lithe legs moving at a fast pace. ‘We’ll take this into the bedroom because we don’t want to be interrupted and Abilio and Catina are about to leave.’
‘I didn’t know you had staff,’ Freddie remarked, keen to fill the smouldering silence.
‘I may not be running the family empire but I’ve made a lot of investments on my own behalf with the income,’ Zac admitted, lounging back against the solid wooden dresser that sat between the twin windows.
Freddie looked everywhere but at him, her gaze wandering to the gargantuan bed where the sheets still remained tossed from his occupancy. With a flush she glanced hurriedly away. ‘Like this hotel?’
‘Exactly.’
Freddie shot him a tense troubled glance. ‘I’m here to apologise. I was upset last night. I wasn’t thinking things through. I still want to marry you.’
Zac jerked his chin in acknowledgement.
‘I was so angry I didn’t even think about the children and...what would happen if we split up,’ she framed awkwardly.
‘Everyone has a price and the children are yours,’ Zac drawled softly.
Freddie’s eyes flared gold. ‘Not everyone has a price!’ she snapped back at him, nerves taking over and forging past her self-control.
‘What else am I supposed to think when you’re evidently still prepared to marry an untrustworthy, unreliable womaniser?’ he derided silkily.
Put on the spot, Freddie reddened to the roots of her hair. ‘I shouldn’t have said those things to you. I haven’t found you unreliable or untrustworthy and what you chose to do while you were single is none of my business,’ she completed with dogged determination. ‘But you had better stay faithful to our marriage while I’m still trying to get pregnant because I will not share you!’
His lean, strong face darkening, Zac dealt her a brooding appraisal. ‘No problem,’ he conceded to that condition without argument, because he could not imagine getting bored with her any time soon.
But he did not appreciate that she had only come back because she was terrified of losing the chance to adopt Eloise and Jack. That struck him as ironic when he knew the adoption was the only reason she was marrying him and willing to have a child with him. But something deep and visceral inside him still rebelled against that ego-zapping knowledge.
He studied her slight figure, sheathed in leggings, ankle boots and a jazzy fitted tunic. Her breasts and her hips and a good part of her legs were hidden so he could not understand why just looking at her soft full mouth and caramel-brown eyes made him so aroused. He wondered how long it would take for him to work out the secret of her irresistible attraction, how long it would take for him to get jaded and start living for the day he would get his freedom back. He had never stayed with a woman longer than a week and even then only on the most casual basis. Now, he recognised, he was facing a steep learning curve.
Conscious of Zac’s scrutiny and his unsettling silence in the face of her retraction of her insults, Freddie grew increasingly tense, the tip of her tongue sliding out to moisten her dry lips as her breath shortened in her throat. ‘So, where do we stand?’ she prompted anxiously.
Zac moved forward, seething energy and hunger powering him. Glittering eyes settled on her tense little face. ‘Where we started. Me wanting, you backing away...’
Her breath literally rattled in her throat because without even realising it she had taken a step back as he approached, and in dismay at that awareness she fell still where she stood.
‘That’s getting old, particularly the day before our wedding.’ Zac lifted a lean brown hand to trail a finger along the taut line of her delicate jaw. ‘What are you so scared of?’
‘I’m not scared,’ she told him tightly, but she knew she was lying. Her body was in a state of conflict, her adrenalin buzzing while little internal alarms shrilled inside her. She wanted him close and she wanted to push him away, because pushing men away came more naturally to her than touching one. Yet she longed to touch him, to unbutton the shirt stretched across his taut pectoral muscles and trace every rippling leashed line of him with her fingers. She wanted shameless things she had never wanted before and that unnerved her.
Yet the little tingles already ignited by his proximity warred with her alarm system. Her skin prickled, her breasts pushing against the restraint of her bra as her nipples tightened almost painfully. Her mouth ran dry, her breathing rupturing into little snatched spurts of air while her body struggled to combat the wave of heat rising from her pelvis.
‘There’s nothing to be afraid of,’ Zac husked, coiling an arm round her with lazy strength, bending her back to trail a hungry kiss across her delicate collarbone and up the slender column of her neck.
A tiny gasp escaped her, her reactions plunged into overdrive and intensified when he lifted her up against him and then brought her down on the tumbled bed. Eyes flying wide, she gazed up at him in disconcertion and got lost in the blazing magnificence of his crystalline eyes.
‘Trust me,’ Zac murmured softly, reaching down to flip off her boots and toss them on the floor. ‘But at least tell me why you’re so scared. Were you assaulted? Hurt?’
‘No...no.’ Freddie tried and failed to swallow, fighting to gather her wits. ‘But, you know, I saw things...when I was living with my sister...and it put me off...er...sex,’ she mumbled as he embarked on her leggings, tugging them down to expose her legs.
‘Anything you don’t like, you only have to tell me,’ Zac told her thickly. ‘Any time you want me to stop, I will.’
‘O-Okay,’ she stammered, barely grasping how she had arrived on the bed and wondering if she should be moving away, reminding him that he had agreed to wait until they were married. Only that restriction seemed so petty now in retrospect that she couldn’t make herself voice that reminder. Tomorrow they would be married and all such restraint would naturally be at an end.
Her leggings went flying and she gulped, feeling overpowered and out of her depth with her rather shabby cheap knickers on view. And she was with a guy who loved luxury lingerie, she recalled in intense mortification, yanking her tunic down to cover herself again.
‘Fique tranquilo...don’t worry,’ Zac urged, convinced she was ready to flee at any moment. ‘I’m worrying enough for both of us.’
Taken aback, Freddie gazed up at him in astonishment. ‘What do you have to worry about?’
A flashing grin softened the taut line of Zac’s mobile mouth. ‘I’ve never been with a virgin before. I want to make it good for you but I don’t know if that’s possible.’
‘Kiss me,’ she heard herself say.
He pressed a soft kiss to her lips and she stopped breathing, her heart hammering a frenzied beat.
‘Once more...with enthusiasm,’ Freddie whispered uncertainly.
And Zac laughed and covered her mouth again with his to extract a forceful, demanding kiss. He nipped at her lips, stroked her tongue, flicked the roof of her mouth and she started trembling, liquid heat rising from the heart of her.
He lifted his head and, gathering her tunic in his hands, he lifted it
