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She walked out ahead of him, and he felt the quiver of awareness beneath his palm.
Winning the war involved figuring out a level of commitment to the child he was comfortable with—and getting Tess to accept it. He would win the war, because he had to—the ghosts of his father’s crimes wouldn’t allow him to do any less by his own child.
He watched her leave, the seductive sway of her hips making arousal tug hard. However, forgoing the spoils of this particular war was going to be a whole other problem entirely.
CHAPTER NINE
AS THE Jeep ate up the miles along Highway One the next afternoon, Nate squinted at the bug-cemetery on his windshield, his eyes gritty with lack of sleep. He’d woken up three times in the night, rigid with desire, after the sort of lurid dreams that hadn’t troubled him since puberty. And Tess Tremaine’s soft, supple, fragrant body, the heavy weight of her breasts and the tight, wet clasp of her fisting around him had been the star attraction in every one.
He tapped his thumb on the steering wheel as the rush of heat hit his groin. Shifting in his seat, he stamped on the accelerator and cruised around another tight bend, the road hugging the rusty red earth of the cliffs.
Eventually the painful erection began to subside. But as he cranked up the car’s stereo and beat the wheel in time to the blaring rock, he acknowledged the fact that forgoing the spoils wasn’t just going to be hard, it might as well be impossible. Because for the first time since his teens, he wasn’t sure will power alone was going to cut it.
* * *
Close to an hour later, Tess drove past the ornate wrought-iron gates mentioned on Nate’s meticulously detailed instructions, then risked a glance at the cracked clockface on the dashboard.
Blast. Four fifty-five.
It was worse than she’d thought. She was nearly an hour late, which would be yet another tick in the ‘Tess needs a keeper’ column. She’d lay bets that Nate had arrived bang on time. The car’s engine whined as the drive swooped round a tight bend and then climbed through a grove of palm trees.
Don’t you dare die before we get there.
Paying no attention to the threat, the car shuddered and a cloud of stream belched from the vicinity of the radiator grill. Why hadn’t she considered the woeful state of her transport options before she’d rashly agreed to drive herself up here? The answer was simple, and sadly humiliating—she hadn’t wanted to spend an hour in a car with Nate Graystone.
Her heart was already beating double time at the thought of seeing him again. And that could not be good.
She needed to get her response to him under control, because she was going to have to take him up on his offer of a place to stay. She might have been able to kid herself a little while longer, until she’d burst in on Eva and Nick canoodling in the kitchen this morning. Eva had gone bright red, and Nick had just chuckled as he sent his wife a roguish look that spoke volumes. The evidence spoke for itself. After a week of staying in their guest room, Tess had outstayed her welcome. She couldn’t impose on her friends any longer.
And Nate’s offer was her only viable option. As long as the guest cottage he was talking about had a roof and running water, she was going to have to be gracious and grateful if it killed her and accept it.
She’d once prided herself on being calm under pressure—it was one of the prerequisites of her job, being able to juggle everything from catering catastrophes to wardrobe malfunctions to the best man breaking his ankle on the big day and still put on the perfect event. That talent seemed to have deserted her ever since she’d set eyes on Nate Graystone, but she intended to wrestle it back. Starting now. Which meant being sensible, and forgoing some of her precious independence, for the time being at least.
She shifted into first to take the incline and winced as the gearbox protested, loudly.
But she didn’t intend to keep mooching off Nate for long, which meant she needed to get real about her employment situation and start making viable plans. And after deciding to accept Nate’s offer, she’d made a few crucial decisions on the long and tortuous drive down the coast road.
Firstly, there was no way she was going to be able to get a good enough job in any of the major events-planning firms in San Francisco before her pregnancy started to show. Even with her killer portfolio and some amazing contacts it didn’t alter the fact that no one was hiring. Every firm she’d contacted so far was laying people off, not taking on new staff and, anyway, she’d probably have to do a probationary period before she’d be entitled to maternity benefits.
But once she’d faced that fact, she’d admitted to herself that the thought of working for someone else had filled her with dread. She had her own very distinctive ideas about how to plan and execute the perfect event—and she doubted she would have got much job satisfaction working for anonymous corporate clients who simply wanted big and brash and had no time for personal or creative. She’d been saving to start her own events planning firm instead of simply freelancing on an ad-hoc basis and she had a string of satisfied clients who could send business her way if she approached them properly. She’d done a course in web design last year with a view to setting up her own website and had even taken business admin classes at the local community college. But she’d never quite had the courage to take the next step—to think about going into partnership with an investor. Eva had offered on numerous occasions to be that partner—an offer she’d made again this morning—but Tess had always resisted, saying she didn’t want to put a financial strain on their friendship. When the real reason was that she had been scared to commit to a project that might curtail her active social life and her freedom to pick and choose what she wanted to work on. But now she had the perfect reason to jump off that cliff. Her high-rent apartment was history, and in seven months’ time she would have a responsibility that wasn’t going to fit around an active social life or last-minute decision making.
Starting her own business would require a lot of hard work in the next six months. But if she could get it up and running, with her own savings and Eva’s investment, and schedule the events she took on either before or six months after the baby’s due date, it could work. It was a huge risk, but she couldn’t afford to let her career coast any longer. And there was no getting around the fact that Nate’s offer of a free place to stay couldn’t have come at a better time. But if she was going to be sleeping under Nate’s roof, one thing she absolutely must not do was end up sleeping in his bed too.
Quite apart from making her even more susceptible to those silly heartbumps, it would send out all the wrong signals.
She sucked in a careful breath and gripped the car’s steering wheel. So stop hyperventilating at the thought of seeing him again.
They weren’t an item. Not in any real sense. They’d had monkey sex. Twice. And made a baby. By accident. And okay, he wasn’t the cold, ruthless, irresponsible guy he’d first appeared to be. And neither his motives nor his personality nor his past were as black and white as she’d instantly assumed. There were definite shades of grey there, complexities she never would have guessed at. But that didn’t alter the fact that he was not really her kind of guy. He was arrogant, super-confident and had a bad habit of trying to tell her what to do. When they weren’t tearing each other’s clothes off, what did they really have in common, except an accidental pregnancy?
They had seven months to establish a civil and manageable relationship with one another, which should be centred on the baby growing inside her and definitely not on the highly combustible monkey sex they had already indulged in.
She chewed on her bottom lip, willing the steam to stop hissing. And felt somew
hat gratified when her heartbeat slowed a little.
At a girl, Tess. All she needed to do was focus on all the things that made her and Nate completely incompatible. Then she shouldn’t have a problem dealing with the areas where they were far too compatible.
The engine wheezed painfully and Tess focused on whispering words of encouragement as the car struggled up the last rise and crested the hill. Then her jaw went slack, and every sensible thought flew right out of her head, chased away by utter astonishment. ‘Good grief!’
