A Touch of Temptation
A Touch of Temptation
Tara Pammi
Cool, calm and collected CEO Kimberly Stanton is following hot on the heels of her scandalous sister Olivia. Not only has she revealed her (very sudden!) pregnancy, but has rocked the international business world with the shock announcement of her marriage to outrageous Brazilian bad-boy-tycoon Diego Pereira!If rumours of huge blow-out arguments, bail-out money for Kim’s company, and dark secrets are already besetting society’s most notorious couple, who can say what lies ahead for these two lovers?One thing’s for sure, it’ll be so much fun watching!
The limo came to a stop in front of the plush New York Plaza Hotel, where the awards ceremony was being held. Kimberly could hear the hushed roar of the crowd outside. Before she could blink, Diego had opened a small velvet box.
Drawing a painful breath, she tucked herself further into her seat, her heart pounding behind her ribcage. He’d done this on purpose—waited until the last minute.
The diamond twinkled in the dark, every cut and glitter of it breathtaking. There was an accompanying band of white gold, exquisitely simple in contrast to the glittering diamond.
Alarm twisted her stomach into a knot. That simple band could very well be an invisible shackle, binding her to him. And it could unlock every impossible hope, every dangerous dream she had so ruthlessly squashed in order to survive.
“I don’t want to wear it. I don’t know what you think this achieves…”
“There is very little I have asked of you or will ever ask of you. But when it comes to our child I won’t settle. I will never be that boy who was denied his rights ever again.” He shrugged—a casual movement—in complete control of himself. “I want my child to be recognized as mine. You had the perfect chance to do that in your press statement. You didn’t. So now we will do it my way.”
THE SENSATIONAL STANTON SISTERS
Notoriety has a new name!
The exploits of the famous—or should that be infamous—Stanton Sisters are guaranteed to sell newspapers the world over.
While they are physically identical, the sisters are as different as night and day.
Olivia Stanton can create scandal from thin air, but this bad girl is desperate to be oh-so-good. Until she comes face to face with the one man whose dark looks are a temptation too far!
Kimberly Stanton is a stunning socialite with a brilliant head for business. But when her dirty little secret comes back to haunt her Kim’s entire life is turned upside down!
One thing’s for sure—both deserve the middle name ‘trouble’ with a capital T!
And what of the men sent to tame them?
We wish them luck!
Last month you read Tara Pammi’s stunning debut in:
A HINT OF SCANDAL October 2013
This month read Olivia’s story in:
A TOUCH OF TEMPTATION November 2013
A Touch of Temptation
Tara Pammi
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
TARA PAMMI can’t remember a moment when she wasn’t lost in a book—especially a Mills & Boon
romance, which provided so much more excitement to a teenager than a mathematics textbook. It was only years later, while struggling with her two-hundred-page thesis in a basement lab, that Tara realised what she really wanted to do: write a romance novel. She already had the requirements—a wild imagination and a love for the written word.
Tara lives in Colorado, with the most co-operative man on the planet and two daughters. Her husband and daughters are the only things that stand between Tara and a full-blown hermit life with only books for company.
Tara would love to hear from readers. She can be reached at tara.pammi@gmail.com or at her website: www.tarapammi.com
Recent titles by the same author:
A HINT OF SCANDAL
(The Sensational Stanton Sisters)
Did you know these are also available as eBooks? Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk
To the man who started it all—my father—for giving me my love of books, for never holding me back, for always believing that there was nothing I couldn’t do if I set my mind to it.
Contents
CHAPTER ONE (#u1e5c0e62-dbda-5b7a-9d39-1c72415cd8fb)
CHAPTER TWO (#u1bec0d01-3eae-5239-9afe-4b551d63b746)
CHAPTER THREE (#u400a332e-0315-51ce-a11f-4a238aaeb2ef)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
KIMBERLY STANTON STARED at the white rectangle of plastic on the gleaming marble counter in the ladies’ bathroom. Terror coated her throat as though it might come to life and take a bite out of her. It looked alien, out of place amidst the lavender potpourri, the crystal lamp settings and the glossy chrome fixtures.
The few minutes stretched like an eternity. The quiet lull of voices outside was exaggerated into distorted echoes.
Her heart beat faster and louder. A painful tug in her lower belly stole her breath. She clutched the cold granite vanity unit and clenched the muscles in her legs, willing herself to hold on.
The scariest word she had ever encountered appeared on the stick.
Pregnant.
No confusing colors or symbols that meant you had to peek again at the box discarded in terrified panic.
Simple, plain English.
Her heart leaped into her throat. Her legs shaking beneath her, she leaned against one of the stalls behind her, dipped her head low and forced herself to breathe past the deafening whoosh in her ears.
Her one mistake, which technically she had committed twice, couldn’t haunt her for the rest of her life, could it?
But she couldn’t change the consequences. She had never been naïve or stupid enough to wish it either.
She flicked the gleaming chrome tap open and dangled her fingers under the ice-cold water. The sound of the water hitting the sink drowned out the sound of her heartbeat, helping her focus on her breathing.
In, out. In, out...
She closed the tap. Straightening up, she was about to reach for the hand towel when she looked at the mirror and froze.
She stared at her reflection, noting the dark circles under her eyes, the lack of color in her face, the skin pulled tautly over her bones. Drops of water seeped through the thin silk of her blouse to her skin beneath.
She looked as if she was on the brink of a nervous breakdown. And maybe she was. But she didn’t have time now. The breakdown had to wait. She touched the tips of her fingers to her temple and pressed. The cold from her almost numb fingers seeped into her overheated skin.
She had no time to deal with this now. She had to compartmentalize—set it aside until she was alone, until she was equipped to think logically, until the shock making her jittery all over faded into nothing more than a numbing ache.
And when it did she would assess the situation again with a clear head, take the necessary action to equip herself better to handle it. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have any experience with dealing with shock and pain.
Although why she had chosen this particular moment to take the test when the pregnancy kit had been burning a rectangular hole in her handbag for more than a week was anybody’s guess. Or maybe she was having another momentary collapse of her rational thinking circuits.
She had been having those moments a lot lately.
She pulled her lip-gloss out of her clutch and reapplied it with shaking fingers. She ran a hand over her suit. The silky material under her fingers rooted her back to reality.
She needed to get back out there. She needed to circulate among the guests—a specially put together group of investors she had researched for more than six months. Investors who had shown interest in her web startup The Daily Help.
She had a presentation to give. She had to talk them through the financial outline she had sketched for the next five years. She had to convince them to invest in her start-up when there were a million others mushrooming every day.
She had to convince them that the recent scandal about her, Olivia and Alexander had nothing to do with the way she did business. It was a sign of how strong her business proposal was that they had even showed up, despite the scandal.
She straightened her jacket and turned toward the exit. And paused midstride.
Turning back, she picked up the plastic tube, wrapped it carefully in the wrapper she had left on the sink and threw it into the trash. She fumbled when she turned the corner, struggling to breathe past the tight ache in her gut. She placed her hand on her stomach and drew in gulps of air, waiting for the tidal wave of pain that threatened to pull her under to pass.
Striding out of the restroom, she plucked a glass of sparkling water from a passing waiter and nodded at an old friend from Harvard. She was glad she had booked this conference hall in one of the glitzy hotels in Manhattan, even though her tightfisted CFO had frowned over the expense.
Kim didn’t think an evening in her company’s premises— a large open space in the basement of a building in Manhattan, unstructured in every way possible—would encourage confidence on the investors’ part.
She checked her Patek Philipe watch, a gift from her father when she had graduated from Harvard, and invited everyone to join her in the conference room for the presentation.
She felt an uncharacteristic reluctance as she switched on the projector. Once she concluded the presentation she was going to be alone with her thoughts. Alone with things she couldn’t postpone thinking about anymore.
* * *
It happened as she reached almost the end of her presentation.
With her laser pointer pointed at a far-off wall, instead of at her company’s financial forecast on the rolled-out projector screen, she lost her train of thought—as though someone had turned off a switch in her brain.
She searched the audience for what had thrown her.
A movement—the turn of a dark head—a whisper or something else? Had she imagined it? Everything and everyone else faded into background for a few disconcerting moments. Had her equilibrium been threatened so much by her earlier discovery?
The resounding quiet tumbled her out of her brain fog. She cleared her throat, took a sip of her water and turned back to the chart on the screen. She finished the presentation, her stomach still unsettled.
The lights came on and she smiled with relief. Several hands came up as she opened the floor to questions. She could recite those figures half-asleep. Every little detail of her company was etched into her brain.
The first few were questions she had expected. Hitting her stride, she elaborated on what put her company a cut above the others, provided more details, more figures, increasing statistics and the ad revenue they had generated last year.
Even the momentary aberration of a few minutes ago couldn’t mar the satisfaction she could feel running in her veins, the high of accomplishment, of her hard work bearing fruit.
She answered the last question, turned the screen off and switched on the overhead lights.
There he was. The reason for the strange tightening in her stomach. The cause of the prickling sensation she couldn’t shed.
Diego Pereira. The man who had seduced her and walked away without a backward glance. The man whose baby she was pregnant with.
She froze on the slightly elevated podium, felt her gut falling through an endless abyss. Like the time her twin sister had dragged her on a free-fall ride in an amusement park. Except through the nauseating terror that day she had known that at some point the fall would end. So she had forced herself to sit rigid, her teeth digging painfully into the inside of her mouth, while Liv had screamed with terror and laughter.
No such assurance today. Because every time Diego stormed into her life she forgot the lesson she had learned long ago.
Her hands instinctively moved to her stomach and his gaze zeroed in on her amidst the crowd. She couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t look into those golden eyes that had set her up to fall. Couldn’t look at that cruel face that had purposely played with her life.
She forced herself to keep her gaze straight, focused on all the other curious faces waiting to speak to her. It was the most excruciating half hour of her entire life. She could feel Diego’s gaze on her back, drilling into her, looking for a weak spot—anything that he could use to cause more destruction.
At least he’d made it easy for her to avoid him, sitting in one of the chairs in the back row with his gaze focused on her.
She slipped, the heel of one of her three-inch pumps snagging on the carpet as she moved past him. Just the dark scent of him was tripping her nerves.
Why was he here? And what cruel twist of fate had brought him here the very same day she had discovered that she was pregnant?
* * *
Diego Pereira watched unmoving as Kim closed the door to the conference hall behind her, her slender body stiff with tension. She was nervous and, devil that he was, he liked it.
He flicked through the business proposal. Every little detail of her presentation was blazing in his mind, and he was impressed despite his black mood. Although he shouldn’t really be surprised.
Her pitch for investment today had been specific, innovative, nothing short of exceptional. Like her company. In three years she had taken the very simple idea of an advice column into an exclusive, information-filled web portal with more than a million members and a million more waiting on shortlists for membership.
He closed his eyes and immediately the image of her assaulted him.
Dressed formally, in black trousers that showed off her long legs and a white top that hugged her upper body, she was professionalism come to life—as far as possible from the woman who had cried her pleasure in his arms just a month ago.
He had even forgotten the reason he had come to New York while he had followed her crisp, confident presentation. But the moment she had realized he was present in the audience had been his prize.
She had faltered, searched the audience. That seconds-long flicker in her focus was like a nervous scream for an average woman.
But then there was nothing average about the woman he had married. She was beautiful, brilliant, sophisticated. She was perfection personified—and she had as much feeling as a lump of rock.
A rock he was finally through with—ready to kick out of his life. It was time to move on, and her little nervous sputter at the sight of him had gone a long way toward pacifying his bitter resentment.
He walked to an elevator and pressed the number for the tenth floor. When he reached her suite he pulled the gold-plated keycard he had bribed from the bellboy from his coat packet.
He entered the suite and closed the door behind him.
The subtle scent of lily of the valley assailed him instantly. It rocked him where he stood, dispensing a swift punch to his gut more lethal than the ones he had taken for half his life.
His lungs expanded, drawing the scent of her deep into him until it sank once again into his blood.
His body pulsed with remembered pleasure. Like a junkie getting his high.
He studied the suite, with its luxurious sitting area and mahogany desk. Her files were neatly stacked on it, her sleek state-of-the-art laptop on top of them. Her handbag—a practical but designer black leather affair—lay near the couch in the sitting area.
The suite was everything its owner was—high-class, flawless and without an ounce of warmth.
He turned at the sound of a door on his right.
Closing the door behind her, she leaned against it. A sheen of sweat danced on her forehead.
He frowned, his curiosity spiking.
Her glistening mouth trembled as she spotted him, her hands moving to her midriff.
There was a distinct lack of color to her skin. Her slender shoulders quivered as she ran the back of her hand over her forehead.
He looked at her with increasing curiosity. Her jacket was gone. A V-necked sleeveless white silk blouse showed off her toned arms. The big steel dial of her designer watch highlighted her delicate wrist. A thin gold chain dangled at her throat.
The shadow of her breasts beneath the thin silk drew his gaze.
He swallowed and pulled his eyes up. The memory of her breasts in his hands was cutting off his breath more effectively than a hand choking his windpipe. The feel of her trembling with pleasure in his hands, the erotic scent of her skin and sex—images and sensations flooded through him.
He could no more fight the assault than he could stop breathing.
Her eyes flared wide, the same heat dancing in those chocolate depths.
She was the very embodiment of perfection—always impeccably dressed, exuding the sophistication that was like a second skin to her. Yet now she looked off-balance.
He reached her, the slight sway of her lithe figure propelling him toward her. “Are you okay, gatinha?”
She ran her palm over her face, leaving pink fingerprints over her colorless skin. Stepping away from him, she straightened the already immaculate desk. Her fingers trembled as she picked up a pen and moved it to the side.
She was more than nervous.
“No, I’m not,” she said, shrugging those elegant shoulders. The frank admission was unusual. “But that’s not a surprise as I just saw you, is it?”
He raised a brow and sliced the distance between them. “The sight of me makes you sick?”
Her fingers clutched the edge of the desk, her knuckles white. “The sight of you reminds me of reckless stupid behavior that I’d rather not remember.”
He smiled. “Not even the good parts, where you screamed?”
Pink scoured her cheeks. The slender set of her shoulders straightened in defense. She moved to the sitting area and settled into a leather chair. “Why are you here, Diego?”
He watched with a weird fascination as she crossed her legs and looked up at him.
The nervousness he had spied just moments ago had disappeared. She sounded steady, without a hint of anger or upset. Even though the last time they had laid eyes on each other she had been half-naked in his bed, her face bereft of color as he had dressed and informed her that he was done with her.
There was no reproach in her tone for his behavior a month ago.
Her calm composure grated on him like the edge of a saw chipping away at wood.
She drove him to be the very worst of himself—seething with frustration, thrumming with desire—whereas she remained utterly unaffected.
He settled down on the coffee table in front of her and stretched his legs so that she was trapped between them. He flipped open the file next to him against his better instincts, to finish what he had come for. “Your proposal is brilliant.”
“I don’t need you to tell me that,” she threw back, her chin jutting out.
He smiled. The confidence creeping back into her tone was not a surprise. When it came to her company his estranged wife was a force to be reckoned with. “Is that your standard response to a potential investor?”
She snorted, and even that was an elegant movement of her straight nose. “It’s my standard response to a man who I know is intent on causing me maximum damage.”
Diego frowned. “Really? Have I done that?”
She snatched the proposal from his hands and the scent of her wafted over him. He took a breath and held it fast, the muscles in his abdomen tightening.
Droga, two minutes in her company and he was...
He expelled it with the force of his self-disgust. Pleasure was not the reminder he needed.
“You already had your revenge, Diego. After I walked out on our marriage six years ago you refused to divorce me with the express purpose of ruining my wedding to Alexander. Then you seduced me and walked out four weeks ago. Isn’t that enough?”
“Seeing that you went back to your life, didn’t even falter for a second, I’m not sure.”
Something flickered in her molten brown gaze as she spoke. “I propelled my sister and Alex into a scandal, putting everything Alex has worked for at risk.”
“Again, them—not you. From where I stand nothing has gotten to you. Apparently nothing ever gets to you.”
She ran her fingers over her nape, her gaze shying away from him. Sudden tension pulsed around her. “You left me utterly humiliated and feeling like a complete fool that morning. Is that better?”
He had wanted her anger, her pain, and it was there in her voice now, thrumming with force. But it was too little, too late. Even now it was only the prospect of her precious company having caught his interest that was forcing any emotion from her.
“Maybe,” he said, shrugging off his jacket.
Her gaze flew to his, anxious. “Tell me—what do I need to say so that you’ll leave my company alone? What will save it from the utter ruin you’re planning?”
“I thought your confidence in your company was unshakeable? Your strategy without pitfalls?”
“Not if you make it your life’s mission to destroy it,” she said. Her voice rang with accusation, anger, and beneath it all, a curious hurt. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Anyone who crosses you, who disappoints you, you ensure their ruin. Now it’s my turn.”
She straightened, her hands folded at her middle. The action pushed her small breasts into prominence. He trained his gaze on her face as though his life depended on it. Maybe not his life, but his very sanity relied on his self-control.
He didn’t plan to lose it again.
“Six years ago you were obsessed with revenge, driven by only one goal—to ruin your father. You didn’t care who you hurt in the process. You took his small construction company and expanded it into an empire—encompassing energy generation, mining. If I were to believe the media—and knowing you personally I’m very much inclined to—you are called a bastard with alarming frequency. You crushed anything that got in your way. Including your own father.” She shot up from the seat and paced the length of the room. “I don’t believe in wasting precious time fighting the inevitable. So whatever you’re about to do—do it. But I won’t go down without a fight. My company—”
“Means everything to you, right? You should be held up as an example to anyone who doubts that women can be as unfeeling and ruthless as men,” he interjected smoothly, feeling that flare of anger again.
She stared at him, her gaze puzzled. “Why do I get the feeling that that’s not a compliment?”
“It’s not.”
Her fingers tightened on the windowsill behind her. “We’re even now, Diego. Let’s just leave it at that.”
He moved closer. He could see his reflection in her eyes, her slender shoulders falling and rising with her rapid breathing. Her gaze moved to his mouth and he felt a roar of desire pummel through his blood. It was impossible not to remember how good she had felt, how she had wrapped her legs around him and urged him on with soft little growls.
If he kissed her she wouldn’t push him away. If he ran the pad of his thumb over the pulse beating frantically at her throat she wouldn’t argue. She would be putty in his hands.
Wasn’t that why he felt such a physical pull toward her? Because when he touched her, when he kissed her, it was the one time he felt that he owned this woman—all of her. Her thoughts, her emotions, the core of her.
He fisted his hands. But it would prove nothing new—to him or to her. Self-disgust boiled through him for even thinking it. He had let her get to him on the island, burrow under his skin until the past six years had fallen away and he’d been standing there with her letter in hand.
Never again.
He needed a new beginning without being haunted by memories of this woman. He needed to do what he had come for and leave—now.
“I realized what I had done wrong the moment I left the island,” he said, unable to stop himself from wringing out the last drop of satisfaction. He had never claimed to be a great man. He had been born a bastard, and to this day he was one. “I’ve come to rectify that mistake.”
Kim trembled all over, an almighty buzz filling up her ears.
“A mistake?” Her throat ached as it pushed that word out.
His golden gaze gleamed, a knowing smile curving his upper lip. “I forgot a tiny detail, although it was the most important of all.”
He plucked a sheaf of papers from his coat pocket and slid them on to her desk. Every inch of her tensed. The words on those familiar papers blurred.
“I need your signature on the divorce papers.”
She struggled to get her synapses to fire again, to get her lungs to breathe again.
The innocuous-looking papers pierced through her defenses, inviting pain she had long ago learned not to feel. This was what she had wanted for six long years—to be able to correct the mistake she had made, to be able to forget the foolish dream that had never stood a chance.
Her palms were clammy as she picked up the papers.
“My staff at the villa were never able to locate the copies you brought.”
She shivered uncontrollably at the slight curiosity in his words. Because she had torn them up after that first night when Diego had made love to her.
No, not love. Sex. Revenge sex. The this-is-what-you-walked-away-from kind. For a woman with an above average IQ, she had repeated the same mistake when it came to Diego.
She turned the papers over and over in her hands. This was it.
Diego would walk out of her life. She would never again have to see the foolishness she had indulged in in the name of love. What she had wanted for so long was within her grasp. Yet she couldn’t perform the simple task of picking up the pen.
“You could have sent this through your lawyer,” she said softly, the shock and confusion she had held in check all evening by the skin of her teeth slithering their way into her. Her stomach heaved. “You didn’t have to come yourself.”
He leaned against the table, all cool arrogance and casual charm. But nothing could belie the cruel satisfaction in the curve of his mouth. He wanted blood and he was circling her like a hungry shark now that he could smell it.
“And miss the chance to say goodbye for the final time?”
“You mean you wanted to see the fallout from your twisted seduction?”
“Seduction?” he said, a dark shadow falling over his features. The force of his anger slammed into her like a gale. “Why don’t you own it, like you do everything else? There was no seduction.” He reached her before she could blink. “What does it say about us that even after six years it took us mere hours after laying eyes on each other to end up in bed? Or rather against the wall...”
Her stomach somersaulted. Her skin sizzled. He was right. Sex was all she could think of when he was close. Hot, sweltering, out-of-control, mind-blowing, biggest-mistake-of-your-life-that-you-made-twice sex.
She would die before she admitted how much truth there was in his words, how much more he didn’t know.
She grabbed her pen and signed the first paper, her fingers shaking.
She lifted her chin and looked up at him, gathering every ugly emotion simmering beneath the surface and pouring it into her words. “It’s nothing more than a stimulus and response—like Pavlov’s dog. No matter how many years pass, I see you and I think of sex. Maybe because you were my first. Maybe because you are so damn good at it.”
The papers slithered to the floor with a dangerous rustle. She felt his fury crackling around them. He tugged her hard against him, his body a smoldering furnace of desire.
She had angered him with her cold analogy. But it only made the void inside her deepen.
His mouth curled into a sneer. “Of course. I forgot that the cruise, those couple of months you spent with me, were nothing but a rich princess’s wild, dirty rebellion, weren’t they?”
She felt a strange constriction in her chest, a tightness she had nothing to fight against. A sob clawed its way up her throat.
She hated him for ruining the most precious moments of her life. For reducing them to nothing. She hated herself for thinking he had loved her six years ago, for losing her mind the moment she had seen him again four weeks ago.
For someone who had been emotionally stunted for so long, the upsurge of emotion was blinding—pulling her under, driving reason from her mind.
She bunched her fingers in his jacket, his heart thundering beneath her touch. “It’s good that you’re so greedy you came back for more. Because I have news for you.”
CHAPTER TWO
“YOU HAVE NEWS...?” He frowned, his fingers locked in a tight grip over hers. “What, princesa? Do you have a new man lined up now that your sister has stolen the last one? Do you think I give a damn?”
“I’m pregnant.”
He didn’t move. He didn’t blink. Not even a muscle twitched in his mobile face.
Hot satisfaction fueled her. She had wanted to shake his infuriating arrogance. She had. On its heels followed raking guilt.
Her knees buckled under her. Only Diego’s hold on her was keeping her upright.
God, she hadn’t meant to blurt it out like that. She hadn’t even dealt with what it meant to her, what it implied...
What did it say about her that the only positive thing she felt about the pregnancy was that it could shock Diego like nothing else could?
After the way he had treated her she owed him nothing. And yet keeping him in the dark required a price higher than she was willing to pay.
He had provided her with the best opportunity to tell him, to get it done with. For all she knew he wouldn’t even care. He had wanted revenge, he’d got it—with little scruples—and now he had divorce papers ready. And he would keep on walking.
His gaze sliced to her, searching her face. Her composure unraveled at his silence.
The roguish arrogance was gone from his face, replaced by a resolute calm. Every inch of her quaked.
“Is it mine?”
Her gut started that dangerous fall again. She needed to get herself under control. Because Diego was a master at reading her. Whatever she wished, he would do the opposite. Just to make her life harder.
She needed to play it cool. “Why do you think I’m giving you the good news?”
“You slept with me mere hours after laying eyes on me again,” he said, his golden gaze betraying his fury, “while the man you were ready to marry still had his lapdog out looking for you and your twin was being your damned placeholder in his life.”
She trembled as he walked away from her, as though he couldn’t bear to breathe the same air as her.
“And you went back to him as soon as I left you. Except he was two-timing you just as you were doing him. So I repeat: is the baby mine?”
“That’s not true. Alex and I—”
She shut her mouth with a snap, leaned back against the soft leather, trembling from head to toe. Guilt hung heavy in her stomach. The media, her father—the whole world had crucified Liv, while Kim was the one responsible for it all.
Except Diego knew where she had been and what she had been up to while Liv had pretended to be her. And of course Diego thought Kim had quietly crawled back to Alex, that nothing had changed for her. That she had jumped into his bed from Alex’s and then jumped straight back.
That was untrue on so many levels.
Even before Diego had made his true intentions known Kim had broken it off with Alexander. Only Diego didn’t know that.
Her next breath filled her with his scent—dark and powerful. Her eyes flew open.
He raised a brow, watching her with hawklike intensity. “It’s a simple question, gatinha, and sadly one only a woman can answer.”
There was nothing in his tone—no nuance of sarcasm, no hint of anger or accusation—nothing that she could latch onto and feed her fury, her misery.
“Alex and I...” she whispered, feeling heat creep up her skin. “We—”
“All I need—” his words came through gritted teeth “—is your word. Not a day-by-day update on your sexual activity.”
Mortification spread like wildfire inside her. Really, she needed to get a grip on herself—needed to stop blurting out things Diego had no need to know.
More information on her non-existent sex-life fell into that category without a doubt. She already had a permanent reminder of how scandalously she had behaved. And now Alex and Liv, her father—the whole world was going to find out...
Her gut churned again with a vicious force. “Of course it’s yours.”
His jaw tight, he nodded. His easy acceptance, his very lack of a reaction, sent a shiver running down her spine. She had expected him to burst out, had braced herself for an attack.
Why did he trust her so easily? He had every right to demand a paternity test. Every right to question the truth of her claim. That was what she wanted from him. That was what she expected from him.
Instead his self-possession—something she usually prided herself on—grated on her nerves. She was still panicking. She had blurted out the news in a petty fit of pique. Whereas he didn’t even blink.
She laughed, the sound edging toward hysteria. “What? No accusations? No demands for proof? No talk of DNA tests? Just like that, Diego?”
He turned away from her to lean against the wall and closed his eyes. He ran his hand over the bump on his nose. Tension overflowed from him, filling up the huge suite, rattling like an invisible chain, reaching for her. His eyes flew open and her gaze was caught by his.
“DNA tests are for women to whom being pregnant with a rich man’s child means a meal ticket to a better life. An accusation my father threw at my mother every time she showed up with me on his doorstep, begging for support.”
His words vibrated with emotion. His very stillness, in contrast to the loathing in his words, was disquieting in the least. “However, with our history, I don’t think that’s what you’re going for.”
Kim tucked her head in her hands, wondering what she had started. A lump of something—she refused to call it gratitude—blocked her throat, making it harder for her to speak. He could have turned this into something ugly if he wished. He hadn’t.
Everything within her revolted at being obligated to him for even that small display of honor. It made her weak, plunged her into useless wishing.
She couldn’t let him put her in the wrong. She couldn’t forget that the very reason she was in this situation was because he had orchestrated payback.
She felt the hard wall of heat from his body and stiffened.
“For a woman who fairly blazes with confidence in every walk of life, your hesitation would be funny if it wasn’t the matter of a child. Are you not so sure who the father is yourself?” he whispered softly, something deadly vibrating in his tone.
“There’s no doubt,” she repeated.
Thinking with a rational mind, she knew she should just tell Diego the stupid truth. That she had never slept with Alexander. But then Diego would never leave the truth alone.
“Now that we have solved that particular puzzle, what do you need from me?”
It took her a moment to realize that he was waiting for an answer. A chill began to spread over her skin. “I...I don’t need anything from you.”
“Of course not.” An edge crept into his tone, his gaze devouring her. Something stormy rumbled under that calm now. “Then why tell me?”
“Honestly? I wasn’t thinking,” she said, wondering if she was destined always to make mistakes when it came to him. “You were gloating. You were...”
“Nice to know something touches you,” he said, a fire glinting in his gaze. She opened her mouth to argue and shut it just as quickly. “And if I hadn’t been here to gloat? Would you have called me then?”
“That’s a question I don’t have to answer, because you are here. And stop pretending as though this means something, Diego. You were ready to walk out of my life, and I say keep on walking.”
“Your arrogance in thinking that you know me is astounding, querida. Did I teach you nothing four weeks ago?”
His words rumbled around her, and images and sensations tumbled toward her along with them. But she refused to back down. “You take risks. Your business tactics are barely on this side of the law. The last thing you need in your life is a baby. If I had hidden this from you you would have only found more reason to hate me.”
“To think for a moment I assumed that you weren’t doing this for purely selfish reasons but for the actual wellbeing of the child you’re carrying...”
She flinched, the worst of her own fears crystallized by his cutting words. Her earlier dread intensified. That was what she should have immediately thought of. The child’s welfare. “I want nothing but a divorce and an exit from you.”
His laughter faded and shadowed intent filled his face. He grabbed the papers she had signed not five minutes ago and shredded them with his hands.
His calm movements twisted her gut. “Then what do you have in mind? We’ll kiss each other and make up? Play happy family—”
He came closer—until she could see the gold specks in his eyes, smell the dark scent of him that scrambled her wits.
“I’m not turning my back on my child.”
Panic unfurling in her stomach, she shot up from her seat. “You’re out of your mind. This is not what I planned for my life—”
“I’m sure you had a list of requirements that needed to be met in order to produce the perfect offspring,” he said, his words ringing with bitter satisfaction, “but it’s out of your hands now.”
“It is. But what I can control is what I do about it now. Being a mother is going to be hard enough. Dealing with you on a regular basis will just tip me over into...”
Perverse anger rose within her—perverse, irrational and completely useless. He could walk away from this. She needed him to walk away from this. But she...she had no such choice. She had a lifelong commitment. She was supposed to love this baby. She was supposed to...
“You don’t want this baby?”
“Of course I don’t. I’ll even go so far as to say it’s the worst thing that has ever happened to me!” she shouted, the words falling off her trembling lips.
Shock flickered in his gaze, but she didn’t have the energy to wish them unsaid.
“This baby is going to be a walking, talking reminder of the biggest mistake of my life. You’ve achieved what you wanted, Diego. You’ve done your worst. You have changed my life in a way I can’t control. Now, please, leave me to get on with it.”
* * *
Diego breathed out through his teeth and hit the punching bag again with renewed force. His right hook was beginning to fall short again. The injury to the muscle in his bicep was making itself known. The same injury that had forced him to withdraw from financially lucrative street-fights. The injury that had forced him to reach out to his father for help when he had been sixteen and unable to pay for his mother’s treatment.
But he wouldn’t stop now. He breathed through the vicious pain, hating himself for even remembering.
The clock on the wall behind him chimed, reminding him he’d been at it for more than two hours now.
Sweat poured down from his forehead and he shook his head to clear it off. His T-shirt was drenched through and the muscles in his arms felt like stones. Adrenaline rushed through him in waves and he was beginning to hear a faint thundering in his ears. Probably his blood whooshing. But he didn’t stop.
Because even trying to drown himself in physical agony he couldn’t block out Kim’s words.
Stimulus and response!
Meu Deus, the woman reduced him to the lowest denominator with her infuriating logic. No one had ever got under his skin like she did. And she was carrying his baby. The resentment that had glittered in her brown eyes pierced even the haze of his pain.
Punch.
Of course it’s yours.
Thump.
It’s the worst thing that has ever happened to me.
Punch.
This baby is going to be a walking, talking reminder of the biggest mistake of my life.
Thump.
Nausea whirled at the base of his throat, threatening to choke him with its intensity. He’d had enough rejection from his father to last him several lifetimes. He would be dead before he did the same to his child or became a stranger.
He took one last punch and pulled his gloves off. He picked up a bottle of water, guzzled half of it down and dumped the rest over his head. The water trickled over his face into his eyes. The biting cold did nothing to pacify the crazy roar in his head.
Because Kim had been right. He didn’t want to be a father.... He wasn’t fit to be a father...
He let a curse fly and went at the punching bag again, shame and disgust boiling over in his blood. Pain waves rippled up his knuckles. His skin started peeling at his continued assault.
He had no good in him. All he had was hatred, jealousy. He didn’t possess a single redeeming quality that said he should even be a part of a child’s life. He had chosen to walk the path he had with full clarity of thought—to take everything from his father that he deserved. He had known exactly what he was doing when he’d reached for that goal.
And that was what he wanted to do now, too. He wanted to take his child from Kim and walk away. Every nerve in him wanted to ensure he had full custody.
But he could not sink so low again.
He had let his hatred for his father lead him to destroy his half brother’s life in the process. If not for Diego’s blind obsession Eduardo would have been...
He shivered, a chill swamping him.
He couldn’t risk that happening with his child. If, because of his obsession with Kim, he hurt his child in any way he wouldn’t be able to live with himself. He couldn’t let his anger at her drive him into making a mistake again—not anymore. Not when it could hurt his own child.
Playing happy family with Kim, seeing her every day, when she was the one weakness he had never conquered—every inch of him revolted at the very thought.
And yet he couldn’t escape his responsibility. He couldn’t just walk away and become a stranger to his own child.
He had a chance to change the vicious cycle of neglect and abuse he and Eduardo had gone through.
He would move mountains to make sure his child had everything he’d never had—two loving parents and a stable upbringing. Even if that meant tying himself to the woman who brought his bitterest fears to the surface.
CHAPTER THREE
KIM PULLED THE satin pillow over her head and groaned as her cell phone chirped. She hadn’t gotten into bed until three in the morning, after going over the new feature on The Daily Help with the design architect and writing her own feature for the career advice section she did every Tuesday.
Pushing her hair out of her eyes, she looked at the digital clock on the nightstand. It was only seven. She felt a distinct lack of energy to attack the day. When her phone rang for the third time in a row she switched the Bluetooth on.
“Kim, are you okay?”
Liv.
Tension tightened in the pit of her stomach at the concern in her twin’s voice. She had been putting Liv off for two weeks now.
She pushed herself up on the bed and leaned against the metallic headboard. “I’m fine. Is everything okay with you and Alex?”
“We’re fine. I’m just...” Liv’s uncharacteristic hesitation hung heavily between them. “God, Kim—is it true? Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”
Kim swallowed, fear fisting her chest. “What are you talking about?”
“You’ve made front page headlines. Not just the scandal rags, like I did, but even the business channels on television.”
“What?”
“It says you’re pregnant. Are you?”
Diego.
Kim closed her eyes and breathed huge gulps of air. Obviously her refusal to have anything to do with him, her refusal even to answer his calls, meant Diego had begun playing dirty.
“Yes.”
“When were you going to tell me? Are you...? I mean, are you okay with this? Does Diego know? What are you planning to do?”
They were all perfectly valid questions. Kim had just shoved them down forcefully.
“I’m perfectly fine, Liv. I don’t have the time right now to process what it means. Once this upcoming milestone for my company has passed I’ll make a list of the things I need to do.” She closed her eyes, fighting for composure. “I’ll even have a few sessions with Mommy Mary.”
“Who is Mommy Mary?”
“The expert on all things maternal on my team.”
“On what?”
“On what I need to learn to be the perfect mother. It’s not like we had a good example, is it?”
“And until then you’re just going to put it on the back burner?”
What else was she supposed to do? Focus on the relentlessly clammy feeling in her stomach every time her thoughts turned to the baby growing in her womb?
The stark contrast between the terrifying emptiness she felt and her newly pregnant CFO’s glorious joy was already a constant distressing reminder that something vital was missing in her own genetic make-up.
“I can’t botch this opportunity for my company by losing my focus.”
“I don’t know what to...” Olivia’s tone rang with the same growing exasperation Kim had sensed in their recent conversations. “Let me know if you need anything, okay?”
Kim tucked her knees close as Liv hung up. She wanted to reach out to Liv. Liv’s love came with no conditions, no judgment.
But Kim—she had always been the strong one. She had had to be in order to protect first her mother and then Liv from their father’s wrath.
She couldn’t confide her fears in anyone. Least of all to her twin, to whom loving and caring and nurturing came so easily.
Whereas Kim had trained herself so hard to not care, not to let herself be touched by emotions. She’d had to after she had learned what her mother had planned...
Only had she accomplished it so well—just as she had everything else in life—that she felt nothing even for the child growing in her womb?
Because even after a week all she felt was utter panic at the thought of the baby. She had spent a fortune buying almost a dozen more pregnancy test kits, hoping that it had been a false positive. And every time the word “pregnant” had appeared her stomach had sunk a little lower.
Or was it because of the man who had fathered her baby? Could her anger for Diego be clouding everything else? Was this how their mother had felt? Beneath her fear of their father, had she felt nothing for her children?
Without crawling out of bed, she pulled her reading glasses on and powered up her iPad. Her heart thumped loudly. She clicked on to one of her favorite websites—one she could count on to provide news objectively.
It was the first time she wasn’t in the news being lauded for one of her accomplishments.
The article, for all its flaming header, didn’t spend time speculating on the answer to either of the questions it posed. But suddenly she wished it did. Because the speculation it did enter into was much more harmful than if they had spawned stuff about her personal life.
The article highlighted the way any woman—especially one who was pregnant and with her personal life in shambles—could expect to expand her company and do it successfully.
Should investors be worried about pouring their money into a company whose CEO’s first priority might not be the company itself? One who has been involved in not one but two major scandals? Could this pregnancy herald the death of the innovative startup The Daily Help and its brilliant CEO Kimberly Stanton’s illustrious career?
She shoved the tablet away and got out of bed, her mind whirling with panic. She ran a hand over her nape, too restless to stay still. It might have been written by Kim herself, for it highlighted every little one of her insecurities— everything she had made a list of herself.
For so long she had poured everything she had into first starting her company and then into making it a financial success. She had never stopped to wonder—never had a moment of doubt when it came to her career.
She opened the calendar on her phone. Her day was full of follow-up meetings with five different investors. By the end of the day she intended to start working on putting the plans she had outlined about the expansion of her company into full gear.
She couldn’t focus on any other outcome—couldn’t waste her mental energies speculating and in turn proving the contentious article right.
Only then would she deal with Diego. There was no way anyone else would have known or leaked the news to the media. She had confided in only one person.
Wasn’t this what Diego had intended all along? She was a fool if she’d thought even for a moment that he wanted anything but her ruin.
* * *
Kim clicked End on her Skype call and leaned back in her chair. Her day had only gotten worse since Liv’s phone call. That had been her fifth and last unsuccessful investor meeting. Not one investor was ready to wire in funds.
Whereas the invoices for the new office space she had leased, for the three new state-of-the-art servers she had ordered, for the premium health insurance she had promised her staff this year mocked her and the vast sum of numbers on the papers in front of her was giving her a headache.
She leaned her head back and rubbed the muscles knotting her neck. Her vision for her company, her team’s livelihood, both were at stake because she had weakened.
Hadn’t she learned more than once how much she could lose if she let herself feel?
The number of things she needed to deal with was piling up. Panic breathed through her, crushing her lungs and making a mockery of the focus that she was so much lauded for. She forced large gulps of air into her lungs.
Breathe in...out...in...out... She repeated it for a few minutes, running her fingers over the award plaques she kept next to her table, searching for something to tune out the panic.
Pull yourself together, Kim. There are people counting on you.
It was the same stern speech she had given herself at thirteen, when she had discovered her mother’s packed bag one night. And the note to her father that had knocked the breath from her.
She had survived that night. She could survive anything.
She had to go on as before—for her company’s sake and for her own sake. If she lost her company she had nothing. She was nothing.
She picked up her cell phone and dialed Alex’s number. He was someone with whom she had always tossed around ideas for her business, someone she absolutely trusted. And someone she had been avoiding for the past month...
But she needed objective, unbiased advice, and Alex was the only one who would give it to her. She would exhaust every possibility if it meant she could go on with the plan for expanding her company.
* * *
Diego cursed, cold fury singing through his blood as he stared at the live webcast on his tablet. Reporters were camped with cameras and news crews in front of Kim’s apartment complex in Manhattan.
He rapped on the partitioning glass and barked her address at his chauffeur.
His gaze turning back to the screen again, he frowned at a sudden roar in the ruckus. And cursed again with no satisfaction as he recognized the tall figure. Her ex had arrived. Diego could almost peek into how the press’s mind would work.
The news about her pregnancy on top of the scandal last month, when her twin had been found with Kim’s ex—the press would come to only one conclusion.
That the unborn child—his child—was Alexander King’s.
This was not what he had intended when he’d had his head of security leak the news of her pregnancy to the media.
He stared at the tall figure of Alexander King as he walked into the complex without faltering, despite the reporters swarming around him. Acrid jealousy burned through him. He slammed his laptop shut, closed his eyes and sought the image of Eduardo’s frail body.
Which was enough to soak up the dark thoughts and send some much-needed reason into his head.
He had done this before—let his obsession consume his sense of right or wrong. He had let it blind him to the fact that Eduardo had needed his help, and instead he’d turned on him.
He couldn’t do that again. This was not about what Kim could drive him to. It was about what was right for their child.
* * *
Kim took a sip of her water as Alex finished a call. She had emailed him her proposal and set up the appointment. Now she wished she had waited for the weekend. Stupid of her not to expect how much the media would make of Alex visiting her alone on a Friday evening at her apartment.
She had never been more ashamed of herself. It had taken everything in her to ask Alex for his help but she had no other options. A flush overtaking her, she plucked up the daily statistics report her website manager had sent her.
Based on the turnover of her company in the last quarter, and on her expansion proposal, investing in her company was a sound opportunity for any shrewd businessman. Except for the scandal she had brought on herself.
Their daily numbers, the number of questions that came into their portal and the website hits, had spiked well above average today.
But she knew, as was pointed out by the breakdown in front of her, that this was because twenty percent of the questions had been about her pregnancy, whether she was married and—worst of them all—whether she was married to the father of her baby.
She needed to make a statement soon.
Tucking his phone into his pocket, Alex turned toward her. “I’m sorry, Kim. You know how much I trust your business savvy. But, as brilliant as your plan and forecast is, I can’t invest in it right now.”
Her stomach turning, Kim nodded. It was exactly as she had expected: the worst.
She blinked back tears as he wrapped an arm around her. “With everything going on out there right now I just... As much as I hate to admit it, my association with your company in the current climate would only damage your credibility.”
Kim nodded, the comfort he offered making her spectacular failure even harder to bear. “I know. And I’m so sorry for putting you and Liv through this—for everything. If I could I would go back to that day and do everything differently.” She smiled and corrected herself. “Well, except for the part where I left you with Liv.”
He laughed, and her mounting panic was blunted by the sheer joy in that sound. “You don’t have to go through this alone, Kim. You should come and stay with—”
“She’s not alone to deal with this. And I would think twice, if I were you, before touching my wife again.”
Kim jerked around so quickly that her neck muscles groaned.
Diego stood leaning against the door of her apartment, a dark, thundering presence, and he looked at them with such obvious loathing that her mouth dried up.
Next to her, Alex stayed as calm as ever as he turned around. Just like her, he knew who was behind the leak to the media. But, gentleman that he was, he hadn’t asked her one personal question.
The very antithesis of the man smoldering with anger at the door.
Mortification heating her cheeks, she met Diego’s gaze. “Don’t do this, Diego. Don’t make me regret ever knowing you.”
He shrugged, the movement stretching the handmade grey silk tight over his muscular frame. “Don’t you already? Aren’t you going to introduce your husband to your ex, querida?”
Alex moved at her side, reaching Diego before she could blink. Her breath hitched in her throat as they both looked at each other.
“Call me anytime, and for any kind of help, Kim,” Alex said.
Without another word he strolled out, closing the door behind him. The silence pulling at her stressed nerves, Kim walked past the sitting area to her kitchen, the open layout giving her an unobstructed view of Diego. She pulled a bottle of orange juice out of the refrigerator and poured it into a glass.
Diego leaned against the pillar that cut off the kitchen from the lounge. She raised the glass to her mouth and took a sip. His continued scrutiny prickled her skin. Every time she laid eyes on him she felt as if she was one step closer to a slippery slope.
“What is this? A lesson in caveman behavior?”
“I don’t understand your relationship with that man.”
She blinked at his soft tone. “Don’t turn this around on me. Were you going to beat your chest and drag me to your side by my hair if he hadn’t left?”
He smiled, his gaze moving to her hair. He flexed his fingers threateningly. “I’ve never done that before...but if anyone can push me to it, it’s you.”
Her mouth open, she just stared at him.
“You like throwing my background in my face, don’t you? I’m not ashamed that my life began on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, that I used my fists for survival.”
She glared at him, insulted by his very suggestion. “It’s got nothing to do with your background and everything to do with how you are acting now.”
“True. This one’s my fault. I should have expected you to go to him for help.”
It was the last thing she’d expected him to say.
Calling her a few names, maybe challenging her word about the paternity of the baby as the whole world was hotly speculating—sure. But this? No. His continuing trust in her word threw her, kept her off-balance.
Or was that what he truly intended?
The doubts assailing her, the real possibility of her company falling apart, filled her veins with ice. “As you have made it your mission to destroy my life, I went crawling for help to the man whom I deceived dreadfully by sleeping with you. Satisfied?”
* * *
Diego let his gaze travel lazily over Kim. A long-sleeved white cotton top hugged her slim torso and the flat of her stomach, followed by tight blue jeans that encased her long legs. Her short hair was pulled back with a clip, leaving shorter tendrils teasing her cheekbones.
He believed her that the baby was his. She had nothing to gain by lying to him and everything to lose.
Except he didn’t understand how, having been almost literally dragged from the altar by Diego, away from a man who was now apparently happily married to her twin, Kim could still share a relationship with Alexander that wasn’t the least bit awkward.
Was she still pining after him? After all, she had gone to him for help. That in itself was revealing.
“I gave you a week, gatinha. I refuse to be ignored. I refuse to let you put your company before the baby and—”
She put her glass down with a force that splashed the juice onto her fingers. Her posture screamed with barely contained anxiety. “The baby’s not going to be here for nine months. Do you expect me to sit around twiddling my thumbs until then? I’m not going to give up something I have built with sheer hard work just because I’m pregnant.”
There it was again. Her complete refusal to accept that things were going to change.
“I expect you to slow down. I expect you to return my calls. I expect you to stop working sixteen-hour days.” She didn’t look like perfection put together today. She looked tired and stressed out. Guilt softened his words. “You look like you’re ready to fall apart.”
“And whose fault is that? I’ve been trying to minimize the damage you’ve caused with your dirty tricks.”
“You have no idea how dirty I’ll fight for what I want. Propelling you toward him wasn’t what I intended, however. But I had forgotten how stubbornly independent you are.”
“Careful, Diego. You sound almost jealous. And yet I know you don’t give a hoot about me.”
“Remember I’m an uncivilized, dirty thug,” he said, with a slanted look at her. “A street-fighting Brazilian, pequena. Of course I’m jealous.”
Kim wiped her fingers on a hand towel, feeling a flush creep up her neck.
Of course she remembered. She remembered every moment of her short-lived marriage with crystal-clear clarity. She had called him that the week before she had left him, her misery getting the better of her. It wasn’t where he had come from that had bothered her. It was what she represented to him because of it that had shattered her heart.
“Why? Even you can see, after everything you have set in motion, how much Alex loves my sister.”
He circled the pillar and neared her, frowning. “And this doesn’t bother you at all?”
“What?”
“That the man you had been about to marry is now married to your twin.”
“I’m incredibly happy for them. If there’s one good thing that’s come out of this whole debacle it’s Liv and Alex.”
“Only one good thing? Still not sure, then?” he queried silkily, his gaze instantly moving to her stomach.
Her spine kissed the steel refrigerator as he suddenly swallowed her space. “Any child who’s the product of you and me is of course not a good thing.”
“You make it sound like it’s a product we designed together.”
His words were soft, even amused, and yet they lanced through her. “Excuse me if I’m not the perfect vision of maternal instinct you were expecting.”
He stared at her, his gaze searching hers. “Your genes needed a bit of diluting anyway, and you need a bit of softening up. All work and no play makes Kimberly a crabby girl.”
“Yes, well—look where all that playing has landed me.”
She sucked in a deep breath, sheer exhaustion finally catching up with her. Trust Diego to force her to face the one thing she didn’t want to think about.
“We can’t even have a conversation without jumping at each other’s throats, Diego.” Every dark fear she was trying to stay above bled into her words. “How do you think it bodes for the...the child?”
Without looking away from her he pulled her hands from behind her and tugged her gently. Stupefied, she went along, for once lacking the energy to put up a fight. With a hand at her back he guided her to the lounge and pushed her onto the couch.
He settled down on a chair opposite.
She felt the force of his look down to her toes. “You might not want this baby, but you want to do the right thing by it—right?”
She swallowed and nodded, a fist squeezing her chest. It was the only thing she was capable of at this point.
“Good. And, as much as you were hoping that I would walk away, I won’t.” His gaze was reassuring, his tone comforting. “Believe me, gatinha, that’s a whole lot more than most kids ever have.”
Was it?
Maybe if her mother hadn’t left that night...and even when she had maybe if she had at least included Kim...would her life have been different, better, today? No, there was no point in imagining a different past or present. Being weak, trusting her heart, only led to unbearable pain. She had learned that twice already.
“Why are you jealous of Alexander?” The moment the question fell off her lips she regretted it.
His long fingers on his nape, Diego closed his eyes and then opened them slowly. His resentment was clear in the tight line of his mouth. “Alexander King has your confidence. I don’t. And, having crawled out of the gutter, I find my first reaction is to hate any man who has what I want.”
His stark admission pulled the rug out from under her. “You want my confidence?” She sighed. “How about you stop trying to destroy me for a minute and then we can talk?”
He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his expression amused. “Isn’t it interesting how your company being in crisis means I’m destroying your life, but when I ruined your wedding you didn’t have a word to say? So, did he agree to save your company and thus your life?”
His absolutely accurate assumption that her life revolved around her career and her company was beginning to grate on her nerves. She had always prided herself on her unemotional approach. It had been a factor that had put her in direct competition with ruthless businessmen like him.
“No.”
He plopped his ankle on his right knee. “Is it because you deceived him? Have you noticed how you leave all the men in your life with less than nice impressions?”
“Not everyone in the world is as concerned about payback as you are.”
His gaze glittered for a second, but the next he was a rogue, savoring the mess he was making of her life. “So why did Mr. King refuse to be your savior?”
“Because—thanks to your tricks and my own stupidity—my image is in tatters. My company is based on the idea of a panel of experts giving women advice on any topic from health, career and fashion to politics, finance and sex. The operative word being experts. And, as unfair as it is, a woman who seems to not have her personal life together without blemish is not someone others—even other women—want advice from. It doesn’t matter that nothing has changed in the way I think or in my brain matter since I learned about my pregnancy. It just is.”
“But eventually the news would have come out. I just accelerated it.”
He was right. It was something she would have had to face in a couple of months anyway. The sooner she dealt with all this, found a way to resolve this situation with her company, the better.
She still needed an investor, but she was not as worried about running her company as the whole world was. She could do it with her hand tied behind her back.
It was the pregnancy that was the near-constant worry scouring through her.
She had succeeded in everything she had taken up in her life. Pregnancy had to be the same, right?
If she prepared enough, if she was willing to work hard, she could do a good job at being a mother, too. She refused to think about it any other way—refused to give weight to the worry eating away at her from inside.
“What’s was the point of all this, Diego?” she said, feeling incredibly tired. “Would it make you feel better if I begged you for help? Leeched money off you in the name of child support?”
“Yes.”
She blinked at the vehemence in his answer.
“What I wanted was to scare away all your other investors so that you have no one else to turn to but me.”
“Why?”
“It seems putting your company in crisis is the only way for me to get your attention.”
Her temper flared again. “That’s the second time you have mentioned my success, my company, as though it’s something to be sneered at—when you pursued your own success with ruthless ambition. And wasn’t that why you married me six years ago? Because I was smart, ambitious? Now that I’m pregnant you’re asking me to put all that aside and suddenly morph into your vision of everything maternal? I never thought you would tout double standards.”
Diego ran a hand over his nape. Just the mention of their short-lived marriage was like throwing a punch in his face. She was doing it again—getting under his skin. And it would end in only one way.
“Do you really want to go down the rabbit hole of the past, gatinha?”
He didn’t want to argue with her. He could see very well that something about her pregnancy was stressing her out. So why didn’t she make it easy on herself? If she didn’t know how to, he would do it. He would drag her kicking and screaming back into his life and force her to slow down if that was what he had to do to take care of her.
He stepped over the coffee table and joined her on the couch. She scooted to the other corner. He sighed. It seemed either they argued or they screwed, and neither was what he wanted to do. Even if one option had infinitely more appeal than the other.
“I’m not asking you to give up your work. I’m asking you to acknowledge that pregnancy changes things.”
Her feet tucked under her, her arms wrapped around herself, she scrunched farther into the corner. She looked absolutely defeated. “And what does that entail? Throwing myself a conception party and inviting the whole world?”
“You have no friends, you don’t talk to your sister and you’re a workaholic. You live in a fortress isolated from anyone else. That cannot continue.”
“Keeping myself idle for hours on end with nothing to do is not going to turn me into mother of the year when the baby comes. In fact it would just...”
His patience was thinning, but there was something in her voice—a note of desperation—that snagged his attention. “Just what?”
Her stubborn silence was enough to drive his control to the edge again. Was this what he was signing up for a lifetime of?
“I will invest in your company.”
Her gaze widened. Her head shook from left to right. “I’ll bounce back from this.”
“No, you won’t.” He leaned toward her, and the scent of her caressed him. “Things are different from what they were a week ago.”
“Because you manipulated them to your advantage.”
“I would have been dead in a ditch years ago if I didn’t push things to my advantage.” He smiled, enjoying her stupefied silence. “Now I’ve got you hooked, haven’t I? I can see the gears already spinning in your head.”
“What’s the catch?”
“Aah... Look at us, gatinha. We’re like an old married couple, reading each other’s minds without words. If that’s not a true, abiding love, then I don’t know what is.”
“Stop it, Diego. Why the investment now?”
“Perhaps I don’t want to see your hard work go to waste? Or I’m overcome by a consuming need to help you? I still have a soft spot for my wife?”
Kim shivered as though someone had trickled an ice cube over her spine. His taunts were painful reminders of things she had cherished once and then realized to be false. He was mocking feelings she held close to her heart, emotions she had locked up forever.
“Not funny.” With each cheeky retort her anxiety spiraled higher and higher. There had to be a huge price to pay for this. “What do you want from me?”
“We make our marriage work. For good.”
She jumped from the couch, a chill descending into her veins. He couldn’t be serious. It was a twisted joke. That was all it had to be...
She swallowed at the calm in his gaze. “Now I get it. No one is allowed to say no to you, to walk away from you, without you going all revenge of the ninja on them. I’m not a task you failed at once and are determined to conquer.”
“Let’s be very clear about something, princesa.” The dark humor faded from his gaze, replaced by something hard and flinty. “Putting up with you, tying my life to yours again, is like signing up for a lifetime of torment. But it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make for my child. To provide a stable home, to give it everything I didn’t have. Nothing more. I plan to be a hands-on parent and I will accept nothing less from you.”
Bile snuck up Kim’s throat. Everything within her rebelled at the thought of being tied to him. It was no better now than it had been six years ago. Then she had been his prize, his trophy, to parade before his father in his victory over a horrible childhood. Now her significance was the fact that she was going to be the mother of his child.
It shouldn’t hurt. But it did. And the hurt was followed by the same raking guilt that had taken up permanent residence in her gut.
She couldn’t think about what this meant for her. She had to think of the baby. She had to do what was right.
Whether she wanted to be a mother or not, whether or not she felt anything for the life growing inside her, it didn’t matter. Unconditional love. She had never received it, she didn’t know it, but responsibility and being strong for someone else—that she understood.
“Is this another trick so you can taunt me for the rest of my life? I won’t let you use the child as some kind of pawn.”
“Every inch of me wants to walk away from you. Every cell in me regrets sleeping with you. I told myself I would not waste another minute on you. But what we did has had consequences. All this is motivated by the fact that we’re having a child together. A child who will have a proper father—not one who will just drop in for birthdays and pose for pictures—and a proper mother. A family. I will do everything in my power to ensure my child has everything I never had.”
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Tara Pammi
Cool, calm and collected CEO Kimberly Stanton is following hot on the heels of her scandalous sister Olivia. Not only has she revealed her (very sudden!) pregnancy, but has rocked the international business world with the shock announcement of her marriage to outrageous Brazilian bad-boy-tycoon Diego Pereira!If rumours of huge blow-out arguments, bail-out money for Kim’s company, and dark secrets are already besetting society’s most notorious couple, who can say what lies ahead for these two lovers?One thing’s for sure, it’ll be so much fun watching!
The limo came to a stop in front of the plush New York Plaza Hotel, where the awards ceremony was being held. Kimberly could hear the hushed roar of the crowd outside. Before she could blink, Diego had opened a small velvet box.
Drawing a painful breath, she tucked herself further into her seat, her heart pounding behind her ribcage. He’d done this on purpose—waited until the last minute.
The diamond twinkled in the dark, every cut and glitter of it breathtaking. There was an accompanying band of white gold, exquisitely simple in contrast to the glittering diamond.
Alarm twisted her stomach into a knot. That simple band could very well be an invisible shackle, binding her to him. And it could unlock every impossible hope, every dangerous dream she had so ruthlessly squashed in order to survive.
“I don’t want to wear it. I don’t know what you think this achieves…”
“There is very little I have asked of you or will ever ask of you. But when it comes to our child I won’t settle. I will never be that boy who was denied his rights ever again.” He shrugged—a casual movement—in complete control of himself. “I want my child to be recognized as mine. You had the perfect chance to do that in your press statement. You didn’t. So now we will do it my way.”
THE SENSATIONAL STANTON SISTERS
Notoriety has a new name!
The exploits of the famous—or should that be infamous—Stanton Sisters are guaranteed to sell newspapers the world over.
While they are physically identical, the sisters are as different as night and day.
Olivia Stanton can create scandal from thin air, but this bad girl is desperate to be oh-so-good. Until she comes face to face with the one man whose dark looks are a temptation too far!
Kimberly Stanton is a stunning socialite with a brilliant head for business. But when her dirty little secret comes back to haunt her Kim’s entire life is turned upside down!
One thing’s for sure—both deserve the middle name ‘trouble’ with a capital T!
And what of the men sent to tame them?
We wish them luck!
Last month you read Tara Pammi’s stunning debut in:
A HINT OF SCANDAL October 2013
This month read Olivia’s story in:
A TOUCH OF TEMPTATION November 2013
A Touch of Temptation
Tara Pammi
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
TARA PAMMI can’t remember a moment when she wasn’t lost in a book—especially a Mills & Boon
romance, which provided so much more excitement to a teenager than a mathematics textbook. It was only years later, while struggling with her two-hundred-page thesis in a basement lab, that Tara realised what she really wanted to do: write a romance novel. She already had the requirements—a wild imagination and a love for the written word.
Tara lives in Colorado, with the most co-operative man on the planet and two daughters. Her husband and daughters are the only things that stand between Tara and a full-blown hermit life with only books for company.
Tara would love to hear from readers. She can be reached at tara.pammi@gmail.com or at her website: www.tarapammi.com
Recent titles by the same author:
A HINT OF SCANDAL
(The Sensational Stanton Sisters)
Did you know these are also available as eBooks? Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk
To the man who started it all—my father—for giving me my love of books, for never holding me back, for always believing that there was nothing I couldn’t do if I set my mind to it.
Contents
CHAPTER ONE (#u1e5c0e62-dbda-5b7a-9d39-1c72415cd8fb)
CHAPTER TWO (#u1bec0d01-3eae-5239-9afe-4b551d63b746)
CHAPTER THREE (#u400a332e-0315-51ce-a11f-4a238aaeb2ef)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
KIMBERLY STANTON STARED at the white rectangle of plastic on the gleaming marble counter in the ladies’ bathroom. Terror coated her throat as though it might come to life and take a bite out of her. It looked alien, out of place amidst the lavender potpourri, the crystal lamp settings and the glossy chrome fixtures.
The few minutes stretched like an eternity. The quiet lull of voices outside was exaggerated into distorted echoes.
Her heart beat faster and louder. A painful tug in her lower belly stole her breath. She clutched the cold granite vanity unit and clenched the muscles in her legs, willing herself to hold on.
The scariest word she had ever encountered appeared on the stick.
Pregnant.
No confusing colors or symbols that meant you had to peek again at the box discarded in terrified panic.
Simple, plain English.
Her heart leaped into her throat. Her legs shaking beneath her, she leaned against one of the stalls behind her, dipped her head low and forced herself to breathe past the deafening whoosh in her ears.
Her one mistake, which technically she had committed twice, couldn’t haunt her for the rest of her life, could it?
But she couldn’t change the consequences. She had never been naïve or stupid enough to wish it either.
She flicked the gleaming chrome tap open and dangled her fingers under the ice-cold water. The sound of the water hitting the sink drowned out the sound of her heartbeat, helping her focus on her breathing.
In, out. In, out...
She closed the tap. Straightening up, she was about to reach for the hand towel when she looked at the mirror and froze.
She stared at her reflection, noting the dark circles under her eyes, the lack of color in her face, the skin pulled tautly over her bones. Drops of water seeped through the thin silk of her blouse to her skin beneath.
She looked as if she was on the brink of a nervous breakdown. And maybe she was. But she didn’t have time now. The breakdown had to wait. She touched the tips of her fingers to her temple and pressed. The cold from her almost numb fingers seeped into her overheated skin.
She had no time to deal with this now. She had to compartmentalize—set it aside until she was alone, until she was equipped to think logically, until the shock making her jittery all over faded into nothing more than a numbing ache.
And when it did she would assess the situation again with a clear head, take the necessary action to equip herself better to handle it. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have any experience with dealing with shock and pain.
Although why she had chosen this particular moment to take the test when the pregnancy kit had been burning a rectangular hole in her handbag for more than a week was anybody’s guess. Or maybe she was having another momentary collapse of her rational thinking circuits.
She had been having those moments a lot lately.
She pulled her lip-gloss out of her clutch and reapplied it with shaking fingers. She ran a hand over her suit. The silky material under her fingers rooted her back to reality.
She needed to get back out there. She needed to circulate among the guests—a specially put together group of investors she had researched for more than six months. Investors who had shown interest in her web startup The Daily Help.
She had a presentation to give. She had to talk them through the financial outline she had sketched for the next five years. She had to convince them to invest in her start-up when there were a million others mushrooming every day.
She had to convince them that the recent scandal about her, Olivia and Alexander had nothing to do with the way she did business. It was a sign of how strong her business proposal was that they had even showed up, despite the scandal.
She straightened her jacket and turned toward the exit. And paused midstride.
Turning back, she picked up the plastic tube, wrapped it carefully in the wrapper she had left on the sink and threw it into the trash. She fumbled when she turned the corner, struggling to breathe past the tight ache in her gut. She placed her hand on her stomach and drew in gulps of air, waiting for the tidal wave of pain that threatened to pull her under to pass.
Striding out of the restroom, she plucked a glass of sparkling water from a passing waiter and nodded at an old friend from Harvard. She was glad she had booked this conference hall in one of the glitzy hotels in Manhattan, even though her tightfisted CFO had frowned over the expense.
Kim didn’t think an evening in her company’s premises— a large open space in the basement of a building in Manhattan, unstructured in every way possible—would encourage confidence on the investors’ part.
She checked her Patek Philipe watch, a gift from her father when she had graduated from Harvard, and invited everyone to join her in the conference room for the presentation.
She felt an uncharacteristic reluctance as she switched on the projector. Once she concluded the presentation she was going to be alone with her thoughts. Alone with things she couldn’t postpone thinking about anymore.
* * *
It happened as she reached almost the end of her presentation.
With her laser pointer pointed at a far-off wall, instead of at her company’s financial forecast on the rolled-out projector screen, she lost her train of thought—as though someone had turned off a switch in her brain.
She searched the audience for what had thrown her.
A movement—the turn of a dark head—a whisper or something else? Had she imagined it? Everything and everyone else faded into background for a few disconcerting moments. Had her equilibrium been threatened so much by her earlier discovery?
The resounding quiet tumbled her out of her brain fog. She cleared her throat, took a sip of her water and turned back to the chart on the screen. She finished the presentation, her stomach still unsettled.
The lights came on and she smiled with relief. Several hands came up as she opened the floor to questions. She could recite those figures half-asleep. Every little detail of her company was etched into her brain.
The first few were questions she had expected. Hitting her stride, she elaborated on what put her company a cut above the others, provided more details, more figures, increasing statistics and the ad revenue they had generated last year.
Even the momentary aberration of a few minutes ago couldn’t mar the satisfaction she could feel running in her veins, the high of accomplishment, of her hard work bearing fruit.
She answered the last question, turned the screen off and switched on the overhead lights.
There he was. The reason for the strange tightening in her stomach. The cause of the prickling sensation she couldn’t shed.
Diego Pereira. The man who had seduced her and walked away without a backward glance. The man whose baby she was pregnant with.
She froze on the slightly elevated podium, felt her gut falling through an endless abyss. Like the time her twin sister had dragged her on a free-fall ride in an amusement park. Except through the nauseating terror that day she had known that at some point the fall would end. So she had forced herself to sit rigid, her teeth digging painfully into the inside of her mouth, while Liv had screamed with terror and laughter.
No such assurance today. Because every time Diego stormed into her life she forgot the lesson she had learned long ago.
Her hands instinctively moved to her stomach and his gaze zeroed in on her amidst the crowd. She couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t look into those golden eyes that had set her up to fall. Couldn’t look at that cruel face that had purposely played with her life.
She forced herself to keep her gaze straight, focused on all the other curious faces waiting to speak to her. It was the most excruciating half hour of her entire life. She could feel Diego’s gaze on her back, drilling into her, looking for a weak spot—anything that he could use to cause more destruction.
At least he’d made it easy for her to avoid him, sitting in one of the chairs in the back row with his gaze focused on her.
She slipped, the heel of one of her three-inch pumps snagging on the carpet as she moved past him. Just the dark scent of him was tripping her nerves.
Why was he here? And what cruel twist of fate had brought him here the very same day she had discovered that she was pregnant?
* * *
Diego Pereira watched unmoving as Kim closed the door to the conference hall behind her, her slender body stiff with tension. She was nervous and, devil that he was, he liked it.
He flicked through the business proposal. Every little detail of her presentation was blazing in his mind, and he was impressed despite his black mood. Although he shouldn’t really be surprised.
Her pitch for investment today had been specific, innovative, nothing short of exceptional. Like her company. In three years she had taken the very simple idea of an advice column into an exclusive, information-filled web portal with more than a million members and a million more waiting on shortlists for membership.
He closed his eyes and immediately the image of her assaulted him.
Dressed formally, in black trousers that showed off her long legs and a white top that hugged her upper body, she was professionalism come to life—as far as possible from the woman who had cried her pleasure in his arms just a month ago.
He had even forgotten the reason he had come to New York while he had followed her crisp, confident presentation. But the moment she had realized he was present in the audience had been his prize.
She had faltered, searched the audience. That seconds-long flicker in her focus was like a nervous scream for an average woman.
But then there was nothing average about the woman he had married. She was beautiful, brilliant, sophisticated. She was perfection personified—and she had as much feeling as a lump of rock.
A rock he was finally through with—ready to kick out of his life. It was time to move on, and her little nervous sputter at the sight of him had gone a long way toward pacifying his bitter resentment.
He walked to an elevator and pressed the number for the tenth floor. When he reached her suite he pulled the gold-plated keycard he had bribed from the bellboy from his coat packet.
He entered the suite and closed the door behind him.
The subtle scent of lily of the valley assailed him instantly. It rocked him where he stood, dispensing a swift punch to his gut more lethal than the ones he had taken for half his life.
His lungs expanded, drawing the scent of her deep into him until it sank once again into his blood.
His body pulsed with remembered pleasure. Like a junkie getting his high.
He studied the suite, with its luxurious sitting area and mahogany desk. Her files were neatly stacked on it, her sleek state-of-the-art laptop on top of them. Her handbag—a practical but designer black leather affair—lay near the couch in the sitting area.
The suite was everything its owner was—high-class, flawless and without an ounce of warmth.
He turned at the sound of a door on his right.
Closing the door behind her, she leaned against it. A sheen of sweat danced on her forehead.
He frowned, his curiosity spiking.
Her glistening mouth trembled as she spotted him, her hands moving to her midriff.
There was a distinct lack of color to her skin. Her slender shoulders quivered as she ran the back of her hand over her forehead.
He looked at her with increasing curiosity. Her jacket was gone. A V-necked sleeveless white silk blouse showed off her toned arms. The big steel dial of her designer watch highlighted her delicate wrist. A thin gold chain dangled at her throat.
The shadow of her breasts beneath the thin silk drew his gaze.
He swallowed and pulled his eyes up. The memory of her breasts in his hands was cutting off his breath more effectively than a hand choking his windpipe. The feel of her trembling with pleasure in his hands, the erotic scent of her skin and sex—images and sensations flooded through him.
He could no more fight the assault than he could stop breathing.
Her eyes flared wide, the same heat dancing in those chocolate depths.
She was the very embodiment of perfection—always impeccably dressed, exuding the sophistication that was like a second skin to her. Yet now she looked off-balance.
He reached her, the slight sway of her lithe figure propelling him toward her. “Are you okay, gatinha?”
She ran her palm over her face, leaving pink fingerprints over her colorless skin. Stepping away from him, she straightened the already immaculate desk. Her fingers trembled as she picked up a pen and moved it to the side.
She was more than nervous.
“No, I’m not,” she said, shrugging those elegant shoulders. The frank admission was unusual. “But that’s not a surprise as I just saw you, is it?”
He raised a brow and sliced the distance between them. “The sight of me makes you sick?”
Her fingers clutched the edge of the desk, her knuckles white. “The sight of you reminds me of reckless stupid behavior that I’d rather not remember.”
He smiled. “Not even the good parts, where you screamed?”
Pink scoured her cheeks. The slender set of her shoulders straightened in defense. She moved to the sitting area and settled into a leather chair. “Why are you here, Diego?”
He watched with a weird fascination as she crossed her legs and looked up at him.
The nervousness he had spied just moments ago had disappeared. She sounded steady, without a hint of anger or upset. Even though the last time they had laid eyes on each other she had been half-naked in his bed, her face bereft of color as he had dressed and informed her that he was done with her.
There was no reproach in her tone for his behavior a month ago.
Her calm composure grated on him like the edge of a saw chipping away at wood.
She drove him to be the very worst of himself—seething with frustration, thrumming with desire—whereas she remained utterly unaffected.
He settled down on the coffee table in front of her and stretched his legs so that she was trapped between them. He flipped open the file next to him against his better instincts, to finish what he had come for. “Your proposal is brilliant.”
“I don’t need you to tell me that,” she threw back, her chin jutting out.
He smiled. The confidence creeping back into her tone was not a surprise. When it came to her company his estranged wife was a force to be reckoned with. “Is that your standard response to a potential investor?”
She snorted, and even that was an elegant movement of her straight nose. “It’s my standard response to a man who I know is intent on causing me maximum damage.”
Diego frowned. “Really? Have I done that?”
She snatched the proposal from his hands and the scent of her wafted over him. He took a breath and held it fast, the muscles in his abdomen tightening.
Droga, two minutes in her company and he was...
He expelled it with the force of his self-disgust. Pleasure was not the reminder he needed.
“You already had your revenge, Diego. After I walked out on our marriage six years ago you refused to divorce me with the express purpose of ruining my wedding to Alexander. Then you seduced me and walked out four weeks ago. Isn’t that enough?”
“Seeing that you went back to your life, didn’t even falter for a second, I’m not sure.”
Something flickered in her molten brown gaze as she spoke. “I propelled my sister and Alex into a scandal, putting everything Alex has worked for at risk.”
“Again, them—not you. From where I stand nothing has gotten to you. Apparently nothing ever gets to you.”
She ran her fingers over her nape, her gaze shying away from him. Sudden tension pulsed around her. “You left me utterly humiliated and feeling like a complete fool that morning. Is that better?”
He had wanted her anger, her pain, and it was there in her voice now, thrumming with force. But it was too little, too late. Even now it was only the prospect of her precious company having caught his interest that was forcing any emotion from her.
“Maybe,” he said, shrugging off his jacket.
Her gaze flew to his, anxious. “Tell me—what do I need to say so that you’ll leave my company alone? What will save it from the utter ruin you’re planning?”
“I thought your confidence in your company was unshakeable? Your strategy without pitfalls?”
“Not if you make it your life’s mission to destroy it,” she said. Her voice rang with accusation, anger, and beneath it all, a curious hurt. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Anyone who crosses you, who disappoints you, you ensure their ruin. Now it’s my turn.”
She straightened, her hands folded at her middle. The action pushed her small breasts into prominence. He trained his gaze on her face as though his life depended on it. Maybe not his life, but his very sanity relied on his self-control.
He didn’t plan to lose it again.
“Six years ago you were obsessed with revenge, driven by only one goal—to ruin your father. You didn’t care who you hurt in the process. You took his small construction company and expanded it into an empire—encompassing energy generation, mining. If I were to believe the media—and knowing you personally I’m very much inclined to—you are called a bastard with alarming frequency. You crushed anything that got in your way. Including your own father.” She shot up from the seat and paced the length of the room. “I don’t believe in wasting precious time fighting the inevitable. So whatever you’re about to do—do it. But I won’t go down without a fight. My company—”
“Means everything to you, right? You should be held up as an example to anyone who doubts that women can be as unfeeling and ruthless as men,” he interjected smoothly, feeling that flare of anger again.
She stared at him, her gaze puzzled. “Why do I get the feeling that that’s not a compliment?”
“It’s not.”
Her fingers tightened on the windowsill behind her. “We’re even now, Diego. Let’s just leave it at that.”
He moved closer. He could see his reflection in her eyes, her slender shoulders falling and rising with her rapid breathing. Her gaze moved to his mouth and he felt a roar of desire pummel through his blood. It was impossible not to remember how good she had felt, how she had wrapped her legs around him and urged him on with soft little growls.
If he kissed her she wouldn’t push him away. If he ran the pad of his thumb over the pulse beating frantically at her throat she wouldn’t argue. She would be putty in his hands.
Wasn’t that why he felt such a physical pull toward her? Because when he touched her, when he kissed her, it was the one time he felt that he owned this woman—all of her. Her thoughts, her emotions, the core of her.
He fisted his hands. But it would prove nothing new—to him or to her. Self-disgust boiled through him for even thinking it. He had let her get to him on the island, burrow under his skin until the past six years had fallen away and he’d been standing there with her letter in hand.
Never again.
He needed a new beginning without being haunted by memories of this woman. He needed to do what he had come for and leave—now.
“I realized what I had done wrong the moment I left the island,” he said, unable to stop himself from wringing out the last drop of satisfaction. He had never claimed to be a great man. He had been born a bastard, and to this day he was one. “I’ve come to rectify that mistake.”
Kim trembled all over, an almighty buzz filling up her ears.
“A mistake?” Her throat ached as it pushed that word out.
His golden gaze gleamed, a knowing smile curving his upper lip. “I forgot a tiny detail, although it was the most important of all.”
He plucked a sheaf of papers from his coat pocket and slid them on to her desk. Every inch of her tensed. The words on those familiar papers blurred.
“I need your signature on the divorce papers.”
She struggled to get her synapses to fire again, to get her lungs to breathe again.
The innocuous-looking papers pierced through her defenses, inviting pain she had long ago learned not to feel. This was what she had wanted for six long years—to be able to correct the mistake she had made, to be able to forget the foolish dream that had never stood a chance.
Her palms were clammy as she picked up the papers.
“My staff at the villa were never able to locate the copies you brought.”
She shivered uncontrollably at the slight curiosity in his words. Because she had torn them up after that first night when Diego had made love to her.
No, not love. Sex. Revenge sex. The this-is-what-you-walked-away-from kind. For a woman with an above average IQ, she had repeated the same mistake when it came to Diego.
She turned the papers over and over in her hands. This was it.
Diego would walk out of her life. She would never again have to see the foolishness she had indulged in in the name of love. What she had wanted for so long was within her grasp. Yet she couldn’t perform the simple task of picking up the pen.
“You could have sent this through your lawyer,” she said softly, the shock and confusion she had held in check all evening by the skin of her teeth slithering their way into her. Her stomach heaved. “You didn’t have to come yourself.”
He leaned against the table, all cool arrogance and casual charm. But nothing could belie the cruel satisfaction in the curve of his mouth. He wanted blood and he was circling her like a hungry shark now that he could smell it.
“And miss the chance to say goodbye for the final time?”
“You mean you wanted to see the fallout from your twisted seduction?”
“Seduction?” he said, a dark shadow falling over his features. The force of his anger slammed into her like a gale. “Why don’t you own it, like you do everything else? There was no seduction.” He reached her before she could blink. “What does it say about us that even after six years it took us mere hours after laying eyes on each other to end up in bed? Or rather against the wall...”
Her stomach somersaulted. Her skin sizzled. He was right. Sex was all she could think of when he was close. Hot, sweltering, out-of-control, mind-blowing, biggest-mistake-of-your-life-that-you-made-twice sex.
She would die before she admitted how much truth there was in his words, how much more he didn’t know.
She grabbed her pen and signed the first paper, her fingers shaking.
She lifted her chin and looked up at him, gathering every ugly emotion simmering beneath the surface and pouring it into her words. “It’s nothing more than a stimulus and response—like Pavlov’s dog. No matter how many years pass, I see you and I think of sex. Maybe because you were my first. Maybe because you are so damn good at it.”
The papers slithered to the floor with a dangerous rustle. She felt his fury crackling around them. He tugged her hard against him, his body a smoldering furnace of desire.
She had angered him with her cold analogy. But it only made the void inside her deepen.
His mouth curled into a sneer. “Of course. I forgot that the cruise, those couple of months you spent with me, were nothing but a rich princess’s wild, dirty rebellion, weren’t they?”
She felt a strange constriction in her chest, a tightness she had nothing to fight against. A sob clawed its way up her throat.
She hated him for ruining the most precious moments of her life. For reducing them to nothing. She hated herself for thinking he had loved her six years ago, for losing her mind the moment she had seen him again four weeks ago.
For someone who had been emotionally stunted for so long, the upsurge of emotion was blinding—pulling her under, driving reason from her mind.
She bunched her fingers in his jacket, his heart thundering beneath her touch. “It’s good that you’re so greedy you came back for more. Because I have news for you.”
CHAPTER TWO
“YOU HAVE NEWS...?” He frowned, his fingers locked in a tight grip over hers. “What, princesa? Do you have a new man lined up now that your sister has stolen the last one? Do you think I give a damn?”
“I’m pregnant.”
He didn’t move. He didn’t blink. Not even a muscle twitched in his mobile face.
Hot satisfaction fueled her. She had wanted to shake his infuriating arrogance. She had. On its heels followed raking guilt.
Her knees buckled under her. Only Diego’s hold on her was keeping her upright.
God, she hadn’t meant to blurt it out like that. She hadn’t even dealt with what it meant to her, what it implied...
What did it say about her that the only positive thing she felt about the pregnancy was that it could shock Diego like nothing else could?
After the way he had treated her she owed him nothing. And yet keeping him in the dark required a price higher than she was willing to pay.
He had provided her with the best opportunity to tell him, to get it done with. For all she knew he wouldn’t even care. He had wanted revenge, he’d got it—with little scruples—and now he had divorce papers ready. And he would keep on walking.
His gaze sliced to her, searching her face. Her composure unraveled at his silence.
The roguish arrogance was gone from his face, replaced by a resolute calm. Every inch of her quaked.
“Is it mine?”
Her gut started that dangerous fall again. She needed to get herself under control. Because Diego was a master at reading her. Whatever she wished, he would do the opposite. Just to make her life harder.
She needed to play it cool. “Why do you think I’m giving you the good news?”
“You slept with me mere hours after laying eyes on me again,” he said, his golden gaze betraying his fury, “while the man you were ready to marry still had his lapdog out looking for you and your twin was being your damned placeholder in his life.”
She trembled as he walked away from her, as though he couldn’t bear to breathe the same air as her.
“And you went back to him as soon as I left you. Except he was two-timing you just as you were doing him. So I repeat: is the baby mine?”
“That’s not true. Alex and I—”
She shut her mouth with a snap, leaned back against the soft leather, trembling from head to toe. Guilt hung heavy in her stomach. The media, her father—the whole world had crucified Liv, while Kim was the one responsible for it all.
Except Diego knew where she had been and what she had been up to while Liv had pretended to be her. And of course Diego thought Kim had quietly crawled back to Alex, that nothing had changed for her. That she had jumped into his bed from Alex’s and then jumped straight back.
That was untrue on so many levels.
Even before Diego had made his true intentions known Kim had broken it off with Alexander. Only Diego didn’t know that.
Her next breath filled her with his scent—dark and powerful. Her eyes flew open.
He raised a brow, watching her with hawklike intensity. “It’s a simple question, gatinha, and sadly one only a woman can answer.”
There was nothing in his tone—no nuance of sarcasm, no hint of anger or accusation—nothing that she could latch onto and feed her fury, her misery.
“Alex and I...” she whispered, feeling heat creep up her skin. “We—”
“All I need—” his words came through gritted teeth “—is your word. Not a day-by-day update on your sexual activity.”
Mortification spread like wildfire inside her. Really, she needed to get a grip on herself—needed to stop blurting out things Diego had no need to know.
More information on her non-existent sex-life fell into that category without a doubt. She already had a permanent reminder of how scandalously she had behaved. And now Alex and Liv, her father—the whole world was going to find out...
Her gut churned again with a vicious force. “Of course it’s yours.”
His jaw tight, he nodded. His easy acceptance, his very lack of a reaction, sent a shiver running down her spine. She had expected him to burst out, had braced herself for an attack.
Why did he trust her so easily? He had every right to demand a paternity test. Every right to question the truth of her claim. That was what she wanted from him. That was what she expected from him.
Instead his self-possession—something she usually prided herself on—grated on her nerves. She was still panicking. She had blurted out the news in a petty fit of pique. Whereas he didn’t even blink.
She laughed, the sound edging toward hysteria. “What? No accusations? No demands for proof? No talk of DNA tests? Just like that, Diego?”
He turned away from her to lean against the wall and closed his eyes. He ran his hand over the bump on his nose. Tension overflowed from him, filling up the huge suite, rattling like an invisible chain, reaching for her. His eyes flew open and her gaze was caught by his.
“DNA tests are for women to whom being pregnant with a rich man’s child means a meal ticket to a better life. An accusation my father threw at my mother every time she showed up with me on his doorstep, begging for support.”
His words vibrated with emotion. His very stillness, in contrast to the loathing in his words, was disquieting in the least. “However, with our history, I don’t think that’s what you’re going for.”
Kim tucked her head in her hands, wondering what she had started. A lump of something—she refused to call it gratitude—blocked her throat, making it harder for her to speak. He could have turned this into something ugly if he wished. He hadn’t.
Everything within her revolted at being obligated to him for even that small display of honor. It made her weak, plunged her into useless wishing.
She couldn’t let him put her in the wrong. She couldn’t forget that the very reason she was in this situation was because he had orchestrated payback.
She felt the hard wall of heat from his body and stiffened.
“For a woman who fairly blazes with confidence in every walk of life, your hesitation would be funny if it wasn’t the matter of a child. Are you not so sure who the father is yourself?” he whispered softly, something deadly vibrating in his tone.
“There’s no doubt,” she repeated.
Thinking with a rational mind, she knew she should just tell Diego the stupid truth. That she had never slept with Alexander. But then Diego would never leave the truth alone.
“Now that we have solved that particular puzzle, what do you need from me?”
It took her a moment to realize that he was waiting for an answer. A chill began to spread over her skin. “I...I don’t need anything from you.”
“Of course not.” An edge crept into his tone, his gaze devouring her. Something stormy rumbled under that calm now. “Then why tell me?”
“Honestly? I wasn’t thinking,” she said, wondering if she was destined always to make mistakes when it came to him. “You were gloating. You were...”
“Nice to know something touches you,” he said, a fire glinting in his gaze. She opened her mouth to argue and shut it just as quickly. “And if I hadn’t been here to gloat? Would you have called me then?”
“That’s a question I don’t have to answer, because you are here. And stop pretending as though this means something, Diego. You were ready to walk out of my life, and I say keep on walking.”
“Your arrogance in thinking that you know me is astounding, querida. Did I teach you nothing four weeks ago?”
His words rumbled around her, and images and sensations tumbled toward her along with them. But she refused to back down. “You take risks. Your business tactics are barely on this side of the law. The last thing you need in your life is a baby. If I had hidden this from you you would have only found more reason to hate me.”
“To think for a moment I assumed that you weren’t doing this for purely selfish reasons but for the actual wellbeing of the child you’re carrying...”
She flinched, the worst of her own fears crystallized by his cutting words. Her earlier dread intensified. That was what she should have immediately thought of. The child’s welfare. “I want nothing but a divorce and an exit from you.”
His laughter faded and shadowed intent filled his face. He grabbed the papers she had signed not five minutes ago and shredded them with his hands.
His calm movements twisted her gut. “Then what do you have in mind? We’ll kiss each other and make up? Play happy family—”
He came closer—until she could see the gold specks in his eyes, smell the dark scent of him that scrambled her wits.
“I’m not turning my back on my child.”
Panic unfurling in her stomach, she shot up from her seat. “You’re out of your mind. This is not what I planned for my life—”
“I’m sure you had a list of requirements that needed to be met in order to produce the perfect offspring,” he said, his words ringing with bitter satisfaction, “but it’s out of your hands now.”
“It is. But what I can control is what I do about it now. Being a mother is going to be hard enough. Dealing with you on a regular basis will just tip me over into...”
Perverse anger rose within her—perverse, irrational and completely useless. He could walk away from this. She needed him to walk away from this. But she...she had no such choice. She had a lifelong commitment. She was supposed to love this baby. She was supposed to...
“You don’t want this baby?”
“Of course I don’t. I’ll even go so far as to say it’s the worst thing that has ever happened to me!” she shouted, the words falling off her trembling lips.
Shock flickered in his gaze, but she didn’t have the energy to wish them unsaid.
“This baby is going to be a walking, talking reminder of the biggest mistake of my life. You’ve achieved what you wanted, Diego. You’ve done your worst. You have changed my life in a way I can’t control. Now, please, leave me to get on with it.”
* * *
Diego breathed out through his teeth and hit the punching bag again with renewed force. His right hook was beginning to fall short again. The injury to the muscle in his bicep was making itself known. The same injury that had forced him to withdraw from financially lucrative street-fights. The injury that had forced him to reach out to his father for help when he had been sixteen and unable to pay for his mother’s treatment.
But he wouldn’t stop now. He breathed through the vicious pain, hating himself for even remembering.
The clock on the wall behind him chimed, reminding him he’d been at it for more than two hours now.
Sweat poured down from his forehead and he shook his head to clear it off. His T-shirt was drenched through and the muscles in his arms felt like stones. Adrenaline rushed through him in waves and he was beginning to hear a faint thundering in his ears. Probably his blood whooshing. But he didn’t stop.
Because even trying to drown himself in physical agony he couldn’t block out Kim’s words.
Stimulus and response!
Meu Deus, the woman reduced him to the lowest denominator with her infuriating logic. No one had ever got under his skin like she did. And she was carrying his baby. The resentment that had glittered in her brown eyes pierced even the haze of his pain.
Punch.
Of course it’s yours.
Thump.
It’s the worst thing that has ever happened to me.
Punch.
This baby is going to be a walking, talking reminder of the biggest mistake of my life.
Thump.
Nausea whirled at the base of his throat, threatening to choke him with its intensity. He’d had enough rejection from his father to last him several lifetimes. He would be dead before he did the same to his child or became a stranger.
He took one last punch and pulled his gloves off. He picked up a bottle of water, guzzled half of it down and dumped the rest over his head. The water trickled over his face into his eyes. The biting cold did nothing to pacify the crazy roar in his head.
Because Kim had been right. He didn’t want to be a father.... He wasn’t fit to be a father...
He let a curse fly and went at the punching bag again, shame and disgust boiling over in his blood. Pain waves rippled up his knuckles. His skin started peeling at his continued assault.
He had no good in him. All he had was hatred, jealousy. He didn’t possess a single redeeming quality that said he should even be a part of a child’s life. He had chosen to walk the path he had with full clarity of thought—to take everything from his father that he deserved. He had known exactly what he was doing when he’d reached for that goal.
And that was what he wanted to do now, too. He wanted to take his child from Kim and walk away. Every nerve in him wanted to ensure he had full custody.
But he could not sink so low again.
He had let his hatred for his father lead him to destroy his half brother’s life in the process. If not for Diego’s blind obsession Eduardo would have been...
He shivered, a chill swamping him.
He couldn’t risk that happening with his child. If, because of his obsession with Kim, he hurt his child in any way he wouldn’t be able to live with himself. He couldn’t let his anger at her drive him into making a mistake again—not anymore. Not when it could hurt his own child.
Playing happy family with Kim, seeing her every day, when she was the one weakness he had never conquered—every inch of him revolted at the very thought.
And yet he couldn’t escape his responsibility. He couldn’t just walk away and become a stranger to his own child.
He had a chance to change the vicious cycle of neglect and abuse he and Eduardo had gone through.
He would move mountains to make sure his child had everything he’d never had—two loving parents and a stable upbringing. Even if that meant tying himself to the woman who brought his bitterest fears to the surface.
CHAPTER THREE
KIM PULLED THE satin pillow over her head and groaned as her cell phone chirped. She hadn’t gotten into bed until three in the morning, after going over the new feature on The Daily Help with the design architect and writing her own feature for the career advice section she did every Tuesday.
Pushing her hair out of her eyes, she looked at the digital clock on the nightstand. It was only seven. She felt a distinct lack of energy to attack the day. When her phone rang for the third time in a row she switched the Bluetooth on.
“Kim, are you okay?”
Liv.
Tension tightened in the pit of her stomach at the concern in her twin’s voice. She had been putting Liv off for two weeks now.
She pushed herself up on the bed and leaned against the metallic headboard. “I’m fine. Is everything okay with you and Alex?”
“We’re fine. I’m just...” Liv’s uncharacteristic hesitation hung heavily between them. “God, Kim—is it true? Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”
Kim swallowed, fear fisting her chest. “What are you talking about?”
“You’ve made front page headlines. Not just the scandal rags, like I did, but even the business channels on television.”
“What?”
“It says you’re pregnant. Are you?”
Diego.
Kim closed her eyes and breathed huge gulps of air. Obviously her refusal to have anything to do with him, her refusal even to answer his calls, meant Diego had begun playing dirty.
“Yes.”
“When were you going to tell me? Are you...? I mean, are you okay with this? Does Diego know? What are you planning to do?”
They were all perfectly valid questions. Kim had just shoved them down forcefully.
“I’m perfectly fine, Liv. I don’t have the time right now to process what it means. Once this upcoming milestone for my company has passed I’ll make a list of the things I need to do.” She closed her eyes, fighting for composure. “I’ll even have a few sessions with Mommy Mary.”
“Who is Mommy Mary?”
“The expert on all things maternal on my team.”
“On what?”
“On what I need to learn to be the perfect mother. It’s not like we had a good example, is it?”
“And until then you’re just going to put it on the back burner?”
What else was she supposed to do? Focus on the relentlessly clammy feeling in her stomach every time her thoughts turned to the baby growing in her womb?
The stark contrast between the terrifying emptiness she felt and her newly pregnant CFO’s glorious joy was already a constant distressing reminder that something vital was missing in her own genetic make-up.
“I can’t botch this opportunity for my company by losing my focus.”
“I don’t know what to...” Olivia’s tone rang with the same growing exasperation Kim had sensed in their recent conversations. “Let me know if you need anything, okay?”
Kim tucked her knees close as Liv hung up. She wanted to reach out to Liv. Liv’s love came with no conditions, no judgment.
But Kim—she had always been the strong one. She had had to be in order to protect first her mother and then Liv from their father’s wrath.
She couldn’t confide her fears in anyone. Least of all to her twin, to whom loving and caring and nurturing came so easily.
Whereas Kim had trained herself so hard to not care, not to let herself be touched by emotions. She’d had to after she had learned what her mother had planned...
Only had she accomplished it so well—just as she had everything else in life—that she felt nothing even for the child growing in her womb?
Because even after a week all she felt was utter panic at the thought of the baby. She had spent a fortune buying almost a dozen more pregnancy test kits, hoping that it had been a false positive. And every time the word “pregnant” had appeared her stomach had sunk a little lower.
Or was it because of the man who had fathered her baby? Could her anger for Diego be clouding everything else? Was this how their mother had felt? Beneath her fear of their father, had she felt nothing for her children?
Without crawling out of bed, she pulled her reading glasses on and powered up her iPad. Her heart thumped loudly. She clicked on to one of her favorite websites—one she could count on to provide news objectively.
It was the first time she wasn’t in the news being lauded for one of her accomplishments.
The article, for all its flaming header, didn’t spend time speculating on the answer to either of the questions it posed. But suddenly she wished it did. Because the speculation it did enter into was much more harmful than if they had spawned stuff about her personal life.
The article highlighted the way any woman—especially one who was pregnant and with her personal life in shambles—could expect to expand her company and do it successfully.
Should investors be worried about pouring their money into a company whose CEO’s first priority might not be the company itself? One who has been involved in not one but two major scandals? Could this pregnancy herald the death of the innovative startup The Daily Help and its brilliant CEO Kimberly Stanton’s illustrious career?
She shoved the tablet away and got out of bed, her mind whirling with panic. She ran a hand over her nape, too restless to stay still. It might have been written by Kim herself, for it highlighted every little one of her insecurities— everything she had made a list of herself.
For so long she had poured everything she had into first starting her company and then into making it a financial success. She had never stopped to wonder—never had a moment of doubt when it came to her career.
She opened the calendar on her phone. Her day was full of follow-up meetings with five different investors. By the end of the day she intended to start working on putting the plans she had outlined about the expansion of her company into full gear.
She couldn’t focus on any other outcome—couldn’t waste her mental energies speculating and in turn proving the contentious article right.
Only then would she deal with Diego. There was no way anyone else would have known or leaked the news to the media. She had confided in only one person.
Wasn’t this what Diego had intended all along? She was a fool if she’d thought even for a moment that he wanted anything but her ruin.
* * *
Kim clicked End on her Skype call and leaned back in her chair. Her day had only gotten worse since Liv’s phone call. That had been her fifth and last unsuccessful investor meeting. Not one investor was ready to wire in funds.
Whereas the invoices for the new office space she had leased, for the three new state-of-the-art servers she had ordered, for the premium health insurance she had promised her staff this year mocked her and the vast sum of numbers on the papers in front of her was giving her a headache.
She leaned her head back and rubbed the muscles knotting her neck. Her vision for her company, her team’s livelihood, both were at stake because she had weakened.
Hadn’t she learned more than once how much she could lose if she let herself feel?
The number of things she needed to deal with was piling up. Panic breathed through her, crushing her lungs and making a mockery of the focus that she was so much lauded for. She forced large gulps of air into her lungs.
Breathe in...out...in...out... She repeated it for a few minutes, running her fingers over the award plaques she kept next to her table, searching for something to tune out the panic.
Pull yourself together, Kim. There are people counting on you.
It was the same stern speech she had given herself at thirteen, when she had discovered her mother’s packed bag one night. And the note to her father that had knocked the breath from her.
She had survived that night. She could survive anything.
She had to go on as before—for her company’s sake and for her own sake. If she lost her company she had nothing. She was nothing.
She picked up her cell phone and dialed Alex’s number. He was someone with whom she had always tossed around ideas for her business, someone she absolutely trusted. And someone she had been avoiding for the past month...
But she needed objective, unbiased advice, and Alex was the only one who would give it to her. She would exhaust every possibility if it meant she could go on with the plan for expanding her company.
* * *
Diego cursed, cold fury singing through his blood as he stared at the live webcast on his tablet. Reporters were camped with cameras and news crews in front of Kim’s apartment complex in Manhattan.
He rapped on the partitioning glass and barked her address at his chauffeur.
His gaze turning back to the screen again, he frowned at a sudden roar in the ruckus. And cursed again with no satisfaction as he recognized the tall figure. Her ex had arrived. Diego could almost peek into how the press’s mind would work.
The news about her pregnancy on top of the scandal last month, when her twin had been found with Kim’s ex—the press would come to only one conclusion.
That the unborn child—his child—was Alexander King’s.
This was not what he had intended when he’d had his head of security leak the news of her pregnancy to the media.
He stared at the tall figure of Alexander King as he walked into the complex without faltering, despite the reporters swarming around him. Acrid jealousy burned through him. He slammed his laptop shut, closed his eyes and sought the image of Eduardo’s frail body.
Which was enough to soak up the dark thoughts and send some much-needed reason into his head.
He had done this before—let his obsession consume his sense of right or wrong. He had let it blind him to the fact that Eduardo had needed his help, and instead he’d turned on him.
He couldn’t do that again. This was not about what Kim could drive him to. It was about what was right for their child.
* * *
Kim took a sip of her water as Alex finished a call. She had emailed him her proposal and set up the appointment. Now she wished she had waited for the weekend. Stupid of her not to expect how much the media would make of Alex visiting her alone on a Friday evening at her apartment.
She had never been more ashamed of herself. It had taken everything in her to ask Alex for his help but she had no other options. A flush overtaking her, she plucked up the daily statistics report her website manager had sent her.
Based on the turnover of her company in the last quarter, and on her expansion proposal, investing in her company was a sound opportunity for any shrewd businessman. Except for the scandal she had brought on herself.
Their daily numbers, the number of questions that came into their portal and the website hits, had spiked well above average today.
But she knew, as was pointed out by the breakdown in front of her, that this was because twenty percent of the questions had been about her pregnancy, whether she was married and—worst of them all—whether she was married to the father of her baby.
She needed to make a statement soon.
Tucking his phone into his pocket, Alex turned toward her. “I’m sorry, Kim. You know how much I trust your business savvy. But, as brilliant as your plan and forecast is, I can’t invest in it right now.”
Her stomach turning, Kim nodded. It was exactly as she had expected: the worst.
She blinked back tears as he wrapped an arm around her. “With everything going on out there right now I just... As much as I hate to admit it, my association with your company in the current climate would only damage your credibility.”
Kim nodded, the comfort he offered making her spectacular failure even harder to bear. “I know. And I’m so sorry for putting you and Liv through this—for everything. If I could I would go back to that day and do everything differently.” She smiled and corrected herself. “Well, except for the part where I left you with Liv.”
He laughed, and her mounting panic was blunted by the sheer joy in that sound. “You don’t have to go through this alone, Kim. You should come and stay with—”
“She’s not alone to deal with this. And I would think twice, if I were you, before touching my wife again.”
Kim jerked around so quickly that her neck muscles groaned.
Diego stood leaning against the door of her apartment, a dark, thundering presence, and he looked at them with such obvious loathing that her mouth dried up.
Next to her, Alex stayed as calm as ever as he turned around. Just like her, he knew who was behind the leak to the media. But, gentleman that he was, he hadn’t asked her one personal question.
The very antithesis of the man smoldering with anger at the door.
Mortification heating her cheeks, she met Diego’s gaze. “Don’t do this, Diego. Don’t make me regret ever knowing you.”
He shrugged, the movement stretching the handmade grey silk tight over his muscular frame. “Don’t you already? Aren’t you going to introduce your husband to your ex, querida?”
Alex moved at her side, reaching Diego before she could blink. Her breath hitched in her throat as they both looked at each other.
“Call me anytime, and for any kind of help, Kim,” Alex said.
Without another word he strolled out, closing the door behind him. The silence pulling at her stressed nerves, Kim walked past the sitting area to her kitchen, the open layout giving her an unobstructed view of Diego. She pulled a bottle of orange juice out of the refrigerator and poured it into a glass.
Diego leaned against the pillar that cut off the kitchen from the lounge. She raised the glass to her mouth and took a sip. His continued scrutiny prickled her skin. Every time she laid eyes on him she felt as if she was one step closer to a slippery slope.
“What is this? A lesson in caveman behavior?”
“I don’t understand your relationship with that man.”
She blinked at his soft tone. “Don’t turn this around on me. Were you going to beat your chest and drag me to your side by my hair if he hadn’t left?”
He smiled, his gaze moving to her hair. He flexed his fingers threateningly. “I’ve never done that before...but if anyone can push me to it, it’s you.”
Her mouth open, she just stared at him.
“You like throwing my background in my face, don’t you? I’m not ashamed that my life began on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, that I used my fists for survival.”
She glared at him, insulted by his very suggestion. “It’s got nothing to do with your background and everything to do with how you are acting now.”
“True. This one’s my fault. I should have expected you to go to him for help.”
It was the last thing she’d expected him to say.
Calling her a few names, maybe challenging her word about the paternity of the baby as the whole world was hotly speculating—sure. But this? No. His continuing trust in her word threw her, kept her off-balance.
Or was that what he truly intended?
The doubts assailing her, the real possibility of her company falling apart, filled her veins with ice. “As you have made it your mission to destroy my life, I went crawling for help to the man whom I deceived dreadfully by sleeping with you. Satisfied?”
* * *
Diego let his gaze travel lazily over Kim. A long-sleeved white cotton top hugged her slim torso and the flat of her stomach, followed by tight blue jeans that encased her long legs. Her short hair was pulled back with a clip, leaving shorter tendrils teasing her cheekbones.
He believed her that the baby was his. She had nothing to gain by lying to him and everything to lose.
Except he didn’t understand how, having been almost literally dragged from the altar by Diego, away from a man who was now apparently happily married to her twin, Kim could still share a relationship with Alexander that wasn’t the least bit awkward.
Was she still pining after him? After all, she had gone to him for help. That in itself was revealing.
“I gave you a week, gatinha. I refuse to be ignored. I refuse to let you put your company before the baby and—”
She put her glass down with a force that splashed the juice onto her fingers. Her posture screamed with barely contained anxiety. “The baby’s not going to be here for nine months. Do you expect me to sit around twiddling my thumbs until then? I’m not going to give up something I have built with sheer hard work just because I’m pregnant.”
There it was again. Her complete refusal to accept that things were going to change.
“I expect you to slow down. I expect you to return my calls. I expect you to stop working sixteen-hour days.” She didn’t look like perfection put together today. She looked tired and stressed out. Guilt softened his words. “You look like you’re ready to fall apart.”
“And whose fault is that? I’ve been trying to minimize the damage you’ve caused with your dirty tricks.”
“You have no idea how dirty I’ll fight for what I want. Propelling you toward him wasn’t what I intended, however. But I had forgotten how stubbornly independent you are.”
“Careful, Diego. You sound almost jealous. And yet I know you don’t give a hoot about me.”
“Remember I’m an uncivilized, dirty thug,” he said, with a slanted look at her. “A street-fighting Brazilian, pequena. Of course I’m jealous.”
Kim wiped her fingers on a hand towel, feeling a flush creep up her neck.
Of course she remembered. She remembered every moment of her short-lived marriage with crystal-clear clarity. She had called him that the week before she had left him, her misery getting the better of her. It wasn’t where he had come from that had bothered her. It was what she represented to him because of it that had shattered her heart.
“Why? Even you can see, after everything you have set in motion, how much Alex loves my sister.”
He circled the pillar and neared her, frowning. “And this doesn’t bother you at all?”
“What?”
“That the man you had been about to marry is now married to your twin.”
“I’m incredibly happy for them. If there’s one good thing that’s come out of this whole debacle it’s Liv and Alex.”
“Only one good thing? Still not sure, then?” he queried silkily, his gaze instantly moving to her stomach.
Her spine kissed the steel refrigerator as he suddenly swallowed her space. “Any child who’s the product of you and me is of course not a good thing.”
“You make it sound like it’s a product we designed together.”
His words were soft, even amused, and yet they lanced through her. “Excuse me if I’m not the perfect vision of maternal instinct you were expecting.”
He stared at her, his gaze searching hers. “Your genes needed a bit of diluting anyway, and you need a bit of softening up. All work and no play makes Kimberly a crabby girl.”
“Yes, well—look where all that playing has landed me.”
She sucked in a deep breath, sheer exhaustion finally catching up with her. Trust Diego to force her to face the one thing she didn’t want to think about.
“We can’t even have a conversation without jumping at each other’s throats, Diego.” Every dark fear she was trying to stay above bled into her words. “How do you think it bodes for the...the child?”
Without looking away from her he pulled her hands from behind her and tugged her gently. Stupefied, she went along, for once lacking the energy to put up a fight. With a hand at her back he guided her to the lounge and pushed her onto the couch.
He settled down on a chair opposite.
She felt the force of his look down to her toes. “You might not want this baby, but you want to do the right thing by it—right?”
She swallowed and nodded, a fist squeezing her chest. It was the only thing she was capable of at this point.
“Good. And, as much as you were hoping that I would walk away, I won’t.” His gaze was reassuring, his tone comforting. “Believe me, gatinha, that’s a whole lot more than most kids ever have.”
Was it?
Maybe if her mother hadn’t left that night...and even when she had maybe if she had at least included Kim...would her life have been different, better, today? No, there was no point in imagining a different past or present. Being weak, trusting her heart, only led to unbearable pain. She had learned that twice already.
“Why are you jealous of Alexander?” The moment the question fell off her lips she regretted it.
His long fingers on his nape, Diego closed his eyes and then opened them slowly. His resentment was clear in the tight line of his mouth. “Alexander King has your confidence. I don’t. And, having crawled out of the gutter, I find my first reaction is to hate any man who has what I want.”
His stark admission pulled the rug out from under her. “You want my confidence?” She sighed. “How about you stop trying to destroy me for a minute and then we can talk?”
He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his expression amused. “Isn’t it interesting how your company being in crisis means I’m destroying your life, but when I ruined your wedding you didn’t have a word to say? So, did he agree to save your company and thus your life?”
His absolutely accurate assumption that her life revolved around her career and her company was beginning to grate on her nerves. She had always prided herself on her unemotional approach. It had been a factor that had put her in direct competition with ruthless businessmen like him.
“No.”
He plopped his ankle on his right knee. “Is it because you deceived him? Have you noticed how you leave all the men in your life with less than nice impressions?”
“Not everyone in the world is as concerned about payback as you are.”
His gaze glittered for a second, but the next he was a rogue, savoring the mess he was making of her life. “So why did Mr. King refuse to be your savior?”
“Because—thanks to your tricks and my own stupidity—my image is in tatters. My company is based on the idea of a panel of experts giving women advice on any topic from health, career and fashion to politics, finance and sex. The operative word being experts. And, as unfair as it is, a woman who seems to not have her personal life together without blemish is not someone others—even other women—want advice from. It doesn’t matter that nothing has changed in the way I think or in my brain matter since I learned about my pregnancy. It just is.”
“But eventually the news would have come out. I just accelerated it.”
He was right. It was something she would have had to face in a couple of months anyway. The sooner she dealt with all this, found a way to resolve this situation with her company, the better.
She still needed an investor, but she was not as worried about running her company as the whole world was. She could do it with her hand tied behind her back.
It was the pregnancy that was the near-constant worry scouring through her.
She had succeeded in everything she had taken up in her life. Pregnancy had to be the same, right?
If she prepared enough, if she was willing to work hard, she could do a good job at being a mother, too. She refused to think about it any other way—refused to give weight to the worry eating away at her from inside.
“What’s was the point of all this, Diego?” she said, feeling incredibly tired. “Would it make you feel better if I begged you for help? Leeched money off you in the name of child support?”
“Yes.”
She blinked at the vehemence in his answer.
“What I wanted was to scare away all your other investors so that you have no one else to turn to but me.”
“Why?”
“It seems putting your company in crisis is the only way for me to get your attention.”
Her temper flared again. “That’s the second time you have mentioned my success, my company, as though it’s something to be sneered at—when you pursued your own success with ruthless ambition. And wasn’t that why you married me six years ago? Because I was smart, ambitious? Now that I’m pregnant you’re asking me to put all that aside and suddenly morph into your vision of everything maternal? I never thought you would tout double standards.”
Diego ran a hand over his nape. Just the mention of their short-lived marriage was like throwing a punch in his face. She was doing it again—getting under his skin. And it would end in only one way.
“Do you really want to go down the rabbit hole of the past, gatinha?”
He didn’t want to argue with her. He could see very well that something about her pregnancy was stressing her out. So why didn’t she make it easy on herself? If she didn’t know how to, he would do it. He would drag her kicking and screaming back into his life and force her to slow down if that was what he had to do to take care of her.
He stepped over the coffee table and joined her on the couch. She scooted to the other corner. He sighed. It seemed either they argued or they screwed, and neither was what he wanted to do. Even if one option had infinitely more appeal than the other.
“I’m not asking you to give up your work. I’m asking you to acknowledge that pregnancy changes things.”
Her feet tucked under her, her arms wrapped around herself, she scrunched farther into the corner. She looked absolutely defeated. “And what does that entail? Throwing myself a conception party and inviting the whole world?”
“You have no friends, you don’t talk to your sister and you’re a workaholic. You live in a fortress isolated from anyone else. That cannot continue.”
“Keeping myself idle for hours on end with nothing to do is not going to turn me into mother of the year when the baby comes. In fact it would just...”
His patience was thinning, but there was something in her voice—a note of desperation—that snagged his attention. “Just what?”
Her stubborn silence was enough to drive his control to the edge again. Was this what he was signing up for a lifetime of?
“I will invest in your company.”
Her gaze widened. Her head shook from left to right. “I’ll bounce back from this.”
“No, you won’t.” He leaned toward her, and the scent of her caressed him. “Things are different from what they were a week ago.”
“Because you manipulated them to your advantage.”
“I would have been dead in a ditch years ago if I didn’t push things to my advantage.” He smiled, enjoying her stupefied silence. “Now I’ve got you hooked, haven’t I? I can see the gears already spinning in your head.”
“What’s the catch?”
“Aah... Look at us, gatinha. We’re like an old married couple, reading each other’s minds without words. If that’s not a true, abiding love, then I don’t know what is.”
“Stop it, Diego. Why the investment now?”
“Perhaps I don’t want to see your hard work go to waste? Or I’m overcome by a consuming need to help you? I still have a soft spot for my wife?”
Kim shivered as though someone had trickled an ice cube over her spine. His taunts were painful reminders of things she had cherished once and then realized to be false. He was mocking feelings she held close to her heart, emotions she had locked up forever.
“Not funny.” With each cheeky retort her anxiety spiraled higher and higher. There had to be a huge price to pay for this. “What do you want from me?”
“We make our marriage work. For good.”
She jumped from the couch, a chill descending into her veins. He couldn’t be serious. It was a twisted joke. That was all it had to be...
She swallowed at the calm in his gaze. “Now I get it. No one is allowed to say no to you, to walk away from you, without you going all revenge of the ninja on them. I’m not a task you failed at once and are determined to conquer.”
“Let’s be very clear about something, princesa.” The dark humor faded from his gaze, replaced by something hard and flinty. “Putting up with you, tying my life to yours again, is like signing up for a lifetime of torment. But it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make for my child. To provide a stable home, to give it everything I didn’t have. Nothing more. I plan to be a hands-on parent and I will accept nothing less from you.”
Bile snuck up Kim’s throat. Everything within her rebelled at the thought of being tied to him. It was no better now than it had been six years ago. Then she had been his prize, his trophy, to parade before his father in his victory over a horrible childhood. Now her significance was the fact that she was going to be the mother of his child.
It shouldn’t hurt. But it did. And the hurt was followed by the same raking guilt that had taken up permanent residence in her gut.
She couldn’t think about what this meant for her. She had to think of the baby. She had to do what was right.
Whether she wanted to be a mother or not, whether or not she felt anything for the life growing inside her, it didn’t matter. Unconditional love. She had never received it, she didn’t know it, but responsibility and being strong for someone else—that she understood.
“Is this another trick so you can taunt me for the rest of my life? I won’t let you use the child as some kind of pawn.”
“Every inch of me wants to walk away from you. Every cell in me regrets sleeping with you. I told myself I would not waste another minute on you. But what we did has had consequences. All this is motivated by the fact that we’re having a child together. A child who will have a proper father—not one who will just drop in for birthdays and pose for pictures—and a proper mother. A family. I will do everything in my power to ensure my child has everything I never had.”
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Tara Pammi
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
Отзывы: Пока нет Добавить отзыв
О книге: Cool, calm and collected CEO Kimberly Stanton is following hot on the heels of her scandalous sister Olivia. Not only has she revealed her (very sudden!) pregnancy, but has rocked the international business world with the shock announcement of her marriage to outrageous Brazilian bad-boy-tycoon Diego Pereira!If rumours of huge blow-out arguments, bail-out money for Kim’s company, and dark secrets are already besetting society’s most notorious couple, who can say what lies ahead for these two lovers?One thing’s for sure, it’ll be so much fun watching!