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He shook his head, trying to jolt himself free from the effect of her sudden and shocking appearance. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t thought of her in the last three months, thought of finding her, his fingers itching to type her name into the search engine on his computer. In truth, there hadn’t been a day—or night—that he hadn’t remembered her soft sighs, or the feel of her beneath him. The wrenching he’d felt that morning after, when he’d sneaked out of the room, leaving her asleep in the bed of his suite. Both hating himself and knowing that it was right.
But why was she here? What did she want?
Then a cold steel clamp choked his thoughts.
She knew. Who he was.
And just like so many women before him, Maria had come to cash in on his notoriety. Had thought to play on the vulnerabilities he’d accidentally exposed that night. The one night he’d offered her and no more.
Anger clenched his jaw. He had thought her different. He had thought her to be something...almost mythical in her purity. A purity that he had single-handedly taken that night. He should have known better. Had he not learned at seventeen what the female sex wanted from him?
The sound of her boots on the marble floor cut through his thoughts and he turned to find her looking up at him nervously, her hands twisting within each other, but valiantly bearing the weight of his scrutiny as he searched her expressive features for clues of her motivation for being here.
She was still breathtakingly beautiful. He’d half convinced himself that he’d imagined it. The shocking impact she’d had on him that night. The way that his pulse kicked up a notch, just being near her. The way his need rose within him to seize him by the throat.
‘Hi,’ she said simply.
He nodded, unable to trust himself to say more. To bring about the moment where she exposed her greed.
‘Can we...?’
‘Talk?’
She nodded, an almost sad smile on her features. And for a moment he almost felt sorry for her. Because while she obviously knew who he was, she clearly did not realise just who she was up against.
‘This way,’ he said, his words as clipped as the sound of their shoes as he led them to the last elevator.
He swiped his key card over the electronic plate and the doors swished apart revealing the mirror-lined lift that led only to the top floor where his offices were housed.
She silently followed him into the confined space and when he inhaled he was swamped by that scent of hers. Sage and salt, something so unique to her and that night that he had to fight against the sudden wave of desire that rose up within him from being this close to her.
He studied her in the mirrors, Maria determinedly looking ahead and not making eye contact, offering him the chance to take in her appearance. The night they’d met, she had been dressed in white lace. Now, she wore tight grey denim jeans and a black leather waterfall jacket that covered a loose T-shirt in a burnt-pink colour.
Her hair, loose again, fell in waves over her shoulders and down her back, the slight curls twisting strands of dark browns and reds, making him want to reach out and touch. But he stifled the ridiculous urge.
The elevator drew to a stop and the doors opened, prompting him to gesture for her to go first, and then he realised how silly that was, when she pulled up short in the large area between three glass-fronted rooms. Two of which were meeting rooms, the third, his office.
He stepped around her and entered the latter. Immediately regretting not showing her to one of the large meeting rooms and ensuring that she would be ill at ease and more likely to reveal the truth about her intentions under such stark surroundings.
Instead, his office was completely different. Dark brown leather sofas faced each other, with a corner chair bracketing the end nearest the side wall. A discreet unit fronted the rest of the wall on the other side of a hidden door in the panelling that led to a bathroom and shower unit. A fireplace was hidden by the large corner chair—one that he never used and tried as much as possible to ignore behind the smooth dark leather. His father had loved it when this office had been his and, as much as he’d wanted to brick it up, he couldn’t seem to do so.
The opposite wall, in front of which was his desk, was covered head to toe in shelves full of books. Beautiful leather-spined tomes that gave the room an almost gothic feel, despite the sleek modern technology that covered the desk. Two large monitors fed into a discreet desktop hidden on a lower-level shelf just beneath the surface of the desk—a feature that had forced him to raise the desk a few inches in order to seat his long legs comfortably and without taking his kneecaps off every time he sat.
He turned to watch Maria take in the space.
‘Would you care for a drink?’ he asked, his hands unaccountably reaching for the bottle of whisky that had remained largely untouched for the three years it had been in his office’s wet bar.
‘Sparkling water, please.’
Where had the woman so full of words and even a bit of humour gone? Perhaps it was him. Was she picking up on his cynical reaction to her presence?
He poured sparkling water over ice, the cubes splintering and fracturing beneath the liquid in each glass. He passed Maria’s drink to her and was about to say some pithy salutation when she blurted, ‘I’m pregnant.’
* * *
The glass hovered before his
lips, his fingers gripping it so hard, his knuckles turned white from his apparent shock. His eyes went from speculative to furious in a heartbeat and Maria inwardly cursed, wishing she’d had the courage to say it more gently, to warn him... Anything other than what she’d just thrown between them like an unexploded bomb. Only it wasn’t unexploded. It had detonated three months earlier, though neither of them had known.
