His Miracle Baby
His Miracle Baby
Kate Walker
Why had Ellie left him? Morgan didn't know.It was obvious she'd still been blissfully in love with him. She'd even agreed with his edict that they never have children.Then Ellie had disappeared.When Morgan found her to his absolute shock, she had with her the most adorable baby girl that he'd ever seen. His heart twisted inside him.Had Ellie found another man to give her what he never could, or was this baby Morgan's very own miracle?
“How old is she?” Morgan asked Ellie
“She’s eight months.”
“Gah!”
Rosie shrieked at the top of her voice and flung her rattle straight at Morgan. He held it out to her again. Two pairs of sapphire eyes locked for endless seconds, the baby’s holding a mixture of curiosity and suspicion, Morgan’s impossible to read, before a plump hand reached out and snatched the rattle back.
“And gah to you, too,” Morgan returned with a flicker of amusement.
Ellie turned away to hide the hot, betraying tears that stung her eyes. Morgan’s tiny smile had shattered her composure.
Would that smile still be there if he knew the truth?
“She’s a pretty little thing,” Morgan said. “I assume that she takes after her father?”
in
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A Secret Vengeance
Harlequin Presents #2236
His Miracle Baby
Kate Walker
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
IT WAS the moment Ellie had been dreading most. The worst moment in a day she had been anticipating with a sense of something close to horror for almost a month now.
No, that wasn’t strictly true. The actual fact was that she had feared this moment for around a year and a half. Ever since she had left Morgan and fled here to Cornwall, she had had the worry at the back of her mind that one day he might come back into her life.
And that day was now. The thought was enough to still her footsteps, bring her to a stumbling halt, a thousand frantic butterflies fluttering wildly inside her stomach as she stared at the short stretch of path that led away from her, towards the cottage.
‘I can’t! I can’t do it.’
Morgan was just around that corner. And he was waiting for her to appear. Though of course he didn’t actually know it was Ellie he was waiting for. And the thought of his probable reaction lifted all the tiny hairs on her skin in a shivering reaction to the panic that clenched all her nerves tight.
‘Come on, Eleanor,’ she reproached herself. ‘What can he do to you?’
He didn’t have to do anything, that was the trouble. Morgan could mess up her life, her mind, her heart, simply by existing, and, no matter how she tried, nothing would change that.
No!
Pushing a hand through the golden blonde length of her hair, she squared her slim shoulders resolutely.
‘Get a move on…’
Once more she addressed herself out loud. It was the only way to drown out the endless chattering of the inner voice of fear and unhappiness.
‘Just go!’
Somehow the command gave her the impetus to move, one step following the other, her determination growing, adding force, speed to her movements until at last she swung round the corner in a rush.
The sleek, powerful Alfa Romeo parked incongruously on the unmade road outside the small cottage told its own story. If she had been in any possible doubt, had harboured any weak, faint hope that the Morgan Stafford who had arranged for a six-month rental could possibly be someone other than the man she dreaded seeing, then that, and the sight of the tall, dark figure standing beside it, immediately disabused her.
She had forgotten just how big he was. Big and powerful, with a whipcord strength that made her mouth dry just to think of it. In well-worn jeans, tight as a second skin, and an equally elderly, faded, soft denim shirt that clung lovingly to the strong lines of his shoulders and arms, he wouldn’t have been taken by anyone for the latest star in the literary firmament and a strong contender for an Oscar for the screenplay of his award-winning thriller.
He was leaning against the rough stone wall of the cottage, long legs crossed at the ankles, arms folded across his powerful chest in a gesture of controlled impatience. But as she approached, more slowly now, he straightened up, somehow managing to convey a sense of disapproval with every movement as he glanced pointedly at his watch.
‘You’re late!’ were the first words she had heard from him in what seemed like a lifetime.
Morgan saw Ellie coming down the path towards him and felt his insides clench in instant response to just the sight of her.
She hadn’t changed. The afternoon sun glinted on the golden length of her hair, warming the peach softness of her skin to an enticing glow. Her tall, shapely body was enhanced by the neat red skirt that clung to the curve of her hips, the crisp white shirt, open at the neck to give a provocative glimpse of the slender neck that had always delighted him in the past.
She was still the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. The woman who had haunted his dreams by night, tormenting him with a thousand potently erotic images, so that he woke with his heart and head pounding, his body slick with sweat, and the ache of need clawing at him like a pain.
He had to say something. But what did you say to the woman who had, metaphorically at least, kicked you in the guts before walking out of the life you shared without a backward glance?
The life he had thought they’d shared.
The small correction altered his mood at once. The nostalgic feeling vanished as anger rushed over it, dark and thick and hot.
‘You’re late!’
That brought her head up sharp as he had known it would. The neat chin lifted determinedly, stunning amber eyes flashing gold behind their lush shield of long, thick lashes—impossibly dark for someone with her colouring. This was the way she’d looked the first moment he’d seen her. She’d knocked him for six then and if he didn’t get a grip on himself she’d do it again.
‘I’m late? I think not! If anything, you are early. We said three o’clock and it’s…it’s…’
Words failed Ellie as she stared at her watch in stunned confusion. Of all the times for the battery to die, it had to go and do it now!
‘It’s very nearly half past,’ Morgan supplied for her as she glared at the offending watch, shaking her wrist roughly in a vain attempt to get it started again. ‘I see your time-keeping hasn’t got any better over the past eighteen months.’
He had come closer as he’d spoken, moving between her and the sun so that his long body cast a shadow over her as she concentrated fiercely on the unmoving second hand on her watch.
Don’t look at him! Don’t look! she told herself fiercely. Don’t even risk it until you’re more under control!
Every inch of skin on her body felt as if it were afflicted by prickling pins and needles, and with the once dearly familiar scent of his body tantalising her nostrils she had to struggle to hide her instinctive response. Electricity sizzled along her nerves, making her heart beat a crazy, uneven tattoo. If she looked into his face she would be lost for ever.
And so in spite of her hunger, the aching need to see just once more the features of the man who had taken total possession of her heart and never let it go, she kept her gaze stubbornly averted, watching him only out of the corners of her eyes.
‘But if you will insist on wearing that decrepit old thing, then I suppose you can’t expect it to be accurate.’
‘I happen to like this watch!’ Ellie retorted defensively. It was also the only one she could afford, but she wasn’t going to admit that to him. ‘And living and working on a farm, I wouldn’t have much use for anything more expensive.’
‘True,’ Morgan conceded. ‘Though I have to admit that a farm in rural Cornwall was really the last place I ever expected to find you.’
‘I…’
Her resolution failed her as surprise forced her gaze upwards, to focus on the hard-boned face, all her fears realised as she felt the thudding shock to her system.
Dear heaven, but he looked good! So stunningly, devastatingly good.
After all those months of abstinence, the hunger that swamped her was like a raging tide, sweeping everything before it and threatening to throw her thought processes into total chaos.
‘Expected to find…? Y-you knew!’ she forced herself to stammer. ‘You were expecting me all the time. So the story that you were here to do research was pure make-believe.’
It made her blood run cold in horror at the idea.
‘Not completely,’ Morgan returned imperturbably. ‘I do have research to do for my next book. And I’ve tried hotels but I just can’t work in them. So renting a place to live in seemed the next best idea.’
‘But you could rent anywhere you like—there are many more houses, all much bigger and better than this cottage! You could easily afford any one of them—you could even buy one of them if you wanted to! Why did you have to come here?’
‘This place suits me. I don’t need space—somewhere to eat, sleep and work is all I want. But to work I need quiet and…’
His narrow-eyed glance took in the wooded surroundings, the rutted path that led to the cottage, the distant view of the sea.
‘They really don’t come much quieter than this.’
His half smile challenged her to make more of it than that. But there was more to make of it, Ellie could have no doubt. Too late, she recognised the clues that her tension had made her miss the first time.
There had been his total lack of surprise at her appearance. His total lack of anything, just that cold, hard, assessing stare that had been fixed on her as she’d walked the last few yards. He had not been expecting just anyone. He had known very well who would come to hand over the key, show him round the cottage. He had been expecting her, and her alone.
And that begged the question—why?
‘Just what are you doing here, Morgan?’
She had forgotten just how blue his eyes were until now when, up close, she found herself seared by their sapphire blaze, her own angry glare caught and held transfixed, unable to look away.
‘Perhaps I came to look up an old friend.’
‘Friend!’ she scorned the word cynically. ‘We were never friends. Things moved so fast at the start that we never had time for friendship. And you were certainly not in the least bit friendly when you told me to go—to get out of your life and stay out of it for good.’
‘I didn’t feel friendly,’ Morgan growled savagely, a black scowl darkening his face. ‘I couldn’t wait to see the back of you.’
‘A fact which you made perfectly plain.’ Remembered pain roughened the edge of her voice.
‘Well, what did you expect? After all, you’d just told me that you’d been seeing someone else.’
She hadn’t actually told him that. It had been a conclusion he had jumped to, and in order to protect herself she had let him think it. By that point she had been too worn down, too miserable to fight him any more.
‘Which brings us back to my question. Precisely why are you here?’
This time his smile was icy, fiendish, tinged with a danger that set her teeth on edge.
‘Perhaps I’m planning an old lovers’ reunion.’
That smile did terrible things to what little was left of Ellie’s composure.
‘Well, you can forget that idea straight away!’ she flung at him. ‘I’m not interested in a reunion or any such thing. The only thing I am to you is an ex-lover, with the emphasis very definitely on the ex, and that’s the way I intend it to stay. If I could have done, I would have sent someone else here in my place today, but just because I’m here doesn’t mean you can interpret it to your advantage!’
The look he turned on her was dark with contempt, searing over her skin like lightning.
‘Might I suggest that you wait until you’re invited, my dear Ms Thornton?’ he tossed at her in a voice so laden with acid that it seemed to strip a protective layer from her skin, leaving her even more vulnerable than before.
Her certainty that Morgan had some private, hidden agenda was growing by the second. And that being so, she knew that this could never work. She could never cope with him living in the cottage, with waking up every morning knowing that he was here, living in fear of a meeting every single day.
Studiously ignoring his interjection she snatched at a half-formed idea as it presented itself.
‘Well, I’m sorry, but I’m afraid there’s a slight problem…’
‘A problem? What sort of a problem?’
‘The—the cottage… It’s double booked. Someone else has the tenancy for the next…’
Her voice deserted her as she saw the way his beautiful mouth thinned in anger, his adamant shake of his dark head rejecting her desperate bluff even before she’d managed to express it.
‘Then “someone else” will have to find somewhere else to stay.’
‘But they can’t! They…’
‘Don’t fight me on this, Ellie,’ Morgan warned. ‘You won’t like the consequences if you do. The tenancy is mine—signed and paid for—and with a cheque that was cleared even before I set off from London. So if you have any ideas of backing out, I warn you that you will find things very uncomfortable. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Crystal.’
What else could she say? He didn’t have to put his threat into words. She could read it in the cold brilliance of his eyes, the ruthless determination that set his strong jaw hard against any hope of appeal.
And she couldn’t risk that threat being made real. Money was desperately tight on the farm, and the idea of setting up the holiday cottages to bring in some much-needed income was a new one. It had taken a huge investment to bring the old buildings up to scratch. That was why Henry had been so delighted when he’d taken Morgan’s near end of season booking.
‘No—I’m sure it can be sorted out. We’ll find a way round…’
‘We?’ Morgan demanded sharply. ‘I spoke to a Mr Knightley on the phone.’
‘Henry.’ Ellie nodded, her expression warming slightly. ‘He owns the farm.’
And Henry knew nothing about her own former relationship with Morgan. So of course he had seen no reason at all to hesitate when Morgan had rung up asking about the tenancy of Meadow Cottage.
‘He’s married to Nan—to my grandmother.’
Just for a moment the stiff mask slipped from his face, revealing a look of genuine astonishment.
‘Marion?’
It would be a shock, Ellie reflected, a touch of amusement breaking through the tension that held her slim body taut and stiff. The last time he had seen her grandmother had been almost two years ago when she had been the widowed Mrs Thornton. Even her own family had been stunned by the whirlwind romance that had ensued from Marion’s meeting with Henry Knightley.
‘She married again in November last year. Just after…’
Frantically she caught the words up, terrified at what she had been about to reveal.
‘Just two months after she met Henry,’ she amended awkwardly, painfully conscious of everything she was holding back.
By mentioning Henry Knightley, she had moved the conversation onto very dangerous ground. Morgan might know nothing about Henry, other than the phone conversation he’d had with the older man, but Henry’s grandson was a totally different matter. Pete Bedford was the man Morgan believed that she had left him for. The man she had allowed Morgan to think was her new lover in order to cover up the truth.
‘So is that how you came to be here? You came with Marion?’
‘No, I was here first. I was helping Henry out and Nan came to visit. She met Henry and the rest is history.’
The same could have been said about herself and Morgan, she reflected miserably. Their relationship had followed much of the same heady pattern.
They had met, fallen head over heels for each other, become lovers, and moved in together in exactly the same time span as her grandmother and Henry. But the major difference was that at no point at all had Morgan shown any inclination to want to make any other commitment to her. Marriage, and all that went along with it, had very definitely not been in his plans for the future.
She had been prepared to put up with that. Loving him so desperately, she hadn’t asked for more than he’d been willing to give. She had lived with him, shared his life, his bed, and at first that had been enough.
But then things had changed, forcing her into a decision that had torn her heart in two.
‘Well, if you’re stopping, you’ll need these…’
Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out a bunch of keys and waved them, letting the ring that held them dangle from one finger. The faint jingling noise they made added a welcome note of carelessness, one she tried to match as she went on, ‘I think you’ll find Meadow Cottage very comfortable. I hope you enjoy your stay.’
There, now she’d done her duty—more than her duty! She’d met Morgan as arranged, faced him, spoken to him, and by doing so she’d also confronted her own private demons.
And she’d survived.
If she could just get out now, then she might be able to hold herself together. If she went home…
Home…
A sudden wave of devastating longing swept over her. The need to see Rosie, to hold her daughter’s small, warm body close, to inhale the sweet baby scent of her, to hear her soft breathing, was so powerful that it almost overwhelmed her.
It was because of Rosie that she had had to leave Morgan in the first place, something that had come close to destroying her but which had seemed the only way out. Faced with a choice that had been no choice at all, she had been torn between the two people that she loved most in all the world. And she had had to choose Rosie.
Rosie was her world now, all that she had left after losing her relationship with Morgan and the future she had dreamed of. But if Morgan ever found out the truth, then that world was likely to come crashing down round her ears, and she couldn’t even begin to imagine what her future would be after that.
CHAPTER TWO
‘MR STAFFORD will you please take the keys?’
He’d waited just too long for Ellie’s peace of mind. His silence and the way he was watching her, blue eyes slightly narrowed against the sun, made her feel desperately uneasy, the tangled mass of knots in her stomach tightening with every uneven heartbeat.
‘The keys…’ she repeated with as much emphasis as she dared. ‘I have to be going.’
‘No.’
It came so softly, almost thrown away, that for a moment or two she wasn’t at all sure she had heard him right and frowned her confusion.
‘What…?’ Bewildered she looked up at him, golden eyes wide in shock and confusion. ‘Mr Stafford—I…’
Did she know what it did to him when she looked at him like that? Morgan wondered. Did she know how it twisted deep inside him to see those amazing eyes burn with rejection where once he had seen them burn with love for him—or with what he had believed was love? Did she know how it felt to see her so anxious to leave when in the past it had seemed that she couldn’t have enough of him? Couldn’t protest her love for him often enough.
Or had all that been a pretence too?
‘The name is Morgan,’ he declared with cold precision. ‘And you go when I say you can—not before.’
That brought a flare of defiance into her flashing gaze.
‘But I have to go!’
‘No.’
Dammit, it had taken months to get to his moment. Had he spent so long looking for her only to have her turn and run at the very first meeting? She was as edgy as a cat on hot bricks, and it wasn’t just as a result of seeing him again. She was hiding something and he was determined to find out what.
‘I only want what I’m entitled to.’
‘Entitled?’
The need to see Rosie was uppermost in her mind, making it impossible to think straight. She knew that her daughter was safe and well cared for with Marion who doted on her first great-grandchild, but it wasn’t for Rosie’s sake that she wanted to be with her. It was for her own.
One look at her baby daughter would remind her why she was in the hateful position of lying to the man she had loved.
Morgan’s slow smile mocked her tense question, the spark of uncertainty in her eyes.
‘The contract said that I would be met, given the keys—and shown round the property.’
‘Shown round! Oh, come on! I mean, look at it…’
The gesture of her hand to indicate the cottage beside them was wilder than she would have liked, betraying too much of how easily he had rattled her. Get a grip! she warned herself inwardly. Morgan in this mood was like some watchful predator. Show a moment of weakness and he would pounce.
‘You don’t need to be shown anything—you could walk round the entire place in two minutes flat.’
‘Nevertheless I expect you to fulfil the agreement. Come on, Ellie,’ he cajoled, his voice deepening, softening, his smile an enticement in itself. ‘Indulge me in this.’
For a brief second Ellie actually had to close her eyes against the appeal of his voice that curled around her senses like a plume of warm smoke, soft as a caress. She had never been able to resist him when he’d switched on the charm like this, and to her horror she found that she still couldn’t.
‘Very well, then…’
Reaching back into her past, she dragged out from some hidden corner the image of the woman she had once been. The Eleanor Thornton who had been second in command of a large, profitable secretarial agency. The Eleanor Thornton that Morgan had first met.
Adopting a tone of voice that was all control, all businesslike and nothing more, she even managed to flash a swift and obviously insincere smile into his watchful face.
‘If you’ll just come this way, I’ll show you where everything is. And perhaps you’d like to know a little bit about the area too.’
This was better; she was in the swing of things now. After all, she had done this many times before. Meadow Cottage had been occupied almost every week since Easter, and Ellie had usually been the one to greet the new tenants.
‘Watch the floor here,’ she said when, after unlocking the door, she made her way into the narrow hall. ‘It’s a little uneven. As you will have seen in the brochure, Meadow Cottage was formerly one of the farm’s cowsheds, and these stone flags formed part of the original flooring.’
Her voice was perfectly steady as she went into the well-worn patter she had used so often before, but her control over the rest of her body wasn’t quite so complete. When a struggle with the slightly stiff door brought him to her side to help her, the brush of his tall, strong body against her own in the constricted, confined space sent her senses into overdrive.
He still wore the same aftershave that had been a favourite when they had been together; one that she had bought for him for the only Christmas and birthday they had shared. Just the scent of it was like an instant shot of memory, jolting her back in time to those gentler, happier days.
But underneath the evocative cologne was the subtler, more intensely personal scent of his body that stabbed straight to her heart as it stirred up the waters of the past, bringing to the surface the bitter-sweet recollection of how it had felt to lie in bed with him, her head pillowed on the strength of his shoulder, breathing in the clean, musky scent of his skin.
At once all her familiar spiel deserted her. Her head was buzzing, her senses stirring in a disturbingly primitive way. For a moment the memories that gripped her were so powerful, so real that her eyes burned with bitter tears and she had to blink furiously to drive them back.
‘The kitchen…’ was all she could manage, gritting her teeth against the sting of irony in his murmured, ‘Obviously.’
From then onwards all she wanted to do was to get the job done as quickly as possible. Not giving him time to look around, she marched him to the next door, opening it briefly.
‘The sitting room… The second bedroom is up there…’
A wave of her hand indicated the small gallery above the sitting room where a neat bedroom nestled under the eaves.
‘The bathroom is down here… And the main bedroom directly opposite. You can get milk and eggs from the farm—everything else from the store in the village, and they’ll cash a cheque for you in an emergency. I’m afraid there isn’t a bank anywhere nearer than St Austell. We provide fresh linen and towels on Mondays.’
There, she was done! Surely now he had to let her go.
‘Is there anything else?’
‘Just a couple of things. But why don’t we discuss them over coffee?’
‘No, thanks,’ Ellie managed through teeth gritted against the urge to scream in frustration. ‘I have other things to do.’
‘And I have things I want to discuss.’
Blatantly ignoring her protest, he turned and headed back down the white-walled corridor to the kitchen, leaving her with no option but to follow him.
‘Morgan, I don’t have time for coffee. I have to work…’
The need for her daughter was like an ache in her heart, a hunger that no food could possibly assuage.
‘Work?’
The look he directed at her burned with frank scepticism.
‘You working on a farm—that’s not at all what I’d have expected from the elegant Ms Thornton.’
‘I told you, I’m not the same person any more. I’ve changed a lot in the past eighteen months.’
‘So I see.’
His tone was a slow drawl and those brilliant eyes swept over her in a deliberately insolent assessment. She couldn’t miss the way that sapphire gaze lingered around the fullness of her breasts, the curves of her hips in the close-fitting skirt.
As a result of her pregnancy she had filled out noticeably, so that her shape was definitely more womanly when contrasted with her slenderness when they had been together. And Morgan, who had known her body with the intimacy of a lover, couldn’t be unaware of those changes either.
‘So I see,’ he repeated, and there was no mistaking the disturbingly sensual note on the words.
She knew that purring tone of voice. Knew only too well what it implied. She had heard it often enough when they had lived together. Then it had made her heart leap in anticipation, had set her body tingling in uncontrolled response. Just to hear her name spoken in that huskily appreciative way had been like a subtle form of foreplay, telling her instantly what was in his mind, and triggering off the same heated longings in her own.
But hearing it now shocked her rigid. Foolishly, naively perhaps, she had expected that the feelings Morgan had once had for her, every type of feeling, would have died, starved into non-existence by eighteen months of lack of nourishment. But there was no mistaking the heated desire that now flared in the brilliance of his eyes, the instant response that made his pupils so huge and dark.
‘Country life obviously suits you. You’re looking really well.’
‘I’m happy here.’
She had learned how to be happy but it hadn’t come easily to her. At first she had felt as if half of her soul had been cut away and it had only been the need to care for the baby growing in her womb that had kept her going.
‘So why don’t you make that coffee while I unload the car and then you can tell me all about it?’
Ellie’s breath hissed in through her teeth in a sound of exasperation.
‘Morgan, what part of what I said did you not understand? I don’t have time for this…’
But she was speaking to empty air. Morgan had already opened the door and gone out to the car. When she hurried after him it was to find that he’d opened the boot and was pulling a case from it.
‘Why won’t you listen to me? I can’t stay! Nan’s expecting me—she’ll be wondering where I am.’
‘I never thought of Marion as a slave-driver.’
He was coming back to the door again now, a suitcase in either hand so that Ellie had to flatten herself against the wall to let him past.
‘And I’m sure she’ll understand that you and I will need to spend a little time getting reacquainted.’
‘We’re not going to get reacquainted or re anything.’
Her words would have more emphasis if she didn’t have to keep trotting after him, forcing her shorter legs to keep up with the long, swift strides that took him through the cottage and into the ground-floor bedroom in the space of a few seconds.
‘I told you—the only reason I’m here is because you’re a guest and it’s part of my duties to make sure you’re settled in.’
‘And to arrange the other services you’ll provide,’ Morgan returned sharply, dumping the cases on the floor and heading back to the car again.
‘Services?’
It was a squawk of panic, both at the thought of just what he might have in mind and because he had come to an abrupt halt, whirling round to face her so that she had to screech to a stop herself, narrowly avoiding slamming straight into his chest.
‘I was given to understand by Mr Knightley that you provided a cleaning service.’
‘Well, yes…yes, we do. But surely—’
‘And some meals?’
‘Yes—for long-stay guests we can provide an evening meal…’
Too late she saw just where his thoughts were heading.
‘Oh, no! No way! I’m not—’
‘But it’s in the contract.’
Anyone else might only have heard the gentle reminder in his comment but, knowing Morgan as she did, Ellie was hypersensitive to the ominous undertone that threaded darkly through the words.
‘I know it’s in the contract, but surely now you can’t expect us to keep to it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well—isn’t it obvious? I mean, you won’t want me round the house every day.’
‘Won’t I?’ Morgan’s expression gave nothing away. ‘As a matter of fact I think it could work very well. You know my ways—know not to move papers, the crazy hours I work, the food I like. You’d be less likely to disturb me than a stranger.’
‘But Dee—the housekeeper—she usually…’
Her voice failed her as she saw the adamant shake of his dark head.
‘Not Dee,’ he stated in a voice that brooked no further argument. ‘I want you, angel. You and no one else.’
‘I won’t do it.’
For one thing she couldn’t be away from Rosie that long—and she certainly didn’t plan on bringing her little daughter along to the cottage with her. And for another, she already felt emotionally mangled after barely half an hour in Morgan’s presence. There was no way she could cope with the prospect of seeing him for long periods of time, day after day.
‘You’ll have to find someone else.’
‘I don’t want anyone else.’
The blue eyes were like shards of ice, hard and implacable. Past experience told her that arguing with Morgan at times like this was like banging her head hard against a brick wall; that she was only hurting herself by continuing, but she couldn’t give in.
‘What is this? Some sort of power game? A way of getting back at me for leaving you? Do you get some sort of perverse pleasure out of the prospect of seeing me skivvying for you?’
‘Is the idea of doing a few hours’ simple housework so humiliating?’ Morgan shot back at her.
Not for anyone else. But working for Morgan—working with Morgan was quite a different prospect. Where he was concerned nothing was ‘simple’ at all.
‘I don’t find it in the least humiliating—normally! Actually, I quite enjoy it. And as a matter of fact, the additional services were my idea. I suggested we put them…’
‘In the contract,’ Morgan finished for her with grim satisfaction when, seeing how her foolish outburst had trapped her, she let the sentence trail off weakly. ‘Believe me, Ellie, I intend to keep you to every letter of every word of that agreement. There’s no way I’m going to let you run out on this.’
He didn’t add the words ‘as you did before’, but they were there at the back of what he was saying, implied by his scathing tone and the black, burning look that seared over her skin.
‘I didn’t “run out”!’ she protested. ‘I explained.’
‘Oh, yeah.’
The harshness of his tone slashed into her heart like a savage sword.
‘You said that things had changed. You “didn’t feel the same way any more”.’
Hearing the words flung at her so brutally, Ellie could only wince inwardly at the realisation of how inadequate they sounded.
But she couldn’t possibly have told the truth. And even to protect her unborn child she couldn’t have told Morgan that she no longer loved him.
‘Well, my feelings had changed—I’d changed!’
Changed in the most fundamental way it was possible for a woman to do so. She had become pregnant and, knowing how he would react to that one basic fact, she had seen leaving him as the only course open to her.
‘You certainly had.’
Morgan leaned back against the wall, arms folded across the width of his chest, eyeing her with bleak cynicism.
‘If I’d been a betting man, angel, I’d have put money on the fact that we had something special…’
‘Well, you’d have been wrong.’
He would never know how much it cost her to say those words. Because she too had thought they had had ‘something special’ and she had dreamed of it staying that way. Of it growing and flowering into the sort of relationship you could build a lifetime upon. She had even let herself dream of marriage, maybe, one day.
But there had been one small flaw in the perfection of her love. Morgan didn’t want children. He had been absolutely emphatic on that matter right from the start. Had warned her that if she hadn’t been able to cope with the idea then he’d been prepared to break it off now, before either of them had got in too deep.
But Ellie had already been in too deep. She had told herself she could manage—that Morgan himself was enough for her. And he had been enough—until the day she had realised that an accident had happened and that in spite of her precautions she was going to have a baby.
Ellie came back into the present with a jolt, and, looking deep into those inimical blue eyes, she shivered involuntarily, fearful of the cold antipathy she could see in their depths.
‘Nothing stays the same for ever,’ she managed, ruthlessly suppressing her voice’s tendency to wobble revealingly.
‘Nothing stays the same…’ Morgan echoed viciously. ‘How true. Nothing—not even the protestations of undying love, the vows of eternal faithfulness, the declarations that you had never felt this way before, would never feel it again. How long did it last, my angel? Ten months? A year?’
‘Oh, stop it!’
Ellie longed to lift her hands and clap them over her ears, anything to drown out the brutal litany of scorn he was subjecting her to.
‘I never thought—I… I’m sorry…’ she finished miserably, knowing she had to say it, even though it was hopelessly inadequate and far, far too late. ‘I’m really sorry. If I could say anything—’
‘No!’ Morgan cut in harshly. ‘Don’t! Don’t say anything—and don’t say that you’re sorry—because I’m not! I was angry when you left—true. I was even a little hurt at the thought that you could discard me so easily, move on to someone else. But when I calmed down and started thinking rationally again, I realised that in fact you’d done me one hell of a favour.’
‘A favour?’
‘Yeah, a favour. I was close to making the biggest mistake of my life with you.’
He shook his head as if in despair at his own foolishness.
‘Something I would have regretted for as long as I lived. But by leaving when you did, you saved me from that. Really, instead of reproaching you, I reckon I should thank you.’
‘Don’t bother!’ Ellie snapped, unable to take any more.
For the first time she admitted to herself that she had come here with a tiny thread of a weak, foolish hope in her heart. Hopes of a reconciliation, of finding that Morgan, too, had suffered from their time apart, and so might be prepared to rethink his feeling about children. But his comments had not only taken that pathetic hope away from her, they had crushed it into tiny, irreparable pieces, impossible ever to put together again.
‘Well, at least you won’t expect me to stay after—’
‘Oh, but I do,’ Morgan cut in sharply. ‘In fact, now I want that coffee more than ever.’
‘Well, you can just go on wanting! I’m finished here, I—’
‘But I haven’t finished with you,’ Morgan came back at her with deadly quietness. ‘There are things we still have to talk about.’
He pushed himself away from the wall, straightening up lazily.
‘Make the coffee, Ellie,’ he said and it was a command, not a request.
CHAPTER THREE
FOR a moment Morgan thought he’d lost her.
He knew that look of old. The set jaw, the compressed mouth, the mutinous glare that declared only too clearly that Ellie was having none of whatever she thought he was suggesting.
This was Ellie at her most stubborn, and, strangely enough, it was seeing her in this mood that reached out and stabbed him in the heart, when he least expected it to.
This was the Ellie who had most infuriated him when they’d been together. The woman who could set against something, however small, and turn it into a battle, one she had no intention of letting him win. There had never been any chance of wearing her down when she’d been like this. In fact there had only ever been one approach that had a chance of winning her round.
So he used it.
‘Please…’ he added softly, pitching his voice at a very different level.
She wasn’t going to give in that easily, it was clear. Just one swift, stunned blink of those amazing eyes showed any sort of response, making Morgan wonder exactly why he was so set on having her stay when quite clearly she would rather be anywhere but here.
But perhaps that was the whole point. Whatever was bugging her, it was pretty damn important to her. And the more she seemed determined not to let any hint of it drop, the more he wanted to know what it was.
‘Ellie…’
He pushed one long-fingered hand through his ebony hair, raking it back from his face with a sigh.
‘I’ve been driving for hours and I really could murder for a coffee.’
He did look tired, Ellie admitted to herself reluctantly. Typical Morgan. When he was working, or concentrating on anything, he forgot about minor practicalities like food or drink.
‘What are you afraid of if you stay?’ Morgan questioned softly.
‘Nothing.’ It didn’t sound at all convincing. ‘What on earth makes you think that I’m afraid?’
That was better. She might even believe herself now. But she knew only too well what she was afraid of—and with good reason. She just couldn’t bring herself to admit it.
‘Just one cup of coffee,’ she growled reluctantly, risking a swift glance at his face and immediately wishing she hadn’t as she was rewarded with the sort of wide, flashing smile that would have melted rock, never mind her weak, foolish heart.
‘You’re an angel.’
‘It will only be instant…’
Desperately she tried to claw back some of the ground she had surrendered.
‘Fine!’
He punctured her sense of triumph quickly and easily, tossing the response over his shoulder as he headed back out to the car.
Struggling to keep her mind blank, Ellie moved to fill and switch on the kettle. One cup of coffee wouldn’t take very long. She’d be on her way in no time.
At least she didn’t have to worry about Rosie. Even if the little girl had woken from her nap, she would have Nan and Dee to take care of her. She’d known both women all her short life and had had them wrapped round one small, chubby finger since the day she’d been born.
‘You couldn’t rustle up a sandwich or something as well, could you?’
Morgan dropped a cardboard box of groceries on the kitchen table beside her, startling her out of her thoughts.
‘There’s bread and cheese in there somewhere.’
‘When did you last eat?’
It wouldn’t be held back, the sense of exasperation painfully familiar.
He paused briefly to consider, then shrugged his broad shoulders.
‘Don’t know.’
He was too close, that evocative scent setting her nerves prickling again. The sun slanting in through the kitchen window gleamed on hair of ebony silk, highlighting sapphire eyes behind a fringe of outrageously thick dark lashes. Narrow hips in snug fitting denim rested casually against the side of the table, and he had rolled up his sleeves revealing tanned and muscular forearms, lightly covered in soft dark hair.
‘Didn’t want to waste time stopping. And you know what motorway services are like.’
And she knew what Morgan was like. Motorway services, with his best-sellers on display in the shops, meant the possibility of being recognised, something he avoided like the plague. Ellie bit down hard on her lip as she struggled with the twist of pain in her heart that came with yet another reminder of just how well she had once known this man.
‘But a sandwich would be very welcome…and if you could slice up some tomatoes as well…’
‘What did your last servant die of?’ Ellie flung after him, his laughter in response infuriating her further.
But she was only protesting to save face, she knew. She would do it, dammit. She would make him his coffee and his sandwich not just because she felt she had no option. She couldn’t even deceive herself with the thought that she would do the same for any new guest who had had a long journey.
She would do it because she couldn’t help herself. Because she could no longer deny herself the opportunity to do this small thing for this man who had once meant all the world to her. Sighing, she rooted in the box, pulled out bread, cheese.
It was as she was slicing into the crisp crust of the loaf that memory struck, hard and sharp, stilling her hand and holding her frozen, staring straight ahead with sightless, unfocussed eyes.
It had been—what?—over two years ago. A warm June evening, not unlike today. The night she had moved to Morgan’s London apartment following his suggestion that she come and live with him. Of course, she hadn’t hesitated. She’d been crazily out of her mind with love, her ‘Yes’ had been out of her mouth almost before he’d finished asking, and she had moved in the very next day.
Then, as now, Morgan had directed her into the kitchen, suggesting she prepare something for them to eat while he unloaded her belongings from the car.
The knife shook in Ellie’s hand, tears stinging cruelly as she recalled how he had whistled as he’d worked. How each time he had passed her he had flashed that wide, devastating smile that had turned her insides to molten liquid, and snatched a kiss or simply let his hands trail along her back, her shoulders, her hair. It was if he hadn’t been able to keep his hands off her and had had to keep reassuring himself that she’d been there.
And then, when everything had been unloaded, he had come up behind her, sliding strong, warm arms around her slim waist, resting his head on her shoulder, his breath warm against her cheek…
This had been a mistake, Morgan told himself as he slammed the now-empty boot of the car shut and turned to the last box that still lay on the back seat of the Alfa Romeo. One hell of a stupid mistake.
It was no wonder that he’d had a sense of déjà vu. No wonder that it seemed as if he’d lived through this before. It was almost an exact replay of the day that Ellie had first moved in with him.
‘Oh, hell!’
Forgetting the box for a moment, he rested his arms on the sun-warmed top of the car, his chin supported on one hand as he let the memories roll over him.
He’d never been so happy. Or so scared. Never in all his twenty-eight years had he known a feeling like it. He still couldn’t actually believe that he’d made the move, spoken the words that he’d been sure he’d never say to anyone.
Or that she had agreed.
He hadn’t known that he was going to say anything. No rational thought, no careful preparation had come into his head. One moment he’d been lying there, his heart still thudding, his skin still slick with sweat after the blazing passion of their lovemaking, the next he had turned and looked into her face and just known.
But the feeling had been still too new, too delicate, to share with anyone, even Ellie. Ellie who’d declared ‘I love you’ as easily as breathing, who’d seemed to have no fear, no doubts.
And so he’d gone for the casual approach.
‘I think, after that, saying goodnight and going home alone has definitely lost its appeal. How do you feel about making this into a—more logical arrangement?’
‘Coffee’s ready!’
Ellie’s call from the kitchen splintered his memories, bringing his head up sharply, reminding him where he was.
It was just as well he’d held back on his true feelings, he reflected cynically as he forced his mind back on to the present and, collecting the last box, headed inside once more. Ellie’s ‘love’, so carelessly given, had been just as easily taken away again. They had had perhaps eleven months before he had felt her attention drifting and barely two weeks after that she had told him she was leaving.
‘Is that the last one?’
Ellie was buttering bread, her attention fixed on what she was doing, and she glanced up casually as he came in.
‘Just dump it somewhere and come and get your coffee while it’s hot. Not that dump is the appropriate word,’ she added as her eyes focussed on what he was carrying. ‘That’s a laptop, isn’t it?’
‘The newest, state-of-the-art, portable wonder machine.’ Morgan nodded, concentrating unnecessarily hard on placing the box carefully on the sideboard while he got his thoughts back under control. ‘It does everything I want of it. If I could just get it to create plots for me as well, then it would be perfect.’
He was talking to distract himself, he knew. He should never have let himself remember what it felt like to make love to her. Never have recalled the blazing desire, the pounding of his blood in his veins, the hungry kisses and even hungrier caresses. Just to think of them made his body tighten, setting up an ache that left him fighting for control.
‘You’ve made enough sandwiches to feed an army.’ He struggled to keep the conversation light.
‘Self-defence,’ Ellie returned, concentrating fiercely on laying pieces of tomato on top of the thinly sliced cheese. ‘I know what your temper’s like when you’re hungry—it’s one thing about you that I have most definitely not missed.’
‘So there are things that you do miss?’
He couldn’t stop himself from moving closer, had to clench his hands tight in the pockets of his jeans so as to resist the temptation to touch. A shining golden strand of her hair had fallen forward over her cheek and his fingers itched to smooth it back, tangle in the rest of the silken weight.
‘Oh, yes…’
Did he have to come so close? Every nerve in her body sang with tension, tight as the strings of a harp, and the race of her heart made it a struggle to breathe.
‘I miss the tip that your office turns into when you are working. The way you are perfectly capable of forgetting about the practicalities of life and existing on nothing but endless mugs of coffee. I miss the impossible hours you work. The way you forget about appointments, social commitments, invitations…’
‘You obviously have very fond memories!’ Morgan put in wryly.
Lord, but she smelled good. A mixture of roses and sunshine and the private, sweet scent of her skin. It drew her to him as if her body were a powerful magnet and his just a powerless needle, tugged into her gentle but irresistible force field.
‘Leave me some self-respect.’
His plea was accompanied by such a ruefully pained expression that the boyish appeal of it twisted sharply in Ellie’s heart. Was it just her imagination or had he moved even closer?
‘I didn’t expect such a demolition job on my character.’
Black pepper, Ellie told herself, forcing her thoughts onto practical matters. Morgan loved black pepper on tomatoes.
Reaching for the pepper mill, she twisted the top fiercely, then stilled abruptly as the movement brought her into contact with Morgan’s right arm, the soft brush against the warmth of his skin sending a searing electric spark of response right down to her toes until they curled inside her shoes.
‘Is there anything else you miss?’
His hand snaked out and snatched up one of the ripe, moist slices of tomato speckled with spicy flecks of black pepper and he bit into it appreciatively, his teeth very white and strong.
‘Yes,’ Ellie managed in a voice that sounded rusty and raw as if it hadn’t been used for some time. ‘I miss the way you steal food when I’m preparing it and you can’t wait… Stop it!’
He’d reached for another segment of the fruit, but this time she was ready for him. This time she moved as quickly as he had, giving the back of his hand a gentle slap before closing her fingers around his wrist to still it.
And froze.
Her heart was beating high up in her throat. Her fingers were clenched over the hard bones, feeling the powerful muscles tighten suddenly, then relax again, but still holding a tension that communicated itself silently to her quivering sense. Unable to control herself, she drew in one swift, shuddering breath and let it go again on a ragged sigh.
Behind her, Morgan shifted slightly, coming so close that she could feel the warmth of his long body all the way down her back.
‘Ellie,’ he said softly, and his voice sounded as raw and husky as hers had just a moment before so that she had to close her eyes against the sharp tug of its appeal to her already heightened senses.
‘Morgan…’ She tried to protest, but either her voice failed her and he didn’t hear or he heard and deliberately ignored it, bringing his head down so that he could whisper in her ear, the heat of his breath feathering against her skin.
‘Do you know what I miss about you, angel?’
‘No…’
Even she didn’t know if she meant to encourage him to go on or quite the opposite. But whatever was in her mind, the word had no effect. Morgan didn’t even pause to listen but continued inexorably.
‘I miss the feel of your hair…’
His cheek rested against the blonde strands, soft as a caress.
‘The scent of your skin. I miss the sound of your breath, your voice, your heartbeat next to mine. I miss the softness of your flesh underneath my fingertips.’
With his free hand he traced a delicate, tantalising path along the side of her cheek and down the slender line of her throat, pausing briefly to rest on the point at the base of her neck where her pulse leapt and throbbed in heady, drumming response.
‘Morgan…’
The knife she was holding fell from Ellie’s loosened grasp to land with a clatter on the table-top and the hand that held his shifted slightly, moving from restraint to a softer embrace. The pad of her thumb moved over the heated satin of his skin, tracing out an enticing pattern that brought a murmur of response from his throat.
‘I miss the taste of you on my lips, in my mouth…’
His lips had replaced the touch of his hands, following the same path down her face, kissing her forehead, her temple, her closed eyelid, the fine line of her cheekbone. With the heat of response flooding through her, Ellie felt her whole body melt, becoming pliant as wax. With a soft murmur she let her head fall against his shoulder, releasing his hand, no longer able to keep hold of it.
Immediately his newly free arm came round her, fastening about her waist and pulling her tight against him. She welcomed the support of his strength, knowing that her own had deserted her, that she was incapable of holding herself upright.
‘The feel of your breasts in my hands…’
Suiting actions to the words, he slid his hands upward, cupping her breasts in the heat of his palms, his thumbs stroking over the hardening points of her nipples. Against her back, she could feel the potent evidence of his desire, hot and swollen and forceful, and the memories it roused in her made her senses swim.
His fingers were busy with the buttons on her blouse now, easing them swiftly and efficiently from their fastenings, letting the soft white cotton ease apart. One hand slipped inside the white lacy cup of the bra underneath, drawing a shuddering sigh of response as she felt its caress against the smooth slope of her breast.
‘Morgan!’
It was a choking cry of delight, of appeal, of surrender all in one, and she whirled round in the confining hold of his arms and crushed the aching tips of her breasts against his chest. Her arms went up around his neck, her fingers lacing in the darkness of his hair, and she drew his head down urgently to hers.
His kiss felt like coming home. Hard and demanding, it pressed her lips open to the hungry invasion of his tongue, his hands twisting in her hair, fingers clenching around her skull, bringing her even closer to him.
Heavy waves of desire rolled over her, hot and thick and hungry, swamping her mind and driving away almost all coherent thought. All coherent thought but one. Because now the word that she had dodged away from, the word she had feared, had been unable to face since she had known she would have to see him again, was the only thing that was clear inside her thoughts. Over and over it repeated, again and again, swirling round the inside of her skull like a litany of need.
Love. That was the word she had been avoiding; the word she couldn’t bring herself to consider. It meant too much, hurt too much, laid her open to too much danger.
But now she knew she couldn’t avoid it any longer. She still loved Morgan, always had loved him, would always love him. That was the cruellest irony of their situation. She had been forced into making him believe that she no longer loved him, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. She loved this man more than all the world, and only the love of one other human being, her child, could ever have forced her from his side.
But now Morgan was back. His arms were round her, his lips on hers. She could see the passion in his darkened eyes, the flare of colour on the carved cheekbones, and she knew there was no way she could deny herself this. Her hands shook with the pent-up need of long months apart, making her fumble with buttons on his shirt in her haste to touch him. Really touch him. To feel the heat and smoothness of his skin under her urgent fingertips.
‘Easy, angel…’ Morgan murmured, his voice thickened by a matching desire, but she shook her head frantically, too overwhelmed, too lost in sensation to heed.
At last she reached her goal, smoothing her palms over the warm flesh, the springing dark hairs with a deep sigh of satisfaction. She wanted to touch him everywhere, couldn’t get enough of him.
‘Morgan…Morgan…’
She muttered his name restlessly, feverishly, the two syllables the only sound her mouth could form in between the hungrily snatched kisses as she added the unique taste of his skin to the thousand other sensations that were bombarding her awareness.
‘Ellie!’
On a groan of surrender Morgan gave up all attempt to speak and swept her up into his arms. Shouldering open the door, he took her through the small living room, down the corridor, and into the ground floor bedroom. One of his cases still lay where he had dumped it on the unmade bed, but he violently kicked it aside, almost falling onto the mattress, taking Ellie with him.
With more haste than gentleness he rushed her shirt and the delicate bra underneath it from her yearning body, and now it was his turn to use her name as a form of incantation, an expression of longing that could not be held back.
‘Ellie…Ellie…’ he muttered over and over, hands twisting in her tumbled hair, smoothing over her skin, sliding under her breasts, lifting them to the heated attentions of his lips.
The first, almost gentle kisses on the creamy slopes soon changed in the space of a frantic heartbeat to hungrier, more passionate caresses. The sharp tug of his mouth on one achingly sensitive nipple made Ellie cry out in shock and delight, her body writhing in uncontrolled response to the stinging pleasure. Pushing aside his loosened shirt, her fingers clenched over the powerful bones of his shoulders, closing over hard muscle, feeling it bunch and move under her grip.
‘I want you…I want you…’
She could hardly believe it was her own voice she heard, it sounded so rough and raw. But she seemed to have lost control of her tongue and the muttered plea escaped of its own volition.
‘You’ll have me, angel…’ was Morgan’s breathless, laughter-shaken response. ‘Just as soon as I can get rid of these—these damn clothes!’
The red skirt was too tight, the fastening too time consuming for his hunger and, abandoning with a rough, exasperated curse the attempt to open it, he reached for the hem instead, pushing it violently up over the slender length of her legs, to bunch in crumpled disorder around her waist.
Because of the warmth of the summer, she wore no tights or stockings and the small scrap of satin and lace that was the only delicate barrier to his demanding hands was soon discarded, tossed aside without a care for where it landed.
‘You too…’ Ellie muttered, fingers made clumsy with need as she tugged at the buckle of his belt, yanking it loose.
He helped her with the single button underneath. She heard the faint rasp of the zip sliding down and caught her breath in sharp anticipation. It felt as if a hungry fire blazed deep inside her, sending rivulets of heat out through every nerve, pulsing between her legs, and she couldn’t wait for the thrusting force of his possession to ease the yearning ache.
But something had changed. Above her, Morgan had stilled, his face changing suddenly. His expression darkened and he looked deep into her passion-glazed eyes, frowning as he searched for some answer there.
‘Ellie—we can’t…’
Disappointment and the savage bite of frustrated need scythed through her like a heated sword. Totally at the mercy of her clamouring body, she turned a bruise-dark gaze on his hard, set face.
‘Yes, we can! We can!’ she protested as, unbelievingly, she saw him shake his head. ‘Morgan!’
‘Answer me one question, Ellie. Are you protected? Are you on the pill or…?’
If he had slapped her brutally in the face he couldn’t have brought her out of the heady delirium faster or more cruelly. Ellie could only stare at him in shocked distress until, slowly and unwillingly, her mind began to realise just what he had said and why.
Are you protected? Oh, she knew that question of old. Knew how he could express it in a way that sounded like concern for her and for her alone. But she knew the truth. And the truth was that Morgan Stafford had made it plain that he had never wanted children. Not with her, not with anyone.
‘No…’ she managed shakily, and the look on his face, the shock in those deep blue eyes said it all.
Already he was withdrawing from her, moving back, putting a distance that was more than physical between them. One that tore at her heart with the pain of both the present and a past when this had divided them so savagely.
Are you protected? He wanted to protect himself against the possibility of a child he didn’t want being created as a result of their lovemaking.
But the truth was that it was already too late. Almost twenty months before, the protection he so valued had failed. Morgan didn’t know it but he already had a daughter. But a daughter he would never want, never acknowledge. And because of that there could never be any future for the two of them.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘GET off me!’
The change was so sudden, so stunning that for a second or two Morgan could almost believe another woman had taken Ellie’s place.
Gone was the willingly wanton bedmate he had anticipated, and in her place was a furiously distant iceberg, one whose golden eyes sparked with furious rejection where before he had seen burning hunger and a passion to match his own. It was so totally unexpected that he actually laughed.
‘I said, get off me!’
This time the cold command was accompanied by a threatening movement of one leg, her knee coming up with such obviously ominous intent that any man would very rapidly think twice about remaining in the danger zone.
Not being prepared to take the risk, he moved swiftly, jackknifing off the bed. The bite of the denim shirt into his arms reminded him of the way Ellie had pushed it down from his shoulders, imprisoning him. With an angry movement he shrugged it back into position again just as Ellie twisted herself off the bed, frantically pushing at the bunched and crumpled skirt to cover herself.
‘Just what the hell is going on here?’ he demanded, matching her fury with his own, an aggrieved sense of injustice combining with a hard ache of frustration with explosive results. ‘When I show consideration for the possible consequences of my—our—actions, I don’t expect to be turned on as if I’ve tried to force myself on you.’
When he’d shown consideration! Ellie’s mind nearly blew a fuse at the thought. She knew damn well that he was not considering her in the slightest!
All he wanted was to avoid the encumbrance of a child. If she needed any further evidence that her decision not to tell him about Rosie had been the right one, it was staring her in the face. In fact her grandmother had been the only person she had told the truth about Rosie’s father, and that was the way she wanted it to stay.
‘Or were you just leading me on, playing some nasty little game?’
‘No! Oh, no!’
But she had to say something to explain her behaviour. To distract him from the dangerous path his thoughts were taking.
‘You’re forgetting something,’ she blustered nervously, backing away from the glare he turned on her.
‘And what, precisely, am I forgetting, my angel?’
‘Not what—who. You’re forgetting about Pete.’
‘Pete!’
He spat the name out as if it were an obscenity. To her horror all the fire seemed to have died out of his eyes, replaced by an icy cold that seemed to flay a layer of skin from her body, leaving her agonisingly exposed and desperately vulnerable.
Suddenly terribly aware of the fact that she was only half dressed, the crumpled skirt all that covered her, she turned wide desperate eyes to hunt for her missing clothing. Her bra seemed to have disappeared completely and her white blouse lay just inches from Morgan’s feet. No matter how urgently she longed to pick it up and pull it on, she didn’t dare risk moving to retrieve it. Not while he was in this mood. So instead she had to content herself with crossing her arms across her exposed breasts in order to provide an inadequate form of protection.
‘Pete Bedford,’ Morgan repeated with ominous quietness. ‘And just what has he to do with this?’
Something was wrong here. He’d been told that Pete Bedford was no longer in the picture. The realisation that the other man was still part of Ellie’s life was like a kick in the teeth, combining with the savage nag of a frustrated libido to leave him incapable of thinking straight.
‘Isn’t it obvious? I—couldn’t possibly sleep with you b-because of Pete…’ she managed clumsily.
Something in what she’d said had surprised him. His dark head went back sharply, blue eyes narrowing in swift appraisal.
‘But I thought that you two were no longer an item.’
There it was again. The suggestion—more than a suggestion—that Morgan was not here by chance but that he had somehow found out exactly where she was and had come here forewarned—and forearmed—by knowledge about her circumstances.
‘Of course he’s in the picture! He’s headmaster of a school in Truro.’
Morgan took a moment to absorb that fact.
‘I see,’ he said at last. ‘And I presume that you suddenly had a belated attack of conscience because it would mean being unfaithful to dear Pete.’
‘It wasn’t belated! And I’ll tell you this whether you believe it or not—I have never—never—been unfaithful to any man while we were still officially together.’
‘You came pretty close to it a moment ago. I’d say your second thoughts came just that bit too late to leave you totally innocent of all charges. Or are you trying to claim that I forced you?’
‘I wouldn’t dare.’
Morgan nodded his grim satisfaction.
‘At least you have the honesty to admit to the truth. I’ve never forced a woman in my life.’
‘Of course not!’
It was impossible to hide her pain, though she tried to mask it behind a show of scorn that she hoped was convincing.
‘I suppose you believe you’re so totally irresistible that no woman can resist you!’
Images she didn’t want to face were filling her mind. Images of a string of newspaper reports that she had seen in the time they had been apart.
‘But then of course you have the evidence of all those starlets and models to support you. Who was it last month, Morgan? Kitty Spencer? And the month before that? Macy Renton?’
A dangerous scowl creased Morgan’s straight black brows and he pulled the sides of his gaping shirt together, fastening it swiftly with brusque, aggressive movements that spoke eloquently of the feelings he was holding back.
‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the papers,’ he snarled.
‘Oh, so nothing of what was reported is true?’ Her eyebrows shot up in cynical query and scepticism dripped from her voice.
The scowl darkened, his strong jaw tightening aggressively.
‘Not nothing,’ he snarled.
He wasn’t proud of the way he’d behaved during the first month or so after Ellie had left him. Wasn’t proud of the lengths he’d gone to to fill the emptiness she’d left behind, the women with whom he’d tried to forget her. He’d tried to go back to the sort of life he’d lived before Ellie only to find that he had moved further away from it than he’d ever dreamed.
None of it had worked. All that had happened was that he’d managed a few hours of oblivion, but the morning had always come. He’d always had to face reality again, and reality had meant the dreadful irony of knowing that now he’d been free to do whatever he wanted with his future—but that freedom and that future had meant nothing without this one woman. A woman who had turned his life upside down, changed his perspective on everything, and then walked out, leaving behind an empty hole he’d found impossible to fill.
‘But at least any women I had a relationship with were free to be with me. They weren’t committed to anyone else, emotionally or otherwise.’
He was pushing his shirt into the waistband of his jeans as he spoke, the brisk efficiency of his movements as he fastened the zip, buckled his belt, expressing forcefully the distance that had now come between them.
‘Unlike you and your precious Pete. So what is it, my angel? Are you and your headmaster a couple or not? Or is your new man not the lover you thought he was?’
‘How dare you?’ Ellie threw the words into his cold face, amber eyes burning gold with fury. ‘Pete has been very kind to me.’
‘Oh, yes, and we both know how “kind” he’s been. But perhaps that’s the problem. Perhaps you don’t want “kind” any more. Perhaps it doesn’t satisfy you, and you’re looking for something a little different—something more exciting?’
‘Well, if I was, then it wouldn’t be with you!’
‘No?’
Sceptical ice-blue eyes went to the bed, drifted over to the suitcase he had kicked aside so violently, and then came back to her flushed and indignant face.
‘No?’ he questioned again on a new and very different note, one eyebrow drifting upwards in cynical query.
‘Excitement wasn’t the word for that!’ Ellie injected every ounce of contempt she could manage into her tone. ‘It was more like a form of masochism—an exorcism of any lingering delusions I might have had about you.’
‘Believe me, angel,’ Morgan drawled with silky menace, ‘the feeling is entirely mutual. Like I said, I very nearly made the biggest mistake of my life.’
And he’d been hers, Ellie reflected bitterly. The worst mistake she had ever made in her life had been allowing herself to love him. Not that there had been any choice in the matter. She had been out of her depth almost from the very first moment she had met him. And nothing that had happened had done anything to change that.
‘So at least we both know exactly where we stand,’ she stated, somehow managing to make herself sound every bit as cold and uninvolved as he had done. All she wanted now was to get away from here as quickly and quietly as she possibly could. ‘Would you mind passing me my blouse? I’d like to get dressed.’
Morgan stooped, picked up the discarded shirt and tossed it disdainfully in her direction. Ellie just caught it and, pointedly ignoring his hard-eyed stare, turned her back to pull it on. The brush of the soft cotton over her sensitised skin, the still-aching peaks of her breasts, was a new form of torture, but she gritted her teeth and ignored it, fastening the buttons with determined movements.
Clothed, at least she felt better, even if the shirt was dreadfully crumpled and must look like nothing more than a rag. Her hands awkward and unsteady, she tried to smooth down the tousled strands of her hair, knowing that her attempts were having very little effect at all as she swung round to face Morgan again.
He hadn’t moved. He was still standing just feet away, tall and dark and devastating to her peace of mind, long hands resting loosely on the leather belt around his narrow waist, blue eyes hooded and watchful.
Ellie forced the polite, meaningless smile she used for really difficult customers, all lips and teeth, flashed on and off again, with nothing in the eyes at all.
‘Well, I don’t think there is anything more we need to discuss, so I’ll leave you to settle in.’
He waited until she reached the bedroom door, until she was thinking thankfully of escape, of finally getting away and hiding somewhere, licking her wounds in peace.
‘And you’ll be back—when?’ he enquired sardonically.
Never—if she had a choice.
‘Back?’
‘The “extra services”,’ Morgan reminded her harshly. ‘Cleaning—meals…’
‘Under the circumstances, I really think that you’d prefer it if Dee did your housekeeping after all.’
‘No way.’ It was a flat, emotionless statement but one that made it plain he had no intention of yielding or offering any concession on the point at all. ‘I don’t want this Dee, or your grandmother, or anyone else at all. I want you.’
‘But why? Why me?’
Why? Morgan asked himself the same question even as he phrased the words, ‘I want you’, not quite sure he had actually heard himself speak them.
Why when she had made it plain that she hated him, that she wanted nothing more to do with him, was he still so determined to play the only cards he had left in order to keep her near him? Why the hell did he want an unwilling, hostile, spitting alley cat coming to the house every day to perform tasks that she clearly resented with every cell in her body?
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Kate Walker
Why had Ellie left him? Morgan didn't know.It was obvious she'd still been blissfully in love with him. She'd even agreed with his edict that they never have children.Then Ellie had disappeared.When Morgan found her to his absolute shock, she had with her the most adorable baby girl that he'd ever seen. His heart twisted inside him.Had Ellie found another man to give her what he never could, or was this baby Morgan's very own miracle?
“How old is she?” Morgan asked Ellie
“She’s eight months.”
“Gah!”
Rosie shrieked at the top of her voice and flung her rattle straight at Morgan. He held it out to her again. Two pairs of sapphire eyes locked for endless seconds, the baby’s holding a mixture of curiosity and suspicion, Morgan’s impossible to read, before a plump hand reached out and snatched the rattle back.
“And gah to you, too,” Morgan returned with a flicker of amusement.
Ellie turned away to hide the hot, betraying tears that stung her eyes. Morgan’s tiny smile had shattered her composure.
Would that smile still be there if he knew the truth?
“She’s a pretty little thing,” Morgan said. “I assume that she takes after her father?”
in
Harlequin Presents
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A Secret Vengeance
Harlequin Presents #2236
His Miracle Baby
Kate Walker
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
IT WAS the moment Ellie had been dreading most. The worst moment in a day she had been anticipating with a sense of something close to horror for almost a month now.
No, that wasn’t strictly true. The actual fact was that she had feared this moment for around a year and a half. Ever since she had left Morgan and fled here to Cornwall, she had had the worry at the back of her mind that one day he might come back into her life.
And that day was now. The thought was enough to still her footsteps, bring her to a stumbling halt, a thousand frantic butterflies fluttering wildly inside her stomach as she stared at the short stretch of path that led away from her, towards the cottage.
‘I can’t! I can’t do it.’
Morgan was just around that corner. And he was waiting for her to appear. Though of course he didn’t actually know it was Ellie he was waiting for. And the thought of his probable reaction lifted all the tiny hairs on her skin in a shivering reaction to the panic that clenched all her nerves tight.
‘Come on, Eleanor,’ she reproached herself. ‘What can he do to you?’
He didn’t have to do anything, that was the trouble. Morgan could mess up her life, her mind, her heart, simply by existing, and, no matter how she tried, nothing would change that.
No!
Pushing a hand through the golden blonde length of her hair, she squared her slim shoulders resolutely.
‘Get a move on…’
Once more she addressed herself out loud. It was the only way to drown out the endless chattering of the inner voice of fear and unhappiness.
‘Just go!’
Somehow the command gave her the impetus to move, one step following the other, her determination growing, adding force, speed to her movements until at last she swung round the corner in a rush.
The sleek, powerful Alfa Romeo parked incongruously on the unmade road outside the small cottage told its own story. If she had been in any possible doubt, had harboured any weak, faint hope that the Morgan Stafford who had arranged for a six-month rental could possibly be someone other than the man she dreaded seeing, then that, and the sight of the tall, dark figure standing beside it, immediately disabused her.
She had forgotten just how big he was. Big and powerful, with a whipcord strength that made her mouth dry just to think of it. In well-worn jeans, tight as a second skin, and an equally elderly, faded, soft denim shirt that clung lovingly to the strong lines of his shoulders and arms, he wouldn’t have been taken by anyone for the latest star in the literary firmament and a strong contender for an Oscar for the screenplay of his award-winning thriller.
He was leaning against the rough stone wall of the cottage, long legs crossed at the ankles, arms folded across his powerful chest in a gesture of controlled impatience. But as she approached, more slowly now, he straightened up, somehow managing to convey a sense of disapproval with every movement as he glanced pointedly at his watch.
‘You’re late!’ were the first words she had heard from him in what seemed like a lifetime.
Morgan saw Ellie coming down the path towards him and felt his insides clench in instant response to just the sight of her.
She hadn’t changed. The afternoon sun glinted on the golden length of her hair, warming the peach softness of her skin to an enticing glow. Her tall, shapely body was enhanced by the neat red skirt that clung to the curve of her hips, the crisp white shirt, open at the neck to give a provocative glimpse of the slender neck that had always delighted him in the past.
She was still the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. The woman who had haunted his dreams by night, tormenting him with a thousand potently erotic images, so that he woke with his heart and head pounding, his body slick with sweat, and the ache of need clawing at him like a pain.
He had to say something. But what did you say to the woman who had, metaphorically at least, kicked you in the guts before walking out of the life you shared without a backward glance?
The life he had thought they’d shared.
The small correction altered his mood at once. The nostalgic feeling vanished as anger rushed over it, dark and thick and hot.
‘You’re late!’
That brought her head up sharp as he had known it would. The neat chin lifted determinedly, stunning amber eyes flashing gold behind their lush shield of long, thick lashes—impossibly dark for someone with her colouring. This was the way she’d looked the first moment he’d seen her. She’d knocked him for six then and if he didn’t get a grip on himself she’d do it again.
‘I’m late? I think not! If anything, you are early. We said three o’clock and it’s…it’s…’
Words failed Ellie as she stared at her watch in stunned confusion. Of all the times for the battery to die, it had to go and do it now!
‘It’s very nearly half past,’ Morgan supplied for her as she glared at the offending watch, shaking her wrist roughly in a vain attempt to get it started again. ‘I see your time-keeping hasn’t got any better over the past eighteen months.’
He had come closer as he’d spoken, moving between her and the sun so that his long body cast a shadow over her as she concentrated fiercely on the unmoving second hand on her watch.
Don’t look at him! Don’t look! she told herself fiercely. Don’t even risk it until you’re more under control!
Every inch of skin on her body felt as if it were afflicted by prickling pins and needles, and with the once dearly familiar scent of his body tantalising her nostrils she had to struggle to hide her instinctive response. Electricity sizzled along her nerves, making her heart beat a crazy, uneven tattoo. If she looked into his face she would be lost for ever.
And so in spite of her hunger, the aching need to see just once more the features of the man who had taken total possession of her heart and never let it go, she kept her gaze stubbornly averted, watching him only out of the corners of her eyes.
‘But if you will insist on wearing that decrepit old thing, then I suppose you can’t expect it to be accurate.’
‘I happen to like this watch!’ Ellie retorted defensively. It was also the only one she could afford, but she wasn’t going to admit that to him. ‘And living and working on a farm, I wouldn’t have much use for anything more expensive.’
‘True,’ Morgan conceded. ‘Though I have to admit that a farm in rural Cornwall was really the last place I ever expected to find you.’
‘I…’
Her resolution failed her as surprise forced her gaze upwards, to focus on the hard-boned face, all her fears realised as she felt the thudding shock to her system.
Dear heaven, but he looked good! So stunningly, devastatingly good.
After all those months of abstinence, the hunger that swamped her was like a raging tide, sweeping everything before it and threatening to throw her thought processes into total chaos.
‘Expected to find…? Y-you knew!’ she forced herself to stammer. ‘You were expecting me all the time. So the story that you were here to do research was pure make-believe.’
It made her blood run cold in horror at the idea.
‘Not completely,’ Morgan returned imperturbably. ‘I do have research to do for my next book. And I’ve tried hotels but I just can’t work in them. So renting a place to live in seemed the next best idea.’
‘But you could rent anywhere you like—there are many more houses, all much bigger and better than this cottage! You could easily afford any one of them—you could even buy one of them if you wanted to! Why did you have to come here?’
‘This place suits me. I don’t need space—somewhere to eat, sleep and work is all I want. But to work I need quiet and…’
His narrow-eyed glance took in the wooded surroundings, the rutted path that led to the cottage, the distant view of the sea.
‘They really don’t come much quieter than this.’
His half smile challenged her to make more of it than that. But there was more to make of it, Ellie could have no doubt. Too late, she recognised the clues that her tension had made her miss the first time.
There had been his total lack of surprise at her appearance. His total lack of anything, just that cold, hard, assessing stare that had been fixed on her as she’d walked the last few yards. He had not been expecting just anyone. He had known very well who would come to hand over the key, show him round the cottage. He had been expecting her, and her alone.
And that begged the question—why?
‘Just what are you doing here, Morgan?’
She had forgotten just how blue his eyes were until now when, up close, she found herself seared by their sapphire blaze, her own angry glare caught and held transfixed, unable to look away.
‘Perhaps I came to look up an old friend.’
‘Friend!’ she scorned the word cynically. ‘We were never friends. Things moved so fast at the start that we never had time for friendship. And you were certainly not in the least bit friendly when you told me to go—to get out of your life and stay out of it for good.’
‘I didn’t feel friendly,’ Morgan growled savagely, a black scowl darkening his face. ‘I couldn’t wait to see the back of you.’
‘A fact which you made perfectly plain.’ Remembered pain roughened the edge of her voice.
‘Well, what did you expect? After all, you’d just told me that you’d been seeing someone else.’
She hadn’t actually told him that. It had been a conclusion he had jumped to, and in order to protect herself she had let him think it. By that point she had been too worn down, too miserable to fight him any more.
‘Which brings us back to my question. Precisely why are you here?’
This time his smile was icy, fiendish, tinged with a danger that set her teeth on edge.
‘Perhaps I’m planning an old lovers’ reunion.’
That smile did terrible things to what little was left of Ellie’s composure.
‘Well, you can forget that idea straight away!’ she flung at him. ‘I’m not interested in a reunion or any such thing. The only thing I am to you is an ex-lover, with the emphasis very definitely on the ex, and that’s the way I intend it to stay. If I could have done, I would have sent someone else here in my place today, but just because I’m here doesn’t mean you can interpret it to your advantage!’
The look he turned on her was dark with contempt, searing over her skin like lightning.
‘Might I suggest that you wait until you’re invited, my dear Ms Thornton?’ he tossed at her in a voice so laden with acid that it seemed to strip a protective layer from her skin, leaving her even more vulnerable than before.
Her certainty that Morgan had some private, hidden agenda was growing by the second. And that being so, she knew that this could never work. She could never cope with him living in the cottage, with waking up every morning knowing that he was here, living in fear of a meeting every single day.
Studiously ignoring his interjection she snatched at a half-formed idea as it presented itself.
‘Well, I’m sorry, but I’m afraid there’s a slight problem…’
‘A problem? What sort of a problem?’
‘The—the cottage… It’s double booked. Someone else has the tenancy for the next…’
Her voice deserted her as she saw the way his beautiful mouth thinned in anger, his adamant shake of his dark head rejecting her desperate bluff even before she’d managed to express it.
‘Then “someone else” will have to find somewhere else to stay.’
‘But they can’t! They…’
‘Don’t fight me on this, Ellie,’ Morgan warned. ‘You won’t like the consequences if you do. The tenancy is mine—signed and paid for—and with a cheque that was cleared even before I set off from London. So if you have any ideas of backing out, I warn you that you will find things very uncomfortable. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Crystal.’
What else could she say? He didn’t have to put his threat into words. She could read it in the cold brilliance of his eyes, the ruthless determination that set his strong jaw hard against any hope of appeal.
And she couldn’t risk that threat being made real. Money was desperately tight on the farm, and the idea of setting up the holiday cottages to bring in some much-needed income was a new one. It had taken a huge investment to bring the old buildings up to scratch. That was why Henry had been so delighted when he’d taken Morgan’s near end of season booking.
‘No—I’m sure it can be sorted out. We’ll find a way round…’
‘We?’ Morgan demanded sharply. ‘I spoke to a Mr Knightley on the phone.’
‘Henry.’ Ellie nodded, her expression warming slightly. ‘He owns the farm.’
And Henry knew nothing about her own former relationship with Morgan. So of course he had seen no reason at all to hesitate when Morgan had rung up asking about the tenancy of Meadow Cottage.
‘He’s married to Nan—to my grandmother.’
Just for a moment the stiff mask slipped from his face, revealing a look of genuine astonishment.
‘Marion?’
It would be a shock, Ellie reflected, a touch of amusement breaking through the tension that held her slim body taut and stiff. The last time he had seen her grandmother had been almost two years ago when she had been the widowed Mrs Thornton. Even her own family had been stunned by the whirlwind romance that had ensued from Marion’s meeting with Henry Knightley.
‘She married again in November last year. Just after…’
Frantically she caught the words up, terrified at what she had been about to reveal.
‘Just two months after she met Henry,’ she amended awkwardly, painfully conscious of everything she was holding back.
By mentioning Henry Knightley, she had moved the conversation onto very dangerous ground. Morgan might know nothing about Henry, other than the phone conversation he’d had with the older man, but Henry’s grandson was a totally different matter. Pete Bedford was the man Morgan believed that she had left him for. The man she had allowed Morgan to think was her new lover in order to cover up the truth.
‘So is that how you came to be here? You came with Marion?’
‘No, I was here first. I was helping Henry out and Nan came to visit. She met Henry and the rest is history.’
The same could have been said about herself and Morgan, she reflected miserably. Their relationship had followed much of the same heady pattern.
They had met, fallen head over heels for each other, become lovers, and moved in together in exactly the same time span as her grandmother and Henry. But the major difference was that at no point at all had Morgan shown any inclination to want to make any other commitment to her. Marriage, and all that went along with it, had very definitely not been in his plans for the future.
She had been prepared to put up with that. Loving him so desperately, she hadn’t asked for more than he’d been willing to give. She had lived with him, shared his life, his bed, and at first that had been enough.
But then things had changed, forcing her into a decision that had torn her heart in two.
‘Well, if you’re stopping, you’ll need these…’
Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out a bunch of keys and waved them, letting the ring that held them dangle from one finger. The faint jingling noise they made added a welcome note of carelessness, one she tried to match as she went on, ‘I think you’ll find Meadow Cottage very comfortable. I hope you enjoy your stay.’
There, now she’d done her duty—more than her duty! She’d met Morgan as arranged, faced him, spoken to him, and by doing so she’d also confronted her own private demons.
And she’d survived.
If she could just get out now, then she might be able to hold herself together. If she went home…
Home…
A sudden wave of devastating longing swept over her. The need to see Rosie, to hold her daughter’s small, warm body close, to inhale the sweet baby scent of her, to hear her soft breathing, was so powerful that it almost overwhelmed her.
It was because of Rosie that she had had to leave Morgan in the first place, something that had come close to destroying her but which had seemed the only way out. Faced with a choice that had been no choice at all, she had been torn between the two people that she loved most in all the world. And she had had to choose Rosie.
Rosie was her world now, all that she had left after losing her relationship with Morgan and the future she had dreamed of. But if Morgan ever found out the truth, then that world was likely to come crashing down round her ears, and she couldn’t even begin to imagine what her future would be after that.
CHAPTER TWO
‘MR STAFFORD will you please take the keys?’
He’d waited just too long for Ellie’s peace of mind. His silence and the way he was watching her, blue eyes slightly narrowed against the sun, made her feel desperately uneasy, the tangled mass of knots in her stomach tightening with every uneven heartbeat.
‘The keys…’ she repeated with as much emphasis as she dared. ‘I have to be going.’
‘No.’
It came so softly, almost thrown away, that for a moment or two she wasn’t at all sure she had heard him right and frowned her confusion.
‘What…?’ Bewildered she looked up at him, golden eyes wide in shock and confusion. ‘Mr Stafford—I…’
Did she know what it did to him when she looked at him like that? Morgan wondered. Did she know how it twisted deep inside him to see those amazing eyes burn with rejection where once he had seen them burn with love for him—or with what he had believed was love? Did she know how it felt to see her so anxious to leave when in the past it had seemed that she couldn’t have enough of him? Couldn’t protest her love for him often enough.
Or had all that been a pretence too?
‘The name is Morgan,’ he declared with cold precision. ‘And you go when I say you can—not before.’
That brought a flare of defiance into her flashing gaze.
‘But I have to go!’
‘No.’
Dammit, it had taken months to get to his moment. Had he spent so long looking for her only to have her turn and run at the very first meeting? She was as edgy as a cat on hot bricks, and it wasn’t just as a result of seeing him again. She was hiding something and he was determined to find out what.
‘I only want what I’m entitled to.’
‘Entitled?’
The need to see Rosie was uppermost in her mind, making it impossible to think straight. She knew that her daughter was safe and well cared for with Marion who doted on her first great-grandchild, but it wasn’t for Rosie’s sake that she wanted to be with her. It was for her own.
One look at her baby daughter would remind her why she was in the hateful position of lying to the man she had loved.
Morgan’s slow smile mocked her tense question, the spark of uncertainty in her eyes.
‘The contract said that I would be met, given the keys—and shown round the property.’
‘Shown round! Oh, come on! I mean, look at it…’
The gesture of her hand to indicate the cottage beside them was wilder than she would have liked, betraying too much of how easily he had rattled her. Get a grip! she warned herself inwardly. Morgan in this mood was like some watchful predator. Show a moment of weakness and he would pounce.
‘You don’t need to be shown anything—you could walk round the entire place in two minutes flat.’
‘Nevertheless I expect you to fulfil the agreement. Come on, Ellie,’ he cajoled, his voice deepening, softening, his smile an enticement in itself. ‘Indulge me in this.’
For a brief second Ellie actually had to close her eyes against the appeal of his voice that curled around her senses like a plume of warm smoke, soft as a caress. She had never been able to resist him when he’d switched on the charm like this, and to her horror she found that she still couldn’t.
‘Very well, then…’
Reaching back into her past, she dragged out from some hidden corner the image of the woman she had once been. The Eleanor Thornton who had been second in command of a large, profitable secretarial agency. The Eleanor Thornton that Morgan had first met.
Adopting a tone of voice that was all control, all businesslike and nothing more, she even managed to flash a swift and obviously insincere smile into his watchful face.
‘If you’ll just come this way, I’ll show you where everything is. And perhaps you’d like to know a little bit about the area too.’
This was better; she was in the swing of things now. After all, she had done this many times before. Meadow Cottage had been occupied almost every week since Easter, and Ellie had usually been the one to greet the new tenants.
‘Watch the floor here,’ she said when, after unlocking the door, she made her way into the narrow hall. ‘It’s a little uneven. As you will have seen in the brochure, Meadow Cottage was formerly one of the farm’s cowsheds, and these stone flags formed part of the original flooring.’
Her voice was perfectly steady as she went into the well-worn patter she had used so often before, but her control over the rest of her body wasn’t quite so complete. When a struggle with the slightly stiff door brought him to her side to help her, the brush of his tall, strong body against her own in the constricted, confined space sent her senses into overdrive.
He still wore the same aftershave that had been a favourite when they had been together; one that she had bought for him for the only Christmas and birthday they had shared. Just the scent of it was like an instant shot of memory, jolting her back in time to those gentler, happier days.
But underneath the evocative cologne was the subtler, more intensely personal scent of his body that stabbed straight to her heart as it stirred up the waters of the past, bringing to the surface the bitter-sweet recollection of how it had felt to lie in bed with him, her head pillowed on the strength of his shoulder, breathing in the clean, musky scent of his skin.
At once all her familiar spiel deserted her. Her head was buzzing, her senses stirring in a disturbingly primitive way. For a moment the memories that gripped her were so powerful, so real that her eyes burned with bitter tears and she had to blink furiously to drive them back.
‘The kitchen…’ was all she could manage, gritting her teeth against the sting of irony in his murmured, ‘Obviously.’
From then onwards all she wanted to do was to get the job done as quickly as possible. Not giving him time to look around, she marched him to the next door, opening it briefly.
‘The sitting room… The second bedroom is up there…’
A wave of her hand indicated the small gallery above the sitting room where a neat bedroom nestled under the eaves.
‘The bathroom is down here… And the main bedroom directly opposite. You can get milk and eggs from the farm—everything else from the store in the village, and they’ll cash a cheque for you in an emergency. I’m afraid there isn’t a bank anywhere nearer than St Austell. We provide fresh linen and towels on Mondays.’
There, she was done! Surely now he had to let her go.
‘Is there anything else?’
‘Just a couple of things. But why don’t we discuss them over coffee?’
‘No, thanks,’ Ellie managed through teeth gritted against the urge to scream in frustration. ‘I have other things to do.’
‘And I have things I want to discuss.’
Blatantly ignoring her protest, he turned and headed back down the white-walled corridor to the kitchen, leaving her with no option but to follow him.
‘Morgan, I don’t have time for coffee. I have to work…’
The need for her daughter was like an ache in her heart, a hunger that no food could possibly assuage.
‘Work?’
The look he directed at her burned with frank scepticism.
‘You working on a farm—that’s not at all what I’d have expected from the elegant Ms Thornton.’
‘I told you, I’m not the same person any more. I’ve changed a lot in the past eighteen months.’
‘So I see.’
His tone was a slow drawl and those brilliant eyes swept over her in a deliberately insolent assessment. She couldn’t miss the way that sapphire gaze lingered around the fullness of her breasts, the curves of her hips in the close-fitting skirt.
As a result of her pregnancy she had filled out noticeably, so that her shape was definitely more womanly when contrasted with her slenderness when they had been together. And Morgan, who had known her body with the intimacy of a lover, couldn’t be unaware of those changes either.
‘So I see,’ he repeated, and there was no mistaking the disturbingly sensual note on the words.
She knew that purring tone of voice. Knew only too well what it implied. She had heard it often enough when they had lived together. Then it had made her heart leap in anticipation, had set her body tingling in uncontrolled response. Just to hear her name spoken in that huskily appreciative way had been like a subtle form of foreplay, telling her instantly what was in his mind, and triggering off the same heated longings in her own.
But hearing it now shocked her rigid. Foolishly, naively perhaps, she had expected that the feelings Morgan had once had for her, every type of feeling, would have died, starved into non-existence by eighteen months of lack of nourishment. But there was no mistaking the heated desire that now flared in the brilliance of his eyes, the instant response that made his pupils so huge and dark.
‘Country life obviously suits you. You’re looking really well.’
‘I’m happy here.’
She had learned how to be happy but it hadn’t come easily to her. At first she had felt as if half of her soul had been cut away and it had only been the need to care for the baby growing in her womb that had kept her going.
‘So why don’t you make that coffee while I unload the car and then you can tell me all about it?’
Ellie’s breath hissed in through her teeth in a sound of exasperation.
‘Morgan, what part of what I said did you not understand? I don’t have time for this…’
But she was speaking to empty air. Morgan had already opened the door and gone out to the car. When she hurried after him it was to find that he’d opened the boot and was pulling a case from it.
‘Why won’t you listen to me? I can’t stay! Nan’s expecting me—she’ll be wondering where I am.’
‘I never thought of Marion as a slave-driver.’
He was coming back to the door again now, a suitcase in either hand so that Ellie had to flatten herself against the wall to let him past.
‘And I’m sure she’ll understand that you and I will need to spend a little time getting reacquainted.’
‘We’re not going to get reacquainted or re anything.’
Her words would have more emphasis if she didn’t have to keep trotting after him, forcing her shorter legs to keep up with the long, swift strides that took him through the cottage and into the ground-floor bedroom in the space of a few seconds.
‘I told you—the only reason I’m here is because you’re a guest and it’s part of my duties to make sure you’re settled in.’
‘And to arrange the other services you’ll provide,’ Morgan returned sharply, dumping the cases on the floor and heading back to the car again.
‘Services?’
It was a squawk of panic, both at the thought of just what he might have in mind and because he had come to an abrupt halt, whirling round to face her so that she had to screech to a stop herself, narrowly avoiding slamming straight into his chest.
‘I was given to understand by Mr Knightley that you provided a cleaning service.’
‘Well, yes…yes, we do. But surely—’
‘And some meals?’
‘Yes—for long-stay guests we can provide an evening meal…’
Too late she saw just where his thoughts were heading.
‘Oh, no! No way! I’m not—’
‘But it’s in the contract.’
Anyone else might only have heard the gentle reminder in his comment but, knowing Morgan as she did, Ellie was hypersensitive to the ominous undertone that threaded darkly through the words.
‘I know it’s in the contract, but surely now you can’t expect us to keep to it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well—isn’t it obvious? I mean, you won’t want me round the house every day.’
‘Won’t I?’ Morgan’s expression gave nothing away. ‘As a matter of fact I think it could work very well. You know my ways—know not to move papers, the crazy hours I work, the food I like. You’d be less likely to disturb me than a stranger.’
‘But Dee—the housekeeper—she usually…’
Her voice failed her as she saw the adamant shake of his dark head.
‘Not Dee,’ he stated in a voice that brooked no further argument. ‘I want you, angel. You and no one else.’
‘I won’t do it.’
For one thing she couldn’t be away from Rosie that long—and she certainly didn’t plan on bringing her little daughter along to the cottage with her. And for another, she already felt emotionally mangled after barely half an hour in Morgan’s presence. There was no way she could cope with the prospect of seeing him for long periods of time, day after day.
‘You’ll have to find someone else.’
‘I don’t want anyone else.’
The blue eyes were like shards of ice, hard and implacable. Past experience told her that arguing with Morgan at times like this was like banging her head hard against a brick wall; that she was only hurting herself by continuing, but she couldn’t give in.
‘What is this? Some sort of power game? A way of getting back at me for leaving you? Do you get some sort of perverse pleasure out of the prospect of seeing me skivvying for you?’
‘Is the idea of doing a few hours’ simple housework so humiliating?’ Morgan shot back at her.
Not for anyone else. But working for Morgan—working with Morgan was quite a different prospect. Where he was concerned nothing was ‘simple’ at all.
‘I don’t find it in the least humiliating—normally! Actually, I quite enjoy it. And as a matter of fact, the additional services were my idea. I suggested we put them…’
‘In the contract,’ Morgan finished for her with grim satisfaction when, seeing how her foolish outburst had trapped her, she let the sentence trail off weakly. ‘Believe me, Ellie, I intend to keep you to every letter of every word of that agreement. There’s no way I’m going to let you run out on this.’
He didn’t add the words ‘as you did before’, but they were there at the back of what he was saying, implied by his scathing tone and the black, burning look that seared over her skin.
‘I didn’t “run out”!’ she protested. ‘I explained.’
‘Oh, yeah.’
The harshness of his tone slashed into her heart like a savage sword.
‘You said that things had changed. You “didn’t feel the same way any more”.’
Hearing the words flung at her so brutally, Ellie could only wince inwardly at the realisation of how inadequate they sounded.
But she couldn’t possibly have told the truth. And even to protect her unborn child she couldn’t have told Morgan that she no longer loved him.
‘Well, my feelings had changed—I’d changed!’
Changed in the most fundamental way it was possible for a woman to do so. She had become pregnant and, knowing how he would react to that one basic fact, she had seen leaving him as the only course open to her.
‘You certainly had.’
Morgan leaned back against the wall, arms folded across the width of his chest, eyeing her with bleak cynicism.
‘If I’d been a betting man, angel, I’d have put money on the fact that we had something special…’
‘Well, you’d have been wrong.’
He would never know how much it cost her to say those words. Because she too had thought they had had ‘something special’ and she had dreamed of it staying that way. Of it growing and flowering into the sort of relationship you could build a lifetime upon. She had even let herself dream of marriage, maybe, one day.
But there had been one small flaw in the perfection of her love. Morgan didn’t want children. He had been absolutely emphatic on that matter right from the start. Had warned her that if she hadn’t been able to cope with the idea then he’d been prepared to break it off now, before either of them had got in too deep.
But Ellie had already been in too deep. She had told herself she could manage—that Morgan himself was enough for her. And he had been enough—until the day she had realised that an accident had happened and that in spite of her precautions she was going to have a baby.
Ellie came back into the present with a jolt, and, looking deep into those inimical blue eyes, she shivered involuntarily, fearful of the cold antipathy she could see in their depths.
‘Nothing stays the same for ever,’ she managed, ruthlessly suppressing her voice’s tendency to wobble revealingly.
‘Nothing stays the same…’ Morgan echoed viciously. ‘How true. Nothing—not even the protestations of undying love, the vows of eternal faithfulness, the declarations that you had never felt this way before, would never feel it again. How long did it last, my angel? Ten months? A year?’
‘Oh, stop it!’
Ellie longed to lift her hands and clap them over her ears, anything to drown out the brutal litany of scorn he was subjecting her to.
‘I never thought—I… I’m sorry…’ she finished miserably, knowing she had to say it, even though it was hopelessly inadequate and far, far too late. ‘I’m really sorry. If I could say anything—’
‘No!’ Morgan cut in harshly. ‘Don’t! Don’t say anything—and don’t say that you’re sorry—because I’m not! I was angry when you left—true. I was even a little hurt at the thought that you could discard me so easily, move on to someone else. But when I calmed down and started thinking rationally again, I realised that in fact you’d done me one hell of a favour.’
‘A favour?’
‘Yeah, a favour. I was close to making the biggest mistake of my life with you.’
He shook his head as if in despair at his own foolishness.
‘Something I would have regretted for as long as I lived. But by leaving when you did, you saved me from that. Really, instead of reproaching you, I reckon I should thank you.’
‘Don’t bother!’ Ellie snapped, unable to take any more.
For the first time she admitted to herself that she had come here with a tiny thread of a weak, foolish hope in her heart. Hopes of a reconciliation, of finding that Morgan, too, had suffered from their time apart, and so might be prepared to rethink his feeling about children. But his comments had not only taken that pathetic hope away from her, they had crushed it into tiny, irreparable pieces, impossible ever to put together again.
‘Well, at least you won’t expect me to stay after—’
‘Oh, but I do,’ Morgan cut in sharply. ‘In fact, now I want that coffee more than ever.’
‘Well, you can just go on wanting! I’m finished here, I—’
‘But I haven’t finished with you,’ Morgan came back at her with deadly quietness. ‘There are things we still have to talk about.’
He pushed himself away from the wall, straightening up lazily.
‘Make the coffee, Ellie,’ he said and it was a command, not a request.
CHAPTER THREE
FOR a moment Morgan thought he’d lost her.
He knew that look of old. The set jaw, the compressed mouth, the mutinous glare that declared only too clearly that Ellie was having none of whatever she thought he was suggesting.
This was Ellie at her most stubborn, and, strangely enough, it was seeing her in this mood that reached out and stabbed him in the heart, when he least expected it to.
This was the Ellie who had most infuriated him when they’d been together. The woman who could set against something, however small, and turn it into a battle, one she had no intention of letting him win. There had never been any chance of wearing her down when she’d been like this. In fact there had only ever been one approach that had a chance of winning her round.
So he used it.
‘Please…’ he added softly, pitching his voice at a very different level.
She wasn’t going to give in that easily, it was clear. Just one swift, stunned blink of those amazing eyes showed any sort of response, making Morgan wonder exactly why he was so set on having her stay when quite clearly she would rather be anywhere but here.
But perhaps that was the whole point. Whatever was bugging her, it was pretty damn important to her. And the more she seemed determined not to let any hint of it drop, the more he wanted to know what it was.
‘Ellie…’
He pushed one long-fingered hand through his ebony hair, raking it back from his face with a sigh.
‘I’ve been driving for hours and I really could murder for a coffee.’
He did look tired, Ellie admitted to herself reluctantly. Typical Morgan. When he was working, or concentrating on anything, he forgot about minor practicalities like food or drink.
‘What are you afraid of if you stay?’ Morgan questioned softly.
‘Nothing.’ It didn’t sound at all convincing. ‘What on earth makes you think that I’m afraid?’
That was better. She might even believe herself now. But she knew only too well what she was afraid of—and with good reason. She just couldn’t bring herself to admit it.
‘Just one cup of coffee,’ she growled reluctantly, risking a swift glance at his face and immediately wishing she hadn’t as she was rewarded with the sort of wide, flashing smile that would have melted rock, never mind her weak, foolish heart.
‘You’re an angel.’
‘It will only be instant…’
Desperately she tried to claw back some of the ground she had surrendered.
‘Fine!’
He punctured her sense of triumph quickly and easily, tossing the response over his shoulder as he headed back out to the car.
Struggling to keep her mind blank, Ellie moved to fill and switch on the kettle. One cup of coffee wouldn’t take very long. She’d be on her way in no time.
At least she didn’t have to worry about Rosie. Even if the little girl had woken from her nap, she would have Nan and Dee to take care of her. She’d known both women all her short life and had had them wrapped round one small, chubby finger since the day she’d been born.
‘You couldn’t rustle up a sandwich or something as well, could you?’
Morgan dropped a cardboard box of groceries on the kitchen table beside her, startling her out of her thoughts.
‘There’s bread and cheese in there somewhere.’
‘When did you last eat?’
It wouldn’t be held back, the sense of exasperation painfully familiar.
He paused briefly to consider, then shrugged his broad shoulders.
‘Don’t know.’
He was too close, that evocative scent setting her nerves prickling again. The sun slanting in through the kitchen window gleamed on hair of ebony silk, highlighting sapphire eyes behind a fringe of outrageously thick dark lashes. Narrow hips in snug fitting denim rested casually against the side of the table, and he had rolled up his sleeves revealing tanned and muscular forearms, lightly covered in soft dark hair.
‘Didn’t want to waste time stopping. And you know what motorway services are like.’
And she knew what Morgan was like. Motorway services, with his best-sellers on display in the shops, meant the possibility of being recognised, something he avoided like the plague. Ellie bit down hard on her lip as she struggled with the twist of pain in her heart that came with yet another reminder of just how well she had once known this man.
‘But a sandwich would be very welcome…and if you could slice up some tomatoes as well…’
‘What did your last servant die of?’ Ellie flung after him, his laughter in response infuriating her further.
But she was only protesting to save face, she knew. She would do it, dammit. She would make him his coffee and his sandwich not just because she felt she had no option. She couldn’t even deceive herself with the thought that she would do the same for any new guest who had had a long journey.
She would do it because she couldn’t help herself. Because she could no longer deny herself the opportunity to do this small thing for this man who had once meant all the world to her. Sighing, she rooted in the box, pulled out bread, cheese.
It was as she was slicing into the crisp crust of the loaf that memory struck, hard and sharp, stilling her hand and holding her frozen, staring straight ahead with sightless, unfocussed eyes.
It had been—what?—over two years ago. A warm June evening, not unlike today. The night she had moved to Morgan’s London apartment following his suggestion that she come and live with him. Of course, she hadn’t hesitated. She’d been crazily out of her mind with love, her ‘Yes’ had been out of her mouth almost before he’d finished asking, and she had moved in the very next day.
Then, as now, Morgan had directed her into the kitchen, suggesting she prepare something for them to eat while he unloaded her belongings from the car.
The knife shook in Ellie’s hand, tears stinging cruelly as she recalled how he had whistled as he’d worked. How each time he had passed her he had flashed that wide, devastating smile that had turned her insides to molten liquid, and snatched a kiss or simply let his hands trail along her back, her shoulders, her hair. It was if he hadn’t been able to keep his hands off her and had had to keep reassuring himself that she’d been there.
And then, when everything had been unloaded, he had come up behind her, sliding strong, warm arms around her slim waist, resting his head on her shoulder, his breath warm against her cheek…
This had been a mistake, Morgan told himself as he slammed the now-empty boot of the car shut and turned to the last box that still lay on the back seat of the Alfa Romeo. One hell of a stupid mistake.
It was no wonder that he’d had a sense of déjà vu. No wonder that it seemed as if he’d lived through this before. It was almost an exact replay of the day that Ellie had first moved in with him.
‘Oh, hell!’
Forgetting the box for a moment, he rested his arms on the sun-warmed top of the car, his chin supported on one hand as he let the memories roll over him.
He’d never been so happy. Or so scared. Never in all his twenty-eight years had he known a feeling like it. He still couldn’t actually believe that he’d made the move, spoken the words that he’d been sure he’d never say to anyone.
Or that she had agreed.
He hadn’t known that he was going to say anything. No rational thought, no careful preparation had come into his head. One moment he’d been lying there, his heart still thudding, his skin still slick with sweat after the blazing passion of their lovemaking, the next he had turned and looked into her face and just known.
But the feeling had been still too new, too delicate, to share with anyone, even Ellie. Ellie who’d declared ‘I love you’ as easily as breathing, who’d seemed to have no fear, no doubts.
And so he’d gone for the casual approach.
‘I think, after that, saying goodnight and going home alone has definitely lost its appeal. How do you feel about making this into a—more logical arrangement?’
‘Coffee’s ready!’
Ellie’s call from the kitchen splintered his memories, bringing his head up sharply, reminding him where he was.
It was just as well he’d held back on his true feelings, he reflected cynically as he forced his mind back on to the present and, collecting the last box, headed inside once more. Ellie’s ‘love’, so carelessly given, had been just as easily taken away again. They had had perhaps eleven months before he had felt her attention drifting and barely two weeks after that she had told him she was leaving.
‘Is that the last one?’
Ellie was buttering bread, her attention fixed on what she was doing, and she glanced up casually as he came in.
‘Just dump it somewhere and come and get your coffee while it’s hot. Not that dump is the appropriate word,’ she added as her eyes focussed on what he was carrying. ‘That’s a laptop, isn’t it?’
‘The newest, state-of-the-art, portable wonder machine.’ Morgan nodded, concentrating unnecessarily hard on placing the box carefully on the sideboard while he got his thoughts back under control. ‘It does everything I want of it. If I could just get it to create plots for me as well, then it would be perfect.’
He was talking to distract himself, he knew. He should never have let himself remember what it felt like to make love to her. Never have recalled the blazing desire, the pounding of his blood in his veins, the hungry kisses and even hungrier caresses. Just to think of them made his body tighten, setting up an ache that left him fighting for control.
‘You’ve made enough sandwiches to feed an army.’ He struggled to keep the conversation light.
‘Self-defence,’ Ellie returned, concentrating fiercely on laying pieces of tomato on top of the thinly sliced cheese. ‘I know what your temper’s like when you’re hungry—it’s one thing about you that I have most definitely not missed.’
‘So there are things that you do miss?’
He couldn’t stop himself from moving closer, had to clench his hands tight in the pockets of his jeans so as to resist the temptation to touch. A shining golden strand of her hair had fallen forward over her cheek and his fingers itched to smooth it back, tangle in the rest of the silken weight.
‘Oh, yes…’
Did he have to come so close? Every nerve in her body sang with tension, tight as the strings of a harp, and the race of her heart made it a struggle to breathe.
‘I miss the tip that your office turns into when you are working. The way you are perfectly capable of forgetting about the practicalities of life and existing on nothing but endless mugs of coffee. I miss the impossible hours you work. The way you forget about appointments, social commitments, invitations…’
‘You obviously have very fond memories!’ Morgan put in wryly.
Lord, but she smelled good. A mixture of roses and sunshine and the private, sweet scent of her skin. It drew her to him as if her body were a powerful magnet and his just a powerless needle, tugged into her gentle but irresistible force field.
‘Leave me some self-respect.’
His plea was accompanied by such a ruefully pained expression that the boyish appeal of it twisted sharply in Ellie’s heart. Was it just her imagination or had he moved even closer?
‘I didn’t expect such a demolition job on my character.’
Black pepper, Ellie told herself, forcing her thoughts onto practical matters. Morgan loved black pepper on tomatoes.
Reaching for the pepper mill, she twisted the top fiercely, then stilled abruptly as the movement brought her into contact with Morgan’s right arm, the soft brush against the warmth of his skin sending a searing electric spark of response right down to her toes until they curled inside her shoes.
‘Is there anything else you miss?’
His hand snaked out and snatched up one of the ripe, moist slices of tomato speckled with spicy flecks of black pepper and he bit into it appreciatively, his teeth very white and strong.
‘Yes,’ Ellie managed in a voice that sounded rusty and raw as if it hadn’t been used for some time. ‘I miss the way you steal food when I’m preparing it and you can’t wait… Stop it!’
He’d reached for another segment of the fruit, but this time she was ready for him. This time she moved as quickly as he had, giving the back of his hand a gentle slap before closing her fingers around his wrist to still it.
And froze.
Her heart was beating high up in her throat. Her fingers were clenched over the hard bones, feeling the powerful muscles tighten suddenly, then relax again, but still holding a tension that communicated itself silently to her quivering sense. Unable to control herself, she drew in one swift, shuddering breath and let it go again on a ragged sigh.
Behind her, Morgan shifted slightly, coming so close that she could feel the warmth of his long body all the way down her back.
‘Ellie,’ he said softly, and his voice sounded as raw and husky as hers had just a moment before so that she had to close her eyes against the sharp tug of its appeal to her already heightened senses.
‘Morgan…’ She tried to protest, but either her voice failed her and he didn’t hear or he heard and deliberately ignored it, bringing his head down so that he could whisper in her ear, the heat of his breath feathering against her skin.
‘Do you know what I miss about you, angel?’
‘No…’
Even she didn’t know if she meant to encourage him to go on or quite the opposite. But whatever was in her mind, the word had no effect. Morgan didn’t even pause to listen but continued inexorably.
‘I miss the feel of your hair…’
His cheek rested against the blonde strands, soft as a caress.
‘The scent of your skin. I miss the sound of your breath, your voice, your heartbeat next to mine. I miss the softness of your flesh underneath my fingertips.’
With his free hand he traced a delicate, tantalising path along the side of her cheek and down the slender line of her throat, pausing briefly to rest on the point at the base of her neck where her pulse leapt and throbbed in heady, drumming response.
‘Morgan…’
The knife she was holding fell from Ellie’s loosened grasp to land with a clatter on the table-top and the hand that held his shifted slightly, moving from restraint to a softer embrace. The pad of her thumb moved over the heated satin of his skin, tracing out an enticing pattern that brought a murmur of response from his throat.
‘I miss the taste of you on my lips, in my mouth…’
His lips had replaced the touch of his hands, following the same path down her face, kissing her forehead, her temple, her closed eyelid, the fine line of her cheekbone. With the heat of response flooding through her, Ellie felt her whole body melt, becoming pliant as wax. With a soft murmur she let her head fall against his shoulder, releasing his hand, no longer able to keep hold of it.
Immediately his newly free arm came round her, fastening about her waist and pulling her tight against him. She welcomed the support of his strength, knowing that her own had deserted her, that she was incapable of holding herself upright.
‘The feel of your breasts in my hands…’
Suiting actions to the words, he slid his hands upward, cupping her breasts in the heat of his palms, his thumbs stroking over the hardening points of her nipples. Against her back, she could feel the potent evidence of his desire, hot and swollen and forceful, and the memories it roused in her made her senses swim.
His fingers were busy with the buttons on her blouse now, easing them swiftly and efficiently from their fastenings, letting the soft white cotton ease apart. One hand slipped inside the white lacy cup of the bra underneath, drawing a shuddering sigh of response as she felt its caress against the smooth slope of her breast.
‘Morgan!’
It was a choking cry of delight, of appeal, of surrender all in one, and she whirled round in the confining hold of his arms and crushed the aching tips of her breasts against his chest. Her arms went up around his neck, her fingers lacing in the darkness of his hair, and she drew his head down urgently to hers.
His kiss felt like coming home. Hard and demanding, it pressed her lips open to the hungry invasion of his tongue, his hands twisting in her hair, fingers clenching around her skull, bringing her even closer to him.
Heavy waves of desire rolled over her, hot and thick and hungry, swamping her mind and driving away almost all coherent thought. All coherent thought but one. Because now the word that she had dodged away from, the word she had feared, had been unable to face since she had known she would have to see him again, was the only thing that was clear inside her thoughts. Over and over it repeated, again and again, swirling round the inside of her skull like a litany of need.
Love. That was the word she had been avoiding; the word she couldn’t bring herself to consider. It meant too much, hurt too much, laid her open to too much danger.
But now she knew she couldn’t avoid it any longer. She still loved Morgan, always had loved him, would always love him. That was the cruellest irony of their situation. She had been forced into making him believe that she no longer loved him, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. She loved this man more than all the world, and only the love of one other human being, her child, could ever have forced her from his side.
But now Morgan was back. His arms were round her, his lips on hers. She could see the passion in his darkened eyes, the flare of colour on the carved cheekbones, and she knew there was no way she could deny herself this. Her hands shook with the pent-up need of long months apart, making her fumble with buttons on his shirt in her haste to touch him. Really touch him. To feel the heat and smoothness of his skin under her urgent fingertips.
‘Easy, angel…’ Morgan murmured, his voice thickened by a matching desire, but she shook her head frantically, too overwhelmed, too lost in sensation to heed.
At last she reached her goal, smoothing her palms over the warm flesh, the springing dark hairs with a deep sigh of satisfaction. She wanted to touch him everywhere, couldn’t get enough of him.
‘Morgan…Morgan…’
She muttered his name restlessly, feverishly, the two syllables the only sound her mouth could form in between the hungrily snatched kisses as she added the unique taste of his skin to the thousand other sensations that were bombarding her awareness.
‘Ellie!’
On a groan of surrender Morgan gave up all attempt to speak and swept her up into his arms. Shouldering open the door, he took her through the small living room, down the corridor, and into the ground floor bedroom. One of his cases still lay where he had dumped it on the unmade bed, but he violently kicked it aside, almost falling onto the mattress, taking Ellie with him.
With more haste than gentleness he rushed her shirt and the delicate bra underneath it from her yearning body, and now it was his turn to use her name as a form of incantation, an expression of longing that could not be held back.
‘Ellie…Ellie…’ he muttered over and over, hands twisting in her tumbled hair, smoothing over her skin, sliding under her breasts, lifting them to the heated attentions of his lips.
The first, almost gentle kisses on the creamy slopes soon changed in the space of a frantic heartbeat to hungrier, more passionate caresses. The sharp tug of his mouth on one achingly sensitive nipple made Ellie cry out in shock and delight, her body writhing in uncontrolled response to the stinging pleasure. Pushing aside his loosened shirt, her fingers clenched over the powerful bones of his shoulders, closing over hard muscle, feeling it bunch and move under her grip.
‘I want you…I want you…’
She could hardly believe it was her own voice she heard, it sounded so rough and raw. But she seemed to have lost control of her tongue and the muttered plea escaped of its own volition.
‘You’ll have me, angel…’ was Morgan’s breathless, laughter-shaken response. ‘Just as soon as I can get rid of these—these damn clothes!’
The red skirt was too tight, the fastening too time consuming for his hunger and, abandoning with a rough, exasperated curse the attempt to open it, he reached for the hem instead, pushing it violently up over the slender length of her legs, to bunch in crumpled disorder around her waist.
Because of the warmth of the summer, she wore no tights or stockings and the small scrap of satin and lace that was the only delicate barrier to his demanding hands was soon discarded, tossed aside without a care for where it landed.
‘You too…’ Ellie muttered, fingers made clumsy with need as she tugged at the buckle of his belt, yanking it loose.
He helped her with the single button underneath. She heard the faint rasp of the zip sliding down and caught her breath in sharp anticipation. It felt as if a hungry fire blazed deep inside her, sending rivulets of heat out through every nerve, pulsing between her legs, and she couldn’t wait for the thrusting force of his possession to ease the yearning ache.
But something had changed. Above her, Morgan had stilled, his face changing suddenly. His expression darkened and he looked deep into her passion-glazed eyes, frowning as he searched for some answer there.
‘Ellie—we can’t…’
Disappointment and the savage bite of frustrated need scythed through her like a heated sword. Totally at the mercy of her clamouring body, she turned a bruise-dark gaze on his hard, set face.
‘Yes, we can! We can!’ she protested as, unbelievingly, she saw him shake his head. ‘Morgan!’
‘Answer me one question, Ellie. Are you protected? Are you on the pill or…?’
If he had slapped her brutally in the face he couldn’t have brought her out of the heady delirium faster or more cruelly. Ellie could only stare at him in shocked distress until, slowly and unwillingly, her mind began to realise just what he had said and why.
Are you protected? Oh, she knew that question of old. Knew how he could express it in a way that sounded like concern for her and for her alone. But she knew the truth. And the truth was that Morgan Stafford had made it plain that he had never wanted children. Not with her, not with anyone.
‘No…’ she managed shakily, and the look on his face, the shock in those deep blue eyes said it all.
Already he was withdrawing from her, moving back, putting a distance that was more than physical between them. One that tore at her heart with the pain of both the present and a past when this had divided them so savagely.
Are you protected? He wanted to protect himself against the possibility of a child he didn’t want being created as a result of their lovemaking.
But the truth was that it was already too late. Almost twenty months before, the protection he so valued had failed. Morgan didn’t know it but he already had a daughter. But a daughter he would never want, never acknowledge. And because of that there could never be any future for the two of them.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘GET off me!’
The change was so sudden, so stunning that for a second or two Morgan could almost believe another woman had taken Ellie’s place.
Gone was the willingly wanton bedmate he had anticipated, and in her place was a furiously distant iceberg, one whose golden eyes sparked with furious rejection where before he had seen burning hunger and a passion to match his own. It was so totally unexpected that he actually laughed.
‘I said, get off me!’
This time the cold command was accompanied by a threatening movement of one leg, her knee coming up with such obviously ominous intent that any man would very rapidly think twice about remaining in the danger zone.
Not being prepared to take the risk, he moved swiftly, jackknifing off the bed. The bite of the denim shirt into his arms reminded him of the way Ellie had pushed it down from his shoulders, imprisoning him. With an angry movement he shrugged it back into position again just as Ellie twisted herself off the bed, frantically pushing at the bunched and crumpled skirt to cover herself.
‘Just what the hell is going on here?’ he demanded, matching her fury with his own, an aggrieved sense of injustice combining with a hard ache of frustration with explosive results. ‘When I show consideration for the possible consequences of my—our—actions, I don’t expect to be turned on as if I’ve tried to force myself on you.’
When he’d shown consideration! Ellie’s mind nearly blew a fuse at the thought. She knew damn well that he was not considering her in the slightest!
All he wanted was to avoid the encumbrance of a child. If she needed any further evidence that her decision not to tell him about Rosie had been the right one, it was staring her in the face. In fact her grandmother had been the only person she had told the truth about Rosie’s father, and that was the way she wanted it to stay.
‘Or were you just leading me on, playing some nasty little game?’
‘No! Oh, no!’
But she had to say something to explain her behaviour. To distract him from the dangerous path his thoughts were taking.
‘You’re forgetting something,’ she blustered nervously, backing away from the glare he turned on her.
‘And what, precisely, am I forgetting, my angel?’
‘Not what—who. You’re forgetting about Pete.’
‘Pete!’
He spat the name out as if it were an obscenity. To her horror all the fire seemed to have died out of his eyes, replaced by an icy cold that seemed to flay a layer of skin from her body, leaving her agonisingly exposed and desperately vulnerable.
Suddenly terribly aware of the fact that she was only half dressed, the crumpled skirt all that covered her, she turned wide desperate eyes to hunt for her missing clothing. Her bra seemed to have disappeared completely and her white blouse lay just inches from Morgan’s feet. No matter how urgently she longed to pick it up and pull it on, she didn’t dare risk moving to retrieve it. Not while he was in this mood. So instead she had to content herself with crossing her arms across her exposed breasts in order to provide an inadequate form of protection.
‘Pete Bedford,’ Morgan repeated with ominous quietness. ‘And just what has he to do with this?’
Something was wrong here. He’d been told that Pete Bedford was no longer in the picture. The realisation that the other man was still part of Ellie’s life was like a kick in the teeth, combining with the savage nag of a frustrated libido to leave him incapable of thinking straight.
‘Isn’t it obvious? I—couldn’t possibly sleep with you b-because of Pete…’ she managed clumsily.
Something in what she’d said had surprised him. His dark head went back sharply, blue eyes narrowing in swift appraisal.
‘But I thought that you two were no longer an item.’
There it was again. The suggestion—more than a suggestion—that Morgan was not here by chance but that he had somehow found out exactly where she was and had come here forewarned—and forearmed—by knowledge about her circumstances.
‘Of course he’s in the picture! He’s headmaster of a school in Truro.’
Morgan took a moment to absorb that fact.
‘I see,’ he said at last. ‘And I presume that you suddenly had a belated attack of conscience because it would mean being unfaithful to dear Pete.’
‘It wasn’t belated! And I’ll tell you this whether you believe it or not—I have never—never—been unfaithful to any man while we were still officially together.’
‘You came pretty close to it a moment ago. I’d say your second thoughts came just that bit too late to leave you totally innocent of all charges. Or are you trying to claim that I forced you?’
‘I wouldn’t dare.’
Morgan nodded his grim satisfaction.
‘At least you have the honesty to admit to the truth. I’ve never forced a woman in my life.’
‘Of course not!’
It was impossible to hide her pain, though she tried to mask it behind a show of scorn that she hoped was convincing.
‘I suppose you believe you’re so totally irresistible that no woman can resist you!’
Images she didn’t want to face were filling her mind. Images of a string of newspaper reports that she had seen in the time they had been apart.
‘But then of course you have the evidence of all those starlets and models to support you. Who was it last month, Morgan? Kitty Spencer? And the month before that? Macy Renton?’
A dangerous scowl creased Morgan’s straight black brows and he pulled the sides of his gaping shirt together, fastening it swiftly with brusque, aggressive movements that spoke eloquently of the feelings he was holding back.
‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the papers,’ he snarled.
‘Oh, so nothing of what was reported is true?’ Her eyebrows shot up in cynical query and scepticism dripped from her voice.
The scowl darkened, his strong jaw tightening aggressively.
‘Not nothing,’ he snarled.
He wasn’t proud of the way he’d behaved during the first month or so after Ellie had left him. Wasn’t proud of the lengths he’d gone to to fill the emptiness she’d left behind, the women with whom he’d tried to forget her. He’d tried to go back to the sort of life he’d lived before Ellie only to find that he had moved further away from it than he’d ever dreamed.
None of it had worked. All that had happened was that he’d managed a few hours of oblivion, but the morning had always come. He’d always had to face reality again, and reality had meant the dreadful irony of knowing that now he’d been free to do whatever he wanted with his future—but that freedom and that future had meant nothing without this one woman. A woman who had turned his life upside down, changed his perspective on everything, and then walked out, leaving behind an empty hole he’d found impossible to fill.
‘But at least any women I had a relationship with were free to be with me. They weren’t committed to anyone else, emotionally or otherwise.’
He was pushing his shirt into the waistband of his jeans as he spoke, the brisk efficiency of his movements as he fastened the zip, buckled his belt, expressing forcefully the distance that had now come between them.
‘Unlike you and your precious Pete. So what is it, my angel? Are you and your headmaster a couple or not? Or is your new man not the lover you thought he was?’
‘How dare you?’ Ellie threw the words into his cold face, amber eyes burning gold with fury. ‘Pete has been very kind to me.’
‘Oh, yes, and we both know how “kind” he’s been. But perhaps that’s the problem. Perhaps you don’t want “kind” any more. Perhaps it doesn’t satisfy you, and you’re looking for something a little different—something more exciting?’
‘Well, if I was, then it wouldn’t be with you!’
‘No?’
Sceptical ice-blue eyes went to the bed, drifted over to the suitcase he had kicked aside so violently, and then came back to her flushed and indignant face.
‘No?’ he questioned again on a new and very different note, one eyebrow drifting upwards in cynical query.
‘Excitement wasn’t the word for that!’ Ellie injected every ounce of contempt she could manage into her tone. ‘It was more like a form of masochism—an exorcism of any lingering delusions I might have had about you.’
‘Believe me, angel,’ Morgan drawled with silky menace, ‘the feeling is entirely mutual. Like I said, I very nearly made the biggest mistake of my life.’
And he’d been hers, Ellie reflected bitterly. The worst mistake she had ever made in her life had been allowing herself to love him. Not that there had been any choice in the matter. She had been out of her depth almost from the very first moment she had met him. And nothing that had happened had done anything to change that.
‘So at least we both know exactly where we stand,’ she stated, somehow managing to make herself sound every bit as cold and uninvolved as he had done. All she wanted now was to get away from here as quickly and quietly as she possibly could. ‘Would you mind passing me my blouse? I’d like to get dressed.’
Morgan stooped, picked up the discarded shirt and tossed it disdainfully in her direction. Ellie just caught it and, pointedly ignoring his hard-eyed stare, turned her back to pull it on. The brush of the soft cotton over her sensitised skin, the still-aching peaks of her breasts, was a new form of torture, but she gritted her teeth and ignored it, fastening the buttons with determined movements.
Clothed, at least she felt better, even if the shirt was dreadfully crumpled and must look like nothing more than a rag. Her hands awkward and unsteady, she tried to smooth down the tousled strands of her hair, knowing that her attempts were having very little effect at all as she swung round to face Morgan again.
He hadn’t moved. He was still standing just feet away, tall and dark and devastating to her peace of mind, long hands resting loosely on the leather belt around his narrow waist, blue eyes hooded and watchful.
Ellie forced the polite, meaningless smile she used for really difficult customers, all lips and teeth, flashed on and off again, with nothing in the eyes at all.
‘Well, I don’t think there is anything more we need to discuss, so I’ll leave you to settle in.’
He waited until she reached the bedroom door, until she was thinking thankfully of escape, of finally getting away and hiding somewhere, licking her wounds in peace.
‘And you’ll be back—when?’ he enquired sardonically.
Never—if she had a choice.
‘Back?’
‘The “extra services”,’ Morgan reminded her harshly. ‘Cleaning—meals…’
‘Under the circumstances, I really think that you’d prefer it if Dee did your housekeeping after all.’
‘No way.’ It was a flat, emotionless statement but one that made it plain he had no intention of yielding or offering any concession on the point at all. ‘I don’t want this Dee, or your grandmother, or anyone else at all. I want you.’
‘But why? Why me?’
Why? Morgan asked himself the same question even as he phrased the words, ‘I want you’, not quite sure he had actually heard himself speak them.
Why when she had made it plain that she hated him, that she wanted nothing more to do with him, was he still so determined to play the only cards he had left in order to keep her near him? Why the hell did he want an unwilling, hostile, spitting alley cat coming to the house every day to perform tasks that she clearly resented with every cell in her body?
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Kate Walker
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Why had Ellie left him? Morgan didn′t know.It was obvious she′d still been blissfully in love with him. She′d even agreed with his edict that they never have children.Then Ellie had disappeared.When Morgan found her to his absolute shock, she had with her the most adorable baby girl that he′d ever seen. His heart twisted inside him.Had Ellie found another man to give her what he never could, or was this baby Morgan′s very own miracle?