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‘And what about the baby? The unfortunate bargaining chip in all of this? What was it agreed you would do with my baby after Sebastian died?’
‘Nothing... I mean, he knew I was going to bring it up here, of course,’ she said huskily. ‘He knew that I’d be a good mother—’
‘And a father didn’t matter? What if something happened to you, for God’s sake!’ he exploded, jerking her wrist and leaning forward to thrust his face fiercely close to hers. ‘Don’t you think Paula would have wanted to contact me then? Even if I’d never demonstrated a shred of interest in the child before, your mother still might have considered that I had the right to know. Or wouldn’t it have mattered what a bloody mess you left behind you, as long as you had everything you wanted while you were alive?’
Jennifer blanched. She had never even considered the possibility. Under the rules of donor IVF programmes the biological parents had no legal access or responsibility, and, anyway, in her own mind the baby had always been hers and hers alone. Both the nominal and the biological father had been irrelevant. If anything happened to her she vaguely assumed that her mother would have sole legal guardianship—but of course Paula thought that it had been an entirely natural conception...
‘Oh, God,’ she breathed, her free hand moving to her stomach. She couldn’t believe how short-sighted she had been—no, how utterly blind in her pursuit of her goal.
The movement dragged Rafe’s eyes away from her face, and he suddenly cursed virulently under his breath and dropped her wrist as if it was hot coal. She sat back on her heels, rubbing at the faint red weals on her tender skin. He got up and paced, running a hand down the back of his neck, and Jennifer got shakily to her feet, uncertain of her next move.
‘What a mess! What a crazy bloody mess!’ Rafe ground out. ‘I still don’t understand it! If everything was going as planned, why did you have to run away like a thief in the night? That certainly put a kink in your image as a caring wife. What were you afraid might happen after he died? Everything was legal. You had the money. And you had no way of knowing that he’d told me the baby was mine, because I was the last one to see him alive.’
She jumped as he prowled back to stand in front of her, hands on his hips, streaks of temper across his hard cheekbones.
‘Tell me this one thing straight at least: if Sebastian hadn’t suffered his deathbed crisis of conscience, would you ever have told me that my “half-brother” or “half-sister” was in fact my own child?’
‘I—I don’t know—’
‘You don’t know.’ It was repeated with such contempt that she knew he didn’t believe her. ‘Come on, you must have thought about it. Maybe you figured that if you ever milked the trust dry you could turn up and blackmail me for child support.’
‘No! I never thought—Maybe if—Oh!’ She raised her hands and covered her distraught face. She didn’t know how much it was safe to admit. How much to trust him.
‘Oh, I don’t know what I was going to do! How could I know? How could I possibly have known that—’ She put her clenched fist to her mouth, biting down on the words, her brown eyes dark with anguished doubt.
‘How could you have known—what? Jennifer?’ He pulled the gag from her mouth, encompassing her entire fist in his warm hand. ‘How could you have known what?’
But the moment of revelation had passed. Jennifer had herself under control again, albeit very shaky control.
‘That it was all going to come apart at the seams like this,’ she whispered.
The dark gold stubble on his lower cheeks glinted as his jaw muscles clenched. He lifted her fist and pressed his mouth to the tiny indentations created by her teeth, his lips brushing in a mocking salute across the gold wedding band on her third finger before letting her go.
‘Lies usually do, especially the kind of whoppers you’ve been telling.’
‘Oh, right, and I suppose you’ve never told a lie in your life,’ she said sarcastically, wiping her fingers on her trousers to try and rid herself of his lingering touch. ‘You were doing pretty well there downstairs, for an amateur...’
‘I’m reasonably proficient with a social lie, but, no, until I met you I’d actually considered myself to be quite painfully honest—especially in my relationships with women.’
He bent to his suitcase, unzipping the top and flinging it back, pawing through the neatly packed clothes. He threw a pair of black jeans and a thin black knitted jumper over the back of her desk chair and pulled his cream sweater over his head, dumping it back on top of the unzipped suitcase. Underneath he was wear
ing a white silk shirt with pearlised buttons, which he began to flick open with one hand. As the shirt parted she could see that the hair on his chest was one shade darker than that on his head. It grew in flattened swirls around his dark, masculine nipples and created a thick mat over his rippling pectorals. His evenly tanned skin was sleek and glossy, glowing with health.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked, her eyes darting nervously past him to the bed.
He dealt with his cuffs and divested himself of the shirt before he spoke, now bare to the low-slung belt of his snug jeans.
‘I’ve been travelling non-stop for over twenty-four hours. I’m grimy, I’m tired and I’m angry—and I can do something about at least two of the three. I’m going to strip, shower, nap and change into fresh clothes—in that order. If you want to stand there and watch, feel free. Or you can join me, if you like...’
His eyes fixed on her, he unclipped his flat gold buckle and stripped his leather belt from its denim loops, folding it to a strop in his hand, which he then struck lightly against his other palm.
He saw Jennifer’s eyes widen behind her glasses and growled, ‘You needn’t look like that; I don’t beat my women.’
‘I never thought you did,’ she defended herself, wondering if he realised what he looked like, standing there stripped to the waist, golden head cocked, his green eyes stoked with insolent challenge, the lean muscles of his arms and torso rippling as he flexed the leather strap. He looked like every woman’s fantasy of a dangerous lover. Jennifer’s fingers itched for her keyboard, her protection against the pangs of forbidden lust.
‘Unless they consider it a stimulating form of foreplay, of course,’ Rafe added, with a sultry smoulder designed to get under her creamy skin. ‘Then I’m perfectly willing to indulge in a little light bondage and discipline to enhance the lady’s pleasure...’ He slapped leather to palm again. ‘How about you, Jennifer? Do you like your sex strictly straight—or with an intriguing twist?’
She was shattered by the question and it showed. Shattered but not shocked, Rafe’s keenly developed sexual instincts told him, and he felt a hot throb of curiosity thicken his loins. Then his anger kicked in, snarling through his veins. Dammit, he wanted her to be shocked. He wanted her to feel tormented, as the thought of her had tormented him for the last few months. He wanted her to be eminently shockable, so that he could have the satisfaction of making her pay in some small measure for all the trouble that she had caused him, and would cause him...
