A Hidden Heir to Redeem Him Read online

  She leveled him a look that cut past his shields to punch into his gut. It would have been an exit worthy of him if she’d managed it. Her phone buzzed in her hand, though.

  Tremendous vulnerability overcame her at whatever she saw on the screen. He instinctively leaped on it as an extraordinary weakness he could exploit.

  She arranged a smile on her discomfited face as she swiped. “Hi, baby.”

  The most joyous, dollish voice he had ever heard said a very exuberant, “Mummy!”

  “Are you having fun with Nanny?” Kiara sank onto the sofa, disappearing into the screen the way he’d seen her do once before, when she had opened her sketch pad.

  Fascinating.

  The voice babbled about “bubberflies” in the garden.

  “Did you see Kitty?” Kiara asked.

  He couldn’t resist. He crossed toward Kiara and she lifted a gaze that held real fear. Her hand tightened on the phone and her whole body tensed.

  He stayed out of the camera angle but took in the small oval face on the screen. She had a slightly lighter shade of her mother’s brown skin and Kiara’s lips. Her corkscrew hair stood around her face like dandelion fluff with sun-tipped ends. She was pointing off screen, telling a story that made no sense, but he could have listened to her earnest chatter for hours.

  When she looked back at the screen, he saw pale, silvery eyes, familiar as his own in the mirror. Something heavy landed in his chest. He wanted to apologize to her for tainting her with any shred of himself. She was so damned natural and unbroken and pure.

  And even though he knew he had no business soiling her existence with his own, all he could think was, Give me that child.

  Why? He had never liked children even when he’d been one. They were mean and whiny and most of them were vanity projects on the part of parents who shouldn’t have been granted the license to duplicate themselves. He’d been a small adult in the workforce before he’d understood that it wasn’t normal to let people take your picture for money.

  This child, though? He wanted to reach through the screen and take her. Where? And do what? He didn’t know, only that he wanted to hold her. Curl his arms around her and ensure nothing impacted the sweetness she wore so artlessly.

  “Oh, no, lovey, I’m not in my studio,” Kiara said as a joggled vision of grass appeared. “Remember? I went in the helicopter with Auntie Scarlett. I have to stay here with her. She’s having her baby.”

  The image stopped and righted. Aurelia’s face appeared again. “Can I see?”

  “Not yet. Soon.”

  Kiara’s smile was so tender, Val found himself rubbing the heel of his hand against his breastbone, trying to ease the sensation of the hard shell around his heart being pried open, leaving breezy cracks and raw spots. Wind whistling into chasms. He had to remind himself to breathe.

  “I’ll be back in the morning. One more sleep,” Kiara assured her.

  “No, Mummy.” The little girl frowned with dismay. Maybe even distress. “I want you now.”

  “Oh, baby.” Kiara’s eyes welled and her smile wobbled.

  The nanny stepped in to distract the girl and they quickly said their goodbyes, promising to talk to Mummy at bedtime.

  The call ended and Kiara pressed the phone between her breasts, drawing a breath to gather her composure.

  “See?” she said with a falsely cheerful smile. She stood and wiggled the phone. “I don’t need any guilt trips from you. I’m on a permanent self-inflicted one, thanks.” She threw the phone into her handbag and started for the door.

  “Kiara.”

  Do you want to be a father?

  He didn’t know what he wanted beyond, “I want my daughter.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  THOSE WORDS WERE her kryptonite. Perhaps she’d given that away when she had mentioned having no family.

  She was still shaken by his callous dismissal of the poverty she’d endured most of her life. A poverty both material and emotional.

  She shouldn’t have been surprised by his behavior. Niko had warned her that Val was contemptuous and judgmental and had learned the fine art of manipulation at the knee of his mother. Even Scarlett had called him “challenging” and “intentionally difficult.”

  That hadn’t been her experience the night she met him, though. He’d been arrogant, yes, demanding she show him the sketches she’d made of him, but he’d then praised her talent and sat for more. Part of her had wondered if he was flattering her to get her into bed, but he’d offered constructive critique and positioned himself in better lighting, sitting patiently while she worked. He had very generously encouraged her to use his notoriety to make a name for herself.

  It wasn’t until he was married and his mother was so dismissive that she had begun to worry she’d misread him. Then Niko’s and Scarlett’s reports had further helped her rationalize going along with Niko’s wish that she keep Aurelia a secret.

  Val had a right to his anger over that, but, “Are you saying you intend to challenge me for her?”

  Her heart pulsed as a lump in her throat. She would fight to the death to keep her daughter, but didn’t want to put any of them through it.

  “I told you, I want to marry you. I want her in my life.” He spoke firmly, but his shoulders were tense, his gaze guarded.

  “Are you certain?” She wasn’t an outwardly tough person. She had the strength of perseverance, not pushback. When it came to her daughter, however, she was pure mama bear. “Because I would do nearly anything to give Aurelia a good father. And I will do everything in my power to avoid giving her a bad one.”

  Meeting Val’s gaze was such an act of courage every time she tried it. She wasn’t nearly as brave as she was pretending to be, but her statement wasn’t bravado or warning. It was a heartfelt vow.

  Something she couldn’t interpret flickered in his silvery-blue eyes. Her daughter had those same steely, piercing irises. She tried not to let the glimpse of her beloved girl in this ruthless man sway her. He already affected her merely by being in the same room.

  His cynicism had nearly cut her in two a few minutes ago, but even when he was denigrating her choices and mistrusting her motives, she couldn’t stop looking at him. She wanted to sketch him again. Talk in the meandering way they had that night. Like equals. She wanted to touch him and lie with him and feel his powerful body thrusting into hers.

  As that unbidden image entered her mind, a prickling sting climbed from her breasts to her cheeks.

  Heat came into his eyes as though he read her mind. A faint smile touched his smooth lips. “Anything?” he mocked softly.

  Her heart caught the hiccups and her knees went weak. She yanked her gaze away.

  “I—I’m open to letting you meet her,” she said, scrambling to recall things she had prepared herself to say when she had believed this conversation would play out in a boardroom where Scarlett and Davin would smoothly step in if she stumbled. “But you have to be sure about your commitment level. I won’t bring you into her life only to have you disappear if things don’t work out.”

  “Has that happened?” His tone dropped like an ax. “With other men?”

  “Like Niko?” she shot back. “Yes. She wasn’t seeing much of him the past few weeks. He was rarely conscious. She’s confused and keeps asking when he’s coming back.”

  Kiara was still struggling with the loss herself. Niko had been in so much pain, it had been a merciful relief when he had finally let go, but everything had changed with his passing.

  “You know I mean lovers,” Val growled.

  She offered him the blithe smile she was learning from him. “I don’t feel we’re at the stage in our relationship where we can ask about each other’s lovers.”

  “We are lovers.” The velvety timbre in his voice caressed her ears, swirling heat through her with nothing more than a careless re
ference to the memories they shared.

  “Were,” she said in a strangled voice.

  “I am a seer of all things, Kiara. Especially human nature.” He knocked back the last of his drink and set it aside, then used his gaze to stoke the desire taking hold in her. “You want back into my bed.”

  Tendrils of culpable desire curled in her abdomen, but she managed to choke, “There’s that arrogance I’ve heard so much about.”

  Her words were smoke and mirrors, no substance to back up her bravado.

  All shreds of humor fell from his expression.

  “I see through lies as clearly as you see pictures on a blank page. Look me in the eye and tell me you don’t want to have sex with me.”

  She tried, but she couldn’t. Her throat seized up and her gaze dropped to his shoulder then strayed across to the open button where a few fine chest hairs were visible. Her artist’s eye began cataloging shades and angles, the strain of fabric on his biceps and the flat bones of his bare wrist. The time-worn softness in his jeans. The missing rivet at his pocket and the ripple of his fly. Denim hugged hard thighs, and swarthy skin peeked through exposed threads above his knee.

  She watched his black boots walk toward her until the toe of one halted between her painted toenails. The other caged the side of her right foot.

  Heat radiated off him. The embers inside her glowed red-hot. Sparks seemed to rise around them as if bellows fanned her latent desire into a conflagration.

  Her gaze snagged on the sardonic indentation at the corner of his mouth.

  “You would prefer a platonic marriage?” His voice had gone sensually rough the way it’d gone when they’d been in bed.

  Her mouth pursed to form her answer, but she dimly realized that saying no would be an agreement to marry. He was a very dangerous, crafty man. Infinitely seductive and infinitely sly.

  “Hmm?” he prompted. His warm hand cupped her neck.

  Her pulse was already thudding. The pressure of his hand against her artery made her heartbeat reverberate in her head.

  She couldn’t see what was in his eyes. All she saw was his mouth. She could sketch it in her sleep, that full, squared-off bottom lip and the well-defined peaks of the upper lip. Photographs didn’t do justice to the smoothness of them. To the way they darkened and sheened when his tongue dampened them.

  She wanted that mouth on hers. Ached with three years’ worth of yearning to taste him again.

  His mouth hardened with savage satisfaction right before he crashed it onto hers.

  His lips arrived in one hot sweep that tasted of whiskey and triumph. He pressed and angled in a lazy, confident demand for full possession, taking her simmering desire to an explosive, rolling boil.

  She rocked weakly into him, thrust into the depths of passion, the kind she’d only experienced once, and that time there’d been a gradual buildup to get here. The suddenness of pure want that speared into her made her light-headed. Maybe she wasn’t even breathing. She didn’t care. Thought abandoned her and she opened her mouth wider to welcome his ravaging. To deepen their kiss and greedily take everything he offered, slaking an arid thirst.

  His arms closed around her, deliciously hard as he dragged her body into his, sending her mind spinning even more as he squeezed her against his strength. She wanted more. More heat. More sensations of firm muscle ironed to her front, strong hands molding her back, his sharp scent hitting her brain like a drug.

  She ravenously thrust her fingers into the silky strands of his hair. Her other hand went around his neck as she lifted on tiptoe, trying to increase the pressure of their kiss to the point of pain, needing a more acute sensation to appease the depth of longing in her. Needing all of him. Faster.

  His tongue sought hers and that wicked intrusion stole the air from her lungs and tightened every inch of her skin. Her nipples hurt and heat rushed so sharply into her loins she groaned at the ache.

  With a growl, he slowly ran his big hands from her hips to beneath her butt cheeks and pulled her higher, almost off her feet so the steely shape of him, fully aroused, ground against her mound while his entire body strained tautly against hers.

  She hung against him, drowning in sensations, only startled back to awareness when he blatantly sucked on her bottom lip, teeth raking the sensitive inner tissues as he released her and lifted his head.

  Now she saw his eyes, narrowed in mockery, but with a feral light that called to her. Taunted but urged. Lie back. Open for me.

  With her pulse hammering low and hard in the aching place between her thighs, she nearly did. Instead, she protectively folded her top lip over her bottom one, aware now of the tender sting his teeth had left there. Her muscles were weak, her skin sensitized, her libido well and truly returned from whatever maternity leave it had taken.

  She dropped her hands to his chest and he very slowly eased his grip on her backside so she could settle onto her unsteady heels. She had to hold his forearms to keep herself upright, still breathless and dizzy. And mortified.

  Look me in the eye and tell me you don’t want to have sex with me.

  She couldn’t. Not now. She could fairly smell the grim satisfaction wafting off him and had no way to deny how she’d reacted. She was appalled to realize that if he hadn’t called a halt, she might have been on her way to another unexpected pregnancy.

  “There are different levels of want,” she managed to say. She dropped her hands from his arms and moved away, feeling as though each unsteady step only found dunes of sand.

  When she was beyond arm’s reach, she turned and pushed her gaze to meet his. It was like thrusting herself into the center of a fire gone silver-white with heat. Her eyes stung and her lungs strained for air, yet she wanted to walk straight back into that inferno.

  “Of course I’m attracted to you. Point me to the woman who isn’t.” Did he think she liked being one more in a line he could choose from at random? “I don’t want to be attracted, though. I don’t want to act carelessly when I need to forge a mature relationship with the father of my daughter. You look me in the eye and tell me I would be your lover in the truest sense of the word. Then we’ll talk about whether we’ll have sex. Or marry.”

  She watched his mental retreat as clearly as if he took several steps back himself. The unmistakable rejection stung, but at least she knew exactly what this had been—a lesson. Not reunion or nostalgia or, in her case, indulgence of a lingering crush on a man who had accidentally given her nearly everything she had ever wanted.

  She fiddled with her clutch, trying not to betray how skinless his rebuff left her.

  “Which hotel is your mother at? I don’t want to accidentally bump into her. Actually, I’ll sit at the hospital until there’s news.”

  * * *

  “You’ll stay here with me,” Val said on reflex.

  “No. I won’t.” Kiara spoke with a quiet dignity that held an underpinning of wariness, maybe hurt. Whatever it was, he understood it to be a concern that he would pressure her for sex.

  “There are two bedrooms.” As he said it, his libido howled against his efforts to bank it. That kiss. He hadn’t felt so alive in three years. He wanted more. Now.

  The fine tremble in her fingers revealed the wild depth of desire still lurking beneath her efforts to pull her composure back into place.

  That passion had intrigued him from the first time they met. She came across as a wide-eyed observer on the sidelines of life, but it only took one kiss to tap into the absolute essence of life that teemed within her.

  Both then and now, everything had fallen away when she had yanked him into her world of pure, unbridled sensuality. He’d never experienced anything like it with anyone else. It disturbed him.

  It seemed to outright terrify her.

  While her demand to tell me I would be your lover in the truest sense of the word unsettled him.

 
There were some lines even his pathetic standards of behavior wouldn’t cross. He didn’t pay for sex, didn’t force it and he didn’t lie to get it. In fact, his brutal honesty was the core of his reputation as a complete waste of unblemished skin.

  While Kiara’s brand of truth telling kept jabbing holes into his thick hide.

  “It’s too early to go for dinner,” he noted. “Let’s buy you some art supplies.” He checked for his wallet and headed to the door.

  “Why?” She stayed where she was, frowning with suspicion.

  “I’m afraid you’ll compromise my virtue if we stay here,” he said, not entirely being facetious.

  Her flush and the way she tucked her elbows into her sides as though a shiver of excitement accosted her nearly undid him, but he had fallen into bed with her once before and look where they were.

  No, he would set the ground rules before they went any further. Did she really believe in love? Because he had hard proof it was a lie sold to children like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. But they shared a child and they would share her.

  “I could simply leave. We can take this up another time,” she suggested.

  She wished.

  “You said your sketch pad is your way of coping. You’ll relax if you have one in your hands.” Perhaps be less inclined to plot or lie.

  “Why would you want that? Oh, is this like when a colonel offers a nice meal as a switch-up from torture to get the interrogation victim to trust him?”

  “You see straight through me.”

  “I can’t be won over with a sable brush and a prestretched canvas.”

  “Would you prefer to stay here and hammer out the terms of our marriage?” His phrasing was deliberate, and the way she caught her breath was deeply gratifying.