back her bitterness. ‘Roddy hurt me so much that day, twisting my arm behind my back, that in the end I fainted. He was furious because I’d gone to London with you. He came to the hotel with the intention of making love to me. I was just regaining consciousness after my faint when you burst in on us. You—you made vile accusations,’ she remembered shakily.
‘But I didn’t mean for you to go! I came after you, you know.’
Her eyes widened with disbelief. ‘You did?’
‘How do you think I got to the hospital so quickly? I wasn’t far behind you. When I saw the crumpled wreck of Roddy’s car, and the police told me someone had been killed, I nearly went insane. When I reached the hospital and they told me you were still alive I just sat down and cried. Then when you woke up you told me to leave, would have nothing more to do with me.’
Megan swallowed hard. ‘I thought—’
‘You thought I still wanted to have an affair with you. You still think that.’
‘And do you?’ she challenged.
‘A lifelong one,’ he admitted huskily. ‘One that will take us even beyond life.’
‘Are you asking me to marry you?’ she asked breathlessly.
‘I’m begging you to.’ Jerome avidly searched her features for some response to his proposal. ‘I’m asking you to try and love me,’ he added pleadingly.
‘Even though you believe I’ve taken other lovers?’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t you mind about these other lovers?’
‘I hate them like hell!’ Jerome told her savagely. ‘I didn’t realise how possessive I was until I fell in love with you. It hasn’t been an easy lesson. Megan, a little while ago you told me you wanted me—well, you’ve got me, for a lifetime. Would you—could you ever come to love me?’
Megan didn’t like to see this arrogant man bowed by his love for her, hated to see his humility. ‘The day we met, you changed your mind about asking me out. Why?’
‘I thought you might feel embarrassed, working at The Towers, and dating me. Believe me, as soon as your mother was well enough to return I would have asked you out. Then you showed me in no uncertain terms that you didn’t like me, so I came up with the idea of a deal with Brian as a means of keeping you at The Towers.’
She smiled, her last uncertainty removed. ‘My mother once told me that The Towers needed a couple of children running about in it to make it into a home. But I don’t think she thought they would be he
r grandchildren.’
A fierce light entered the darkness of his eyes. ‘Do you love me?’ he asked disbelievingly.
‘Insanely,’ she laughed. ‘But I’m going to need some convincing about your loving me.’
‘Oh, I’ll convince you,’ he promised throatily, taking a threatening step towards her.
She licked her lips nervously. ‘There’s something else I think you should know.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Something you have to know before we’re married.’
Jerome seemed to pale. ‘What is it?’
‘You may not like it.’
‘What is it?’
‘I’m not experienced, Rome. I’ve never had a lover, not one, and I’m not sure I’ll even know how to start.’
He looked long and deeply into her completely innocent eyes, finally pulling her gently against him. ‘How I’ve misjudged you,’ he groaned. ‘What an idiot I’ve been!’
‘You don’t mind?’ she frowned up at him.
‘Mind? I’m bloody ecstatic! Oh, Megan!’ He picked her up and swung her round. ‘Hey, I’ve just thought of the perfect wedding gift from your mother. Bertha,’ he revealed smilingly. ‘She brought us together, it’s only fair that she should be back with the herd she misses so much.’
Megan glowed up at him. ‘I think that’s a wonderful idea. Mum’s going to live with Aunt Rose once Brian is married, and there’s really no room for Bertha at the farm now. Now I think we should go back downstairs, it is your party.’
He suddenly became serious. ‘I much prefer my own private party up here. Besides, if we start now maybe our own child could attend next year.’
‘Rome!’ she pretended shock, but was secretly thrilled at his mastery.
‘Mm?’ He bent to caress her earlobe.
‘I—Oh nothing.’ She gave herself up to the man she loved, knowing that their future would take care of itself. Right now the present was enough—more than enough.
* * * * *
Now, read on for a tantalizing excerpt of Caitlin Crews’s new release,
A BABY TO BIND HIS BRIDE
The next part of the One Night With Consequences miniseries!
Leonidas Betancur, presumed dead after an accident, cannot recall the wedding vows he made to Susannah. Her finding him awakens his memories and his desire for a wedding night! When their passion has consequences, Susannah realises she’s bound to her husband forever…
Keep reading to get a glimpse of
A BABY TO BIND HIS BRIDE
CHAPTER ONE
“THEY CALL HIM the Count,” the gruff man told her as he led her deeper and deeper into the wild, wearing more flannel and plaid than Susannah Betancur had ever seen on a single person. “Never a name, always the Count. But they treat him like a god.”
“An actual god or a pretend god?” Susannah asked, as if that would make any difference. If the Count was the man she sought, it certainly wouldn’t.
Her guide shot her a look. “Not sure it really matters this far up the side of a hill, ma’am.”
The hill they were trudging up was more properly a mountain, to Susannah’s way of thinking, but then, everything in the American Rockies appeared to be built on a grand scale. Her impression of the Wild, Wild West was that it was an endless sprawl of jaw-dropping mountains bedecked with evergreens and quaint place names, as if the towering splendor in every direction could be contained by calling the highest peak around something like Little Summit.
“How droll,” Susannah muttered beneath her breath as she dug in and tried her best not to topple down the way she’d come. Or give in to what she thought was the high elevation, making her feel a little bit light-headed.
That she was also breathless went without saying.
Her friend in flannel had driven as far as he could on what passed for a road out in the remote Idaho wilderness. It was more properly a rutted, muddy dirt track that had wound deeper and deeper into the thick woods even as the sharp incline clearly indicated that they were going higher and higher at the same time. Then he’d stopped, long after Susannah had resigned herself to that lurching and bouncing lasting forever, or at least until it jostled her into a thousand tiny little jet-lagged pieces. Her driver had then indicated they needed to walk the rest of the way to what he called the compound, and little as Susannah had wanted to do anything of the kind after flying all the way here from the far more settled and civilized hills of her home on the other side of the world in Rome, she’d followed along.
Because Susannah might not be a particularly avid hiker. But she was the Widow Betancur, whether she liked it or not. She had no choice but to see this through.
She concentrated on putting one booted foot in front of the other now, well aware that her clothes were not exactly suited to an adventure in the great outdoors. It hadn’t occurred to her that she’d actually be in the wilderness instead of merely adjacent to it. Unlike every person she’d seen since the Betancur private jet had landed on an airfield in the middle of nowhere, Susannah wore head-to-toe black to announce her state of permanent mourning at a glance. It was her custom. Today it was a sleek cashmere coat over a winter dress in merino wool and deceptively sturdy knee-high boots, because she’d expected the cold, just not the forced march to go along with it.
“Are you sure you don’t want to change?” her guide had asked her. They’d stared each other down in his ramshackle little cabin standing at lopsided attention in an overgrown field strewn with various auto parts. It had made her security detail twitchy. It had been his office, presumably. “Something less…?”
“Less?” Susannah had echoed as if she failed to catch his meaning, lifting a brow in an approximation of the ruthless husband she’d lost.
“There’s no real road in,” her guide had replied, eyeing her as if he expected her to wilt before him at that news. As if a mountain man or even the Rocky Mountains themselves, however challenging, could compare to the intrigues of her own complicated life and the multinational Betancur Corporation that had been in her control, at least nominally, these last few years, because she’d refused to let the rest of them win—her family and her late husband’s family and the entire board that had been so sure they could steamroll right over her. “It’s off the grid in the sense it’s, you know. Rough. You might want to dress for the elements.”
Susannah had politely demurred. She wore only black in public and had done so ever since the funeral, because she held the dubious distinction of being the very young widow of one of the richest men in the world. She found that relentless black broadcast the right message about her intention to remain in mourning indefinitely, no matter what designs her conspiring parents and in-laws, or anyone else, had on her at any given time.
She intended to remain the Widow Betancur for a very long while. No new husbands to take the reins and take control, no matter how hard she was pushed from all sides to remarry.
If it was up to her she’d wear black forever, because her widowhood kept her free.
Unless, that was, Leonidas Cristiano Betancur hadn’t actually died four years ago in that plane crash, which was exactly what Susannah had hauled herself across the planet to find out.
Leonidas had been headed out to a remote ranch in this same wilderness for a meeting with some potential investors into one of his pet projects when his small plane had gone down in these acres and acres of near-impenetrable national forest. No bodies had ever been found, but the authorities had been convinced that the explosion had burned so hot that all evidence had been incinerated.
Susannah was less convinced. Or maybe it was more accurate to say that she’d been increasingly more convinced over time that what had happened to her husband—on their wedding night, no less—had not been any accident.
That had led to years of deploying private investigators and poring over grainy photographs of dark, grim men who were never Leonidas. Years of playing Penelope games with her conniving parents and her equally scheming in-laws like she was something straight ou
t of The Odyssey, pretending to be so distraught by Leonidas’s death that she couldn’t possibly bear so much as a conversation about whom she might marry next.
When the truth was she was not distraught. She’d hardly known the older son of old family friends whom her parents had groomed her to marry so young. She’d harbored girlish fantasies, as anyone would have at that age, but Leonidas had dashed all of those when he’d patted her on the head at their wedding like she was a puppy and had then disappeared in the middle of their reception because business called.
“Don’t be so self-indulgent, Susannah,” her mother had said coldly that night while Susannah stood there, abandoned in her big white dress, trying not to cry. “Fantasies of fairy tales are for little girls. You are now the wife of the heir to the Betancur fortune. I suggest you take the opportunity to decide what kind of wife you will be. A pampered princess locked away on one of the Betancur estates or a force to be reckoned with?”
Before morning, word had come that Leonidas was lost. And Susannah had chosen to be a force indeed these past four years, during which time she’d grown from a sheltered, naive nineteen-year-old into a woman who was many things, but was always—always—someone to be reckoned with. She’d decided she was more than just a trophy wife, and she’d proved it.
And it had led here, to the side of a mountain in an American state Susannah had heard of only in the vaguest terms, trekking up to some “off the grid” compound where a man meeting Leonidas’s description was rumored to be heading up a local cult.
“It’s not exactly a doomsday cult,” her investigator had told her in the grand penthouse in Rome, where Susannah lived because it was the closest of her husband’s properties to the Betancur Corporation’s European headquarters, where she liked to make her presence known. It kept things running more smoothly, she’d found.
“Do such distinctions matter?” she’d asked, trying so hard to sound distant and unaffected with those photographs in her hands. Shots of a man in flowing white, hair longer than Leonidas had ever worn it, and still, that same ruthlessness in his dark gaze. That same lean, athletic frame, rangy and dangerous, with new scars that would make sense on someone who’d been in a plane crash.
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