Innocent's Pregnancy Revelation (Barsi On Fifth 05; HQR Online Read) Read online

  He’d been at the top of his game when he’d hired her, without any idea he was being set up to lose everything.

  He should have trusted his instincts. Something had seemed off when he’d brought up Vincent during her interview. Her body language had changed, her face blanking.

  “He called to tell me you were one of his top students,” Ben had told her. It wasn’t unusual for a seasoned professional from America to take a position with a foreign university, nurturing along the next generation of dirt scientists. It had surprised him she hadn’t mentioned Vincent as a reference.

  “I don’t trade on that relationship,” she had claimed flatly. “It was coincidence that my mother began working for him while I was at university. They married, but she passed away two years ago. I was never close to him.”

  A prickle of warning had gone down the back of Ben’s neck. He had known she wasn’t telling him everything, but he’d been so dazzled by her, he’d let it pass.

  Besides, Vincent’s attempt to insert himself into the hiring process had seemed harmless. Ben’s success and reputation meant people sought to impress him. Plus, he came from a family of loving oversteppers. He’d done it himself when a cousin needed rent and was too proud to ask. He had accepted Vincent’s eagerness to get Henriqua hired as natural parental behavior.

  Vincent wouldn’t be coming to Indonesia with him, Ben had reasoned. Henriqua would.

  Which was the most salient point now.

  “Vincent wasn’t there.”

  Chapter 7:

  He didn’t want to believe her. Henriqua could see that.

  She had to try, though. This wasn’t much, but it was something—all she had—and it had cost her to procure it.

  “Look.” Her hand shook as she pointed to the first page. It showed Vincent’s purchase of stock in Ben’s company shortly after she started working for him.

  “So?”

  She folded her arms. “The day after you hired me, Vincent called me, said I should keep him in the loop about results. He made it sound like he was curious about my work, but he was looking for insider information. He also mentioned photos of my mother, asked if I wanted them.”

  “In exchange for that information?” His thumbnail went white where he held the pages.

  “He didn’t say so openly, but that was the implication. I didn’t give him any.” It would have been a crime. “So he burned her photos.”

  Ben narrowed his eyes.

  “He’s very manipulative. He turned my mother against me.” She refused to let any more tears fall over that. “I didn’t want him to do the same to us.”

  “There is no us,” he stated firmly.

  “I know.” Her throat rasped. “Why do you think I ran instead of trying to stick around to argue I was being set up by him?”

  “How could he do that from Colombia?”

  “Look.” She pointed to the next page, a class list from the university. It showed another person from the Indonesian team, Carlos Sanchez, had studied under Vincent. “When he couldn’t coerce me, he had Carlos set me up to look like the culprit. Vincent is the one who profited, not me.”

  She pointed to the last statements. They showed Vincent’s sell-off of Ben’s stock days before the sampling was thrown into question. Vincent had promptly invested in one of Ben’s competitors. Three months after Ben’s samples proved worthless, Vincent’s new stocks showed a healthy bump in value as he cashed out.

  “The only fraud I’ve committed is pretending to be Vincent’s assistant when I called to request those statements be mailed to his house. Then I entered through his open back door to retrieve them.”

  Vincent had always left his mail in a wall pocket in the kitchen. He hadn’t noticed that she’d already pocketed the envelopes when he walked in and caught her there, but he had guessed rightly that she was searching for proof to clear her name. Their ensuing shouting match had turned from accusations and ugly threats to a physical attack.

  A neighbor pounding on the door had given her the chance to run and she had, not stopping until she arrived here.

  “I nearly went to jail,” Ben said harshly. “And this is all you give me?”

  Chapter 8:

  She had given him her virginity. Did he remember that?

  Before Henriqua could say anything, his phone rang. He glanced at the screen. Swore. “I have to take this.”

  He stepped away, probably instructing his caller to send the police to arrest her. Although he was speaking Hungarian—perhaps it was his grandmother on the phone?

  While Henriqua yearned for some sign of the man who had enthralled and seduced her in Indonesia.

  Not that their affair should have happened. He’d been her employer. But they’d been alone one afternoon when he hiked out with her to collect samples. It had begun to rain and they’d taken refuge under the pop-up canopy she carried in her daypack. Huddled close enough that their knees and elbows touched, they’d sipped coffee from a thermos. The silence had been charged with awareness.

  “I should tell you that I find you very attractive,” he had said abruptly, not looking at her. “I wanted to see how you work—which is as methodically and efficiently as I do. Keep it up. But if I make you uncomfortable, I’ll make other arrangements and won’t come out with you alone again.”

  Henriqua swallowed. “I’m only uncomfortable because…” She’d hesitated, then admitted baldly, “I thought it was one-sided. And wrong of me to think about my boss this way…” Her gaze snagged on his mouth and hung there as she wondered for the millionth time how those sternly shaped lips would feel against her own.

  “I’ve been thinking about that, too.” His gaze flicked from her mouth to her eyes. His were so dark they seemed black. Bottomless.

  He’d looked at her mouth again, making her lips tingle with anticipation. Then he closed in and she knew exactly how he felt. Hot, smooth, firm. Those were the outward sensations, but the way he slanted his mouth to take a deeper taste had made her heart flip and her blood race. He seemed to want to slake a thirst that only grew more fervent as he drank, which stoked a greedy need in her for more of him.

  She curled an arm around his neck and angled her torso into his so her breasts mashed against him. He seemed to like that. He groaned with pleasure and slid his hand up to cup them. Massage them. She found herself arching into his hands, uninhibited in showing him how much she enjoyed his touch. It lit a flame in her, which seemed to light one in him. One that doubled and redoubled into unchecked fire. A conflagration that burned high, searing past anything that resembled clear thought, leaving only hot, hot desire.

  She made a helpless noise, wishing she wasn’t such a neophyte and knew what came next. How to ask for it.

  “This is fast slipping beyond what it was supposed to be,” he groaned, pressing his mouth to her neck. The light suction he applied to her skin curled her toes and made her nipples tighten and her scalp tingle. She moaned, thrilling at all he was doing to her.

  “Then I should tell you…” She really wished she was more experienced and had taken precautions by this time in her life. “I’m not protected.”

  “I don’t have a condom.” He released her and braced his forearms on his splayed knees, hands in fists as though gripped by pain.

  Chapter 9:

  Should I apologize?” she had asked him tentatively.

  “I should.” He had turned his head, his hot gaze seeming to memorize what had to be pink cheeks and glassy eyes. “But my only regret is that we have to stop. Can I at least see…?” He reached to release her hair. “I’ve been wondering how long it is.”

  She smiled faintly and drew the clip from her hair, then fanned the dark copper mass with her splayed fingers, showing him how the waves fell to her breasts.

  “Beautiful,” he muttered, filling his hand and burying his face in the mass.

  She wound both arms around his neck, fell into him so he was knocked onto his back, half in the rain, her hair falling around his face.

  And she had told him the truth. “I don’t want to stop.”

  In an athletic twist, he rolled her beneath him. “We don’t have to go all the way. But I really want to touch you. See you.”

  He was heavy and strong and virile. Bold in the way he lifted to gaze down her front, yet tender in the way he slowly opened her shirt, sending frequent glances into her eyes to make the experience both intimate, yet mutual. He wanted this to be something she wanted, and she did.

  When he opened her shirt, he did it slowly, drawing out the anticipation until she wanted to scream. She released the front closure on her bra herself, swelling with feminine power when he drew in a sharp breath and ate up her curves with an avid, greedy smile.

  But just as he’d upended her by rolling her beneath him, he quickly overturned her command of the moment by taking her turgid nipple into his mouth. Pleasure, knife-like and sharp, streaked through her, jabbing a hot, joyous sensation into her loins. She clenched as heat flooded there. She writhed, almost overcome by the intensity.

  His arms hardened, holding her for his thorough teasing, driving her crazy until she grabbed handfuls of his hair and brought him back to kissing her.

  He slid fully atop her, legs between hers so they were grinding their hips in mock lovemaking. She had never gone this far. Why not? It was sheer magic to feel the hard ridge of him rubbing her tender flesh through the layers of their clothes. Erotic and exciting and insanely arousing.

  “Ben,” she gasped, trying to find words she didn’t know how to say. “I want more. I want everything.”

  “I’ll have to pull out,” he said against her mouth.

  She nodded, only vaguely aware what he was suggesting, but if it meant they could keep doing this, she wanted it.

  He reared onto his knees, tore off his shirt and opened his pants.

  Oh, that chest. Wide shoulders, thickly muscled pecs and washboard abs sprinkled with a light layer of hair that dipped into the loose, open fly of his trousers.

  He chucked his chin at her in an invitation to strip. She opened her pants and pushed them off her hips, lifting and helping as he took her underpants, too. She still wore her shirt and bra, both hanging off her shoulders, bare thighs falling across his.

  Nostrils flared, he lightly petted her. The moment was so intensely intimate, she bent her knees and would have closed her legs, but he murmured something in a reassuring tone and settled over her.

  As the heat of his chest blanketed her quivering breasts, his touch between her legs explored with more purpose, finding the hidden knot of nerves that made her jolt with sensation.

  “Do you want to stop?” he asked against her mouth.

  “Never,” she breathed.

  Chapter 10:

  He seemed to have no sense of urgency, despite the fact he was caressing her so blatantly. Henriqua returned his long, languorous kisses with greed, moaning at the way he was torturing her with that delicious play of his touch against her folds, fingertips moving with slick ease against her abundantly damp flesh.

  “You’re making me crazy.” She might have spoken in Spanish. She’d lost track.

  “I don’t know how long I’ll last. I want you really, really close.” He bit her bottom lip, holding her paralyzed with that erotic warning of pain while he gave her such exquisite pleasure.

  She withstood it as long as she could, so aroused, yet held on the precipice by his slow, light, touch. She dragged her mouth free of his.

  “I’m dying.”

  He hitched his pants down off his hips and caressed her again, this time with the tip of his erection. Then he was pressing against her entrance. Kissing her again.

  She moved her hands over his back, restless and nervous and wanting this to be good, but not sure if it would hurt—

  “Oh!” There he was, entering her body with his own. She felt pinched and stretched and uniquely full. Deeply, deeply connected to him as he stared into her eyes.

  He frowned. “Hurt?” he murmured, coming out of his passionate daze.

  “Not as much as I thought it would.”

  “You’re a virgin?”

  She smiled as knowledge sank into her as easily as he had. Her knees bent on instinct to hug his ribs, and her ankles crossed behind his back while she draped her arms across his broad shoulders, pulling him the final inch into her depths.

  “Not anymore.” She arched, basking in this new world he’d revealed to her.

  “You should have told me,” he admonished with a light nip on her chin. “Tell me if it hurts.” He began to move, dragging her out of the sweet, tender closeness back into the fire.

  This was why sex was so popular, she realized in a stunned, final thought, before she was fully overtaken by the act. Sensation bombarded her as he thrust and withdrew, inciting her to cling to each stroke of pleasure until the intensity became impossible to withstand. Yet he continued stoking it. Provoking her to cling and lift her hips for his thrusts and moan so loud she sounded feral.

  But he was groaning as though each powerful penetration and retreat caused the same intense reverberation of acute pleasure to rock him as was gripping her.

  They were both sweating. As his hips took on a more rapid tempo, she slapped her arms flat on their blanket and let the storm rise up and take her. Gave herself over to the grip of his hands on her hips, the crisis that arrived in a rushing swell that tore cries of release from her lips. Pulsing waves rocked her as he continued to move in her, the experience so satisfying she never wanted it to end.

  But he suddenly withdrew and his arms crushed her while his whole body convulsed atop her. His wild cry was sexy and agonized, thrilling her with the knowledge she had given him as much pleasure as he’d given her.

  She touched her lips to his salty neck where his artery pulsed rapidly against her tongue, certain she had found her soul mate.

  “My grandmother is worried you were an agent here to arrest me,” Ben muttered, pocketing his phone and jerking her out of her glorious memory. “I told her as much as I had to, to keep her from coming up here.” He gestured at the pages on the coffee table. “This is useless. You realize that, don’t you?”

  She swallowed back a helpless sob. Earning back his trust had been a long shot, but this entire exercise, right up to trying to find her baby a safe haven, was fast becoming utterly futile.

  Chapter 11:

  What are you really here for?” Ben demanded, still showing nothing but scorn. “A payoff? You thought you’d extort from a bighearted old lady because you know I have nothing, now that I’ve paid a fine and lost my company?”

  “No!”

  “You’ll come back when the baby is born, then?” He didn’t seem to possess any compassion for the position she was in, but she laid her predicament bare anyway.

  “I have nothing, Ben. I used the last of my savings to get here. I can’t work. Not in this industry.” She’d been waiting tables while staying on a friend’s sofa, but couldn’t bring her baby back to that tiny apartment. Her option was the slum she’d been raised in or what she had come here prepared to do.

  “So you are looking for a handout. Quelle surprise.”

  “I believe your grandmother was in the same boat—pun intended—when she came to America?”

  She had been so touched when he had related the story of a young woman escaping unrest in Hungary by selling an earring given to her as an engagement promise only to wind up in a strange country, alone and pregnant. When she learned her lover had been killed, she sold the earring to a fellow immigrant who proposed marriage to the desperate single mother. Together, they had established a jewelry store that had become one of Manhattan’s iconic destinations for the wealthy and discerning, falling deeply in love and having two more children, including Ben’s father.

  “My grandmother didn’t light a match on her lover’s life and disappear,” Ben scoffed.

  “Were we lovers?” Henriqua challenged hotly. “Because the last thing you said to me was that sleeping with me was a mistake and we couldn’t keep doing it.” She held his gaze, refusing to blink and let her brimming tears fall. “That’s the real reason I left. I didn’t have anything worth staying for. Did I?”

  She had been fathoms deep in love with him when he had said, We can’t keep scurrying around.

  She had known it, but hadn’t been able to bring herself to cut things off. Being rejected by him was a blow she hadn’t seen coming.

  “You said you didn’t want to be accused of getting ahead by sleeping with me,” he reminded.

  That had been true. After Vincent had cast doubt on her grades, she’d needed more than ever to be seen as succeeding on her own merit. But she had also been scrambling to save face.

  “You said that we should pretend it hadn’t happened.” His fierce gaze dropped to her midsection.

  “I didn’t want to make presumptions about your feelings.” She set her hand against the swell where the baby hadn’t moved lately. “I didn’t want you to think I was trying to get ahead that way.”

  “And what am I supposed to think now? When you’ve cost me everything, but didn’t even come here to see me?”

  “I thought the baby would be better off with your family,” Henriqua said in a small voice that begged for leniency. “If you can raise it without your anger with me coloring things, then of course I’ll relinquish it to you.”

  Chapter 12:

  Something broke inside him. It was tangled up with hurt and disbelief and I didn’t have anything worth staying for. But a marrow-deep belief in family had him asking with outrage, “Don’t you care about our baby at all?”

  “Of course I care!” Her flare of mother bear fury was strangely reassuring, despite how charged and dangerous she became. “Why the hell do you think I’m here?”

  “I don’t understand you,” he bit out. It was the understatement of the century. He didn’t understand himself, either. The idea of her handing him their child and walking away… He swallowed against the ache in the back of his throat.

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