AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Condom,” he ground out.
“I’m on the pill.”
She started to reach for him again, her head lowering. The thought of her exquisite mouth wrapped around him nearly undid him once more.
“Next time.” When she started to argue, he silenced her by kissing her mouth before trailing his lips across her cheek and along her jaw. “I need to be inside you.”
Her legs spread, her body moving to the edge of the desk. He guided himself to her core, gently pressed against her, teasing both of them into a frenetic frenzy before he finally gave in to both their needs and plunged inside her welcoming body. She closed around him as if she’d been made for him. Her head dropped back, baring her neck to his lips, his tongue, his relentless need. She grabbed on to his shoulders, met him thrust for thrust as he took everything she gave and demanded more.
“Alaric... I can’t... I’m so...”
He wrapped his arms around her, tangled one hand in her hair and kissed her senseless as she came apart in his arms. He followed a second later, growling into her mouth as he claimed her body and soul.
CHAPTER TWO
Five weeks later
THETESTSWERElined up like little toy soldiers, five in total. Each one said the same thing.
PREGNANT
Why, Clara mused as she drummed her fingers on the edge of the bathroom sink,did they put that word in all capital letters?Like the tests were shouting just how big a mistake she’d made.
Because she’d made a colossal one. Not only had she not planned on having a child anytime soon, if ever, but having her boss’s baby catapulted the situation fromuh-ohto catastrophic.
She turned sideways. Her stomach was still flat. She’d chalked the bone-deep exhaustion up to overseeing the royal wedding, her loss of appetite to the time of year. The anniversary of Miles’s death always left her tossing all night, afraid of the nightmares waiting for her on the other side of sleep. Even though her brief marriage to the scion of Clemont Oil had been a deeply unhappy one, it didn’t wipe away the guilt embedded in her bones.
Guilt that Miles’s death had, at least partially, been her fault.
It’s why she’d taken an herbal remedy every night the last month. It knocked her into a dreamless state that made life possible until the anniversary passed and the memories faded.
But that sleep had come at a price. After the fifth test, an online search had revealed that herbal remedy also decreased the effectiveness of the pill.
Panic fluttered in her chest. Should she wait to tell Alaric until a doctor confirmed her pregnancy? Or should she get the big reveal over with?
Alaric’s handsome face appeared in her mind. Normally his dark, chiseled features were frozen in a cold mask, a permanent poker face that gave nothing away, including his innermost thoughts and desires. The first couple of years she’d worked for him, his harsh attractiveness hadn’t fazed her. Her heart had been too battered and wary to entertain anything beyond acknowledgment that the prince was extremely good-looking. She knew, too, between his own hints and palace gossip, that he wasn’t living like a monk in the years leading up to his wedding. Neither was his fiancée, although her indulgences had played out across the press with increasing frequency compared to the shroud of secrecy Alaric had conducted his affairs under.
Still, as she’d healed and started to regain threads of her lost confidence over the last couple of years, she’d been grateful for the rarely-spoken-of engagement. It kept her mind where it belonged: on her work and off her unattainable boss’s broad shoulders, dark gaze and razor-sharp wit. Easier said than done the more he’d sought her out, talked with her and, most importantly, listened. A stark contrast from Miles’s preference for her to be seen, not heard. And Alaric’s passion for the country he would one day inherit added another seductive layer to the intoxicating mix that was Prince Alaric Van Ambrose.
But there had always been Miss Celestine Osborne in the background. Alaric’s future wife.
Until last year. Until That Night, as she’d come to think of it. The night when the innocent little flutterings in her belly and enjoyment she received from their talks had crackled into something more intense.
The night Alaric had ceased being just a prince and shown her that he was most definitely a hot-blooded man.
The tapping of her fingers intensified as she remembered Alaric, stripped to the waist with sweat glistening on his back as he’d pummeled the punching bag in his private gym. When he’d looked at her, she’d barely stopped herself from tripping over her own two feet at the intensity in his gaze. A mix of heated anger and raw pain at complete odds with the calm, controlled prince who had dealt with both his fiancée’s and his father’s machinations with a disapproving yet bored air.
He hadn’t let up on the bag, delivering blow after blow as he’d released all the hurt and fury that had to have been building for years. She’d felt like a voyeur, her eyes riveted to the ripples of muscle as his body had moved with lightning speed. Desire had wound its way through her veins with an intensity she hadn’t anticipated. She’d never experienced that intoxicating, languid heat, so potent she’d almost felt bewitched.
“I don’t want your pity,” he’d snapped at her.
Anyone else might have mistaken his growl for an order. But she’d sensed the undercurrents running beneath his words. He didn’t want her support, fine. But the man needed someone to tell him exactly what she had:
You just deserve better.
The tapping ceased as she grabbed the sink in a death grip. What on earth had she been thinking, crossing that line with him? An innocuous comment that had taken the spark they’d both ignored and fanned it into a slow-burning flame. A flame that had suddenly burst out of control into an all-out blaze that had shocked her to her very core.
Even now, despite the exhaustion that had etched dark half-moons into the skin below her eyes, her body tingled at the memory of how they’d melted into each other, his fingers tangling in her hair as if to anchor her against him, his mouth plundering, possessing, marking her with his passion.
