shoulders. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘Altering the packaging. Reminding you who you really are under the costume you’re wearing.’ His burning gaze slid lazily down her body. ‘You come in here, suitably dressed to teach a class of schoolchildren or sort books in a library, that hot red hair all twisted away and tamed. On the outside you are all buttoned up and locked away, yet we both know what sort of person you are on the inside.’ His dark eyes fixed on hers and his voice was rich and seductive. ‘Passionate. Wild.’
His tongue rolled over the words, his accent more pronounced than usual, and she felt her stomach flip over and her knees weaken.
‘You’re wrong! That’s not who I am! You have no idea who I am.’ Despite her promise to herself that she’d remain cool, she couldn’t hold back the emotion. ‘Did you really think I’d be the same pathetic little girl you seduced all those years ago? Do you really think I haven’t changed?’
Despite her heated denials, she felt a flash of sexual awareness that appalled her and she squashed it down with grim determination.
She wasn’t going to let him do this to her again. She wasn’t going to feel anything.
She’d come here to tell him something she should have told him seven years ago, not to resurrect feelings that she’d taken years to bury.
‘You weren’t pathetic and neither,’ he said softly, touching a curl of fiery red hair, ‘did I seduce you, determined though you seem to be to believe that. Our passion was as mutual as it was hot, meu amorzinho. You were with me all the way.’ He said the words ‘all the way’ with a smooth, erotic emphasis that started a slow burn deep within her pelvis. ‘The only difference between us was that you were ashamed of how you felt. I assumed that maturity would allow you to embrace your passionate nature instead of rejecting it.’
To her horror she felt her body start to melt and her breathing grow shallow and she shrank away from him, desperate to stop the reaction.
How?
How, after all these years and all the thinking time she’d had, could she still react to this man?
Did she never learn?
And then she remembered that she had learned. The hard way. And it didn’t matter how her body responded to this man, this time her brain was in charge. She was older and more experienced and well able to ignore the insidious curl of sexual desire deep in her pelvis.
‘This isn’t what I came here for.’ She lifted a hand to her hair and smoothed it away from her face. ‘What happened between you and me isn’t important.’
‘So you keep saying. So what is important enough to bring you all the way back to Rio de Janeiro when you left and swore never to return, I wonder? Our golden beaches? Our dramatic mountains?’ His rich accent rolled over the words. ‘The addictive beat of the samba? I recall that evening that we danced on my terrace…’
He flicked memories in front of her like a slide show and she looked away for a moment, forcing herself to focus on something bland and inanimate, trying to dilute the disturbing images in her head. The chair drew the full force of her gaze while she composed herself and plucked up the courage to say what she had to say.
‘I want us to stop talking about the past.’ She paused for a moment and felt her knees turn to liquid. It was now. It had to be now. ‘I’m here because—’ Her voice cracked and she licked dry lips and tried again. ‘I’m trying to tell you—w-we had a son together, Luc, and he’s now six years old.’ Her heart pounded and her body trembled. ‘He’s six years old and his life is in danger. I’m here because I need your help. I’ve no one else to turn to.’
CHAPTER TWO
HOWcould silence seem so loud?
Was he ever going to speak?
Relief that she’d finally told him mingled with apprehension. What was he going to say? How was he going to react to the sudden discovery that he was a father?
‘Well, that’s inventive.’ His tone was flat and he sprawled in the nearest chair, his eyes veiled as he watched her, always the one in control, always the one calling the shots. ‘You certainly know how to keep a guy on his toes. I never know what you’re going to come up with next.’
Kimberley blinked, totally taken aback.
He didn’t believe her?
She’d prepared herself for anger and recrimination. She’d braced herself to be on the receiving end of his hot Brazilian temper. She’d been prepared to explain why she hadn’t told him seven years before. But it hadn’t once crossed her mind that he might not believe her.
‘You seriously think I’d joke about something like that?’
He gave a casual shrug. ‘I admit it’s in pretty poor taste, but some women will stoop to just about anything to get a man to fork out. And I presume that’s what you want? More money?’
It was exactly what she wanted but not for any of the reasons he seemed to be implying.
Her mouth opened and shut and she swallowed hard, totally out of her depth. She hadn’t even entertained the possibility that he wouldn’t believe her and she honestly didn’t know what to say next. She’d geared herself up for this moment and it wasn’t going according to her script.
‘Why wouldn’t you believe me?’
‘Possibly because women don’t suddenly turn up after seven years of silence and announce that they’re pregnant.’
‘I didn’t say I was p-pregnant,’ she stammered, appalled and frustrated that he refused to take her seriously. ‘I told you, he’s six. He was born precisely forty weeks after we had—after you—’ She broke off, blushing furiously, and his gaze dropped to her mouth, lingered and then lifted again.
‘After I had my wicked way with you? You’re so repressed you can’t even bring yourself to say the word “sex”.’ His dark eyes mocked her gently and she bit her lip, wishing she was more sophisticated—better equipped to deal with this sort of situation. Verbal sparring wasn’t her forte and yet she was dealing with a master.
He’d wronged her and yet suddenly she felt as though she should be apologising. ‘You’re probably wondering why I didn’t tell you this before—’
‘The thought had crossed my mind.’
‘You threw me out, Luc,’ she reminded him in a shaky voice, ‘and you refused to see me or take my calls. You treated me abominably.’
‘Relationships end every day of the week,’ he drawled in a tone of total indifference. ‘Stop being so dramatic.’
‘I was pregnant!’ She rose to her feet, shaking with emotion, goaded into action by his total lack of remorse. ‘I decided that you ought to know about your child. I tried to tell you so many times but you cut me out of your life. And you hurt me. You hurt me so badly that I decided that no child of mine was going to have you as a father. And that’s why I didn’t tell you.’ She broke off, waiting for an angry reaction on his part, waiting for him to storm and rant that she hadn’t told him sooner.
Instead
