Cinderella for the Miami Playboy, page 12
“You said she never told your father that she was pregnant. Why not?”
“Why should she?” A note of challenge entered her tone, but her voice quavered ever so slightly.
He was standing on a very raw nerve. What was that about?
“To give him a chance to step up?” Everett suggested lightly. “I would certainly like to know if I had a child out there somewhere.”
“Would you?” Her spine snapped straight, and her fork went down with a clunk. “What if I become pregnant? What do you expect me to do?”
His shoulders hit the back of his chair and a churn of gravel arrived in his stomach.
“I expect you not to get pregnant.” His teeth hurt, he clenched his jaw so tight. “That’s why I wear condoms. I don’t want children.”
“Mom took precautions, yet here I am.” She waved at herself, chiding, “Even fantasies can have consequences, Everett.”
His heart was pounding so hard, his lungs were having trouble catching a breath.
“But don’t worry,” she muttered into the glass she raised. She took a big swallow of wine, then set it down. “Wanting children is a very personal decision. I wouldn’t expect anyone to get on board just because I want them. I would deal with it myself.”
“How?” The word shot out of him like a bullet.
A flash of shock bloomed behind her eyes.
“I won’t know unless it happens, will I?” Her brows went up, but her mouth was trembling. “I would likely continue the pregnancy and raise the child myself. Alone. The way Mom did. It’s not easy, but it’s not impossible.”
“And you wouldn’t even tell me? I would want to know, Bianca.” His own glass should have shattered in his hand, he was holding it so tightly.
“Why? What would you do?” she challenged.
“I won’t know unless it happens,” he said caustically. “But I want to know if it does.” Ignorance was not bliss. It was ignorance. And even though this conversation was hypothetical, the idea she might keep something that profound from him thrust a wedge of deprivation into him.
“Noted.” She threw her napkin onto the table and rose. “I’m going for a bath.” She took her wine with her.
* * *
Bianca couldn’t fall asleep. She kept thinking of Everett’s emphatic, I don’t want children. And the fact that the easiest way not to slip up and have a surprise pregnancy would be to not have sex at all.
She threw her arm over her eyes, hating that idea even more than having a child with a reluctant father. She’d been honest about not pressing a man to have a family if he didn’t want one, but if that’s what he would be, she shouldn’t run the risk of pregnancy, should she?
She flipped her pillow to the cool side and stuffed her face into it.
That was only one of many reasons they didn’t have a future ahead of them. Her whistleblowing would have repercussions for years. Not only was it unfair to ask him to stand by her through that, but he was underwriting a lot of her support. She had cornered him into that—unwittingly, but she had still done it.
And she hadn’t fully appreciated how much he must resent the attention she had put on him until she had begun taking calls for interviews. Most of them had stuck to asking about her relationship with Troy, which was intrusive enough, but that producer today had wanted to do a memoir like Freja’s. He had been taking notes about where she went to college and where her mother had worked. When he had asked about her father, Bianca had nearly snapped.
Yet again, she wondered if she should tell Everett who her father was. Warn him. But if she was the only one who knew, how could it affect him? No, as long as she kept it to herself, they were both safe from any ramifications on that front.
The door latch quietly clicked, and she instinctively held very still, trying to calm her breathing so he would think she was asleep.
He went into the bathroom to brush his teeth, and she clenched her eyes shut, willing herself to drop off, but she was still lying there stiff as a board when he slid onto the other side of the mattress. The bed was wider than the Great Plains and so well-made she didn’t feel any dip or movement, but she felt his presence all the same.
His tension.
She hadn’t moved one iota since he had entered the bedroom, but he said, “I thought you’d be asleep by now.”
How was he so perceptive? She rolled onto her back.
“You’re basically the most important person in my life right now. I don’t like fighting with you,” she said.
“Is that really what’s keeping you awake? Because it didn’t feel like a fight.”
It wasn’t. Whatever injury she had taken from the conversation had been disappointment that they were so different, not hurt at being attacked.
He clicked on the lamp on his side, then rolled to prop himself on his elbow, facing her. He was naked from the waist up, usually wearing boxers to bed from the few peeks she’d caught.
“But we could still kiss and make up,” he suggested. “At least then we’ll be able to sleep.”
She rolled her eyes, then asked with mocking sweetness, “Are you sure you want to risk it?”
His face fell into grave lines. The sobriety in his voice left a chill across her skin. “That’s why you don’t want to have children with me, Bianca. I have a taste for risk that is higher than most can stomach.”
He slid closer and loomed over her.
She pressed deeper into the mattress and set her hand on his chest, but he only reached to her night table and picked up the book she’d been reading in the bath. He read the back.
“Forced marriage.” He slid her an amused look. “I think we could work with that.” He continued to read. “I actually have majority shares in the shipping line that my great-grandfather started so I check the box for shipping magnate. That leaves you and what you’re prepared to do for your grandmother’s farmhouse.” He set the book aside and held himself over her with his arms on either side of her. “Will you consummate this marriage?” His nose nuzzled hers. “It’s in the will that we have to treat it as a real marriage.”
He was big and solid, and his breath smelled like mint. The fine hairs on his chest were teasing her fingertips to pet him. If she did, she would bump into the hard bead of his nipple, and she really wanted to do that. She wanted to make his breath hiss and feel his body tremble and hear him call her Mine.
It’s just a game. Harmless fun, she reasoned.
She turned her face to the side. “I’ll submit to my conjugal duty, but I won’t remove my nightgown.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“Scars. My grandmother believed I was too fearful of rejection to marry anyone. That’s why she made this condition that I marry. Turn out the light.”
“I’ve seen a lot in my rough life. I think I can handle it.” His lips brushed hers.
She jerked her face to the side again. “And no kissing on the mouth. My grandparents fell in love the first time they kissed. I don’t want to fall in love with you.”
He stilled for one pulsebeat, then drawled, “Lie back and let me have my way, then. I’ll try not to bother you too much.”
His mouth went into the crook of her neck while his hand searched beneath the covers, finding the hem of her nightgown and caressing the tops of her thighs.
She slid her arms over his shoulders and sifted her fingers into his hair, instinctually wanting to draw him to kiss her, but his tickling touch found her tangle of damp curls.
He made a rough noise of pleased discovery. “You have been lying here waiting for me, haven’t you?”
She had. Shimmering pleasure swept through her pelvis as he casually pressed her legs apart and fondled her with a more proprietary touch.
“Poor neglected wife. Don’t worry. I’ll make it good for you.” He set small kisses across her jawline as he swirled her dampness over her folds, parting and easily sliding one finger, then two, into her.
She groaned and dipped her chin to search for his mouth, but he shifted so he could find her nipple through the fabric of her nightgown. His hot mouth dampened the silk, and he used his tongue to rub it against the distended button.
Tension gathered across her abdomen. She instinctually lifted her hips, encouraging the rocking caress of his hand, clamping down as he found a spot that made stars appear behind her clenched eyelids. Very suddenly she was bucking in sharp, heady climax.
He was saying something to her in a gratified voice and slowed his caress to draw out her pleasure. She couldn’t hear it through her shaken moans of joy.
His mouth came back to her neck and her cheek and her brow before he finally eased his touch away.
“You do want that farmhouse, don’t you, darling? Will you do anything I ask?” He threw off the covers and dragged a pillow into the middle of the bed. “Let’s try this.”
She was still trembling with the final shivers of climax, muscles too lax to do anything but cooperate as he rolled her stomach onto the pillows and positioned her knees under her.
He kicked off his boxers and applied a condom, then brushed her nightgown up her buttocks, exposing her as he sought her still-molten entrance. He pressed into her, the wide dome of his erection forging where his fingers had been, reaching deeper, filling her more completely.
She closed her fists into the sheets, groaning at how good it felt to have him inside her.
When his hips were flat against her buttocks, he bent to cover her and kissed her neck and licked her ear. Then he dragged her hand down between her own thighs and said, “Let me feel it this time. Make yourself come again.”
She couldn’t deny him anything. He straightened and took hold of her hips, thrusting with steady power while she caressed herself and bit her lip and arrived at the crisis with embarrassing speed, practically screaming her sharp release into the mattress.
She could have wept, he made her feel so good.
He folded onto her again, crooning noises of approval and gratitude as he palmed her breast and suckled her earlobe. Carefully, he withdrew and rolled her onto her back, then slid inside her again, catching her up in his arms and drawing her into his lap as he rose to kneel on the bed.
“Do you know what kills me, Bianca?”
She clung to his shoulders and dragged her eyes open. “What?” Her lips were buzzing and her brain was too far away to imagine anything could bother either of them right now.
“That I left you to do that for yourself all those months when I could have been right here—” His hand flattened on her tailbone, and he shifted so he penetrated a fraction deeper. “Helping you, the whole time.”
Her heart juddered to a halt in her chest.
Those words meant too much. They suggested things. They made her think she’d been on his mind the way he’d been on hers. They made her think he had missed her while they were apart and would later, when they were no longer together.
She didn’t want to think of that. It made a scalded sensation rise in the back of her throat, one that burned all the way into the center of her being.
“I thought we only met and married this morning.”
The piercing blue of his eyes reflected fiery heat and arctic ice.
She held her breath until his mouth curled into a self-deprecating line.
“Am I ruining the fantasy? Let me make it up to you.” He eased her onto her back and began to thrust, sending her back into that golden place where nothing mattered but the fact they were joined. No longer two disjointed people, but one perfect entity. Whole.
She ran her hands over the landscape of his shoulders and back and buttocks, claiming all of him while she had the chance. He hooked his arm under one of her legs and drove deeper, making her writhe at the intensity of the sensations.
“There, Everett. There. Don’t stop.” She was straining for the pinnacle, hands going into his hair again, so she cradled his skull. “Never stop.”
“Never,” he vowed, muscles bunched as he thrust hard and fast, bringing her with him as he raced toward climax.
There it was. The horizon where she would tip off into the sun. He was right there with her, gritting through his teeth, “Now, Bee, now.”
As the quaking fracture tore across the earth toward them, he clamped his mouth over hers in a hot, passionate, claiming kiss.
They fell.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“SERIOUSLY, LOOK AT these two,” Bianca said a week later when they were in the car. “Freja doesn’t want me to go to Sicily. I’ll kidnap her children and bring them home with me.”
Everett glanced at the photo of Louisa and Theresa caught playing dress-up with Freja’s sunglasses, jewelry, handbags and oversize shoes.
“Cute,” he pronounced, because he wasn’t a sociopath, but if Bianca was hoping for him to wax poetic with adoration and suggest they make a set of their own, she would be sorely disappointed.
“They are,” she agreed. She turned off her phone and dropped it into her handbag, then turned her nose to the window.
She was disappointed. His conscience pinched.
Even fantasies can have consequences, Everett.
He kept thinking of that and how his brain had flatlined at the thought of her pregnant. Her suggestion of raising his child alone—Don’t worry about it—had gone against every sense of decency he possessed.
He had gone to bed that night thinking, fine, they wouldn’t have sex anymore. The chance of making a baby was one risk too far for even his nearly infinite threshold. He was still scarred from having to tell Giovanni that Freja had lost their first pregnancy. He could hardly bear recalling it, let alone contemplate experiencing it himself. He sure as hell wouldn’t want to be responsible for Bianca going through that.
But when he got into bed, she’d been awake. The pull between them had been impossible to resist. He didn’t want to control his desire for her. That was the problem. He wanted to revel in it no matter how self-destructive it might prove to be.
If she had stopped him, he would have backed off, but she had gone along with it. He’d never met a woman so greedy for orgasms. It made him want to spend all day, every day, giving them to her.
A review of their track record revealed he’d spent a week doing exactly that. Between meetings and social engagements, he’d been an Australian station owner, brushed up on his Greek for an island stranding, seduced his winemaker on his Chilean vineyard and skipped the stepbrother role in favor of being her brother’s best friend holding a grudge over a broken career. An hour ago, he had been her ex-husband snowed in with her at their Whistler chalet.
When he had asked her why she read romance over anything else, she had said, “They keep me company, like friends. I lost touch with most of my real ones while Mom was sick. I made a few at work, but once I started gathering evidence, I was afraid I’d slip up if I went out for drinks with any of them. And they all had lives. Careers and marriage and families. I was taking a hatchet to my chances for all of that, so I insulated myself. I like that romance takes me out of the crater where my life used to be, and they always end happily, which gives me hope. I need that. It’s really hard being alone.”
Which was why she wanted a family.
That always put an ache in the pit of his stomach, but he had always thought of it the other way. It was really hard to care about someone. You worried for them. Hurt for them. He still had his mother, but she was thankfully healthy and lived a quiet life that caused him very little anguish. He cared about Giovanni and his family, but the worst of the responsibility for their welfare fell on his friend. Still, if something happened to any of them, Everett would be gutted.
There was a difference between preferring to stand on the sidelines of life and being pushed there by circumstance, though. Bianca obviously wanted to throw herself into that emotionally messy fray, foolishly brave soul that she was.
She couldn’t have that with him, though, and maybe he owed her the real reason why.
“My father wanted more children. My mother refused.” He ran his hand over his thigh, never finding it pleasant to talk about his childhood. “I think she wanted them, but my father was difficult to live with. She was afraid he wouldn’t be there for her.”
“Because of the brain injury?”
“Even before that. He got into automotive engineering because he loved speed. Any high-risk activity, really. That was really distressing for my mother, never knowing if he would come home.”
“I’ve never understood how anyone gets a thrill out of being in danger. The whole time I was sneaking around behind Troy’s back, my stomach was in knots.” She rolled her lips inward before giving a small snort. “That doesn’t bother you, though. Does it? The fear of getting caught.”
It bothered him right now, when he glanced into her soft brown eyes and knew she saw straight into his soul. His chest felt unguarded. Exposed.
“It’s a common misconception that daredevils are impulsive idiots with no sense of self-preservation. Some are, but my father was actually a control junkie. He believed he could anticipate all the risks and calculate all the variables and triumph over the fragility of being human.”
“And you?” She already knew. He’d told her his tolerance for risk was more than she could stomach.
“I was blessed with his nature, and he nurtured it.” His mouth twisted with self-deprecation. “I was seven when he first took me out onto a test track. He got us up to two hundred miles an hour. I freaking loved it.”
“That’s more than dangerous, isn’t it?” she gasped. “I’m no physicist, but aren’t there g-forces or something that would kill a small child?”
“If he had stopped and started too abruptly, yes. That’s why my mother lost her mind over it. The more I followed in his tire tracks, the more she withdrew from both of us. To this day, she’ll claim that she sent me to boarding school so she could be more accessible at work, but I think she was keeping me from seeing how distressed she was.”
