Chapter Two
Tessa
I’VE BEEN READY for over an hour.
My linen jumpsuit is practical for the heat—wide-legged, belted at the waist, the ivory fabric crisp against my skin. I paired it with low-heeled sandals and a head wrap of indigo wax print that hides the flyaway curls that humidity always teases loose.
Gold hoops, simple, nothing ostentatious. I wanted armour that looked effortless, but not defensive. Professional. A world removed from that red gown I wore four years ago. The one that made me feel sexy and empowering. Maybe way too empowering.
Sure, let’s blame the gown…
I grimace and spin away from the window I’m pretending not to be looking out of.
I’ve been pacing my rented flat like a woman about to face temptation and judgement instead of a site visit. The apartment is airy, upmarket and clean, but impersonal, temporary housing arranged by Ashon and Cilla’s foundation until I find something more permanent.
Ashon and Cilla had insisted I stay with them in the plush mansion they use when they’re in Ghana and not Beverly Hills, their primary home. But the thought of living under their watchful affection made my insides churn. I need space. Space to remind myself that I stand on my own feet, not theirs.
That while I might not have excelled at relationships like they have—hell, that I was smeared not once but twice by the filthy brush of infidelity from the men I chose to be with—I am neither broken nor a charity case.
That even beyond the distance disgrace of Giles—the ex who turned out to have had more than one woman in his bed—and the unfortunately more visceral and hard-to-forget Theo Biney—I’ve overcome a lot and have shouldered the kind of grief that would make their loved-up eyes soften in sympathy, maybe even pity, if they only knew.
Exactly the kind of reaction I hadn’t wanted to suffer when the horrifying happened. Or now.
But space isn’t helping now. Not when every step I take only replays yesterday in sharper detail.
Four years.
Four years of silence. Of pushing Theo out of my mind, of refusing to even type his name into a search bar.
I never read the glossy magazine spreads or architectural journals.
Never asked Ashon or Cilla about him, even though they both witnessed us glaring daggers at each other at the film premiere last year.
That stupid reaction alone had necessitated my very swift exit after Ashon and Cilla had given their speeches.
And yes, pretending ignorance at Cilla’s gentle probing was easier than risking the anguish of raking the wound raw.
Then I walked into that room today and saw Theodore Biney again.
Time hadn’t dulled him one bit. Hell, it’d done the opposite. Sharpened him into an even more lethally devastating weapon. One I’d been intensely wary of nearing in case it cut me as deeply as it did four years ago.
The tailored cut of his suit, the power in the way he moved and carried his body, those eyes…
dark and assessing, as if he could peel back every layer I’d built up to protect myself.
I hated it. I hated that a single look from him had jolted something alive inside me, something reckless and hungry I thought I’d buried for good.
And behind all of it, the echo of that moment.
The message on his phone.
I’M PREGNANT.
Those words still haunt me like suffocating smoke that never leaves a room, even after the fire is long gone.
I force my feet to stop pacing. I force myself to take several deep breaths. To clench my fists and force away the memory. Because these days, I don’t let myself remember what came after. I don’t let myself think it, let alone name it.
My heels click against the polished floor as I pivot for the tenth time. ‘Get yourself together,’ I mutter under my breath. ‘You’re not a girl any more. You’ve survived worse than Theo Biney.’
The sound of my voice echoing in the semi-darkness is only fractionally more startling than the ring of the doorbell.
I press my still-clenched fist to my chest for a handful of seconds before I straighten, draw a breath and smooth my palms over my jumpsuit.
The driver, I tell myself. It’s just the driver.
But when I open the door, it isn’t a uniformed chauffeur standing in the corridor.
It’s him.
Theo.
Hand in his pocket, shirtsleeves rolled to the forearm, looking indecently at ease, far too imposing and sexy and devastating and everything…for a man who fractured me once and never looked back.
‘Tessa,’ he says, his voice rich velvet with the faintest scrape of gravel.
I glance around, hoping futilely that it’s my imagination conjuring him up. That the fifteen minutes of grace I’d hoped for to compose myself further on the way to the airport hadn’t just been snatched from me. ‘What are you doing here? I thought your driver was picking me up?’
‘Didn’t trust him not to get lost. Besides, I was up anyway, driving past this way. So I thought I’d come myself.’
And just like that, my pulse betrays me, racing ahead while my pride fights to hold the line. To hide it I swivel, take my time to turn off the lights and grab my satchel.
As I approach the door again, he’s leaning one shoulder against the frame—casual arrogance wrapped in sexiness and restraint. My mouth is dry, though I refuse to give him the satisfaction of seeing it.
‘You’re early,’ I lie.
‘I’m on time,’ he corrects smoothly, his gaze running over me like a surveyor marking a site. ‘And you’re dressed to go. Efficient. I approve.’
‘Did you come to comment on my outfit or to drive me?’ I step past him before he can reply, the faint brush of his sleeve against my arm sparking like static.
He falls into step beside me, unhurried. ‘Both. I’m very good at multitasking.’
My feet and hips feel stiff as I walk beside him down the short flight of stairs to the entrance.
Hell, everything inside me is uncomfortably tense and I realise I’m holding my breath, refusing to breathe in the scent of sandalwood and power that oozes so effortlessly from this pillar of a man.
Memories of how I once did the exact opposite shivers near the corners of my mind but I shake my head free of it.
I can’t think about how I made stupid excuses to myself when I should’ve known better. When, fresh from Giles’s betrayal, I should’ve run fast in the opposite direction. But Theo had been a storm I didn’t see coming—dangerous, magnetic, all-consuming.
He looked at me like I could break his formidable control…
probably even craved and relished it. He didn’t see the woman betrayed by a man who’d promised for ever while bedding his assistant.
He’d been everything I only saw in Giles through rose-tinted spectacles—confident without apology, intense without pretending and so infuriatingly alive that for one reckless night I wanted to remember what it felt like to be wanted.
To feel something, anything, other than betrayal.
Maybe, I told myself, it was only sex. A beautiful, ruinous way to exorcise the ache Giles had left behind.
But the truth? The moment Theo touched me, all my carefully built defences melted.
He made me forget my bruised pride, my good sense, even my own name.
He held and kissed me like he already owned me, and I, stupidly, let him.
Because I wanted to believe that not every man who burned that bright would eventually burn me down.
I rein in my searing memories as I step outside and see his luxury SUV at the curb, a glossy black machine gleaming in the early morning light, as intimidating as its owner. He rounds to the passenger side, opens the door and I slide in without thanking him. Spine rigid, eyes forward.
The moment he starts the engine, the interior hums to life with quiet power.
He drives the way he does everything, with control, deliberate, unapologetically in command.
And I hate how my eyes betray me, tracing the flex of his hands on the wheel, the easy spread of his muscled thighs, the faint arrogant smirk curving his sensual mouth when he catches me looking.
I snap my gaze to the window, my cheeks warming.
Pathetic, Tessa. You don’t even know if he’s in a relationship. He could have another princess waiting in his penthouse right now. You’re not allowed to stare. Either way, he’s way off limits to you.
But my body doesn’t listen. It remembers and it betrays me with flashes of memory that have my nipples hardening and a deeply despised throbbing between my thighs that makes my hands clench once more on my lap.
‘Are you quiet because you’re not a morning person or because you’re distracted?’ he asks after a stretch of silence, voice low and too knowing.
‘Neither. I’m reviewing logistics,’ I answer crisply, refusing to look at him, wishing the short miles to the airport away.
‘Interesting. Logistics must be very…handsome, if the way you’ve been staring at me is any indication.’
I whip my head towards him, outrage sparking, only to find those dark eyes already on me, full of mockery and heat. My stomach drops, my pulse rises and I curse myself for giving him an opening.
‘I wasn’t staring.’
‘Of course not.’ He shifts gears with an easy flick of his wrist. ‘You were analysing. Calculating. Berating yourself for noticing. It’s adorable.’
‘Adorable?’ I choke on the word. ‘That’s not in the professional vocabulary, Biney.’
His mouth curves, wicked. ‘Neither is the way you just licked your bottom lip. And you’ll call me Theo.’
‘Is that an order?’
He shrugs one broad, strong shoulder and once again I’m helplessly caught in the fluid, sensual way his body moves. ‘It’s an offer. One you should accept.’
‘And let me guess, return a similar offer of my own?’
Another shrug. ‘I’ve called you Tessa many times without a single objection from you. So yes, I intend to carry on with that. Protests from you will only make me think you’re reacting to the past and not the present.’