Her tiny feet were tucked between his calves and his morning erection was pressed against her delectable bottom. It felt incredible, but he did not think she would agree if she were to awaken in such a position. She would accuse him of taking advantage. Her comment regarding that the night before still bothered him.
He'd messed up the morning after, but their time together in bed had been perfect and their passion had been mutual. If she had convinced herself otherwise because of what had happened afterward, he had little hope of her giving him another chance.
Carefully, so as not to wake her, he disengaged their bodies and got out of the bed, but he did not immediately leave the room. Bright morning sun filtered through the window shades and he watched her sleep. She was so beautiful. So gentle.
And the mother of his baby.
He gave thanks for her pregnancy, certain that had she not conceived she would never have contacted him again. And Heaven alone knew when Hawk would have found her otherwise.
He'd engaged the services of the international investigative firm the day she left, but she'd made it out of Greece without leaving even a trail of her flight. Sebastian understood that now. She'd been traveling under a different name. Newman.
He could not believe it had never once occurred to him after the rather one-sided discussion with his mother that Rachel might take that sort of concrete action to distance herself from such a notorious woman as Andrea Long Demakis. She'd made a totally new life for herself in the States and had told him that day in the study how much she'd hated the media attention.
He appreciated the reality of how separate her new life was from her old one after trying to find a clue to her whereabouts in Andrea's New York apartment. The only number Andrea had had there for Rachel had been disconnected two years previously.
He'd asked his mother how she'd contacted Rachel to apprise her of Andrea's death. After another lecture on his intelligence, or lack thereof, she had told him the contact information had been in an address book of Andrea's. Rachel had tossed it when cleaning out her mother's things. His mother's attitude had softened toward him when she realized he had no idea of how to contact Rachel, but wanted to.
Later, he had remembered Rachel's claim that one of Andrea's friends had contacted her and he'd had Hawk interview the women known to be in Andrea's circle of cronies. The investigator hit pay dirt when he'd literally had to offer money to one woman for Rachel's E-mail address.
Sebastian had tried to contact her that night only to discover the E-mail account had been deactivated when the message came back to him as undeliverable.
Hawk had been working on tracing the account when Rachel called. Yes, Sebastian had many reasons to give thanks his woman had gotten pregnant the first time they made love, but he was also concerned about her health.
The fact she'd been going along without treatment for two weeks made him want to hit something.
He wasn't a violent man, but damn it...she could have died.
Rachel walked into the kitchen, her nose sniffing appreciatively at the smell of bacon, buttery toast and aromatic coffee.
She stopped on the threshold of the room at the sight of a bowl of freshly prepared fruit in the center of her small Mission style dinette table. Even more shocking was the spectacle of Sebastian standing at the coffeemaker, his feet bare and his dress shirt hanging loose over his lean hips.
"You have hidden depths, Kouros." She took a deep whiff of the Sumatran blend coffee. Her favorite. "I would never have guessed you for a closet cook."
He turned from where he was pouring coffee into mugs and she realized his shirt was not only untucked, but unbuttoned as well.
Bronze skin rippled over rock hard abs as he leaned over to place one of the mugs on the table. "I am not, but one of my bodyguards is handy in the kitchen. He just left."
From the look of the perfectly prepared breakfast, the bodyguard had been cooking when Sebastian had woken her to tell her she had fifteen minutes to shower.
They ate in silence for a little while before she asked, "Where did your security team stay last night?"
What she really wanted to ask was where Sebastian had slept last night? As in, had he slept on her side of the bed with his arms around her? She thought she'd woken up at some point and been surrounded by male warmth. She'd felt protected and slept better than she had since leaving Greece, but he'd gotten out of bed before her. She simply could not be sure it had been a harmless dream, but she much preferred that scenario to her body finding instinctive and unconscious comfort in his presence.
"They stayed in a nearby hotel."
She pulled out one of the ladder-back dinette chairs and sat down. "Nardo was okay with that?"
His security chief made sure the bodyguards followed him everywhere. Although they stayed in the background, there had even been security men in the apartment and at the villa the whole time she'd been there.
"He was not given a choice."
She bet Nardo was an unhappy head of security this morning.
"I don't mean to be a problem for you."
"You are not a problem." He joined her at the table, his coffee mug in one hand, his gaze disturbingly intent on her. "You are the mother of my unborn child."
"You say that with such assurance, but I'm still surprised you didn't want tests." About traumatized by astonishment really.
"You were a virgin when we made love. The baby could have no other father."
"You're sure of that now?"
"Yes."
"For heaven's sake, why?" Nothing had changed that she could see, but all of a sudden she was not some awful man-eating liar.
What was going on here?
His big shoulders tensed. "You reacted like a total innocent. I should have given that more credence the next morning, but I did not."
"You were too busy making assumptions because there had been no blood." He was so medieval, he should be in a museum.
His gray gaze darkened with some intolerable emotion. "You said you were attacked."
“And you said I was making up stories in order to trap you like my mother had used lies to lure Matthias in." That had hurt so much.
She'd never told anyone about what had happened in her teens and to have the one person she shared it with disbelieve her had been as devastating as his wholesale rejection.
At that moment, granite and his jaw could have competed in the rigidity stakes. "We would do better to forget the things I said the morning after we made love."
Just like that. Amazing. She was having his baby, so she was supposed to pretend everything was fine between them?
She didn't think so.
CHAPTER EIGHT
"So, are you saying you now also trust me about my past?"
"That is what I am saying."
She shook her head, not believing him for a single second. It was too easy, too much of a blanket acceptance of what he had violently rejected before. "I wish I could understand why you are so sure the baby is yours."
She was certain the rest of his supposed newfound faith in her stemmed from that belief.
He looked wary and that pricked her curiosity.
"What changed, Sebastian? When I left your apartment, you thought I was little better than a whore."
"Never that."
"You accused me of using my body for financial gain. What would you call it?"
"Stupidity."
"Tell me why."
He looked distinctly uncomfortable. "My mother thinks I am a fool."
"You're kidding, right?" Greek mothers revered their sons and Phillippa thought Sebastian and Aristide were the best the male species had to offer.
Besides, what did Phillippa's opinion have to do with Sebastian changing his?
"She called me a dinosaur and said that lack of blood is no indication of a sexual past."
It took a second for the meaning of his words to sink in. but when they did. Rachel jumped from her chair and screeched, "Yo
u told your mother about us having sex?"
What must Phillippa think of her? Here Rachel's mother and stepfather had been less than two weeks dead and she'd been hopping in the sack with Sebastian. It had to have appeared indecent to Sebastian's mother.
Heck, it had been indecent.
Sebastian reached out and anchored her wrist. "Sit down and calm yourself, Rachel."
She did sit, but only because she started feeling woozy and didn't want him to realize it. She yanked her wrist from his grasp and glared at him. She'd spent her whole life calm and had never even realized she had a temper until Sebastian started pricking at it after the funeral.
"Please tell me you did not discuss what happened between us with your mother," she gritted out between clenched teeth.
Red scorched Sebastian's cheekbones. "I told her, yes. And I believe it was the first time in my life my mother spoke freely to me about matters of a sexual nature. It would please me if it were also the last."