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She whirled away towards the windows, putting her hands to her hot cheeks.
Tell him.
He knew his father, knew the lengths he’d been willing to go to get his own way. Why should she protect Sebastian any longer when he hadn’t protected her?
Tell him.
She could feel Rafe on her heels, pursuing her for an answer, but she couldn’t turn, couldn’t face him.
‘It wasn’t supposed to be yours,’ she whispered wretchedly.
‘What?’ He circled in front of her, catching her by the sleeve. ‘What did you say?’
But she didn’t have to repeat it. He stared at her anguished embarrassment, the echo of disillusionment in her shimmering eyes, and she saw it all come together in his mind, saw the precise moment when the intuitive leap of his intelligence suddenly made sense of all the confusing contradictions.
‘My God...he didn’t tell you,’ he breathed, the realisation transformed into instant, utter certainty. He peeled her hands gently away from her scalding cheeks. ‘The manipulating bastard didn’t tell you that the donated sperm was mine. Did he? Did he?’
She shook her head, the tears that had been in abeyance for months spilling over—tears for her tarnished miracle.
‘I—I didn’t know whose it was; I didn’t want to know,’ she cried. ‘You just fill in a questionnaire about the physical characteristics you’d like the father to have...I did put down tall and blond, and—but I never—it wasn’t... He didn’t tell me until that awful afternoon at the hospital, the day he died.’ Another sob tore from her aching chest. ‘He...he s-said that he’d been wrong not to tell me from the beginning, but that it didn’t change our bargain, it didn’t have to matter... But it did, oh, it did!’
She closed her eyes in memory of the devastating shock. ‘I didn’t know he was going to tell you as well. I know I shouldn’t have run away from the hospital like that, but, oh, God—how could I have stayed? I didn’t know what to do, what to think...I felt so alone. How could he expect me to see you, to talk to you, to act naturally around you knowing...knowing that...?’
‘Ah, don’t, Jennifer...don’t!’ Rafe gathered her against his bare torso, rocking her with his strength, sinking his fingers into her soft brown hair and combing it soothingly against the back of her skull, letting her sob out her repressed anger and betrayal.
Her damp face buried in the crisp curls on his chest, her arms wrapped around his solid waist, Jennifer couldn’t help but become aware of the growing tension in his body as her storm of emotion eased and he continued to stroke her back and nuzzle at her hair, murmuring nonsensical words of reassurance, acknowledging that they had both been victims of his father’s hidden scheming.
He wiped her face with her towelling lapel and then proceeded to erase the evidence of her tears with kisses, his lips moving down over her tangled lashes to her pink nose and the salty traces on her cheeks. Her lips, still rosy from his previous kisses, were tasted and savoured anew.
‘Rafe...’
His hand, tangled in her hair, wouldn’t let her evade his sensual assault.
‘Tell me what it feels like to have me inside you?’ he whispered into her mouth.
She groaned.
‘You love it, don’t you?’ He sipped the husky sound from her lips. ‘In spite of everything that’s happened, you love the feeling that your body is changing, ripening, stretching itself to fit around my baby...’
His long, languorous kisses and sinuous words made her feel exquisitely feminine, earthy and voluptuously sensual.
‘Share the feeling with me, Jen. Let me make love to the mother of my child...’
Shaken by the intensity of need in his voice, she leaned back to look into his face and was surprised when he instantly let her go.
She put a hand to her breast and took an uncertain step back, her face flushed with a mingling of guilt and desire as she realised he was giving her the freedom to choose.
‘We shouldn’t...’
Rafe’s body surged into full arousal as he recognised the implicit surrender in her thready protest. The guilty fascination with which her eyes furtively caressed him was a fierce turn-on. It made him want to tear off her clothes and thrust inside her without preliminaries, staking his claim and slaking his raw lust before she could change her mind. But even stronger was his greedy desire to draw out the process of sensuous discovery as long as possible, to spend a long time exploring, arousing, tasting, teasing...making her moan and thresh with orgasmic pleasure before he finally granted them both release. He wanted to be the lover she would never be able to forget.
‘You want me,’ he said, deliberately thickening his voice, permeating it with a gravelly sexuality, simultaneously both rough and smooth.
Jennifer could no longer deny it, to herself or to him, but she found she couldn’t look him in the face as she admitted one of her most private fantasies.
She turned and looked out across the balcony, to the mountain whose eruption symbolised the irrepressible forces of nature. Like the force that ensured the survival of a species, the overpowering urge of male and female to mate, to reproduce...
‘Yes. But just for tonight,’ she added quickly, thinking that at least she could circumscribe her sin. Wrapped in her own doubts, she didn’t consider she might be insulting his male ego.
