“You’re welcome.” He resisted the urge to press a kiss to the curve of her neck and stepped up to the ticket counter. Kyril ordered the replacement ticket in fluent French, and the woman behind the glass batted her eyes at him.
“Better hurry,” she replied in her native French. “The train is leaving.”
As if on cue, the whistle blew again, shrill and urgent.
“It’s leaving!” Hannah squeaked, her voice rising in panic. “Kyril—”
He took Hannah’s hand. She didn’t pull hers away. “Let’s go, let’s go. You can still catch it, hurry—”
He rushed her toward the train, the seconds ticking away around them. Kyril wanted badly, with every fiber of his being, to wrap her in his arms and take her away with him. He’d settle for keeping her hand in his. But he couldn’t afford to get caught up in emotions like this. The whistle screeched again, a final warning, and he squeezed her hand and guided her onto the silver train.
Hannah stepped into the wide-open doors. She turned back to look at him, hiking her bag up to her shoulder.
That was when he saw it.
The gentle curve of her belly under the sundress.
It was a shock that ran from his head to his toes, ice followed by a surprise that was pure heat.
“I was going to tell you.” She was eye level with him, standing one step up, and her face was stricken, undecided. “I didn’t plan on meeting you here.”
“Is it mine?”
There was no hint of deviousness in those big green eyes of hers, only an electric truth. “It is.”
“Mine.” His mind seized on the details. The little rise in the hem of her sundress where the bump lifted the fabric. The way the curves of her body were smooth and glowing. Her skin shone, and in the center of it all, her eyes searched her face. Was she looking for excitement? Disapproval? Could she see the storm that raged in the center of his chest?
His hands rose, and he pressed his palms against that curve. Oh, it was like a sigh of relief, touching her like this, and underneath his palms he felt it—an incandescent spark of life.
One they’d created together.
Hannah leaned into his hands, an imperceptible shift of her weight, and he slid his hands around to the sides of her waist. A new life, there between his hands. A new life that was his. He could hold her like this forever.
The train shuddered, the brakes releasing, and he dropped his hands away from her and stepped back.
“Goodbye, Kyril,” she said, and the doors of the train slid closed between them.
“Sir? Is everything all right?” The head of his security team drew close. Hannah turned away, disappearing into the car.
The train pulled away without him, leaving him standing alone on the platform.
2
Kyril had let her go.
Hannah sat heavily in one of the blue padded seats of the train’s dining compartment, empty at the moment except for one uniformed waiter at the opposite end.
She couldn’t believe it.
He’d gone so far as to guide her by the hand
off the platform, onto the train, and away from him. She’d turned away from the door the moment it closed, but that didn’t stop her from imagining his dashing, suited figure getting smaller and smaller by the moment.
It wasn’t like him to let her out of his sight like this. They’d spent one week together, three months ago, and he’d never taken his eyes off her. Heat raced down the back of her neck at the memory of those dark wells of passion tracing the curves of her body as she stretched out in bed, feeling lazily beautiful and glamorous for the first time in her life.
“God, Hannah,” he’d said, putting the pads of his fingers where his eyes had lingered. “How will I breathe without you?”
She’d taken it as a throwaway compliment, but even so, he’d been so protective. Always standing close by, always his hand on her elbow, steering her away from any possible danger. It was the kind of thing that would have driven her crazy if some American frat boy had tried it in college. Hannah could take care of herself, thank you very much, but with Kyril…she’d found his attentions so sexy that they heated up the air around her and scorched her lungs in the most pleasant way.