AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Are you sure?’
‘I wouldn’t be bothering you if I wasn’t,’ she replied, with a composure of tone and expression that was in direct contrast to the sound of his heartbeat pounding in his ears.
‘But we were safe. I used protection.’
‘It happened anyway.’
Her olive-green eyes continued to look unflinchingly back at him, and in spite of the quiet fury he had nursed since learning her identity, and in spite of all that he had felt when he locked eyes on her moments ago downstairs—a blaze of blistering anger and betrayal and hurt—something hot and heavy leapt into life in his stomach. The yearning to lean over and crush her plump mouth beneath his ripped through him, unexpected and intense.
‘I’m ten weeks along. A recent blood test and a doctor’s appointment confirmed it. I thought you had a right to know that I am pregnant and that I’m having the baby.’
And there it was again—the impact of those words striking him in the centre of his chest, punching pockets of air from his lungs, making his heart stop and start with a distress that threatened to be his undoing.
Gritting his teeth, Damon tried to breathe through it...tried also to steady his thoughts. But there was only a frighteningly familiar sense of the world spinning out of his control. He could feel the closeness of those inky black tentacles, poised to clamp around his wrists and ankles and drag him back into that abyss that had swallowed him as a boy, when he’d lost his father, and then his mother, and his whole world had been in a million pieces around his feet and there had seemed no way to put it back together again.
But he refused to return to that place.
‘I know it’s a shock...’ Carrie said, watching him somewhat cautiously with her large eyes as he propelled himself to his feet.
His agitated stride carried him to the fridge for a bottle of chilled water and he snapped off the top with a frantic twist of his impatient fingers.
‘Me showing up and telling you this... I did try to call, but whenever I tried to make contact I was stonewalled.’
She looked at him almost beseechingly, as if wanting forgiveness for... What? Her unexpected announcement? Did she not realise she needed to repent for bigger sins thanshockinghim?
‘You were stonewalled at my instruction,’ Damon informed her indifferently, his feet moving once again on orders from his restless body, taking him back in the direction of his desk. ‘Because I uncovered who your father was and I didn’t want there to be any further contact between us. Naturally I didn’t expect you’d be reaching out to inform me that our one night together had resulted in pregnancy.’
His chest heaved yet again at that word and all it implied. But rather than be overwhelmed by it he focused on the facts of it.
Ten weeks along, she had said. He didn’t need to do the maths. He knew exactly how long it had been since they’d been together...since he had explored and tasted every inch of her incredible body. Seventy days.Ten weeks.
It wasn’t inviolable proof, but nonetheless he found that he believed her. She had lied to him about who she was, providing him with ample reason to doubt every word that came out of her mouth, yet for a reason he could not fully comprehend he believed her.
‘No. Of course not.’ Carrie dropped her gaze to the floor, twisting her fingers together in front of her stomach. ‘How did you find out?’
Because I couldn’t let you go, he thought as his gaze moved over the delicate features of her face: eyes as large and captivating as an owl’s, lips that were full and tempting, and satin-smooth black hair that was a striking contrast to her pale skin.
She was wearing a summery dress, a design with thin straps and a flouncy skirt that brushed against her lightly tanned legs just above her knees, and that flash of toned flesh was mere inches from where he’d nuzzled her with his lips, kissing higher and higher until he had—
With a suppressed curse, Damon broke himself free from the intoxicating memory and pulled his eyes away. But it was too late. He had lingered in it too long to be unaffected, and beneath the heat of recollection blood surged through his veins and a thudding pulse ignited at the base of his groin.
He sighed, perturbed that for a second time she was appealing to him on a sexual level that was forbidden. ‘Does it really matter?’ he asked.
‘I guess not.’
Her slender throat convulsed and the little colour she’d had in her cheeks seemed to fade. Approaching his desk uneasily, she perched on the edge of one of the duo of chairs facing him. It occurred to Damon that, given she was pregnant, he should have invited her to sit immediately. Irked by his uncharacteristic thoughtlessness, he rose from his seat, extracted another bottle of water from the fridge, decanted it into a glass and placed it in front of her.
She murmured her thanks. After a sip she raised her eyes to him. ‘I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you who I was.’
Surprise at such a forthright apology rendered him momentarily mute. In the two decades since the scandal, Sterling Randolph had never issued any words of regret or contrition for what had unfolded in the wake of his actions. It had been Damon’s assumption that his daughter would have the same problem with atoning. But she offered the words readily and sincerely, and they carried more weight than he would have credited, loosening some of the tension straining his arms and easing the red-hot sting of anger swirling in the hollowed pit of his stomach.
‘Answer me one question, Carrie—was our meeting in Paris a coincidence?’
He told himself he was asking because it was all that mattered. Because it concerned the plans he had in motion and he needed to know if they were in jeopardy...if Randolph had some notion of what he was up to. But deep down he wanted to know for himself. He wanted—needed—to know if it had been real, if the emotions and yearnings Carrie had provoked in him had been the product of a true and pure connection, or nothing more than a skilful emotional seduction by a manipulator as practised as her father.
‘Yes,’ she rushed to respond.
But the quick answer failed to satisfy the drumming ache within him and he didn’t know why. It was the answer he had needed to hear after all.
