Her Nine Month Confession

It finally clicked. She was talking about the property he’d inherited last year from his great-uncle.

‘For now. I’ll check it out, see if it’s worth staying there.’

The flight took for ever. When they finally landed at the private airstrip he arranged for his bag to be dropped at the house, while he headed straight for the hotel that Elizabeth Gray had described as a paradise.

And a prerequisite of paradise was temptation.

Ben lifted a hand to shade his eyes from the sun. He was jet-lagged. No, actually, he’d been jet-lagged when he arrived at Warren Court twelve hours ago. Now walking in totally inappropriate handmade leather shoes along the deserted white sand beach still wearing the same suit, he had gone way beyond mere jet lag.

He was operating on a combination of adrenaline and anger. The hours that had passed since his discovery had not reduced the latter, but the delay had worn his patience to a single-cell thickness.

With his eyes still on the horizon, he dropped down into a crouch and balanced on his heels, examining the sand for the light indents he had followed from her beach bungalow. A redhead was not so difficult to track down, especially when generous tips were involved. A muscle tightened in his chiselled jaw as his efforts were rewarded. The footprints were still there, but they were now heading out to the water.

Straightening up, he altered course, heading towards the towel that lay in a crumpled heap a few feet away. As he picked it up his nostrils flared at the faint but distinctive scent of rose impregnating the soft fabric. He gave a snort of self-disgust as his libido gave a hefty kick.

He still remembered that scent; he remembered everything.

Ignoring the sizzling slither of heat that licked along his nerve endings, Ben muttered under his breath and clenched the fabric in his hands. He levelled his steely gaze at the head of the figure far out in the water. Too far given the luridly painted warning signs along the beach that informed of currents behind the reef.

If this day had carried a convenient warning sign he might have stayed in bed. Ben’s entire body clenched in anticipation as the figure in the water began to swim towards the shore.

* * *

Behind her the water appeared clear azure blending almost seamlessly into the sky. Ahead of her it was turquoise and clear as crystal. The warmth was totally seductive and though she had only intended to stay out for a few minutes she had quickly lost track of time. She was enjoying swimming lazily, though kept in mind the maid’s story of the tourist who, after a boozy dinner, had ignored the warning signs or probably not seen them and tragically drowned because he’d ventured past the protective reef.

One of the things she had noticed about motherhood was it made a person very aware of their own mortality and a lot more risk averse. Not that she’d ever been a massive risk taker—well, only once!

Seeing the shore through a watery haze and pretty much spent, Lily paused and, holding her chin up, felt for the sandy bottom, acknowledging the toe contact with a sigh of relief. She bounced along for a few feet, spitting out water before she could place her feet flat on the sand. With the water at shoulder level she walked her way down to waist level, aware as she did so that she wasn’t alone. There was a figure on the beach.

She assumed it was one of her fellow guests. This stretch of beach, though not private but because of its remote inaccessibility, was used almost exclusively by the guests at the beach resort. Lily lifted one hand in greeting while she pushed her wet hair back from her face with the other and blinked away the water from her eyelashes.

Then her vision cleared.

For a moment shock wiped her mind as she refused to accept what she was seeing. Her heart thudding with adrenaline-fuelled speed, she closed her eyes, wiped away the moisture with her hand and opened them again.

He was still there, the man in the incongruous dark suit, tall, dark and terrifying familiar. He returned her stare with incredible eyes, the colour rare but not unique—she saw that colour every day.

The last time she’d looked into those eyes she had melted. She didn’t melt now, she froze. Every muscle and nerve fibre went into shock. Her brain shut down, a protective response to a situation where she had no other defences to fall back on.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_f6dcddd8-62ed-559f-9fbd-baccd955f648)

FOR SOME REASON her baby’s father was standing there looking taller and more imposing than she remembered. He was wearing a medium grey tailored suit, white shirt open at the neck—the only concession to the setting. The bespoke tailoring was almost as inappropriate as the tight ache low in her pelvis. Yet somehow he made her feel as if she were the one dressed inappropriately or at least inadequately.

Screamingly self-conscious of every inch of exposed skin, Lily called on all her rusty acting skills and lifted her chin acknowledging his presence with a tiny lift of her hand and an expression of small world surprise. Only it wasn’t, it was a massive world and he was here. Hard to believe that meant anything good. Pushing through the moment of panic, she forced herself to leave the shallows; the sense of impending doom remained.

Counselling herself sternly not to assume the worst, she took a tiny grain of comfort from the fact that Emmy was safely at home. She wished she were there too as her eyes made an unscheduled covetous sweep up the long, lean length of him. It was pretty hard to pretend to be composed when your stomach felt as if you’d just stepped off a cliff.

But it was sand, not air, beneath her feet and she made herself walk towards him. Lily was so focused on controlling herself and taking that next step that she got within a few feet of Ben before registering the clenched rigidity of his stance. Anger—it radiated off him in waves, and it was all aimed at her. Anger was actually too mild a word for the volcanic aura of antagonism he was vibrating. He pinned her with a stare that was as hard and unforgiving as tempered steel.

Hampered by guilt, fear, a racing heart and a skin-crawling self-consciousness, Lily pushed away the image of her daughter’s face and struggled to return the glare with some degree of composure. Beneath her carefully schooled expression her brain was firing off scenarios to explain his presence, all carefully avoiding the most obvious.

He knew!

Fighting the increasingly urgent compulsion to swim back out to sea, she straightened her shoulders and speared her hands into her long drenched hair before shaking it back from her face. Unable to maintain contact with the accusing blue glare for more than a second, she cleared her throat and broke the tense, explosive silence.

‘Hello.’ She discovered her voice sounded weirdly normal.

* * *

Hello...?

She didn’t even have the grace to look guilty, she just looked... The muscles in his brown throat worked as he dragged his wandering gaze up the slim length of her sinuous pale curves. The fury he could barely contain mingled with a large dollop of desire. He couldn’t deny his reaction when his body still thrummed with the testosterone-fuelled heat that had immobilised him with lust as she’d emerged from the waves like some mythical goddess.

But, in his defence, Lily Gray was the sort of woman who could stop traffic wearing a bin sack. And right now she was wearing very little at all. His eyes made another unscheduled dip. The black bikini consisted of a few triangles of cloth tied together with tiny metallic loops, three in total, one rested between her glorious breasts, the others low on each hip bone. The colour emphasised the creamy, opalescent pallor of her glistening skin. It was every bit as incredible as he remembered it, he thought, hungrily devouring the details. Her body might be lusher than it had been three years ago—in a very good way—but he would still be able to span her waist with his hands.

He looked at them and now realised he still had hold of her towel. The muscles around his jaw tightened as he felt a fresh blast of scalding self-disgust at his lack of control over his emotions. He thrust the towel at her with a grunt.

* * *

‘Thank you.’ Under the cover of a stiff automatic smile, her swirling thoughts raced as she wrapped the soft fabric sarong-wise across her breasts and waited, with a sense of fatalism that approached a Zen-like calm, for him to speak.

When he didn’t, she flung a rope of wet hair over her shoulders. She was amazed that her hands were still steady, despite the fact that under the calm, pulses of fear continued to pound through her body and her knees felt ready to give way.

She was living her worst nightmare. If the ground had opened up at her feet, she would have gladly jumped into the black hole.

No obliging hole appeared, so she met his hostile stare with as much composure as she could summon.

‘This is a surprise. So what are you doing here?’

‘Have a guess?’ he ground back, tearing his eyes from the small trickle of sea water running down the curve of her pale, creamy shoulder.

‘I was never very good at guessing games,’ she blurted, her voice a low driven undertone almost drowned by the low hiss of waves breaking on the shore. ‘If you have something to say...?’ The tense silence stretched. ‘Well, if you’ll excuse me I’m late for my massage.’ She made to move past him but he blocked her path. The sheer menace of his physical presence would have made her pause if his next words hadn’t frozen her to the spot.

‘Oh, well, when you can fit me into your schedule, I thought we might have a conversation. One like—oh, I don’t know... How about: Ben, it totally slipped my mind, but I had your baby a few years back...?’

She closed her eyes and thought, Oh, hell... Well, maybe now was as good a time as any to get this over with. Sucking in a short, tense breath, every muscle in her body taut, she turned and looked him in the face and nodded.

‘Sorry.’ Then because it crossed her mind he might think she was sorry she’d had Emmy she tacked on hastily, ‘That you found out about it in the way—’ She stopped. She didn’t know how he’d found out, but she supposed the significant bit was it hadn’t been from her. ‘This way.’

He clenched his jaw and ground out grimly, ‘So you’re not even going to deny it?’

A bit late now. ‘I’m not a good liar.’

His lip curled. ‘Oh, I think you’re a very good liar.’

‘I didn’t lie, I just decided not to—’

‘Burden me with the truth?’