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Martina’s stomach dipped. She had thought he wouldn’t be back for at least a week or two. Wishful thinking. She turned quickly and met Noah’s gaze, noting the fact that he, instead of Rodney, was carrying her grocery bags.
“What a surprise,” she finally managed.
Rodney eyed Noah with suspicion.
“Rodney, this is Noah.” She took a deep breath. She rebelled at using Noah’s words. They were primal, possessive, and emphasized the connection between them, a connection Martina preferred to diminish. “He, uh, contributed genetic material,” she said, and forced a smile. “Thanks again for helping.”
“Any time,” Rodney said with a nod and curious glance at Noah.
“What brings you here?” she asked Noah after Rodney left.
“You.” Noah caught the door for her and followed her into the kitchen. “You missed me,” he said, his voice holding a mix of sexy humor.
Martina’s lips twitched and she put her bag on the counter. “Like I miss morning sickness.”
“Did you have much of it?” he asked more seriously.
“About three weeks when I lived on saltines, soda and vitamins.”
“And now?”
She turned to face him. “Now I’m just really big.”
His gaze fell over her, lingering on her breasts, tummy and legs. “Just in a few places,” he said. “Pregnancy looks good on you.”
The way he looked at her reminded her of the passion they’d shared and the way he had taken her body. The way he looked at her reminded her of how much she had wanted him. Martina pushed the thought from her mind and turned back around to put away the groceries. “You didn’t really say what you wanted.”
“Yes, I did,” he said. “You.”
Her heart jumped and she nearly dropped a carton of eggs. “You wanted to talk to me about something,” she quickly corrected for his benefit and hers.
“Have you thought any more about my proposal?”
She mentally put on her armor as she put away the groceries. “I don’t recall any proposals.”
“For you to marry me,” he told her calmly.
“You didn’t ever really ask,” she said. “You ordered.”
“Will you marry me?”
“No,” she said as quickly as he’d asked.
He sighed and she reluctantly met his gaze. “Do you think you are doing the best thing for the baby to not have me involved at all?”
She opened her mouth to say yes, but a strong inner integrity defeated her. She closed her mouth.
“Do you think the best thing for this baby is to have two parents married to each other living in the same home?”
Martina had admired his insight before. Now it got under her skin. “In general, yes, but we have a special circumstance. Our families have held a grudge against each other for over a hundred years.”
“What’s more important? A grudge or the welfare of our child?”
Martina shook her head. “There’s more involved and you know it. You and I wanted each other temporarily. We knew we weren’t looking for anything permanent. There’s a big difference between what is good on a temporary basis and what is good forever.”
Noah walked toward her, his eyes glinting. “Are you saying I’m not good husband material?”
Each step he took closer packed a wallop on her nerve endings. His intensity, his confidence, his personality, his aura had been and still were entirely too sexy for her own good. She lifted her chin. “Yes, I am. There’s a big difference between a lover and a husband. As a husband, I can already tell you’ll pull the same kind of caveman routines my brothers do. You’ll order me around and tell me what to do and expect me to be a good, submissive wife. I’m too independent for that. While you may have been an—” she took a breath and wished for a fan “—incredible lover, you wouldn’t work for me as a husband,” she said, “at all.”
She needed to make that clear to him, to her, to the entire free world, all Third World countries and any planets inhabited by intelligent life.
He put his hands on the counter on either side of her, crowding her. “You’re assuming I’ll act that way. You don’t know that I will. You really only have your experience to judge me. So tell me, what did I do wrong?”
Martina stared into his eyes and bit her lip to keep from repeating the words that flooded her brain. You were too sexy. You made me melt. You made me feel more like a woman than I’ve ever felt in my life. You made me feel like the most desirable woman in the world. You made me fall so hard I almost couldn’t get back up. You made me feel so much for you so fast. You terrified me.
She tore her gaze from his and stared down at his boots. “You have the wrong last name. And you have given signs that you would try to rule me,” she told him. “You tried to order me to marry you and come live with you.”
“What was your reaction when you found out you were pregnant?”
Martina remembered the bloodcurdling scream she’d let out once she’d left the doctor’s office and closed herself in her car. “Okay, I’ll admit it wasn’t a quiet, rational response.”
“How many decibels?”
She frowned at him. “I don’t know. I just remember wondering if I’d permanently broken my larynx.” She smiled. “But as you can see, I didn’t.”
“The point is, your first response wasn’t the most rational. My first instinct was and is to protect.” His gaze drifted over her body, warming her. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing, as long as you don’t go overboard.”
“And you don’t think you’ll go overboard protecting our baby?”
Martina’s chest tightened. She was already feeling overprotective of the precious life inside her. “It’s my job to protect.”
“Mine, too,” he said, lifting his hand to cup her chin. “I won’t forget it,” he told her, and everything about him, his voice, his determined eyes, his posture, made an oath.
Martina felt a sinking sensation. This was why she hadn’t wanted to tell him. She had known Noah wouldn’t abandon his child, and her life would be intertwined with his for the rest of her days. She just wasn’t sure she could see him on a regular basis and keep her good sense intact. Lifting her head away, she steeled her mind against him. “That’s nice, but—”
“And it’s part of the reason I’m here,” he said, dropping his hand to his hip, but still crowding her. “There’s a lot I don’t know about you, and there’s a lot you don’t know about me. You may not want to marry me, but we’re still having a baby together. In that case, we’ve got a lot to learn about each other.”
Martina hadn’t thought her stomach could sink any lower. “What are you saying?”
“We need to get to know each other. We need to spend some time together.”
No, no, no, no, no. Sliding past him would have been much easier if she hadn’t been seven months pregnant. Martina gently nudged him away. “I hate for you to have to drive so far for something that shouldn’t take much time. Don’t you think a résumé would work just as well?”
“No.”
“We could write each other. E-mail,” she said enthusiastically. “Everyone keeps in touch through e-mail these days.”
He shook his head. “If this were the Old West, I could haul you off and carry you home. Sadly, in this case, those days are gone,” he muttered under his breath. “I know you as a lover. I know what makes you—” his eyes darkened in remembrance “—go,” he finished. “But I need to know more than that. I need to know the mother of my child.”
His gaze cut through her, and Martina had a terrible premonition that having Noah know her could be more dangerous for her than making love with him had been. His intensity made the prospect feel unbearably intimate. Oh, hell, Martina thought, wanting to kick something. How was she supposed to refuse that request?
He moved closer, leaning on his uplifted arm against the wall beside her. “We might as well start with the hard stuff.”
Hard stuff, Martina thought. That would be you. “What’s that?” she asked warily.
“What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?” he asked.
A rush of relief raced through her. Martina was so relieved she was almost charmed. Almost, but she was determined to stay on guard.
“En garde!” Gideon cried, and lunged toward Noah. Gideon, whose temper flared quickly but cooled with equal speed, had gotten past his anger and was more than willing to try to best his older brother in a duel.
The parry, the clash and scrape of metal swordplay had been one of the best ways for Noah to let off steam since Zachary had taught him and his brothers to fence in the old barn.
“Rough afternoon with the Logan princess?” Gideon goaded him with a smile.
Noah plunged past his younger brother’s defense to touch his chest. He contributed genetic material. Every time Martina’s flip words played through his mind, his head roared with anger.
Gideon nodded wryly at the point and backed away slightly. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
“It could have been worse,” Noah said with a short nod. “Ready?” he asked, and they began again.
“In other words, she didn’t sic her brothers on you,” Gideon said.
“Compared to Martina, her brothers are cake. We’ve at least been able to reason with Brock Logan about wandering cattle and the pond we share. Martina knows what’s best—she just isn’t being reasonable.”
“And what’s best is…?”
Noah stated the obvious. “For us to marry and raise the baby here.”
Gideon touched his rib cage.
“Touché,” Noah said. “Ready.”
“Can’t blame her for hesitating. We’ve never been the favored family of the county,” Gideon said.
“That’s in the past,” Noah insisted. It was one of his greatest passions to put the bad Coltrane reputation in the past and to build a new one based on respect. “All of us have worked to put that in the past.”
“Yeah, but for Pete’s sake, did you have to pick that Logan woman? Why not someone a little more easygoing?”
“You mean a woman who doesn’t have the ability to slice a man to ribbons with her tongue?” Noah asked, pushing Gideon closer to the back wall.
“Yeah,” Gideon said, swinging his sword for all he was worth.
“Someone more submissive,” Noah said, thinking Martina would probably stab them both if she heard this discussion.
“Yeah. It sounds like you might as well be trying to seduce a porcupine,” Gideon said. “A pregnant porcupine.”
Noah lunged and pressed the tip of his sword to the protective material covering Gideon’s heart. Martina might be acting like a porcupine, but Noah had experienced the soft, giving woman behind the quills. He was determined to find that woman again.
“Touché,” his brother said with a shake of his head. “Hell, you make a great case for contraception. What are you going to do?”
“The same thing I do in a fencing match. Find her weakness and exploit it.” Noah knew he sounded ruthless, but he wasn’t playing for fun with Martina. He was playing for blood, his family name and his child.
He found her reclining on a chaise longue in her backyard in the late afternoon. Dressed in shorts and a maternity tank top she’d lifted above her belly while she rested. Her legs were long and lithe, and knowing the baby she carried was his made him want her in an elemental way. Her expression was soft, almost wistful and her gaze was faraway. He remembered how she had once looked at him with passion-drenched eyes, and he wondered what tender thoughts she could be thinking right now.
He walked closer and heard her say, “I look like a beached whale. I can’t even reach my toenails to paint them.”
Noah saw the bottle of nail polish beside her, and his gaze shot to the next yard. He saw a woman wearing a bikini. He bit back a chuckle. “You still have the best legs in Texas,” he said.
She turned her head quickly, and her cheeks turned pink with embarrassment. “I, uh, was just—”
“—feeling sorry for yourself,” he finished for her. “I brought Chinese food for dinner. Does it agree with you?”
Martina sighed. “Unfortunately every food agrees with me now. And I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, without an ounce of conviction.
Martina stood. No, really. I—”
“Martina, you are a very beautiful woman, pregnant or not pregnant. You just haven’t had a man around to remind you.”
She stared at him for a long moment, revealing a glimpse of the woman he’d known in Chicago. She took a deep breath. “Don’t flatter me.”
“I won’t,” he assured her. “I just tell the truth. I’d say something else,” he said, allowing his gaze to linger on her full breasts. “But I don’t want you to take a swing at me. You might hurt yourself. Are you hungry for Chinese food or not?”
She blinked and paused as if debating whether to hit him, anyway. “I’m hungry, period. Let’s eat inside. I didn’t expect you,” she said, leading him though the back door to the cool kitchen.
“Didn’t your mother tell you to always expect the unexpected from a Coltrane?”
Her smile wavered. “My mother didn’t get an opportunity to teach me anything about the Coltranes. She died when I was born.”
Noah immediately regretted his joke. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any disrespect.”
“That’s okay. Besides, my father and brothers gave me an earful about the Coltranes.” She plucked the containers of food from the bag.
“I’m sure they did,” he muttered, and carefully voiced his next thought. “I realize you descend from Amazons and you could easily harvest an entire field of corn in the morning, deliver your baby at lunch and finish up another field in the afternoon. But do you ever think you might have problems when you deliver the baby?”
She drummed her fingers on the cabinet. “If you hadn’t included the Amazon part, I would say no. But the truth is, although I don’t worry about it a lot and the doctor says I’m perfectly healthy,” she emphasized, “I think about it every now and then.”
He saw the fleeting vulnerability and longing in her eyes and remembered how he had felt when his mother died. “You still miss the chance of knowing her, don’t you?”
“I would have given anything to know her. I’ve always missed her and I probably always will. I was lucky to have two brothers who tried very hard and awkwardly at times to make up for the loss.” She pushed her hair behind her ear. “What about your parents?”
“I think I miss more of what might have been. My parents weren’t happy together.”
Martina lifted her eyebrows. “My parents were crazy about each other. My brothers told me that was why my father never seemed happy after she died. Looking at me was too painful for him, because I reminded him of his loss.”
Noah realized he had known Martina’s mother was dead, but he’d never heard the whole story, and they’d agreed not to speak of their families during their time together in Chicago. It made him see her in a new light. “We had a foreman named Zachary, who taught my brothers and me about being a man. Zachary always said the strongest love survives distance and death, and it always makes you a better man.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Are you saying my parents didn’t love each other?”
“I’m saying your dad missed an opportunity to love and be loved by a little girl who could have taken away some of the hurt.”
Martina looked at Noah for a long moment. He could practically see her mind poking at his statement, examining and pondering, then setting it aside. She glanced at the boxes of food on the counter. “Dibs on the sweet ’n’ sour chicken.”
They dug into the food, and Martina didn’t eat nearly as much as Noah had expected. “I thought you were eating for two. You made it sound like you’re eating everything but the living-room furniture.”
“I’m not eating for two. It’s more like I’m eating for one and one-twelfth. Besides, I wanted to save room for ice cream.” She smiled with mischief. “I need my calcium.”
“Have you had an ultrasound yet?”
She nodded as she scooped fudge-swirl ice cream into two bowls. “Two months ago. The way the baby was positioned didn’t reveal its sex, but I have a feeling it will be a—”
“—girl,” he interjected.
“—boy,” she said at the same time with a look of surprise on her face.
“I would have thought you’d have some sort of macho expectation about producing a male,” she said.
“And I would have thought you’d have some sort of feminist expectation about producing a female,” he said. “Both wrong about each other. Looks like we’ve got a long way to go to get to know each other.”
Her face fell. “I still think e-mail is the best solution.”
“It hasn’t been that bad this time,” he said, rising from his chair and walking closer to her. Following an impulse that could get him kicked, bitten or scratched, he lifted her finger to his lips and sucked the ice cream from the tip. Her eyes grew wide and she jerked her hand from his.
“What has made you more reasonable this time?” he asked. “Maybe you like me a little more than you thought you did.”
She took a quick breath and a dozen emotions swept through her blue eyes. Noah would swear one of them was desire. Maybe he was getting through.
“Food,” she said. “It was definitely the food.”
It was definitely not the food that was keeping her awake tonight, Martina thought much later as she threw back the covers on her bed. Every time she closed her eyes, a picture from the first time she and Noah had made love flashed across her mind.
She sat up in bed and sighed, holding her head in her hands and surrendering to the memory for just a moment. They’d eaten Chicago pizza for dinner, then Noah had taken her back to his suite to show her how he traded futures on the Chicago exchange on his laptop. His excitement had been contagious, and after a while, she’d been more caught up in his enthusiasm than his words.
“You’re not listening,” he said, sitting beside her, his thigh rubbing against hers.
Martina felt her cheeks heat. “I was,” she insisted.
“Okay, what happens after the price jumps ten percent?”
“I didn’t know there’d be a quiz.”
He laughed, and the rich, dark sound curled inside her and heated her down to her toes. He tugged her from her chair and pulled her onto his lap. “If you weren’t thinking about futures, then what were you thinking about?”
Bracing herself on his shoulders, she considered dodging the question, but followed another instinct, instead. “I was thinking about you,” she said, lifting her fingers to his solid jaw. “You have such a passion for almost everything you do.”
His eyes darkened and he pressed her fingers to his lips. “More than one person has called me crazy for my ideas.”
“A little crazy is not a bad thing,” Martina said, feeling a relentless urgency grow in her belly and blood.
He sucked her finger into his mouth, and she held her breath while he held her gaze. “I’m getting a passion for Martina.”
“That could be too crazy,” she whispered as he pulled her face closer to his.
“Too late,” he said, and took her mouth.
Martina’s world spun. He had kissed her before, but tonight was different. She felt it in the air, in his touch, inside her. He made love to her mouth, tasting her, seducing her, savoring her until her heart clamored for more. She sank her fingers into his hair, luxuriating in the soft, wavy texture.
He pulled away and she felt almost as if she was in a dream. Giving her a dozen opportunities to stop him, he slowly, deliberately lifted her sweater over her head and unfastened her bra.
“Do you want this?” he asked, touching the aching tips of her breasts with his thumbs.
Her mouth went dry and she closed her eyes. Her heart hammered a mile a minute. There were reasons, very valid reasons, she should stop, but her brain could not produce one of them at this moment. She had never wanted a man so badly in her life. It wasn’t so much his incredible body as much as it was his mind, his very being. The way he thought, the way he acted.
“Yes,” she said, the honesty coming from deep inside her. “I want you.”
He dipped his mouth to one of her nipples and took it into his mouth.
Fire had raced through her, and Martina had bitten back a moan. He would consume her, she’d thought, and a lick of apprehension had mingled with the heat of her desire. He would learn more about her tonight than any man ever had. She would have to keep a part of herself from him. He must never know, she’d decided, that he was her first.
Distress crowded Martina’s throat, and a soft sound escaped, breaking her reverie. Somehow she had been convincing enough that Noah hadn’t guessed. He had been so caught up in their passion that he still didn’t know he had been her first. Unable to sit still one second longer, she rose from her bed. She needed to leave these memories behind, to exorcise them, if only temporarily, from her mind.
She instinctively walked toward the nursery. She hadn’t bought a crib or even painted the baby’s room yet. The only piece of furniture in the room was a toy chest full of odds and ends she’d begun to collect. She knelt beside the light oak chest and touched the infant sleepers, receiving blankets, a stuffed bear, then brought out the little box that made her heart contract and expand every time.
Baby booties.
It was the silliest thing, but the tiny, tiny white booties made it all feel real and right to her. Seeing Noah tonight had confused her, and she didn’t need to feel confused. Martina knew what she had to do. She had to keep her head together and love and raise this baby. She had to resist the urge to lean, especially on Noah. He made her think. Every time he visited her, there was more to like, more to admire, more to want and, in turn, more to fear.
The thought of knowing him more made every muscle in her body tense. It wasn’t just that he was a Coltrane, although heaven knows that was enough. Martina had a feeling in her heart, in her blood, that if she fell for Noah, his being was so big and powerful that he would swallow her and she would simply disappear.
Three
“Have you heard anything from—” Martina’s sister-in-law, Jill asked “—your assistant procreator?”
Martina grinned as the two women carried the results of their shopping trip into her condo. “I like that. Takes a lot of the messy emotion out of it?”
“I wouldn’t want to upset the mother-to-be.”
“By using expressions like former lover, or father of my child, or one of the top five men my brothers most hate.” Martina gritted her teeth. “Thank you.”
“Hate is a strong word,” Jill said, revealing her public-relations background. “Your brothers may not really hate Noah Coltrane. They don’t even know one another.”
“They hate him,” Martina said, stomping upstairs to the nursery. “Brock hates him because he’s a Coltrane and one of their bulls jumped the fence and had entirely too much fun with some of our heifers. It made calving season a real pain because the bull was the wrong size and some of the calves were too big, and then there’s your husband, Dr. Tyler Logan, who used to get into fistfights with Noah on a weekly basis when they were in their teens. And then there’s the small matter that Noah got their baby sister pregnant. Yeah, I would say his name is dirt.”
“But people change and they haven’t truly sat down and talked since they became adults.”
“That’s to prevent bloodshed and eventual death by lethal injection. Texas believes in capital punishment.”
Jill chuckled and put her arms around Martina in a hug. “Don’t you think you’re exaggerating just a little?”
“No,” Martina muttered. “And I’m not exaggerating when I say how nice you are to check on me and go baby shopping with me.” Martina knew Jill was unable to bear children because of an injury from an automobile accident, and her sister-in-law’s continued generosity often brought tears to her eyes. Jill hadn’t allowed her injury to prevent her from being a mother to a child who needed her. She and Tyler had adopted a son as soon as they got married.
Jill’s watery gaze met Martina’s damp one and both women laughed. “At least you can blame this on hormones. I’m really okay. It’s amazing what marrying your brother and adopting Sam have done for me. I just want you and your baby to be healthy and happy.” She sobered. “And I notice you didn’t answer my question about your assistant procreator.”