A Debt Paid in Passion

And it did nothing to dissipate the attraction she felt toward him. If anything, it was worse now. The thick walls she’d built against him were thinning and little fantasies of somehow finding a future with him, earning his trust and maybe his love, sparkled like fairy dust in the edges of her vision.

So dumb.

Given what he’d just told her, it was time to accept that he would never, ever love her. The best she could hope for was this, a truce and a fresh start.

Injustice sawed behind her breastbone like an abrasive file.

Lucy grew heavy in her arms. She started to change her position, then let Raoul take her, watching as the limp infant was tucked lovingly into her father’s chest.

Folding her empty arms, she tried telling herself she could manage alone, but she couldn’t ignore his point about day care.

“My mother wants to see her,” Raoul added in quiet insistence. “You know how hard travel is on her. Lucy obviously hates the bottle. We could force the issue—”

“No!” she blurted, hating thinking of Lucy being distressed about anything. If she preferred to breast-feed, well, this was a finite time in both their lives.

“You’ll come to New York with us, then.”

“Don’t start with your pushy tactics! I know how you work, getting a small concession and turning it into a major one,” she said with mild disgust. “I’ll think about New York. And if I go, it won’t be as your—”

Lover? Mistress? Girlfriend? The words all sounded so superficial and temporary, paring her self-worth down to nothing.

“Nanny?” he prompted, mouth quirking briefly, then he sobered. “I’d have to hire one if you don’t go. I’d prefer to pay you. You could quit the transcription.”

“Don’t make it sound easy. It’s not.”

One long masculine finger touched her jaw, turning her face to his. “What’s hard? Making the promise about not stealing? Or keeping it?”

His challenge pinned her so she felt like an insect squirming in place, unable to escape even though she wanted to scamper away. Dying by increments, she felt the spasm of hurt reflect in her face before she was able to mask it, but a pierce of pain stayed lodged in her heart like an iron spike.

Looking him straight in the eye, she defiantly said, “I will never take anything from you. Ever.”

He held her gaze for so long she almost couldn’t stand it. Tightness gripped her chest and her skin felt too small for her body.

He nodded once.

As he walked away, she hung back, trembling. Had she lost or won?

* * *

Raoul’s mother cried when she held Lucy for the first time.

“I never imagined he’d give me a grandchild. He’s such a workaholic.” Beatrisa was a tall, slender woman who dressed well and bound her silver hair into a figure eight behind her head. Her subtle makeup enhanced her aristocratic features and she wore elegant jewelry that Sirena suspected were gifts from her son.

Beatrisa had always seemed to lack a real spark of life and now Sirena understood why. She felt a tremendous need to be kind to the older woman, and was glad she’d conceded to the trip, even though everything about staying in this house was awkward.

“She thinks we’re a couple,” she hissed when they were given a room to share.

“What a crazy assumption, with the baby and all,” he drawled.

“You should explain to her.”

“How?” he countered with exasperation.

Oh, that attitude of his grated. Especially since she could see how it would go. Beatrisa was being incredibly polite, plainly trying not to pry as she accepted their “modern” relationship with a murmur about admiring independent women. Any attempt to clarify would crack open the marriage question and Raoul didn’t see any point in that.

Not that she wanted to marry him. No, they might have found a truce and a crooked understanding with their revelations about their past, but it wasn’t as though he’d magically fallen in love with her. For her part, she was too aware of how easily she could tip back into crazy infatuation with him, making her vulnerable to his dominant personality. He’d broken her heart once already. She couldn’t let him do it again.

“I’ll use the bed in Lucy’s room,” she said.

His sigh rang with male frustration. “The doctor cleared you for more than travel, didn’t he?”

“So I’m supposed to fall into bed with you?” She swung around to glare at him across the foot of the enormous, inviting bed with its plump pillows and slippery satin cover. “I realize you think I slept with you to hide my crime, but sex isn’t that mindless for me. I need feelings on both sides.”

A chill washed over her as her words rang in her ears. Nausea threatened, the kind that came from deep mortification. She was an independent woman, all right, one whose only solace against her obsession with her boss was that he’d never known how deep it went, but she’d just snapped her way into humiliation. Her clothes might as well be on the floor around her ankles, she felt so naked and exposed.

He stood arrested, but the wheels were spinning fast behind his inscrutable stare.

Trying to stay ahead of any conclusions he might draw, she gathered her toothbrush and pajamas from her bag, aware she was shaking but unable to control it.

“Of course, I’m given to self-deception,” she stammered. “And thank God, or we wouldn’t have Lucy, would we? But we both know how we feel about each other now and I make enough fresh mistakes without having to repeat old ones, so...”

She practically ran from the room before locking herself into Lucy’s, where she threw herself facedown on the bed and quietly screamed into a pillow.

CHAPTER NINE

RAOUL HAD GROWN up in New York, but he didn’t care for it. Too many dark memories. The climate didn’t help, always socked in with rain or buried in snow or suffocatingly humid with summer heat. The place forced on him a heavy feeling of a weight inside him that he couldn’t shift.

He was already struggling with that when he paused on his way into a meeting and instructed the receptionist to interrupt him if Sirena called.

“Ms. Abbott? I thought she’d left the company! How is she?” The woman’s warmth and interest were sincere.

His blunt “Fine” was rude. And a lie. He’d left the house before he’d seen her this morning, but he knew from the way Sirena had blanched last night that she was not fine. He almost suspected she was injured in a way he hadn’t considered.

Brooding while he half listened to his engineers develop a workback schedule, he did some math. He hadn’t added everything together since their talk over drinks that night by the pool because he’d been distracted by other revelations, but if it was true she hadn’t dated after that boy in college, she’d had exactly one lover since her first, ill-fated relationship.

Him.

...sex isn’t that mindless for me. I need feelings on both sides.

The way she’d practically grabbed the voice bubble from the air and gobbled it back indicated pretty clearly that she’d never meant to admit that to him. Which made it disturbingly sincere.

Of course, I’m given to self-deception, she’d added to cover up, but that only made him grind his teeth, wondering if he was as well. Despite her motives for stealing unfolding into a picture of a woman who hadn’t believed he’d help if she asked, he’d never wavered from believing she’d slept with him to cover up what she’d done.

He needed to believe it. Anything else was too uncomfortable. He wasn’t a womanizer. He didn’t take advantage of the vulnerable. He didn’t lead women on.

She hadn’t expected one hookup to be a marriage proposal, she’d said, but had expected to be treated with respect.

At the time of their affair, he’d been way past respect into genuine liking. Affection. Something deeper he’d never contemplated letting himself feel.

God, when he thought back to how those twenty-four hours had gone, it was like another lifetime. The sweetness of her, the relief of finally giving in to touching her, the powerful release that had shaken him to the core...

The doors opening inside him, a sensation like footsteps invading the well-guarded depths of his soul. Even as their damp, half-clothed bodies had been trembling in ecstasy, he’d crashed back to the reality of what they’d just done. Whom he’d done it with. How vulnerable he felt.

His inner panels had lit up with alarm signals. While Sirena’s plump lips had grazed his throat, he’d been withdrawing, deeply aware of a sense of jeopardy. His father hadn’t killed himself because he’d fallen for his secretary. He’d killed himself because he’d fallen. In love. Deep emotions drove men to desperate acts.

What he’d felt for Sirena in those loaded minutes of sensual closeness had scared the hell out of him.

He’d pulled away, said something about the rain having stopped. By the time he’d dropped her at her building and returned to his own, he’d been primed for a reason, any reason, to knock her so far away from him she’d never reach him again.

And he had.

...Even my stepmother didn’t go that far to hurt me.

Rather than killing himself, he’d destroyed what had been growing between them.

It was a sickening, horrid vision of himself. He lurched to his feet, needing to escape his own pathetic weakness, but only drew the attention of the room.