Lynne Graham's Brides of L'Amour Bundle

A mortified flush lit her creamy complexion. ‘Why do guys always stick together?’

‘Mutual terror?’ Roel quipped in a roughened undertone, level dark golden eyes welded to her. ‘When I understood what sort of agreement you were seeking, I was ashamed. I knew instantly that I had driven you to it.’

Hilary surveyed him with wide, bewildered eyes. ‘What is it with you? Why weren’t you pleased? Why would you be ashamed? I was willing to sign a declaration saying I would never make a claim on your wealth or anything else you owned!’

‘But that would have been wrong because you have every right to share what I have—’

‘It would have shown you once and for all that I don’t want or need anything from you!’

Roel drew in a ragged breath and squared his broad shoulders. ‘I accused you of being a gold-digger because that way I could avoid dealing with how I really felt about you.’

Her brow indented. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘When I had amnesia, I got used to having you around. After I got my memory back, I was furious with you because you had made one hell of a fool of me!’

That frank condemnation leeched colour from below Hilary’s skin. ‘That wasn’t my intention and it isn’t how I see what happened between us,’ she protested.

‘But it changed everything. You’d fooled me successfully and I had no confidence in my own ability to read you after that.’ Savage tension emanating from his lithe, powerful frame, Roel swung away from her. ‘But no matter how great my distrust of you was, I still wanted you back and not only because the sex was dynamite.’

Hilary perked up at that promising confession. ‘But you were quite happy for me to think that it was just that.’

His bold bronzed profile clenched as she put him on the spot yet again. ‘I was covering up…I was—’ He bit off whatever he had been about to say and raised and dropped a broad shoulder in visible frustration. ‘I was…’

‘You were…what?’ she prompted.

‘Scared! OK?’ He shot that reluctant admission at her as if she had turned a gun on him. ‘I was scared. I was feeling stuff I’d never felt before and it spooked me. But even by the time we arrived in Sardinia I had simmered down. I was relaxing and beginning to trust you again…’

Hilary opened dry lips. ‘Then I admitted I was pregnant—’

‘Once again you’d been secretive. If only you had shared that news with me immediately. All that week we had been together and we had been closer than I had ever been with any woman but, throughout it, you’d been hiding the fact that you were carrying our child. That hit me hard, made me wonder what else you might be hiding,’ he confessed heavily.

‘I was afraid of how you’d react.’ But her attempt to defend herself was half-hearted for she could now see that keeping Roel in the dark about her pregnancy had damaged his view of her all over again.

His stunning dark golden eyes held her strained gaze levelly. ‘I needed you to be honest. You weren’t and I had lost faith in my own judgement. From that point on, everything went haywire—’

‘You…went haywire,’ Hilary slotted in unhappily. ‘But I’m not holding that against you. It’s not a hanging offence if you don’t want a baby you didn’t plan to have with me—’

‘I do want our baby very much. But I was afraid that you were taking me for another ride,’ Roel breathed with suppressed savagery. ‘I’ve been at war with myself ever since. Although I was determined to hang onto both of you I hated the idea that you might stay with me solely because you were expecting my child. Does that sound crazy to you?’

‘No…I felt the same way,’ she muttered ruefully.

‘I was trying so hard to stay in control that I went off the rails…’ Roel spread lean brown hands in a gesture that denoted honest remorse, dark colour accentuating his hard, handsome features. ‘I ended up accusing you of things I didn’t even believe. I knew the baby was mine but I didn’t want you to suspect that you had hurt me again, so I decided to hurt first.’

In receipt of that surprising admission, Hilary listened with even greater concentration. She had hurt him? Had he really said those words?

‘I’ve been fighting what I feel for you ever since and I can’t do it any more,’ Roel confided hoarsely. ‘I’ve been trying to work up a resistance to you—’

‘I’m not a disease…’ Hilary whispered.

‘Not seeing you was the only thing that worked. Then you came down in that kimono thing for breakfast and…I realised I was failing badly in the resistance stakes—’

‘You were offensive—’

‘I’m sorry. I was angry with myself, not with you. I was furious that I could not control my desire for you. I took refuge in sarcasm. It’s an unfortunate defence mechanism.’

‘It was the last straw—’

‘It won’t happen again,’ Roel intoned urgently. ‘I’m new at all this and it’s not easy. Do you think you could give me another chance?’