Mistress: Pregnant by The Spanish Billionaire

‘No!’ She held up her hand, shook her head and, just to get her point over, said it again. ‘No!’

‘You introduced the subject,’ he said mildly.

Nell raised her narrowed eyes to his. ‘If I had set out to seduce you I would say sorry. If I deliberately misled you in some way I would say sorry, but I didn’t do either and I’m not going to apologise,’ she added fiercely, ‘for a moment of utter madness.’ She started to rise, found her legs were shaky and sat back down again.

‘You regret what happened?’ Regret—what was to regret? He silently answered his own question—oh, if you didn’t count losing your virginity to a man you barely knew on the floor in the middle of a damn wood…no soft music, no gentle seduction, just a raw, unpolished explosion of hunger. Shame was a sour taste in his mouth.

She had tasted sweet.

At the time the significance of her little gasps of shock had not hit him; they had not made him hold back and make allowances for her inexperience; they had only aroused him more.

The one time in his life he had lost control in the bedroom, and it hadn’t been the bedroom and she had been… His mouth curled into a grimace of bitter self-reproach. Dios, it was a wonder, he told himself, that Nell had not run screaming for the hills.

But she had not.

She had responded to him with a sweetly wild, unrestrained passion that had been equal to his own, as if the same fire that had heated his blood and wiped all sane thought from his brain had also pumped through her veins.

His eyes darkened and he was helpless to control the response of his body as he savoured the sweet memory of her deliciously wild, abandoned responses to his lovemaking.

A woman could lose herself in his eyes, she thought, mesmerised by the glow in his fixed black stare. She took a breath and pulled her eyes clear.

‘When they reach a scary point in their lives some people bury themselves in their work to avoid dealing with it,’ she continued, her voice gaining confidence as she spoke—this was a subject she had given some thought to on the journey, thought, not rationalisation.

‘Me—’ Nell pressed a hand to her chest and gave him a lopsided grin, hoping she was coming across as someone who had dealt with this and come out the other side able to be objective, able to see the funny side.

What funny side?

‘I jumped on a plane for what turned out to be no good reason, then I jumped into bed with you—well, not bed, but you know what I mean. I was…actually I’m not sure what the psychological term is for what I did, or if there is one—’

‘Oh, I feel sure there is one.’

Nell acknowledged the slick, sardonic interruption with a frown.

‘Lucy didn’t need saving.’ Pity the same can’t be said of me! She arched a brow and tilted her head up to him and found he was still watching her.

Nell swallowed as her stomach went into a slow-motion big-dipper dive.

‘You told me that all along. How does it feel to be right?’ She carried on talking because he wasn’t saying anything and Nell felt an irrational need to fill the silence and avoid his smouldering stare.

The trouble with silence was you started thinking, and there were any number of things she didn’t want to think about.

‘I suppose you think it’s funny?’

She struggled to put a name to his expression but it wasn’t amusement.

‘You’re allowed to say I told you so,’ she added. ‘I bet you’re just gagging to.’

‘You want to know what I am… “gagging” to do, querida?’

‘No!’ Cheeks burning, she lifted her hands and held them to her ears.

His laughter took the edge off the high-voltage tension in the air.

‘Look, let’s forget the post-mortems, what’s done is done, no point crying over spilt—’

‘Milk?’ he suggested, cutting across her.

Nell flushed. ‘Well, anyway, that’s it, then. Could you drop me off somewhere I can get a taxi to the airport on your way back?’ Her smile faded. ‘I’ll never see you again.’ Until he responded Nell wasn’t even aware she had voiced the realisation.

‘It is not impossible.’

The mortified colour rushed to her cheeks. ‘Well, our paths are not likely to cross unless you come into the library to borrow a book.’

He lowered his glance with slow deliberation, causing Nell to lift her hands in a protective gesture across her stomach. ‘Or you are carrying my child.’

Nell gave an embarrassed hollow laugh. ‘That isn’t going to happen.’ Anyone would think, from the way he kept harking on about it, that he wanted it to happen.