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“I know.” Her brows quirked as she glanced around with unveiled curiosity. “Mrs. Elliot told me this was where I could find you. Also, we share a child. I think it’s okay if you call me McKenna.”
But she clearly didn’t know “workshop” equaled off-limits, private, no girls allowed. He should post a sign.
“McKenna, then.” He shouldn’t be talking to her. Encouraging her. But he couldn’t stop looking at her. She was gorgeous in a fierce, elemental way that coursed through him every time he got anywhere near her.
And when he stumbled over her breast-feeding? God, that was the worst. Or the best, depending on your viewpoint.
She was at her sexiest when she was nurturing their child. If he’d known he’d suddenly be ten times more drawn to her when she exuded all that maternal radiance, he’d never have invited her to live here.
Of course, he hadn’t really had much of a choice there, had he?
Obviously hiding out wasn’t the answer. Like always, raw need welled up as he watched her explore his workshop, peering into bins and tracing the lines of the hand-drawn gears posted to a light board near the south wall.
“This is a very impressive setup,” she commented as she finished a round of his cavernous workspace.
Her gaze zipped to the two generators housed at the back and then lit on him as he stood behind the enormous workstation spread out over a mobile desk on wheels where he did all of his computation. He’d built the computer himself from components and there wasn’t another like it in the world.
“It’s where I make stuff,” he told her simply because there was no way to explain that this was where he brought to life the contents of his brain. He saw something in his head then he built it. He’d been doing that since he was four. Now he got paid millions and millions of dollars for each and every design, which he only cared about because it enabled him to keep doing it.
“I can see that. It’s kind of sexy. Very Dr. Frankenstein.”
Had she just called him sexy? In the same breath as comparing him to Frankenstein? “Uh... I’ve always thought of myself as more like Iron Man.”
She laughed. “Except Tony Stark is a lot more personable and dresses better.”
Desmond glanced down at his slacks. “What’s wrong with the way I dress?”
Certainly that was the only part of her assessment he could disagree with—he was by no stretch personable and Iron Man did have a certain flair that Desmond could never claim.
“Nothing,” she shot back with a grin. “You just don’t look like a billionaire playboy who does weapons deals with shady Middle Eastern figures. Frankenstein, on the other hand, was a doctor like you and all he wanted to do was build something meaningful out of the pieces he had available.”
She picked up the robot hand he’d been about to solder for emphasis.
Speechless, he stared at her slender fingers wrapped around his creation-in-progress and tried like hell to figure out how she’d tapped into his psyche so easily. Fascinating. So few people thought of him as a doctor. He didn’t even see himself as one, despite the fact that he could stick PhD after his name all day long if he wanted to.
What else did she see when she looked at him? That same recognition he’d felt, as if they’d met in a former life and their connection had been so strong it transcended flesh and bone?
Or would that sound as crazy to her as it did in his head?
“I wasn’t aware I was so transparent,” he said gruffly, a little shocked that he didn’t totally hate it. “Did you want something?”
Her dark eyes were so expressive he could practically read her like a book. He rarely bothered to study people anymore. Once, that had been the only way he could connect with others, by surreptitiously observing them until everything was properly cataloged.
All it had ever gotten him was an acute sense of isolation and an understanding that people stayed away from him because they didn’t like how his brain worked.
She shrugged. “I was bored. Larissa is putting Conner to bed and it turns out that having a nanny around means that once I feed him, I’m pretty much done. I haven’t seen you in, like, a week.”
McKenna, apparently, had no such aversion to Desmond. She’d sought him out. So he could entertain her. That was a first.
“I had no idea you’d mark my absence in such a way.”
Lame. He was out of practice talking to people, let alone one who tied his brain in a Gordian knot of puzzling reactions.
But he wanted to untangle that knot. Very badly.
“Are you always so formal?” McKenna came around the long table to his side and peered over his shoulder at the monitor where he had a drawing of the robot hand spinning in 3-D. “Wow. That’s pretty cool.”
“It’s just a... No, I’m not—” He sucked in a breath as her torso grazed his back. His pulse roared into overdrive and he experienced a purely primal reaction to her that had no place between two people who shared a son and nothing else. “Formal.”
“Hmm? Oh, yeah, you are. You remind me of my statistics professor.”
“You took a statistics class?” Okay, they shared that, too. But that was it. They had nothing else in common and he had no reason to be imagining her reaction if he kissed her.
“Have to. It’s a requirement for premed.”
“Can you not stand there?”
Her scent was bleeding through his senses and it was thoroughly disrupting his brain waves. Of course the real problem was that he liked her exactly where she was.
“Where? Behind you?” She punched him on the shoulder like they were drinking buddies and she’d just told him a joke. “I can’t be in front of you. There’s a whole lot of electronic equipment in my way.”
“You talk a lot.”
She laughed. “Only because you’re talking back. Isn’t that how it works?”
For the second time she’d rendered him speechless. Yeah. He was talking back. The two conversations he’d had with her to date, the one at the hospital and this one, marked the longest he’d had with anyone in a while. Probably since Lacey.
He needed someone to draw him out, or he stayed stuck in his head, designing, building, imagining, dreaming. It was a lot safer for everyone that way, so of course that was his default.
McKenna seemed unacquainted with the term boundaries. And he didn’t hate that.
He should. He should be escorting her out of his workshop and back to the main part of the house. There was an indoor pool that stayed precisely the same temperature year-round. A recreational room that he’d had built the moment Mr. Lively called to say McKenna had conceived during the first round of insemination. Desmond had filled the room with a pool table, darts, video game consoles and whatever else the decorator had recommended. Surely his child’s mother could find some amusement there.
“Tell me what you’re building,” she commanded with a fair enough amount of curiosity that he told her.
“It’s a prototype for a robotic humanoid.”
“A robot?” Clearly intrigued, she leaned over the hand, oblivious to the way her hair fell in a long, dark sheet over her shoulder. It was so beautiful that he almost reached out to touch it.
He didn’t. That would invite intimacies he absolutely wanted with a bone-deep desire but hadn’t fully yet analyzed. Until he understood this visceral need, he couldn’t act on it. Too dangerous. It gave her too much power.
“No.” He cleared his throat and scrubbed at his beard, which he still hadn’t trimmed. “A robot is anything mechanical that can be programmed. A robotic humanoid resembles a person both in appearance and function but with a mechanical skeleton and artificial intelligence.”
It was a common misconception that he corrected often, especially when he had to give a presentation about his designs to the manufacturers who bought his patents.
“You are Dr. Frankenstein,” she said with raised eyebrows. “When you get it to work, do you shout ‘It’s alive!’ or just do a little victory dance?”
“I, um...”
She’d turned to face him, crossing her arms under her breasts that he logically knew were engorged from childbirth, though that didn’t seem to stop his imagination from calling up what they looked like: expanses of beautiful flesh topped by hard, dusky nipples. McKenna had miles of skin that Des wanted to put his hands on.
What was it about her that called to him so deeply?
“I’m just teasing you.” Her eyes twinkled. “I actually couldn’t imagine you doing either one.”
A smile spread across his face before he could stop it. “I can dance.”
“Ha, you’re totally lying.”
“I can dance,” he repeated. “Just not to music.”
He fell into her rich, dark eyes and he reached out to snag a lock of her hair, fingering the silky softness before he fully realized that he’d given in to the impulse. The moment grew tense. Aware. So thick, he couldn’t have cut it with a laser.
“I should...go,” she murmured and blinked, unwinding the spell. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
The lock of hair fell from his fingers as the mood shattered. Fortunately her exodus was quick enough that she didn’t get to witness how well she’d bobbled his composure.
He’d have sworn there was an answering echo of attraction and heat in her gaze.
He wasn’t any closer to unraveling the mysteries lurking inside her, but he did know one thing. McKenna Moore had taken his seed into her womb and created a miracle through artificial insemination.
What had once felt practical now felt like a mistake. One he couldn’t rectify.
But how could he have known he’d take one look at her and wish he’d impregnated her by making love over and over and over until she’d conceived?
Madness. Build something and forget all of this fatalistic nonsense.
Women were treacherous under the best of circumstances and McKenna Moore was no different. She just had a unique wrapper that rendered Des stupid, apparently.
Of course the most expedient way to nip this attraction in the bud would be to tell her how badly he’d wanted to thread all of his fingers through her hair and kiss her until her clothes melted off. She’d be mortified and finally figure out that she should be running away from Desmond Pierce. That would be that.
* * *
McKenna fled Desmond’s workshop, her pulse still pounding in her throat.
What the hell had just happened? One minute she was trying to forge a friendship with the world’s most reclusive billionaire and the next he had her hair draped across his hand.
She could still feel the tug as his fingers lifted the strands. The look on his face had been enthralled, as if he’d unexpectedly found gold. She hadn’t been around the block very many times, a testament to how long she’d been with James, her high school boyfriend, not to mention the years of difficult undergraduate course work that hadn’t allowed for much time to date. But she knew when a man was thinking about kissing her, and that’s exactly what had been on Desmond’s mind.
That would be a huge mistake.
She needed to walk out of this house in three months unencumbered, emotionally and physically, and Desmond was dangerous. He held all the cards in this scenario and if she wanted to dedicate her life to medicine, she had to be careful. What would happen if she accidentally got pregnant again? More delays. More agonizing decisions and, frankly, she didn’t have enough willpower left to deal with those kinds of consequences.
And what made her near mistake even worse was that she’d almost forgotten why she was there. She’d fallen into borderline flirting that was nothing like how she usually was with men. But Desmond was darkly mysterious and intriguing in a way she found sexy, totally against her will. They shared an almost mystical connection, one she’d never felt before, and it was as scary as it was fascinating.
Okay. Seeking him out had been an error in judgment. Obviously. But they never crossed paths and she was starting to wonder if she’d imagined that she’d come home from the hospital with a man. It only made sense that she should be on friendly terms with her baby’s father.
Why that made sense, she couldn’t remember all at once. Desmond didn’t want a mother for his son. Just a chuck wagon. Once she helped Conner wean, she’d finally be on track to get her medical degree after six arduous years as an undergrad and one grueling year spent prepping her body to get pregnant, being pregnant and then giving birth.
In a house this size, there was literally no reason she ever had to see Desmond again. She’d managed to settle in and live here for over a week without so much as a glimpse until she’d sought him out in his workshop.
Her days fell into a rhythm that didn’t suck. Mrs. Elliot fed her and provided companionable but neutral conversation when McKenna prompted her. Clothes magically appeared cleaned and pressed in McKenna’s closet. Twice a week, her beautifully decorated bedroom and the adjoining bathroom were unobtrusively cleaned. All in all, she was drowning in luxury. And she wouldn’t apologize for enjoying it.
To shed the baby weight that had settled around her hips and stomach, she’d started swimming in the pool a couple of hours a day. Before she’d gotten pregnant, she’d jogged. But there were no trails through the heavy forest of hemlocks and maples that surrounded this gothic mansion perched at the edge of the Columbia River. Even if she found a place to run, her enormous breasts hurt when she did something overly taxing, like breathing and thinking. She could only imagine how painful it would be to jog three miles.
The pool was amazing, huge and landscaped with all sorts of indoor plants that made her feel like she was at a tropical oasis on another continent instead of in northwest Oregon where she’d spent the whole of her life. A glass ceiling let in light but there were no windows to break the illusion. She could swim uninterrupted for as long as she liked. It was heavenly.
Until she emerged from the water one day and wiped her face to see Desmond sitting on one of the lounge chairs, quietly watching her. She hadn’t seen him since the workshop incident a week ago that might have been an almost kiss.
“Hey,” she called, mystified why her pulse leaped into overdrive the second her senses registered his presence. “Been here long?”
“Long enough,” he said cryptically, his smooth voice echoing in the cavernous pool area. “Am I disturbing you?”
He’d sought her out, clearly, since he wasn’t dressed for swimming and wore an expectant expression.
So she lied. “Of course not.”
In reality he did disturb her. A lot. His eyes matched his name, piercing her to the bone when he looked at her, and she didn’t like how shivery and goose-pimply he turned her mostly bare skin. There was something about him she couldn’t put her finger on, but the man had more shadows than a graveyard. She could see them flitting around in his expression, in his demeanor, as if they weighed him down.
Until he smiled. And thank God he didn’t do that more often, because he went from sexy in an abstract way to holy-crap hot.
So she’d do everything in her power to not make him smile for however long he planned to grace her with his presence. Hopefully that would only be a few minutes. If she’d known he was going to make an appearance, she’d have brought something to cover her wet swimsuit, like a full suit of armor made of inch-thick chain mail.
The way he was looking at her made her feel exposed.
She settled for a towel, draping it around her torso like a makeshift toga, which at least covered her pointy nipples, and sat on the next lounge chair, facing him.
Desmond was wearing a white button-down shirt today, with the sleeves rolled to his forearms and, despite teasing him the other day about his fashion sense, he had such a strange, magnetic aura that she scarcely noticed anything extraneous like clothes. All she saw was him.
“Are you settling in okay?” he asked.
She had the sense the question wasn’t small talk. “Sure. What’s not to like?”
His eyebrows quirked. “The fact that you’re here in the first place.”
“You’re making it worth my while, remember?”
That shouldn’t have come out so sarcastically. After all, she’d been the one to shake her head at monetary compensation, which he’d likely have readily ponied up.
But he was making her twitchy with his shadowy gaze. After visiting his workshop, she’d looked up the things he’d invented and his mind was definitely not like other people’s. Innovation after innovation in the areas of robotics and machinery had spilled onto her screen along with published papers full of his endless theoretical ideas.
She was not a stupid person by any stretch, having graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biology and a 3.5 grade point average, but Desmond Pierce existed on another plane. And that made him thoroughly out of reach to mere mortals like her.
But he was still oh, so intriguing. And they were married. Funny how that had become front and center in her mind all at once.
He nodded. “I’m sorry my request has delayed your own plans.”
Clearly he didn’t get offended by her jokes that weren’t funny. That was a good thing.
