Chapter 7 #2
The question caught him off guard, made him give a snort. He wasn’t even sure what happiness was, or that it existed. He believed in hard knocks. He believed in hard work. But happiness? It was nothing but a faint, fading memory.
They were walking past beach vendors who hawked their T-shirts and jewelry and artwork from their stands. Damien was saved from answering by an aggressive salesman calling out, “Senorita! Hola... I will give you a good price, come and see. A pretty bracelet for a pretty woman.”
Mandy shook her head with a smile. “No, thank you.”
“Senor is cheap, huh?” he asked with a sly grin at Damien.
Mandy laughed and waved as they walked on past.
“You didn’t even defend me,” Damien said in mock protest. “I am not cheap.”
“Well, I don’t think you are, but I’m really not entirely sure, having never seen you shopping. But you’re not going to distract me from my original question.” Her fingers pressed into his flesh. “Are you happy?”
Damien stopped walking and looked down at her, at the warm expression in her mocha brown eyes. She had a dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose that he wanted to kiss. “Why does it matter to you, Mandy?”
“Because I like you,” she said simply, and it stirred to life embers he had thought were long burned out.
He started walking again, eager to move past the vendors, to where the sun and the ocean met with nothing but beach between them.
He ached inside and out, with the physical need to bury himself inside Mandy, to seek pleasure and oblivion in that tender sensual give and take of sex with someone he respected, admired, was a bit in awe of.
“I’m content,” he told her, figuring that was close enough to the truth. “Or at least I was until I met you.”
“What did I do?” she whispered.
“You made me see that I’m lonely...” Damien stopped, took Mandy’s hand in his, turned her to him.
They were only a few feet past the noise and laughter of the vendors, but he didn’t care.
“I can’t—don’t want—a relationship. But Mandy, I find you very attractive, and I would really like to kiss you right now. ”
Of course, he wanted to have sex with her under the nearest beach umbrella, but he figured he should ease her into the idea.
Start with a kiss, then move to wild sex on the beach.
Mandy swallowed about a bucketful of saliva. Whoa, boy. This was unexpected.
Or maybe it wasn’t.
They had spent the evening talking, laughing, relaxing, and in Damien she saw some of the same loneliness, the same fears that seemed to have taken up permanent residence in her.
She thought, perhaps, Damien Sharpton wasn’t so much a cruel, heartless man as he was a wounded man, scarred inside where no one could see it. Except her.
And she wanted to hold him, be held in return, in a mutual clasp of comfort.
But he was her boss, and she was keeping a big secret from him, and this was a sandy beach far away from home where reality was skewed and where mistakes could be made.
“Damien, I find you very attractive as well. Both physically and as a person. So I’m very much afraid that a kiss would lead to something else, and would that really be such a good...”
Mandy lost complete track of her thought as a fluttering sensation moved across her abdomen. “What on earth?” Heart racing, she placed her hands over her stomach and felt it again. The very first movements of her baby.
Oh, my God, it was incredible, absolutely amazing. She reached out and clutched Damien’s linen shirt with her free hand, suddenly lightheaded.
“Are you going to throw up again?” Damien grabbed her elbows, looking left and right as if seeking help.
Mandy laughed. She was going to be a mother.
There was a child growing inside her, and she/he was swimming laps back and forth from the feel of it.
An almost overwhelming surge of love stole over her for this baby, and she wanted to share such a perfect moment with someone.
Had to explain to another person that her whole world was shifting and morphing and she was settling into a wondrous kind of excitement over those changes.
“I’m not going to be sick.” She grabbed Damien’s hand and laid it flat on her abdomen. “Can you feel it, Damien? The baby’s moving.”
“The baby?” he squawked, eyes the size of dinner plates. “What baby?”
Now he looked like the one capable of tossing his tea and toast. “My baby. The one I’m having in approximately twenty-three weeks.”
His mouth moved, but nothing came out. His gaze dropped to her stomach, where his hand was pressed over the coral sundress.
Mandy put her hand over his, so he wouldn’t pull back.
She wanted someone to feel the same miracle she was experiencing.
Maybe it was too early for someone else to feel the movements, but if it wasn’t. ..
There was a quick push outward, as if the baby had jettisoned off a springboard, and Mandy broke into a smile as awareness dawned on Damien’s face.
“Holy shit,” was his opinion, and he looked a little as though he’d walked into a wall after drinking a fifth of gin, but at the same time his thumb stole over her belly in a little soft stroke.
“That’s amazing.” His eyes locked with hers, and she saw the same wonder in them that she felt. “I actually felt it.”
Tears of joy blurred her vision. “I think I just fell completely in love with my baby.”
“Your baby,” he repeated softly, before pulling his hand back and rubbing his forehead. “Your baby.” He shook his head. “Want to tell me exactly how that is possible?”
Then he quickly held his hand up. “No, wait, that’s not what I mean. I don’t need a detailed description of conception. But...can I ask... who’s the father? Where is he?”
Mandy wiped a tear off her eyelash and knew she needed to explain everything to Damien. This wasn’t a secret she could keep any longer, not when she knew Damien the way she did now. Not when this mutual attraction was undulating between them.
“I was seeing a man for six months. He misused a condom, and when I turned up pregnant, suggested I not continue to carry. When I flatly refused, he offered me five thousand dollars to have my baby and never bother him again. He has two grown sons who are a disappointment to him. He didn’t want to bring up another child, only to have it let him down.
” Mandy was still horrified by Ben’s reaction.
She had thought she’d known him, but clearly she had been completely wrong.
“Asshole,” was Damien’s vehement opinion.
“Yes.” She nodded. That about summed it up.
Damien took a step to the right, then back. His hands went on his hips. “The flu you had... it was morning sickness, wasn’t it?”
She nodded. It didn’t surprise her he had worked that out already. Damien was an intelligent man, a quick thinker. It was how he was so successful.
“No wonder I didn’t catch any germs from you then.
I kept waiting to come down with the flu.
I sure in the hell can’t catch what you have.
” He shook his head and gave an ironic laugh.
“Is this why you’ve avoided me? You didn’t want me to know?
” His finger went into his mouth and he chewed on a corner of the nail.
Mandy wanted to explain herself, wanted to take away the harshness that had crept into his face.
“I need this job. I need the health insurance and I need the nine-to-five hours so that daycare arrangements will be easier. I didn’t think that the Damien Sharpton I’d been told about would hire a pregnant woman.
” And she hoped like hell Demon Sharpton wouldn’t fire a pregnant woman.
But she didn’t believe he would, despite the tension in his shoulders. She wouldn’t have told him if she had.
“You’re probably right.” Damien glanced at his finger and dropped it. “Why the fuck do I keep biting my nails?”
She hoped that was a rhetorical question.
The beach had darkened, and his face was pale against the dark sky. His voice softened. “So why did you tell me now, Mandy?”
“Because I wanted to be honest with you.” She took a step closer to him, skirting the bag she’d dropped in the sand. “And because when I felt the baby move, I needed to share it with someone, and I think that you’re a man who can appreciate what I’m experiencing. Was I wrong?”
She didn’t want to be wrong. She didn’t want to think that her impulsiveness in telling him had been a poor choice.
She had told herself now that she was going to be a mum, she had to leave impulsiveness behind.
But something had told her to tell him, and she just didn’t want to regret it, not now when she was feeling so humbled and in awe of the life growing inside her.
“You should be wrong.” Damien looked over her shoulder toward the water. He sighed. “There are reasons why you should be very wrong.”
He looked down at her, closed the space between them. Her heart started to pound faster, harder, when his hand cupped her cheek.
“But you’re not wrong.”
She closed her eyes, turned her nose and mouth toward his hand. She could smell the salty tang of his flesh, feel the rough callus of his thumb stroking over her. Without thinking, she pressed her lips into the moist hollow of his hand.
“Mandy.” His voice was hoarse, quiet. Intense.
“Yes?”
But he didn’t speak, and his hand dropped.
Her eyes flew open only to see that he was closing in on her, his nose inches from hers, his mouth a hairbreadth away, his shoulders descending toward hers.
She only had time to suck in her breath as anticipation spiked between her thighs, made her breasts tingle.
Then he was kissing her, an honest-to-goodness, lips everywhere, tongue-teasing, knee-wobbling kiss. Excitement exploded throughout her body in little spastic lightning bolts of desire.
Mandy dipped her head back, opening her mouth, marveling at the taste and texture of him, so firm, so wet, so eager, so different, and yet exactly what she should have expected.
Damien was in control, but beneath the surface of the kiss, beneath his dominating impatience, skittered an edgy vulnerability that was just as appealing as his confidence and skill.
“Ooohhh,” she murmured when his lips moved to her jaw, her neck. Her body felt different, more sensitive, quicker to react, and she wasn’t sure if it was Damien or the pregnancy, or a blissful combination of the two.
His thigh shifted, surrounding her with his heat, and he cut off her moan with another kiss that left her clinging to him like seaweed. Mandy could hear the excited little rush of both their breath, the pants, the moans, the shift from casual exploration to urgent questing.
She ground herself against him, then was shocked that she did. Even more so by the obvious dampness in her knickers and the eager kick of satisfaction at feeling Damien’s thick erection nudging her.
“You taste so good, so damn good,” he said in a hot whisper, thumbs rolling her sundress straps toward her shoulders.
“Damien, what the hell are we doing?” Then she yelped when he brushed her nipple. “Bugger it, that feels good.”
She was certain her nipples had never been quite so enthusiastic in her whole life. Just what she needed. She was single and pregnant and her nipples had suddenly become supersensitive sluts looking for action.
“We’re kissing each other. We’re touching each other. And we’re going to go back to your room or mine, doesn’t matter, and we’re going to spend the night having hot, wet sex.”