The Heir From Nowhere (16 page)

‘Simone’s coming with me this time—a couple of functions I have to attend. All good PR. But she won’t be around if you need to contact me urgently so best to call me direct.’

Rosa flashed a glance in Angie’s direction but Angie just smiled, doing her level best to look unconcerned, wondering where this sudden coiling thread of jealousy had come from. And why should she feel jealous?

Simone was his beautiful, elegant PA while Angie was doing nothing more than carrying his child. She was an incubator. She had no claims on Dominic. It wasn’t as if she had any right to feel jealous of the woman spending days and nights away with the father of her child. Not when she was his PA, for heaven’s sake!

She would miss him because of the effort he was making with his baby. She would miss him because his baby would no doubt miss him.

It was hardly as if she were in love with him.

Liar,
a small voice sounded.

She couldn’t be in love with him.

Get used to it,
she heard the voice say.
Why else are you so jealous?

She hated that voice. Hated what it was telling her.
Hated more than anything that she suspected it was right.

She sniffed. He was taking Simone away with him. Why shouldn’t she be jealous?

The woman was beautiful. Sleek, dark-haired and gorgeous, just like his first wife. How could he not be attracted to her? How could he not choose her to be his life partner?

And now they had a week away together. Damn it all, she didn’t want Dominic to marry someone like Simone. He had a baby to think about—a tiny baby who would need a mother.
This baby.
And Simone had struck her as someone as maternal as a viper. Surely he could find someone altogether more …
nurturing?

She heard her name. Looked around to see piercing dark eyes following her fork, which was tracking idly around the edge of her spaghetti. ‘You’re not eating.’ He was watching her carefully. Closely.

She pushed the bowl away. ‘I’m not very hungry.’

His frown deepened. ‘You’re not sick?’

Heart-sick. Devastated. Green with jealousy. And shell-shocked beyond belief.
‘I’m fine.’

If he believed her it didn’t show. ‘So your scan. I won’t miss it?’

She searched through her shattered thoughts for his meaning, remembering the appointment for her twenty-week scan. Twenty weeks already. Which meant twenty weeks until the birth. Twenty weeks until it was time for her to leave.
So soon.
She shook her head. ‘It’s not till the twenty-first. But I wasn’t expecting you to come with me.’

The look he sent her was one hundred per cent ownership, one hundred per cent proprietorial, and all clad in black-as-night eyes that she would miss more than she wanted to admit when she was gone. ‘I’ll be there.’

Auckland was a grind. Normally he thrived on the cut and thrust of doing business face to face. Normally he relished the challenge of negotiating and securing a deal. But here he’d endured meetings that had gone around and around in circles; he’d spent hours locked away in offices in negotiations and he’d suffered long lunches and long dinners, where Simone had been the only person who understood. Stoic Simone who had stayed by his side and said all the right things and smiled to all the right people and laughed at all the lame jokes.

Thankfully, it was the last night. One formal reception and he could escape. He studded cufflinks through shirt cuffs, wondering if he really needed to be here, wondering how things were at home.

Wondering if he’d notice any changes in Angelina’s shape when he got back.

Angelina.

The name suited her so well. It hadn’t at first, when she’d been merely Angie. The name had seemed wrong to him then. But Angelina. That was her. Long limbed and lithe, her sun-kissed hair layered around her face, her lips wide and lush, her eyes so blue he was tempted to dive right into their depths.

A picture flashed into his mind. Angelina standing by the pool, her hands in her hair, her skin honey-gold from the sun and her breasts like an invitation. And lust speared into him again, just as it had that day, hot and hard.

Damn. He grabbed his jacket and frowned, wondering just when it was that he’d stopped thinking of her merely as an incubator and more as a woman? And why now, when he had an evening of dreariness right here to look forward to?

Maybe because you’ve never had any reason to look
forward to going home before,
said a small voice in his head.
Because when Carla was there …

He shrugged the jacket on and just as easily shrugged those thoughts away. Carla was gone. Never again would he make that mistake. Never again would he fall for a woman who was so shallow.

Angelina wasn’t shallow. Angelina was there now.
Angelina and his child.

And deciding he wasn’t really needed here wasn’t such a difficult decision to make at all.

The room was perfect. Almost perfect, Angie realised, as she noticed the row of teddy bears lining the floor instead of sitting atop the shelf that had been purpose-built for them. Darn, how had she missed them?

She snagged a bunch of teddies under one arm and dragged a nearby chair. The bears were an easy fix although the chair could do with being a few inches higher. She was up there on the chair, stretching high to place them. She loved the bears. She loved their faces, some hand-stitched, some machined, but all of them with some kind of expression. She loved them all.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

She turned too fast at the booming voice—he wasn’t supposed to be home yet—lost her balance and she and the remaining teddies went spinning into space.

He caught her, although crashing into someone as hard as Dominic, she figured, as the air was knocked from her lungs, was surely every bit as hard as crashing to the ground. ‘What kind of stupid idea was that?’

‘I’ll say.’ She found her feet, willing her breathing and her pulse back to normal. Not that that was likely given he still held her in his arms. ‘What on earth made you yell like that?’

‘You were up on the chair!’

‘I know. And I was perfectly fine until you barged in huffing more steam than a locomotive.’

‘But you were up on the chair!’

‘I was there, remember, safe as houses until you exploded onto the scene.’

‘Are you all right?’ He held her shoulders and looked her over. ‘Is the baby all right?’

‘The baby’s fine.’ It was her who was finding it difficult to breathe. His big hands were warm on her shoulders and did he realise his thumbs were stroking her skin and doing all sorts of weird things to her breathing, not to mention her nipples?

But it was good to see him. She drank him in. The dark, tousled hair, black-as-night eyes and chiselled jaw. And then he finished his inspection and looked into her eyes and she nearly melted. And it was all she could do to get out the words.

‘Welcome home.’

Her simple welcome was a balm to the soul. His hands shifted. Slowly, subtly as he looked at her, but inexorably towards the column of her throat. He sensed her breath hitch, he saw the fluttering heartbeat at her neck, watched her pupils dilate.

His fingers splayed in her hair as he drew her closer, steered her lips against his own and drank in her sweet essence as he kissed her long and deep.
Welcome home.
Oh, yeah.
This
was a welcome home.

Her taste was addictive. Irresistible. It wasn’t enough. He wanted all of her.

His hands brought her closer until her breasts met his chest and her bump met his aching hardness and he could find a way to say what he needed to say.

‘I want you,’ he told her. ‘I don’t know why. I know
it’s probably wrong or immoral or unethical or all of the above, but I want you and I know that if I kiss you again there is no way I’m going to be able to stop without making love to every single part of you. And even if I don’t kiss you, it’s what I want.’

She made a small sound—a whimper—and he was afraid that she was halfway to raising an objection, telling him he was crazy and about to go running and screaming for the hills. But she didn’t pull away, made no attempt to go running screaming for the hills, her blue eyes looking up at him with what looked like wonder.

‘You’re beautiful,’ he whispered as he brought her forehead to his lips for a kiss. ‘Let me make love to you.’

She paused—a moment in time, she knew, had never felt so rich and agonizingly beautiful.

‘I’m afraid,’ she whispered, trembling into his arms.

He kissed her cheeks. Her eyes. Her nose.

So am I,
he heard, the words coming from the cracks in the stone that was his heart.
So am I.

But he said nothing. He just kissed her and swung her into his arms. Lust, he told himself, trying to reassure himself, plastering over the cracks while he carried her to his room next door. Pure animal lust.

Absolutely nothing to be afraid of.

He placed her reverentially on the bed. Along with Rosa’s cooking, his big bed was one of his favourite things when he came home from business trips. Now, with Angelina lying on the covers, her chest rapidly rising and falling, her cheeks pink, her hair like a golden halo against his dark cotton, the bed shot straight to the top of the list.

Oh, God.

He wanted to be able to go slow except he didn’t know if he could. He knelt down next to her and dipped his head, unable to resist the lure of that wide mouth and those parted lips, unable to stop himself from exploring her with one hand. The dip of her waist, the flare of her hip, the curving tightness of her belly. Everywhere his hands found magic, every part of her a joy, and when he cupped one breast, brushed one peaked nipple with his thumb and felt her mewl of pleasure in his mouth, he felt a primal surge of pride.

He loved the sundress she was wearing, loved that he could slide the fabric up her long, smooth legs, loved that he could take his hand all the way to the sweet curve of her behind with nothing to stop him on the long slide north to paradise. She shuddered into his mouth, trembled with want under his hands and arched into his touch.

Take it slow? She was killing him. His blood thundered in his veins as he found a zip, slid it down, manoeuvred her out of the dress and damn near came when he gazed down at her.

She was beautiful. Long limbs. Glorious breasts he would delight in liberating from a plain white bra, her breasts somehow turned into wicked temptation. And his baby stretching her belly.

He shrugged off his shirt and she shuddered as she watched hungrily and he knew she was on as tight a knife-edge as he was. And then he undid his trousers and he saw her eyes follow his hands and widen in an age-old feminine sign of approval as he kicked them away.

‘Dominic,’ she uttered breathlessly as his underwear joined them and he joined her back on the bed with a
kiss that blew his mind. Skin against skin. Was there any better sensation in the world?

No, he decided, as he peeled her straps down her arms with his teeth and released her breasts to his gaze, his hands, his hot mouth. She cried out when he took their pebbled peaks between his lips; her hands clawed at him, clung to him, her need rivalling his own.

No, he decided, as his tongue trailed lower, to the swell of her belly. He put his lips to her bump, a kiss for the baby that grew beneath, a kiss for the woman who would give him this child.

No, he decided as he moved down the majesty of her ripening body, gently lowering her underwear from her hips, revealing her most secret place to his gaze, his hands at her thighs, stroking, relishing. No better feeling.

She moaned, a low soft moan that called to his inner beast and he dropped his head, parted her gently and supped on her. Her hands tangled in his hair, her body bucking, her gasps coming quick and fast as his tongue destroyed what defences she had left and laid waste to her.

And then she tensed under him, tensed for that sweet second, poised on the brink of the point of no return, before a flick of his tongue catapulted her over and she came apart in his mouth. And he somehow managed to smile under the weight of his own need for release. Somehow watching her come had been more satisfying than he’d imagined. He could wait.

She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. But oh, how she could feel! Every part of her was alight, every part of her sang with pleasure and then he joined her, his kiss deep and drugging, a kiss that tasted of him and tasted
of her and the thought of that was enough to ignite her senses all over again.

‘I have to have you.’ The words sounded as if they’d been ground through his teeth. He splayed a hand over her belly. ‘I will try to be gentle.’

‘The baby is fine,’ she whispered.
It is me who will get hurt.
And the hurt would come, she knew. The hurt and the regret and the sorrow. But there was time for that later. A lifetime for sorrow. And right now there was no room for hurt. There was only time to feel.

‘You are so unbelievably sexy,’ he whispered, his lips against her breast, his tongue flicking at a nipple. His words stirred her, his voice husky and rich, brushing over her skin and senses like a velvet rasp. He was the magnificent one, broad-chested, lean and powerful, all muscle and corded strength, and he was calling her sexy?

And then she felt him.
There.

He was so big. A momentary fear gripped her and held on tight. It had been a while. Months. And even then …

But then he pulled her into another of those kisses with that tongue that seemed to reach right in and rip her very soul from her body and she forgot everything except how to feel.

And how he made her feel.

He entered her in a thrust that made her gasp and sent her head driving back into the pillows, her back arching as her body stretched to accommodate him.

Time stood still while they lay joined. Fused.

And then he moaned above her, a low moan that sounded as if it had been ground through his teeth and spoke restraint that was being sorely tested, and slowly withdrew. She clung to him, desperate to keep him there,
using all her muscles to contain him, the slide of his skin against hers a delicious friction, the feel of him poised once again at her entrance an exquisite torture.