on the beach?”
Nate felt a little sick, thinking of next week’s beach wedding. “We’ll each have a dry martini, two olives for the lady. Three for me,” he said, remembering her drink of choice.
She frowned, but didn’t correct him, apparently needing the alcoholic fortification more than she needed to put him in his place. Nodding her assent to the bartender, she didn’t even look at Nate as she muttered, sotto voice, “Let’s just retreat to opposite corners and pretend we don’t know each other.”
“That’ll work well on a yacht,” he said.
“Maybe I’ll just push you overboard.”
“I’m a good swimmer.”
“Into a school of sharks.”
Her curmudgeonly attitude coaxed a laugh from him. It sounded rusty. Unused. “You’d have to add a lot of chum to the water to get a whole school of great whites on my tail.”
The bartender slid her drink over, his fingers deliberately brushing hers on the glass as she took it.
Nate gritted his teeth.
“Thanks for the tip,” she said as she lifted her martini and sipped it. “I’ll start gathering dead fish guts now.”
He sighed heavily. “Speaking of guts—you hate mine, huh?”
“Well, you certainly didn’t make me feel like you were any happier to see me just now.”
“I was,” he admitted, his tone low, the admission startling even himself. “Heather, I have to explain some things.”
“Don’t bother. I got the message. I happen to be fluent in silence—it’s one of my favorite languages. And yours was pretty deafening.” She smirked, then sauntered over to a table in the back corner, obviously thinking she’d had the last word.
Nate followed, unable to prevent his attention from traveling over her long, wavy red hair. His hands tightened as he remembered the feel of that silky mass twined around his fingers. Her green sheath dress did amazing things to the body he’d worshipped for three days straight, and the gentle sway of her curvy hips as she walked soon had him panting.
Whatever had happened during the past ten months, one thing was sure: he still wanted her.
Heather didn’t chat with anyone, obviously wanting to sit in a corner, alone, to lick her wounds. But he couldn’t let it go. If he didn’t succeed in getting his father to change his mind, they were going to be stuck together on a yacht for several days. He had to clear the air before that happened.
He sat beside her at the empty table, getting right to the point. “I was trying to protect you.”
She blinked and finally peered at him. “Excuse me?”
“What I said to the reporters—about you being a nobody.”
She tossed her head. “Oh, that. No big deal.”
Her tone was as breezy as a woman who’d just told her husband she didn’t mind that he’d forgotten their anniversary. I.e., blasé, but not quite hiding a promise of retribution.
“It was a big deal and I apologize. I hated myself the minute the words came out of my mouth, but you have to understand...”
“You had a pregnant girlfriend to mollify?”
He squeezed his glass. If the glass had been of lesser quality, it might have shattered in his hand. “God, no.”
“I guess I was the only one on the planet who was unaware you were involved with a pop star when we met.”
“That she had been my girlfriend is true. But we broke up before I met you.” He put a hand on her shoulder, urging her to believe him. “I swear, I’m not a cheater.”
She stared into his eyes, searching for answers. He hoped she recognized the truth. Whatever else he might have done in the past year—and he wasn’t proud of some of his actions—he’d never betrayed anyone in that way.
“Okay,” she finally said with a nod. “So you didn’t cheat.”
He didn’t breathe easily just yet. “Nor did I dump a woman who was pregnant with my child.”
“Yeah, I heard DNA tests proved the baby wasn’t yours.”
“The media reported that eventually,” he muttered. “But not until I’d been raked over every coal Kingsford ever made.”
Her tense posture finally relaxed a little. “I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault.”
“Not apologizing. Empathizing. I’m truly sorry you went through all that.” She licked her lips, then, her voice a little softer, asked, “Were you disappointed? I mean, when you found out that the baby wasn’t yours?”
Nate barked a harsh laugh. “There was no chance in hell he could have been mine. I was sure of that from day one.”
Her pretty brow furrowed. “But, I mean...”
“She got pregnant two months after we stopped sleeping together. I guess she figured because I was a football player I couldn’t count all the way up to nine.”
Heather’s green eyes rounded. “You mean, it was all a lie? She knew all along it couldn’t be yours?”
“Yeah. Pretty sick, right?”
“How did she ever believe she would get away with it?”
“Felicity always gets what she wants, and never imagined she couldn’t get me back. She assumed she could get me into bed soon enough for me not to question who’d fathered her baby.” He offered Heather a jaded smile. “When her private eye spotted me with you in Vegas and told her he thought it looked serious, she panicked and called the press.”
“That evil bitch!”
Yeah. She was. Not that the world had seen her that way, even after the paternity had been proven. He was still the guy who’d broken poor Felicity’s heart and hadn’t stood by her after her, uh, mistake. He was also the subject of her last hit song, Broken Promises, an honor he would have happily gone without.
The married producer was out of the picture. No matter how furious Nate had been, he’d never outed the affair to the press. So the baby-daddy was now a big mystery. With no other face or name to dog, the tabloids remained focused on him, to hell with biology. Or decency.
“Anyway,” he said, thrusting off the ugly mental images, “it all started to break that day in Vegas. You were already getting caught up in it, and I knew the paparazzi would be on you, making your life miserable. That’s why I said what I did, to throw them off track. I apologize for how it sounded, and how it must have made you feel.”
She remained silent for a moment, considering. Eventually, she nodded. “All right, I can accept that.”
As for
