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‘Can’t what?’ he muttered, his mouth seeking across her averted cheek, his voice richly clotted with passion.
She had to force herself to think logically. ‘Can’t—can’t go to bed together...’ She groaned. That was where they were headed, wasn’t it?
He raised his head. His eyes, sultry and heavy-lidded, were glittering slits of molten green. ‘Why not? It’s what we both want.’ His voice roughened to a guttural scrawl. ‘And there’s nothing to stop us any more...’
Why not? The words whispered seductively in her brain. Why not take what you want...and pay for it?
But no, not like this. It was too dangerous, the gamble too great, the stakes too high.
‘We just can’t...’ she whispered.
There was a heartbeat’s pause before he responded, brushing his mouth across her feathery fringe. ‘Would you do it if I paid you?’ he urged softly, the golden shadow of his beard capturing several strands of her hair, sliding them across his mouth as he turned his face to breathe his sin against her temple. ‘Would you strip for me if I gave you money, darling? Would you take off your clothes, slowly... and touch yourself for me?’ His creamy voice curdled into brutal cynicism as he went relentlessly on. ‘How much for your body, Jennifer? How much would it cost me to do whatever the hell I liked with it? How much do you charge to have a man’s stolen sperm planted inside you?’
By the time he had uttered the last bitter word he had her thrust against the wood, his hands trapping her shoulders, his thigh pressing across her legs, his searing questions battering at her horrified emotions.
‘It wasn’t stolen; you donated it,’ she protested wildly, pushing at his bulging biceps as she fought an avalanche of undeserved guilt. She wasn’t going to be blamed for his mistakes as well as her own. ‘You went there voluntarily—you said so yourself—and you weren’t at all bothered about the consequences then. You didn’t care about any potential babies then. All you cared about was getting back at your father! It was your idea, so if there’s any blaming to be done you have to take a fair share for yourself.’
‘Anonymity was intrinsic to the whole process,’ he tore at her savagely. ‘And if my sperm wasn’t stolen then why is it I feel raped?’
Jennifer went slack against the door, her defensive anger shattered by his tormented bewilderment. Her fingers relaxed on his straining muscles, and she began unconsciously soothing him with tiny movements of her fingertips. Her mind reeled at the knowledge that her selfish attempts to protect herself had caused him such pain. She couldn’t bear it.
‘No, oh, no, no, no...’ She shook her head, the blunt-cut ends of her hair fluttering across his white knuckles. Her eyes were dark with empathy. ‘Please don’t say that, don’t even think it; it’s not that way at all—’
‘No? So tell me the way it is, Jennifer,’ he said harshly. ‘Make me feel less violated. Tell me how a woman who makes a living out of caring for other people, who sacrifices her career for her disabled mother, who spends her own money building up a business so two old people will feel secure and needed, who’s a sucker for a wounded stray...tell me how a woman like that could knowingly exploit a sick old man’s obsession for what she could get out of it. Did the money really mean that much to you?’
It was the ‘knowingly’ that did it. Jennifer’s own sick sense of betrayal came rushing back.
‘Will you stop talking about the money?’ she said fiercely. ‘Yes, Sebastian gave me a marriage settlement, and, yes, I took it. But I didn’t do it for the money.’
‘Then in God’s name why?’ He shook her shoulders in a violent fit of frustration. ‘What else did you hope to gain from it? His name? His power?’
He was so smart, yet he still couldn’t see it! Because it hadn’t mattered at all to him, while to her it was everything.
‘A baby!’ She yelled her contempt for his blind stupidity. ‘That’s what I had to gain! I made a bargain to marry Sebastian because I wanted to have a baby!’
His hands fell away. He looked utterly thunderstruck, and, perversel
y, that gave her the courage to carry on.
‘I did it to have a baby,’ she admitted painfully, crossing her arms under her breasts. ‘All right? I did it because I wanted a baby of my own and Sebastian promised to give me one if I helped him secure the trust against the witches.’
She saw his expression change from one of stunned incomprehension to raging incredulity. Next, she was certain, would be disgust.
‘Well, what was I supposed to do?’ she cried. ‘I’m twenty-seven, single, not in a relationship—not even interested in getting married....there was no way I was going to get pregnant naturally, unless I was willing to pick up a man just for sex...and I didn’t want my baby to be born out of some sordid liaison that I would be ashamed of—not to mention the risks of doing something like that. But I did want a child of my own so much...’
She turned her face aside so that he wouldn’t see the sheen in her eyes as she remembered her fierce yearning for a dream that had seemed to be slipping further and further out of her reach. A hand under her chin forced her to look back at him. The humiliating look of disbelief had gone from his eyes, but it wasn’t disgust that she saw in its place; it was a dawning wonderment.
“Th-then Sebastian came back to stay’ she said huskily. ‘And it seemed natural to talk about it with him—he’d spent his life helping people to have children. We talked about options, and then he told me about his prostate cancer, and said we could help each other. He...he offered a way for me to get pregnant that would be completely clinical and safe...and free. It was like a miracle. All I had to do was have my doctor do some tests, accompany him to England...a-and marry him—’
‘All...?’ Rafe’s hand smoothed her towelling lapel, creased by her anxious kneading.
She flushed at his sarcasm. ‘It was so that Felicity wouldn’t get her hands on the trust,’ she said flatly. ‘He said there was a loophole, that she’d be able take over as trustee when he died, or before that if he got very ill and was judged incompetent, because she was his most recent wife.’
Rafe opened his mouth as if to protest, then closed it again, and after a brief hesitation said drily, ‘He must have trusted you to the hilt.’
‘He knew I only cared about the baby,’ Jennifer said with touching naiveté. “Under our bargain we both got what we most wanted—I had my baby and he got my name on all his legal documents...’
‘And a grandchild to bear his name,’ he reminded her heavily. ‘So it never made you feel queasy that it was my baby he was bargaining with? You never wondered if maybe I had a right to know he was putting his grandchild into your womb...’
