- -
- 100%
- +
And now she had to face Nat.
She fluffed her hair again. Then she ran a quick comb through it. She wasn’t happy with the last cut, which she’d got done at a beauty school to save money. It took an exceptional stylist to deal with her thick, naturally curly hair. This one had left it too bulky around her shoulders. She tried to tame it with her fingers, but it was no use.
Maybe a little lipstick.
While she’d been on the run, she’d pared down her cosmetics needs to lipstick, mascara and blush. She had the tube of lipstick halfway to her mouth when she stopped to stare at herself in the mirror. What was she doing? Trying to come on to him?
She rolled the lipstick back down, capped it and tucked it into her backpack. She’d take him the herbal supplements she’d brought, though. Fishing them out, she started toward the door. On the way she happened to look down at her feet.
Now, there was a sorry sight. She paused to consider her unpainted toes, clipped with a toenail clipper. Not buffed, not filed, not pampered. Her last pedicure had been before she’d had Elizabeth. Nat had always loved her feet.
Stop it, she lectured herself. He probably didn’t love any part of her anymore. What she looked like didn’t matter. Elizabeth was the only person who mattered in this whole mess.
“Jess?” Nat rapped on the door. “Are you sure you’re okay in there?”
“I’m okay.”
“Then what’s taking so long?”
“I was, um, thinking.”
“Well, could you do that out here? We need to talk.”
“Yes, we do. We most certainly do.” Drawing in a bracing lungful of air, she opened the bathroom door. She found herself staring at his shirtfront. He stood right outside the door, crowding her, invading her space. She would have to walk around him to move any farther into the room.
His masculine scent surrounded her, making her quicken in all sorts of strategic places. She gathered her courage and looked up into his eyes. Her heart stuttered at the fire burning there. “Nat?”
“What’s that?” He glanced down at the two bottles of supplements.
“Herbal stuff for you.”
His gaze lifted. “Why?”
“Because…” Because I love you and worry about you. She didn’t dare say it.
He made an impatient noise deep in his throat. “Jess, I have to ask you something.”
“Okay.” Her heart hammered.
His words were as intense as his gaze. “Is there anyone else?”
Joy rushed through her. Hallelujah. He still wanted her. “No. No one else.”
With a gusty sigh he took the vitamin bottles and tossed them on the floor. Then he pulled her into his arms. “Excuse the beard,” he murmured. Then his lips crushed hers.
Overjoyed as she was to know that he still cared, she was distracted at first by the beard. Kissing him was like smooching a stuffed animal. But then…then he coaxed her mouth open. She forgot all about the beard as she rediscovered why kissing Nat had been one of her all-time thrills. He could pack more sensuality into a kiss than other men could manage in an hour of whole-body sex.
A few moments of kissing Nat beat a day at the spa for making her tingle all over. One kiss from him and she was so awake, from the tips of her curling toes to the tiny hairs at the nape of her neck. His fingers stroked there, and she turned to melted butter in his arms.
Boiling butter might be more like it. She wriggled against him, trying to get closer.
He shifted the angle of his mouth and tugged at the bathrobe’s sash while he muttered something that sounded like have to.
Oh, so did she. Had to. She started on the buttons of his shirt. But wait. She hadn’t planned on this.
“Need you so,” he breathed, backing her toward the bed as he continued to kiss her senseless.
“Wait,” she said, gasping.
“Can’t.” He pushed open the terry cloth and closed his hand over her breast with a groan.
“Nat—” She tried to tell him she wasn’t on the Pill. He kept coming, thrusting his tongue in her mouth, making her crazy with wanting him. The back of her knees hit the edge of the bed. She fell against the quilted spread and he came right with her.
Panting, she tried again. “I’m not—”
His mouth silenced her once more.
Oh, God. How many times had she fantasized about his weight pressing her into the mattress, his hand between her thighs, his mouth at her breast? Both of them going wild. If this was a dream, she’d kill whoever or whatever woke her up.
Even his beard was wonderful, brushing her skin like the pelt of some exotic animal. She’d never realized kissing a bearded man could be so erotic. She pulled him closer, arched into his caress, moaned his name.
“God, I need you,” he groaned.
“I need you, too.” But one unplanned baby was enough. She forced herself to choke out the words. “But I’m not on the Pill anymore. We can’t—”
“Yes, we can.” He nuzzled his way back to her mouth.
At first she thought he meant that he wouldn’t care if she got pregnant. “We can?”
“Yes.” He covered her face with a million kisses. “We can. I want to be inside you, Jess.”
Could he really be telling her that he’d changed his mind about children? Her heart expanded with the possibility. “Why can we?” she asked breathlessly.
“I had room service bring up condoms. Don’t worry.” He kissed her cheeks, her eyelids, her nose. “I won’t get you pregnant.”
She went still. “Would that be so terrible?”
He paused and lifted his head to gaze into her eyes. Although it seemed to take some effort, he gained control of his runaway desire. Then he took a deep breath. “I don’t want to start out with a fight, Jess.”
A pulse hammered in her throat. “Neither do I. But I need to know. Would it be so terrible if you got me pregnant?”
“You mean right now, at this very moment?” Without giving her a chance to answer, he barreled on. “Yeah, it would. We have a lot of talking to do, and that’s one of the things we need to talk about, but I wouldn’t want to make a move like that without taking all kinds of things into consideration. I am willing to give it some thought, much more so than when I left. Maybe…I’m not saying positively, but maybe…someday. But not right now.”
The hope swelling in her heart died. Damn, but he was a pain in the butt. She’d meant to find a gentle way to tell him, but suddenly she didn’t want to be gentle with this incredibly sexy but frustratingly stubborn man. She wanted to hit him between the eyes.
“It’s too late to talk about it, Nat,” she said. “Eight months ago I gave birth to our daughter.”
CHAPTER FOUR
NAT STARED down at her as a sick feeling worked its way through his gut. “No,” he whispered.
“Yes. I’m sorry to spring it on you like this. I hadn’t planned on that, but I’ve carried this secret for so long that I—”
“No!” He scrambled from the bed, as if eliminating all contact with her would change the message she was trying to deliver. He jabbed an accusing finger at her. “You were on the Pill!”
Jess sat up, drew her robe around her with great dignity and retied the sash. Sometimes, at moments like this when she adopted an almost royal air, he realized that some of her upbringing had stuck with her, whether she wanted it to or not.
“Yes, I was, but—”
“You stopped?” The fear boiling in his stomach erupted into accusations. “You stopped without telling me, didn’t you? You thought if you couldn’t hook me one way, you’d try something else!”
“How dare you!” She leaped from the bed, rigid with anger.
“What else am I supposed to think?” Oh, God, he remembered how she’d pleaded with him to commit. Her pleas could have come from the desperate knowledge that she might be carrying his baby.
Clenching her fists, she faced him, her eyes dark with betrayal. “You could try thinking that it was an accident.” Her voice quivered. “I had a cold that weekend, remember?”
“Yeah, I remember.” She’d suggested their not seeing each other because she hadn’t wanted to infect him. But he’d talked her into it by saying he had a great immune system. He’d told her they’d spend the weekend in bed. Which they had. Her cold had made their final argument that much more miserable, because she’d been crying and coughing and sneezing through it all. He’d felt like the worst kind of heel, but she’d been the one pressing the point, not him. And he’d run.
Her tone grew bitter. “I was so worried about you catching whatever I had that I decided to get a prescription for antibiotics, hoping then I’d be less contagious.”
“I remember that, too. What does that have to do with—”
“See? You don’t know, either! Antibiotics can make birth control pills useless!”
So it was true. The realization washed over him in an icy wave. A child. He had a child. His baby wasn’t a refugee, yet still the images of those sad-eyed orphans rose up to taunt him. Life had let them down, and sure as the world, he would let down any child that called him father.
When panic threatened to overwhelm him, he looked for someone to blame. “If that’s true about antibiotics, it should be common knowledge! The doctor should have told you!”
“How could he think to? I ran over to one of those all-night clinics, and they were busy as hell. The guy who prescribed the antibiotics didn’t know me or my situation, and let’s not forget that I was supposed to keep it so damn secret that I was involved in a sexual relationship.”
He looked away from the accusation in her eyes. Guilty. He was so guilty. Loving a woman like Jess had been a mistake from the beginning. After only a couple of days of knowing her, he’d realized she was a white-lace-and-promises kind of gal. Pursuing her had been pure selfishness on his part.
But he’d wanted her in a way that reason and fairness couldn’t touch. He still did. One glance in her direction and the urge to take her came roaring back, especially now, when he was vulnerable and afraid. He’d discovered making love to Jess was magic. Holding her, pushing deep inside her, his fears always went away.
He could still taste her kisses. Her mouth was red from them, her skin rosy from the brush of his beard. The scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose had been something he’d missed more than he realized. He loved her more now than ever before, as she stood there defiantly challenging him, her wild mane of red curls a riot of color around her tight, angry expression.
Then it finally struck him that she’d announced that they had a child, but she was here alone. “Where is the baby now?”
The defiance whooshed out of her in no time, and her expression became heartbreakingly sad. “In Colorado,” she said quietly. “At the Rocking D.”
“With Sebastian?” Alarm zinged through him. “Sebastian doesn’t know a damn thing about babies! How long—”
“Maybe we’d better go over there and sit down.” She gestured to a polished cherry table and two side chairs positioned by the window. “We have several things to talk about.”
He couldn’t come up with a better plan. It was as good a spot as any for him to be while she flung one hand grenade of information after another. Walking over to the window, he opened the drapes. He’d closed them while she was in the shower as part of his preparation for seducing her. Now he needed a feeling of space.
Below them the city still bustled even though it was nearly midnight. Which meant it was early morning in London. If his body ever stopped pumping with adrenaline, he’d probably keel over from lack of sleep. As it was, he felt as if he’d never be able to sleep again.
“Are you going to sit down?” she asked.
He turned. She was seated primly in one of the Queen Anne chairs, her elbows resting on the arms, her fingers laced together and her feet crossed at the ankles. He thought again how well she fit into this environment. She looked like a younger version of her mother.
He also had the ignoble thought of going over to that chair and trapping her within its arms while he ravished her. There was something very provocative about that bulky terry robe covering her naked body, and the untidy mass of her just-washed hair made her look like a woman in need of ravishing. She had freckles across the top of her breasts, too, and he’d been too busy to take proper notice of them the first time he’d opened her robe. Those freckles called to him.
She’d given birth to his child. He couldn’t take it in. His mind kept trying to reject the whole concept.
“I guess you’re not going to sit down,” she said. “I can understand you being agitated. I really had hoped to break this to you more gradually. But before I say anything more, I need to know if we can keep this between us, or if you will feel some obligation to contact my parents.”
He thought of the worry etched into Adele’s forehead, and the desperate gleam in Russell’s eyes. “They’re worried sick about you. They said you’ve been traveling…” He paused to stare at her. “Have you been hauling that kid around all over the place?”
“Her name is Elizabeth, and no, I haven’t. Like I told you, she’s been at the Rocking D.”
Elizabeth. Her name made her more real, which was not a good thing. “Since when?”
“Since March.”
“Holy shit! Is she okay? Is Sebastian—”
“She’s fine. I keep checking by phone.” Her knuckles whitened as she clenched her hands in her lap. “I had to do it like this, Nat. But first I have to know. Are you going to call my parents and tell them everything?”
“Don’t you think they deserve to know? My God, it’s their grandchild, Jess!”
“I know.” She swallowed. “But they’d want to swoop back in and protect me, and this time they’d include Elizabeth in their net. She’d become a little prisoner, just like I did. Once they knew the whole story, they might even get a court order giving them the right to do that.”
Gradually he began to piece things together. Her disguise, her separation from the baby, her traveling around. He walked over to stand directly in front of her. “What’s the problem, Jess?”
“I need your word that you won’t call my parents.”
“You’re not getting it. That might be the thing to do.”
She looked frantic. “No, it’s not! I won’t have my daughter grow up that way.” Her eyes begged for his understanding. “Please, Nat. Promise you won’t bring them into this.”
He shook his head. “No promises. I understand what you’re afraid of. I’ve seen Franklin Hall and I’m sure you were very lonely there. But there are worse things than being lonely.” And he was the guy who could testify to that. “You’ll have to trust me. I wouldn’t contact them unless I thought it was absolutely necessary, but if they’re your best alternative, and you’re being too pigheaded to see that, then—”
“You never lived there.” She pushed out of the chair and brushed past him, headed for the bathroom. “Tell you what. My main objective was to tell you about Elizabeth, and I’ve done that. All I ask is that if anything should happen to me, you’ll see about our baby.” She went into the bathroom.
He was across the room with one hand bracing the door before she could close it. “Stop right there.” His heart hammered in his ears. “What the hell do you mean, if something should happen to you?”
She looked at him. “There are no guarantees in life, are there? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get dressed and out of your way.”
“The hell you will.” Seventeen months ago he wouldn’t have thrown his weight around. That was before he’d lived in the middle of a war zone, where life could be snuffed out in an instant. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her back into the room. “You’re obviously in some kind of danger, and you are, by God, going to tell me about it.”
She resisted, trying to struggle out of his grip. Her color was high, and she was breathing hard. “This macho routine isn’t like you.”
“I’ve changed. Now tell me.”
“Why should I?”
Both fury and passion put the same bloom in her cheeks and the same hitch in her breathing, he noticed. He might not recognize the difference, except for the look in her eyes. “Well, for one thing—” he grabbed her other wrist “—you’re the mother of my child.” Saying it made him shudder, but the fact gave him some rights.
Her eyes spit fire. “I have always put Elizabeth first, and I always will. I’ll make sure she’s safe, no matter what happens to me.”
“She needs you.” He tightened his grip on her wrists. “And damn it, so do I.”
“No, you don’t!” Tears of frustration filled her eyes. “You just need me for sex!”
His throat ached with remorse. Of course she’d think that. He forced the words past the lump in his throat. “Oh, I need you for sex, all right. Like you wouldn’t believe. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg, sweetheart.”
Her response was low and choked with tears. “I don’t believe you. Now let me go.”
“No. Tell me what danger you’re in. I have a right to know.”
She gazed up at him and he could tell from the turmoil in her eyes how hard she was trying to be tough, how desperately she wanted to handle whatever she was dealing with by herself.
He couldn’t let her do it. “Tell me. For Elizabeth’s sake.” Saying the baby’s name, acknowledging her personhood, took another major effort on his part, but he figured it might turn the trick with Jess.
It did. Her shoulders slumped. “Someone’s trying to kidnap me,” she murmured.
“Oh, God.” He didn’t remember letting go of her wrists to wrap his arms around her, but all at once there she was in his arms, and he was holding on for dear life as he rocked her back and forth. He buried his face in her hair. “Oh, God, Jess.” He knew about kidnapping. In the political upheaval he’d just witnessed, people had been kidnapped all the time. They never came back.
“It’s just like my dad predicted!” she wailed, hugging him tightly. “In Aspen I thought someone might be following me. Then a car tried to force me off the road one night. Thank God Elizabeth wasn’t with me. I got away, but I saw the same car following me another time, and I knew for sure then. Somebody has found out who I am. They’ve decided to snatch the Franklin heir.”
With growing horror he listened as the story came tumbling out. She’d traded in her car for a different one, packed up the baby and taken her to the Rocking D for safekeeping. For the past six months she’d been on the run. But it had been a creative run.
Using different disguises and modes of transportation, she’d tried to elude the kidnapper. But just when she thought she had, a man would follow her along a crowded street, far enough away that she couldn’t positively identify him, but close enough for her to suspect he was the same man. By keeping her wits about her, she’d stayed out of his clutches.
When she was finished, Nat held her tight for a long moment. Then he sighed. “We’re calling the police.”
“No!” She backed away from him. “The minute you do that, my parents will be all over this situation, and then my life as we know it will be over.”
“Your life as you know it is totally screwed up!”
“No, it isn’t.” She tucked her wayward hair behind her ears, which made her look like a schoolgirl. A sexy schoolgirl.
He was determined not to be distracted. “The hell it isn’t. You have a kidnapper on your trail and you can’t even risk being close to your baby as a result.”
“I can risk it now that you’re home.”
“Now, wait a minute. Flattering as that sounds, I can’t have you thinking I’m an adequate bodyguard.”
“You just said you’d changed. And I can see it. You’re more aggressive than you were seventeen months ago.”
“I’m not a trained bodyguard, and your parents are exactly the people who could—”
“Oh, gee, look at the time.” She glanced at her bare wrist and started back toward the bathroom. “Gotta run.”
“Oh, hell.” He clamped a hand on her shoulder to keep her from disappearing behind the closed door. Holding her firmly by the shoulder, he heaved a gusty sigh. “Are you telling me that if I call your parents, you’ll take off and leave me to deal with them?” He didn’t relish the thought of facing Russell P. Franklin alone and announcing he’d gotten the Franklin heir with child.
She glanced over her shoulder. Jess was the sort of woman who could be provocative without even trying. “I guess that’s about the size of it, Nathaniel Andrew.”
“That’s blackmail, Jessica Louise.”
She smiled a vixen’s smile. “I know.”
He couldn’t decide which he’d rather do, strangle her or kiss that saucy mouth until she moaned. He did neither. “You’re blackmailing your parents, too, you know. Your dad wants to put a private detective on your trail so bad he can taste it, but your mother won’t let him because she thinks you’ll go away for good if he does.”
“She’s right.”
Turning her to face him, he grasped her other shoulder and barely stopped himself from giving her a shake. “Jess, what if this kidnapper gets ahold of you? What if he decides, after getting the ransom money, to just kill you? Have you thought of that?”
She nodded. “That’s why I needed to talk to you and tell you about Elizabeth,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “So everything would be okay for the baby.”
The thought of something happening to Jess had the power to paralyze his mind, so he didn’t think about it for long. “Setting aside the issue of how the rest of us would fare in that event, let me emphasize that if you got yourself killed, it would not be okay for the baby.” Panic nibbled at him some more. “I’m a lousy candidate for a parent, and you know it.”
“I don’t know it, but if you call my parents, we’ll never get a chance to find out. They’ll have Elizabeth behind the gates of Franklin Hall before you can say boo.”
“Sounds like a plan to me.” Then he wouldn’t have to worry about the baby. He had a business in Colorado, after all. He could pay support, although the Franklins would probably scoff at the pittance the courts would ask of him.
“And I’d have to go with her,” Jess said softly.
Ah, there was the rub. The woman he loved would be safe but unhappy. And he would be…lost. Lost without hope of redemption.
“You see, it has to be this way if you and I are to have any chance. If Elizabeth is to have any chance.”
As he gazed into her eyes and saw the glimmer of hope there, his feelings of inadequacy threatened to swamp him. “I would botch the job of being Elizabeth’s father, Jess. We’ve been through all that, and you know how I feel about having kids of my own. I’ll admit that on the flight over I began thinking that maybe someday I could consider adopting an orphan from one of the refugee camps. But see, that would be different. The kid wouldn’t have that many options, and even having me as a parent would be better than nothing.”
“Oh, Nat.” She moved in close and combed her fingers through his beard so she could cup his face in both hands.
He loved her touch, and decided at that very moment that he wanted to shave so nothing interfered with the feel of her soft hands on his face.
“I’ve never met your father,” she said, “but I know you’re nothing like him. You would never beat a child the way you were beaten, or belittle them until they felt worthless, the way your father did.”
“You don’t know that. It’s the pattern I saw for eighteen years. Some of that behavior has to be lurking in me, waiting for the time when I have a kid, and that automatic conditioning kicks in.”
Her gaze searched his. “Don’t you at least want to see her?” she asked gently.
His stomach churned at the thought, but yes, he’d admit to a flicker of curiosity. “Maybe, from a distance.”
Jess smiled. “How far a distance?”
“One of those videophones would be about right.”
She held his gaze. “I think she has your eyes.”
That rocked him. All along he’d pictured her with woeful brown eyes, like the children he’d left in the camps. “Blue?”
“They probably are by now. The color was still a little indistinct when I…when I left her at the ranch.” Her breath caught and her eyes began to glow with longing. “Oh, Nat, please. Let’s call the ranch and tell them we’re on our way. It’s been an eternity. Please. It’s still only ten there. They won’t be in bed. Let’s call them now.”