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“Stop!” I cried, stepping between them in real fear. “Stop this at once!” I pressed on Edward’s chest. “Just go.”
He lifted his eyebrows in shock. “You can’t honestly choose him over me?”
“Go. And don’t come back.” I glanced back at Alejandro and knew only the fact that I stood between them kept him from attack. I took a deep breath. “Thank you for everything you did for me, Edward. I’ll never forget how you helped me.” My jaw hardened. “But it’s over.”
Edward’s face contorted. “You’re throwing yourself away on him? Just because of some stupid baby?”
My sympathy disintegrated.
“That stupid baby is my son.”
“Dammit, you know I didn’t mean...”
But my heart had iced over. Releasing him, I stepped back, closer to Alejandro. “Yes, I choose him. Over you.”
“You heard her,” Alejandro said roughly. “You have thirty seconds to be out of my building, before security throws you out.”
“Sending in your goons, eh?” he sneered. “Can’t be bothered to do it yourself?”
“Happy to,” Alejandro said grimly, pushing up the sleeves of his tuxedo jacket as he took a step forward, fists raised.
“No!” I grabbed his arm. My hand couldn’t even fully wrap around the full extent of the hard, huge biceps beneath his tuxedo. “Please, Alejandro,” I whispered. “Don’t hurt him. He was good to me, when I had no one else. I never would have survived without him. Neither would Miguel. Please. For my sake.”
Jaw taut, Alejandro slowly lowered his fist. “For your sake.” His voice was low and cold as he turned to Edward. “Thank you. For protecting what I love.”
Love? For a moment I stared at Alejandro, then I realized he was speaking of Miguel.
Edward glared at him. Obviously not realizing he’d just narrowly escaped death, he sneered, “Go to hell.” At the door, he turned back and said, “I’ll be back for you, Lena.”
Then he was gone. And Alejandro and I were suddenly alone in the cloakroom. But my relief was short-lived.
“No wonder he loaned you his house,” he said. “No wonder he protected you. He sees you as his. Why does he believe that?”
I whirled to face him. The cold fury in his eyes was like a wave. But there was something else there, too. Hurt.
“He tried to kiss me last week,” I admitted in a low voice, then shook my head. “But I just gave a shocked laugh and he left. Whatever he might have hoped, all he ever was to me was a friend—”
“Friend,” he said scornfully. “You knew what he wanted.”
I shook my head fiercely. “Not until last week, I never—”
“Then you were willfully blind. He’s in love with you.”
“You’re wrong there.” Shivering, I crossed my bare arms over my pink strapless ball gown. “If he’d really loved me, he would have loved Miguel, too. But he was always getting annoyed about him. Suggesting things...like I should send him away, farm him out for adoption...”
Alejandro’s eyes darkened. “And you were willing to call him a friend? To let him near our son?”
I wanted to lash back at him. To tell him he was being unreasonable, or that I hadn’t had a choice. Instead, I said the only thing that mattered. The only thing that was true.
“I’m sorry,” I said in a low voice. “I was wrong.”
He’d been opening his mouth to say more, no doubt cutting, angry accusations. But my humble, simple words cut him off at the knees. For a long moment, he stared at me in the shadowy cloakroom. Down the hall, we could distantly hear music playing, people laughing. Then he turned away, clawing back his dark hair.
“Bien. I wasn’t exactly perfect, either,” he muttered. Lifting his head, he glared at me. “But you’re never to see him again. Or let him near Miguel.”
“Fine,” I said.
“Fine?”
“He stopped being my friend the moment he called my baby ‘it.’”
“So,” he said with a casual tone that belied the tension in his shoulders, “did you let him kiss you?”
I gaped at him. “Oh—for heaven’s sake!” I stomped my foot against the plush carpet. “I’m not going to say it again!”
“I found the two of you here, talking...”
“And I just saw you talking to an actress in the ballroom. I didn’t accuse you of making out! He made a pass at me last week. I refused. End of story.”
“Once we are married...”
My cheeks went hot. “Married!” I stared at him, shocked. “Who said anything about marriage?”
Now Alejandro was the one to look shocked.
“I just asked you to marry me!”
“Asked?” My voice was acid. “When you asked, I said no. Tonight, you just announced it! In front of everyone! You may have asked—I never said yes!”
“We are going to be wed. Accept it.”
“I will accept an engagement,” I retorted. “I will accept that we need to live in the same town, perhaps even the same house, for our son. A public front, a pretense for Miguel’s sake, to make it appear we are actually a couple—that he wasn’t just some mistake! But nothing more. There’s no way I’m actually going to marry you. Do you think I would ever give you my body again? Or my heart?”
“I told you,” he ground out. “I’m not asking for your heart.”
“Then you can forget anything else—I won’t give you my body, or take your name! I owe you respect as Miguel’s father, but that’s it,” I said through gritted teeth. “Whatever you might believe, you don’t own me, any more than Edward did!”
“I’m not Edward. I’m the father of your child.” He grabbed my wrist, looking down at me. “I’m the man you will wed. I don’t need your heart. But your body, at least, will be mine.”
“No!” But even as I gasped with fury, heat flashed from his possessive grip on my wrist. Electricity crackled up my arm, to my throat, to my lips, to my breasts, down, down, down to my core. Pushing me back roughly against the coats, he looked down at me in the shadows.
“Did you really think,” he said softly, “once I found you, I would ever let you go? I gave you up once for the sake of a promise. I gave you up to do the right thing. But fate has thrown you back into my arms. Now you will be entirely mine—”
Lowering his head, Alejandro kissed me fiercely, his lips hot and hard against mine, plundering, demanding. I tried to resist. I couldn’t let myself feel—I couldn’t—
Then I melted as the banked embers inside me, beneath the cold ash of the past lonely year, roared to a blazing fire. My body shuddered beneath his ruthless, almost violent embrace, and I wrapped my arms tightly around him, holding him to me, lost in the sweet forbidden ecstasy of surrender.
CHAPTER FIVE (#u5e58498e-913f-5e1f-b0a6-0688a65fe213)
HIS LIPS SAVAGED MINE, his tongue hot and salty and sweet. I clutched his shoulders, desperate to sate my desire. I’d hungered for him every night, even when I hated him, against all reason, against my will.
Alejandro’s hands ran along my bare arms then moved to the tangle in my hair, tilting my chin so he could plunder my mouth more deeply. Long tendrils of hair had pulled free from my chignon. I felt them brush against my naked shoulders as his hard, muscular body strained against me, towering over mine, overpowering me. But it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough...
His hot kisses moved slowly down my neck, as he murmured husky endearments in Spanish against my skin. My head fell back against the wall of coats, and I closed my eyes, feeling tight and dizzy. He nuzzled my bare skin over the neckline of my gown. His hands cupped my breasts straining against the pink silk of the bodice.
So sweet. So hot. My breath came at a gasp, and as my eyelids flickered, the world seemed to spin in whirling patterns of shadows and light, echoes of past love and longing. For over a year I’d longed for him. For all my life, I’d longed for this. And it was even better than I remembered, a powerful drug beyond imagining. Wrapped in his embrace, I forgot myself, forgot my own name, and knew only that I had to have him or die....
A low deliberate cough came behind us. Startled, I turned my head, and Alejandro straightened. The Bulgarian ambassador stood at the cloakroom door, with his wife draped in pearls behind him.
“Excuse us,” he said gravely, and stepping forward, he took a black fur coat off the hanger behind us.
I heard his wife titter as they left, “See, Vasil? I told you it was a love match!”
“Poor devil deserves some pleasure, at least,” the man’s reply echoed back to us, “after the grasping creature tricked him into marriage with a pregnancy.”
Shamefaced, I looked up at Alejandro. The air in the cloakroom suddenly felt thin and cold.
“Let me go,” I said.
His hold on me only tightened. “Who cares what they say?”
“I care,” I whispered.
“Bull,” he cut me off ruthlessly. “You’re too strong to be ruled by gossip.” His hands moved slowly down the bare skin of my upper back, and I shivered, fighting my own desire. “It’s this you’re afraid of. This.” He stroked my arms to my breast, then abruptly pulled me up to stand, hard against his body. “This is all that matters....”
“It’s not,” I choked out. “There’s love. And trust....”
“Love for our son. And trust for your husband. Your partner.”
For a second, I trembled. I did want those things. A real home. I’d already accepted that we would need to live in the same town, or better yet, the same house. Why not accept a partnership? We could share a life, a son, even a bed. Would it be enough, without romantic love? Could I live without that? Could I?
For Miguel’s sake?
“Maybe I could accept a marriage without love,” I said in a small voice. I took a deep breath and raised my gaze to his. “But there is no partnership without trust. Can you promise you’ve never lied to me? And that you never will?”
I watched as the brief triumph in his eyes went out. “No.”
My lips parted in a silent gasp. I hadn’t expected that. My heart twisted as I thought how, with just a few hot kisses and the dream of giving Miguel a real home and family, I’d been perilously close to giving up my dreams.
“Well, which is it, Alejandro?” I choked out. “Did you lie to me in the past? Or will you lie to me in the future?”
His jawline tightened. For a moment, his face seemed tortured. Then, as I’d seen happen before, his expression shuttered, becoming expressionless, leaving me to wonder if I’d imagined the whole thing. “Take your pick.”
I stiffened. Hating him—no. Hating myself for letting him kiss me. Letting him? All he’d had to do was touch me and I’d flung myself into his kiss with the hunger of a starving woman at a piece of bread. “What have you lied to me about?”
“You expect me to tell you the truth about that?”
“Other women?”
He glared at me. “I told you. I believe in honor. Fidelity. No. My lie is about—something else.”
“What?”
“Me,” he ground out through gritted teeth. “Only me.”
Which didn’t tell me anything at all! “Fine. Whatever.” I glared at him. “You shouldn’t have kissed me.”
He relaxed imperceptibly now that we were no longer talking about his secrets.
“This isn’t the place,” he agreed.
“I didn’t just mean the cloakroom. I mean anywhere.”
“I can think of many places I’d like to kiss you.”
“Too bad.” My cheeks flamed, but I wouldn’t let him distract me. “Take your kisses, and your lies, somewhere else.”
“A marriage in name only?” He sounded almost amused. “Do you really think that will work?”
“Since I can’t even trust you, let alone love you, there will be no marriage of any kind,” I snapped. “And if you keep asking, even our engagement will be remarkably short.”
“Why are you trying to fight me, when it’s so obvious that you will give in?” he said. “You want to raise Miguel. So do I. What do you expect to do—live next door? In my stable?”
“Better that than your bed.”
His dark eyes glittered. “That wasn’t how you kissed me.”
Heat pulsed through me. I could hardly deny it. I looked away. “Sex is different for women. It involves love!”
He snorted. “Right.”
“Or at least caring and trust!” I cried, stung.
“Who is speaking in generalities now?” he said harshly. A cynical light rose in his eyes. “Many women have sex with strangers. Just—as you said—as many women prefer to drink their coffee black, without the niceties of sugar and cream!”
My cheeks flushed. “Fine for them, but—”
“Lust is just an appetite, a craving, such as one might have for ensaladilla rusa. No one says that you must be deeply committed to the mayonnaise in order to enjoy the taste of the potato salad!”
I lifted my chin. “Go seduce one of those salad women, then! I don’t want you in my bed, I don’t want you as my husband and I just regret I’m stuck with you as Miguel’s father!”
“Enough.” His voice was deadly cold. “You have made enough of a fool of me, making me beg—for the truth about Miguel, for the DNA test, for access to him. I even had to beg you to keep your promise to come to Spain. There will be no more begging, at least—” his eyes glittered “—no more begging from me.”
Alejandro had begged me for stuff? I must have missed that. “I never—”
“You will marry me. Tonight.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!”
