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Escape For Mother's Day: The French Tycoon's Pregnant Mistress
Escape For Mother's Day: The French Tycoon's Pregnant Mistress
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Escape For Mother's Day: The French Tycoon's Pregnant Mistress

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Alana blushed. ‘That’s very … nice of you to say.’ The man was attractive in a heavy-set kind of way, but there was something faintly menacing about him. He’d moved subtly and now he effectively blocked her from the room. In order to move, Alana would have to push past him or go into the garden. She didn’t want to retreat to a dark area where he might follow her.

‘Please.’ He held out a hand. ‘Can I know your name?’

Alana sent up a silent prayer for Pascal to find her. Where was he? She couldn’t ignore the man, as that would be unaccountably rude. So she shook his hand very perfunctorily and whipped hers back before he could clasp it. ‘Alana Cusack; I’m very pleased to meet you. Now, please, my friend will be looking for me.’ Except patently he wasn’t. A very familiar feeling of pain clutched her deep down inside.

She went to move past the man, but he stopped her with an arm. Alana flinched back from the contact.

His voice now held a distinctly threatening tone. ‘But I haven’t told you my name yet, and your accent—where are you from? It is so pretty.’

Alana was beginning to feel desperate. Even though Ryan had never physically harmed her, the latent threat had always been there, and now the memory was making her feel panicky. ‘Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t really want to know your name, OK? Now, I’m sorry, but would you please get out of my way?’

After a long, tense moment, he stepped back with hands held high and spread. ‘Go then, if you want, it’s your loss.’

Alana seized the opportunity and fled. Her heart was hammering, and she had an awful, sick feeling in her chest, an overwhelming sensation of foreboding. She pushed through the crowd and then she saw Pascal, and the whole room tilted crazily, the chatter dulling to a faint roaring in her ears.

He was at the bar, talking to a woman. He didn’t look as if he was in a hurry to go anywhere, much less to look for Alana. The woman was stunningly beautiful—blonde, tall, slim, in a sparkling gown with a thigh-high slit that was being provocatively displayed. She had a hand on Pascal’s waist and was leaning in, her whole body arching seductively into his. His head was bent towards hers as if she were telling him something intimate.

It all hit Alana at once, and again she felt acutely self-conscious in her revealing dress. She hated the compulsion that had led her to wear it now. But, worse than that, she’d let herself be taken in again by a man who lived his life searching for the next thrill, the next pleasure-point. The next adoring female. She could see all too well, in a room like this, how she must have been such a novelty. The innocent Irish cailín. And then, like watching a car crash in slow motion, she saw Pascal’s hand go to where the woman’s rested on his waist. He was about to thread his fingers through hers, lift her hand to his mouth. Alana knew it. But just before she could turn away her humiliation became complete. They both turned, as if they could sense her watching them.

The glittering, too-bright icy-blue gaze of the woman was mocking, triumphant. Pascal’s was … She didn’t wait to find out. Turning, Alana stumbled and pushed through the crowd until she was finally free of the room and burst out into the spacious and hushed lobby. She walked quickly to the door on jelly legs, where a doorman rushed to open it for her.

CHAPTER FIVE

ALANA stood on the steps, shivering.

‘You would like me to get you a taxi, madam?’

‘Yes, please,’ Alana said gratefully to the nice doorman. She had no idea where she would go—all her stuff was at Pascal’s—but she just wanted away from here.

‘She doesn’t need a taxi, she’s with me. Can you send for my driver, please?’ a familiar deep voice, throbbing with anger, came from behind her and she stiffened in rejection.

A harsh hand on her arm pulled her round. She met furious dark eyes, and everything in her rebelled against his anger. The fact that the doorman had already scurried off to do his bidding made things even worse.

‘I believe that I just ordered a taxi; thanks all the same for the offer of the lift.’

‘What the hell just happened back there?’

‘Why, I believe what just happened is that you saw a better option and decided to pursue it, leaving me at the mercy of a … a creepy, slimy lounge-lizard.’

His hand tightened on her arm. ‘What are you talking about? Did someone come on to you? Did someone do something to you?’

‘No,’ she dismissed him furiously, while trying to shake him off unsuccessfully. ‘Not that you would have noticed anyway. But, thanks, you’ve saved me going back in to look for you. If you could give me the keys to your apartment, I’d appreciate it; I’ll get my things and be gone by the time you get back. No doubt you’ll be wanting the place to yourself tonight?’

‘And why would that be?’ His voice was arctic, but Alana was on fire.

‘Do you really need me to spell it out, Pascal? I thought you were more sophisticated than that.’ She berated herself bitterly now for having allowed herself to be seduced by him.

‘Apparently not so sophisticated that I can go to the bar to get a drink for my date and turn around to find she has disappeared, only to find her again and have her run from the room as if I’d chased her out myself.’

He’d been looking for her? A reflex to stop, to apologise, was quashed as she remembered the woman. They’d looked far too cosy. She’d only known Pascal two weeks. Did she really think she could trust him? Her astounding naïvety mocked her mercilessly.

‘Your companion might have another impression. She seemed to think that you were quite interested in what she had to offer.’

Pascal could recall only too noxiously what the British model Cecilia Hampton had been offering. She’d all but wrapped herself around him like a clinging vine, and had spoken in an absurdly quiet, jarring little-girl voice—a well-worn ploy to get a man to come closer, whereupon she’d all but thrust her enormous fake bosom in his face. He’d been feeling foolish ever since he’d stalked away from Alana to get drinks, and had turned back to get her, imagining all the predatory males in the room moving in on her, but she’d disappeared.

His car drew up at that moment and, heaving a sigh of relief, he hurried Alana down the steps and into the back, making her slide along the seat and getting in beside her, not giving her a chance to get out. Or say a thing.

In the back of the car Alana ripped her arm from Pascal’s grasp, her skin hot and tingling. ‘How dare you? I want you to let me out this minute. I’ll get a cab.’

She sat forward and opened her mouth to speak to the driver, but Pascal hauled her over and she lay sprawled inelegantly against him. With his other hand he flicked a switch and the privacy window slid up with a hiss.

The air was electric around them. Alana was very aware of how she lay practically across his lap, in a pose of supplication that galled her. His body was tense and taut, and unmistakably hard. It made her feel sick, that he could so easily transfer his desire from one to another.

‘Isn’t there something wrong with this picture?’ she gritted out, holding herself as tense and as far away as possible.

‘Yes,’ Pascal ground out. ‘You’re wearing far too many clothes for my liking and I want you now.’

Alana tried to pull free, but he was remorseless and held her still. ‘You don’t want me, you want her.’

In an instant Pascal had shifted and lifted Alana with an ease that shocked her. She found herself straddling his lap, knees pressed either side of his powerful thighs. His hands were on her waist, holding her captive. A wave of anger and humiliation at her own helpless response, her lack of strength, drove her to try and move but she couldn’t.

Her arms were rigid, either side of Pascal’s shoulders on the seat behind them. With his hands firmly on her waist he shifted her slightly so that she could feel where his erection strained between them against the confines of his trousers. A rush of desire made her suck in a betraying breath. And then his hands came up to her dress, to undo the clasp hidden underneath the flower. If he undid that, her dress would fall to her waist.

‘Don’t you dare.’ She caught his hands, but he swatted hers away with ease. He undid her dress and it fell. Alana caught it. The motion of the car made her fall against him, and made the apex between her legs grind into Pascal’s hardness. She could hear his breath coming harshly, see the colour slash across his cheekbones. She felt sick inside, knowing that he could just as easily be doing this with any other woman.

She heard him sigh, and he looked up at her with a curiously unguarded expression. She was caught by it.

‘Alana, please believe me: if I were in the unfortunate position of having Cecilia Hampton straddle my lap right now, I can assure you that she would not be feeling what you’re feeling.’

He snaked a hand around the back of her neck. Alana tried to hold herself stiff, but it was too difficult. His voice was low, reasonable, and oh, so sexy. ‘You’d disappeared when I went looking for you, so I went back to wait at the bar, thinking you’d come find me there. Cecilia approached me. If you’d watched for another few seconds before running out, you would have seen me extricate myself from her extremely unwelcome embrace.’

Alana looked down at him. He looked sincere. Had she read it wrong? She found herself wanting to believe him so much. And that was beyond scary in its implications. But right now she could avoid thinking about it without a huge amount of effort. The need consuming her, consuming the air around them, was too great. Desire flowed, hot and urgent, between them. This was all-encompassing, and she had to give into it and deal with the fallout later.

Pascal slowly moved his hand from the back of her neck, over her shoulder and down to her hands. He exerted a little bit of pressure and Alana let him pull her hands away, giving in to a need too great. Her dress fell to her waist, baring her breasts. She put her hands back onto the seat behind Pascal. He took her face in his hands and kissed her softly, reverently. It made something hard melt inside her. She sank into him, found her hips moving sinuously against his. Urgency rose. His kiss became more forceful. He dragged his mouth away and held the weight of one breast in his hand before flicking out a tongue and laving the distended peak. Alana’s back arched.

She pressed kisses feverishly to his face, mouth, neck, her hands seeking to rip open his shirt. Buttons popped and his bow tie disappeared down into the cracks between the seats. She blindly sought his belt buckle and opened it impatiently.

‘You’re like a fever in my blood, Alana. There’s no one else I want.’

His words set her aflame even more, and she bent to kiss him again. He lifted her slightly and she braced her hands against his shoulders. She bit her lip as she heard his zip come down, and as he pulled his trousers down with a rough urgency. Then he settled her back and she almost cried out at the sensation of his hard, virile, unsheathed heat, right there.

He lifted her dress at her waist, and she heard fabric rip as he brought two hands to the side of her knickers and pulled. He pressed a kiss to her throat as she felt the material being pulled away. ‘I’m not sorry and I’ll buy you new ones.’

She didn’t care. She wanted him inside her, right now. The ache was killing her.

As if he heard her silent plea, he lifted her again, and she could feel his hand on himself as he guided his rigid length to the apex of her thighs. He slid in easily, and as Alana sank down onto him, he surged upwards. She was so turned on, and the sensation was so shockingly thrilling, that she came right there and then, her inner muscles clamping around him in a series of minor convulsions.

She dropped her head into his shoulder. He was still rigid within her, filling her. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry …’ She was breathing heavily.

He pulled her back, tipped her head up, pressed a kiss to her mouth, slid his tongue between her soft lips. She could feel him stir within her, and inexplicably she could feel herself start to respond again, not being allowed to fall back to earth; she was kept on a high plateau of sensation that threatened to go even higher.

‘We’ve only just started.’

With a slow, burning intensity, Pascal moved within her like a devil magician. He brought her to the edge only to stop, then start again. In a fever of prolonged ecstasy, skin slick with sweat, it was only when he knew he couldn’t hold back that he allowed free rein to his movements, which became urgent. His big hands moulded her back, held her hips steady. Alana was beyond words. Everything in her was reverent, the orgasm that broke through her just before his was so powerful that she had to keep her eyes locked on Pascal’s or she would have disintegrated into pieces.

Pascal had never felt anything like it. He’d almost have believed that she hadn’t climaxed, if he hadn’t felt her body contracting powerfully around his. But she’d done it with such quiet intensity that it had made his own completion burst up in a never-ending stream of exquisite pleasure. Only her biting her lip at the zenith of sensation had shown any of her internal experience.

Alana shook all over. Pascal pulled her into his chest and cradled her against him. They were still joined intimately, and at that moment she couldn’t ever imagine being separated from this man. She’d never felt like this with her husband, not even in the early days of their marriage when she’d had so many hopes and dreams of a happy future.

Something extraordinary had just happened, and she hated to admit it.

* * *

When they reached his apartment, Pascal carried her straight up to his bathroom and ran them a bath. Then they made love. Again. And now she lay here, blissed out. Replete. Complete.

She heard a movement and looked up. Pascal was holding out a big robe.

‘Come on, or you’ll turn into a prune.’

Something in his eyes made her hold back a quick, joky comment. She stood up and reached for the robe, only to have him pull it back from her reach.

‘Pascal, come on.’ She groaned and immediately went to cover her breasts. She was totally exposed in the low lighting of the intimate bathroom. And it was silly to feel this way when they’d just made love, first in the back of his car and then in the bath. She flushed.

‘Let your hands down. Please.’ His voice sounded rough. ‘I want to look at you, Alana—will you let me look at you? As you are?’

Fear and embarrassment gave way to something else. The desire in his eyes emboldened her. She carefully and slowly climbed out of the bath and stood beside it. She dropped her arms and watched as his eyes travelled down, resting and dwelling on parts of her body that she’d certainly never inspected so intensely herself.

After a long, long minute his eyes met hers again. They were dark. He stepped forward and put the robe around her, drying her, before slipping her arms into the sleeves and tying it securely around her waist. He smoothed back her damp hair and ran a finger down her cheek.

‘I could quite easily have you again right now, on the floor … And all sorts of other images came into my mind as I looked at you.’ Pascal wrestled for a moment inwardly with the very real and disturbing reality that he could take her again right now. The knowledge made him cautious. ‘But there’s time …’

‘Time,’ Alana said stupidly, suddenly wanting very much instead that they could make love on the floor right now. She had an erotic flash of an image: kneeling at his feet and taking him into her mouth. The shocking heat that inflamed her made her feel weak. Where had that desire come from? She’d never even done that with Ryan. She’d never even thought that she found it sexy. But the thought of driving Pascal to the edge of all endurance was intoxicating in the extreme.

‘Yes, time. Let’s eat and have some wine.’ He cut through the fevered images in her wanton imagination and pushed her towards the bathroom door, and then out and down the stairs to the sitting room. A bottle of wine sat open with two glasses. Alana felt stone-cold sober all of a sudden, which wasn’t surprising as she hadn’t drunk all evening, but bizarrely she also felt drunk, heady … something very nebulous and disturbing.

He poured wine into their glasses and busied himself with something at the oven. Although Alana was in a robe, Pascal wore faded jeans and a plain shirt that was haphazardly buttoned, showing the light smattering of hair on his chest and a sliver of hard-muscled, olive-skinned belly. Alana took a quick sip of wine. He really did have the honed body of an athlete—again something niggled at her about that, but it was wispy and eluded her.

‘Look,’ she started nervously. ‘I’m sorry about … running out like that. I’m not normally so dramatic.’

Pascal closed the oven door and slanted her a look before taking a sip of wine from his own glass.

Alana flushed. ‘We should still be there. Didn’t you have to make some kind of speech?’

Pascal shrugged noncommittally. ‘My assistant did it. It’s no big deal, really; I wouldn’t have even been here necessarily if it hadn’t been for the match happening on the same day. It was an opportunity to drum up publicity and kill two birds with one stone. But, no.’ He smiled disarmingly. ‘I would much prefer to be here with you.’

She flushed again, unused to being flattered. ‘Well. Thank you. Next time—’

She stopped abruptly, her eyes flying to his with a sickening feeling as she realised what she’d been about to say—she’d been about to imply that there would be a next time.

‘That is, I don’t mean—’

Pascal hushed her and came round the counter, pulling her into him. ‘Next time I’m not going to let you out of my sight, so there will be no room for any confusion or misinterpretation, OK?’

Her mouth was dry and she just nodded.

He let her go and moved back, smiling easily, charmingly, and her world tilted all over again. ‘Now, how about you tell me about this lounge-lizard of yours?’

Alana shuddered delicately at the memory, realising that it had shaken her more than she cared to admit, but talking about it would lessen it. She told Pascal and acted out his slimy manoeuvres, and by the time she’d finished they were both laughing, and Pascal admitted that he knew exactly who she was talking about. Apparently the man was famous for pouncing on vulnerable-looking women. Their easy intimacy and Pascal’s ability to make her feel protected, to make her feel like she could trust him, was sucking Alana into a veritable whirlpool that she feared it would be nigh impossible to climb back out of.

The following evening, as Alana looked at the Italian capital grow smaller and smaller beneath her, she got hot in the face again thinking of the previous night. The erotic fantasy she’d had in the bathroom had become a reality. Pascal had let her push him to the edge of his endurance. She groaned inwardly; she seemed to be in a permanent state of heat since she met him.

She was alone on his private jet on her way back to Dublin. He was taking a commercial flight back to Paris, and he hadn’t taken no for an answer when she’d objected. He’d flown her to him, and now he was flying her home. Just like that. As if flying someone on a private jet was banal, ordinary. Easy. And she had to concede, for someone like him who strode through life and got what they wanted with a click of their fingers, of course it was easy. Accolades, money, women, beautiful houses—easy come, easy go. And she’d put herself firmly in that category, made no bones about the fact that she was fine with that.

She finally turned away from the view and recalled the stern set of his features as he’d sent her off, having insisted on accompanying her to the airport. They’d had their first row, of sorts. Except it had been more like a non-row. Alana still couldn’t quite figure what had happened but all she knew was that he hadn’t been happy.

They’d woken late, well into the early afternoon. Pascal had insisted that she see something of Rome, and had taken her to the nearby Trevi Fountain and then to a tiny restaurant tucked away from the hordes of tourists. The food had been sublime, authentic Italian cuisine at its best. The experience had been intimate, the table so small that their legs had been all but entwined underneath, and it had been easier for their hands to stay linked, too, separating only when the food arrived.

It was when they’d got back to his apartment so that Alana could pack; they’d been standing in the kitchen and she’d been watching Pascal percolate some coffee. He’d turned round and said easily, ‘There’s so much more you should see. But we can do it again.’

Alana had immediately reacted to his words at a very deep, visceral level, an instant negation of something very fleeting and wishful rising up inside her. ‘Oh, well, yes. I’m sure I’ll be back at some stage.’

It was the way she’d said ‘I’ that got his attention, and she knew it. Even though he said nothing—at first. And then he did say, ‘I meant when you come back here with me.’

Alana took the coffee he handed her and walked away into the living room, holding the cup between suddenly chilled hands. She schooled her features and turned back round to face him, forcing her voice to sound as casual as she could. ‘You really don’t have to say that, you know.’

He took a sip of coffee, his eyes narrowed disconcertingly on her face. She was glad that he was still behind the island in the kitchen.

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

Alana gave a little laugh, which sounded fake to her ears. ‘I mean, you don’t have to do this … reassurance thing. I really don’t expect you to make me feel like you want me to come back …’ Her words trailed off, diminishing some of the vehemence with which she’d started the statement.

He walked round the island, ridiculously small coffee cup in one hand, his other in the pocket of his jeans. He looked astoundingly gorgeous in a dark sweater. Unconsciously, Alana backed away.

‘Believe me,’ he said throatily, ‘the only thing I want to make you feel right now involves a soft surface and no clothing in our way.’

Alana gulped and took a quick swig of coffee.

‘Look,’ she said weakly, ‘all I’m saying is that I know what this is and I’m fine with that. Really.’

‘And what would that be?’

She shrugged one shoulder; they were still doing a bit of a backward dance around the room, she backing, and he advancing.

‘It’s an affair. A fling.’

His eyebrows raised high. ‘Oh, so that’s what this is?’

Alana winced. No doubt his other lovers were far too experienced and suave to put a name on their experience with him. Suddenly she felt anger rise up. Why was he being so obtuse? Surely she was doing him a favour? She stopped backing away and put her coffee cup down carefully on the low table by the sofa.