Chapter Five #3
London was going to be a fresh start. A new life. Moving across an ocean to another country was not just about progressing her career, it was about shedding her old self. In England, she could stop pretending, stop living a lie. She could leave the baggage of the past behind.
Only now the past had caught up with her.
Or was it the past repeating? The idea that she could be pregnant like her mom had been, carrying the baby of a man who neither loved her nor wanted her, made her feel suddenly sick.
Her stomach cramped. But it couldn’t be morning sickness. Could it?
What if it was? She shouldn’t have let it happen. She’d been warned about daydreaming about her future, but she had ignored the warnings. She had let herself get lost in Ares’s dark-eyed beauty, and now she was adrift in the present.
‘Why did you say you were safe?’
Willa let her gaze drift back to the horizon. It was steady now. Unlike her heart, which was beating fast and hard and arrhythmically like a jazz drummer’s improv set.
It was no wonder that Ares had turned a profitable family shipping business into a global behemoth. He was intelligent and determined. But it was that ability to focus on the details when a hurricane was uprooting everything around him that made him exceptional. He would be a formidable opponent.
Would he be a good father?
Not going there, she thought, and blanking her mind she met his gaze. ‘Are you saying you believe I’m not engaged now?’
‘Yes, but you haven’t answered my other question.’ He waited. ‘Did you think you were safe because you were using the pill?’
‘That’s a complicated question so I’m not sure I can give you a clear and accurate answer.’
‘And I’m not sure a judge would agree with you.’
His lips curved up infinitesimally at one corner, and she felt her senses shift entirely to the shape of his mouth.
‘So you’re not acting as judge, jury and executioner anymore. That’s progress.’
‘I’m not a tyrant, Willa.’
‘And I didn’t lie to you. I’m not engaged. I’ve never been engaged. I don’t even have a boyfriend.’
‘But you could be pregnant.’
She smiled stiffly, trying to spin out the role-playing. ‘Objection. Badgering the witness.’
‘You weren’t a witness, though, were you?’ His eyes locked with hers, and she felt it low in her pelvis, a sharp, compelling tug of desire. ‘You were a participant. A willing participant.’
‘You were too.’
He shook his head slowly. ‘Not willing. I was impatient. Hungry.’
Hungry.
The air stirred in the room. Why had he said that?
After the Clarendon, she’d bolstered herself against the world.
Against him. But now he’d taken a wrecking ball and smashed her defences as easily as if they were made of papier maché so that there was nothing between them.
Nothing to stop this gravitational force that seemed intent on pulling them ever closer.
But gravity was supposed to be the weakest of the four natural forces. She just needed to come to her senses—
They both snapped at the same time. His hand was in her hair, and she was gripping his shirt, pulling him closer, and she felt hunger and relief swell inside her as his mouth found hers. It felt so good, so right, so honest.
Be honest, then, she thought desperately, as heat slipped over her skin. Because soon she would be too warm to think, to speak—
‘I wasn’t on the pill.’ Her voice vibrated against his mouth, and she shivered as his fingers moved lightly over her ribs. ‘I wasn’t using contraception.’
She felt his hands still, and then she was shivering again, but this time it was because he was disentangling himself.
‘What do you mean?’ His eyes were dark and impregnable. He was just inches away, but he was so out of reach to her now he could be standing on the moon. And his removal made her feel scooped out, discarded. Superfluous. ‘Are you saying you knew you could get pregnant? Was it deliberate?’
‘No, I didn’t do it deliberately. I never thought it could happen.’
He was too smart. Too relentless. If she said more, there would be another question and another and another, and when he had all the answers, he would see her for what she was.
An empty shell. A phony with a stolen past and no future.
And a present filled with nothing but lies. Because she didn’t belong anywhere now.
She felt as if she was dissolving. There was a tightness behind her eyes that felt like tears. But she didn’t cry. ‘I can’t do this. I can’t—’ She stepped back to the side of a sofa.
‘Willa—’ He reached out to steady her, but she shied away.
‘Just leave me alone.’
She stepped past him, half expecting his hand on her wrist, but then she was out of the room and scampering up the stairs and into the bedroom and—she felt a rush of relief—there was a lock on the door, so she turned the key, then stumbled across the room to the bed and hugged her knees to her chest. Because if she didn’t, all of it would spill out of her, and then there would be nothing left at all.
* * *
Ares woke with a jolt, breathing in sharply, his body twitching beneath the sheets, his cock hard, a sense of disappointment creeping over his skin because, of course, Willa was not in his bed.
And there was a twisted justice to that feeling of loss and frustration.
Now that he had all the facts, it was clearly payback for how he had acted that night at the Clarendon.
Maybe that was why it felt so real. Why she felt real. He could feel the heat of her skin and the soft press of her fingers, and he had to steady his breathing and recalibrate all his senses.
He could see her now, naked, legs curled underneath her body, watching him, staring at him intently, watching, waiting, just out of reach—
Remembering Willa’s small, wary face, he felt his jaw tighten. After yesterday, saying she was just out of reach was something of an understatement.
He had hassled, hounded and hectored her. Accused her of lying in about fifty different ways. And then he had kissed her.
In his defence, he had been caught off guard. Her admission that she wasn’t and had never been engaged was a haymaker that was quickly followed by a second, knockout punch: that she hadn’t been using contraception.
In other words, Toula was right. She could be pregnant, and he could be the father.
He realised he was holding his breath. A father, to a baby conceived from a one-night stand with a woman he had met three weeks ago who he had blackmailed into working for him.
That she was currently writing Ariana’s prenup because he had been so furious with his ditsy sister for getting engaged to a man she had met a couple of months ago now was less an irony than a cosmic joke—on him.
Picturing Ariana’s expression, his skull felt like it was going to explode.
Could Willa have done it deliberately? Had that supposed accident in the street been anything but accidental?
Logically, the answer to that was possibly, at least. And yet he knew that it wasn’t.
That she was as stunned as he was. Unflatteringly, aside from the sex, he got the feeling that she saw him not as a catch but a complication.
The room felt suddenly like it was closing in on him. He needed to get out of here. Get some air. Move. Run.
Throwing back the sheet, he got to his feet and made his way to the window and pushed open the shutters. There was enough light. All he needed to do was get dressed. And then he would run and keep running until the ache in his lungs offset the one in his chest.