Forbidden Lust: 3 (Lust for Life) (12 page)

That made him laugh. He would bet money Eva didn’t quite see
it that way.

He found Eva lying in her empty bathtub with her legs in the
air, heels on the wall above the faucet, dressed in a tank top and shorts that
showed off all but the highest inch or so of those pretty stems of hers. Her
feet were perfectly framed in the square of setting sunlight coming through the
small window on the opposite wall. Her hands were resting lightly on her belly,
her strawberry-blonde hair had been braided into two pigtails and her sweet
face was free of makeup.

Oscar hadn’t gone directly to her apartment after he’d left
her parents’ house. He’d taken a long ride along the country roads to clear his
head first, wandering well into Michigan before he turned around and headed
back. Telling Jamie without her there was one thing, but telling her parents
behind her back was starting to look more and more like the fuck-up of the
century.

When he finally got to her place he found her main door
standing open, the screen letting in the cool, fresh evening air, no light or
radio or television on, making it look as if she’d just abandoned the place. As
much as he wasn’t looking forward to telling her what he’d done, he’d still
felt a sinking in his gut for that moment when he’d thought she wasn’t home,
right before he’d heard her call to him that she was in the bathroom.

“Leni gave me a pedicure,” she told him, wiggling her toes.

He leaned on the narrow strip of wall between the bathtub
nook and the door.

“I went to see your parents today.”

Her gaze shifted from her feet to his face.

“I told them about us,” he added, ripping off the proverbial
Band-Aid.

She gripped the edges of the bathtub and pulled herself to
sitting, then stood, putting herself at eye level with him.

“You did what?” she asked with the same scary kind of calm
he’d gotten from her father earlier. “Without me?” She gave the front of his
jeans a quick glance. “Do you still have your balls?”

“Barely,” he admitted.

“Fuck, Oscar.” She turned and sat, her feet still in the tub
and her back toward the sink. She was quiet a full minute or so, then asked,
“How did it go?”

He sat facing the opposite way, putting them shoulder to
shoulder. “Your father called me an incestuous pig.”

“Shitballs,” she muttered, closing her eyes and hanging her
head.

He nodded. “Pretty much.” She didn’t move away when he
leaned over and kissed her bare shoulder. “Why aren’t you angry?”

She made a bitter, derisive sound. “Nothing you could say
would surprise me after the day I’ve had, Oscar.” She looked at him and he saw
the deep sadness in her green eyes for the first time. “So you went to my
parents and they freaked the fuck out when they found out about us?” She waved
one hand helplessly. “Even if it wasn’t Diego, we should have known someone was
going to hate it. Why not my mother and father?”

“Just your father,” he clarified. “Your mom thinks he’ll
come around but I don’t know. The things he said before she stopped him…”

He instantly regretted telling her when her face crumpled
and she started to cry.

“Hey.” He angled himself toward her and pulled her close.
She wrapped her arms around his waist and cried into his shoulder. “Eva, hey.
Come on, sweetheart.” She was sobbing so hard he became alarmed. “We’ll get
through this. I promise.”

“It doesn’t matter if he approves or not.” She moved away
from him and gave her wet cheeks a fierce swipe as she stood then deftly
stepped out of the tub. Oscar waited while she blew her nose with a loud honk
and threw the tissue into the toilet. She turned to him, eyes wet and nose red.
“I’m fucking pregnant.”

The world seemed to tilt on its axis. “Pregnant,” he
repeated.

“As in I’m knocked up with your kid,” she said impatiently,
as if he needed clarification on what the word meant.

He rose to his feet slowly, torn by the alternating desire
to either shout at the top of his lungs or fall to his knees and weep, both out
of pure happiness. But that warning Diego had given him in his driveway that
long-ago evening came back to him.

“A baby,” he said, testing the word carefully. His baby.
Their
baby.

“Jesus Christ, Oscar.” She opened the door under the sink,
scooped up three white sticks and shoved them into his hand. “It happened the
night the condom slipped,” she told him as he looked at the positive readout on
all three pregnancy tests.

His heart was beating so hard his pulse was rushing loudly
through his ears. He remembered all right. Once they’d gotten their hands on
each other they hadn’t been able to stop, but they’d crossed the threshold from
fucking to making love that night. If he and Eva had conceived a child in that
moment, it had been conceived with Oscar knowing without a doubt that he’d
fallen deeply and irreversibly in love with her.

And yet…

He set them on the edge of the sink and sat down again, mostly
because he wasn’t sure his legs were going to hold him up much longer. He
didn’t know if he was ready for the answer, but he had to ask, “Have you
decided what you want to do?”

Eva’s face went blank for a split second before it filled
with rage.

“You got me knocked up and now you want to know what I’m
going to do?” She was still using the scary-quiet voice. “Fuck you,” she spat
and charged past him and out of the small room. “Fuck you,” she shouted a
second time when he called her name.

Goddamn it. He sprinted across the living room and caught
her just before she ran out the door. She screamed another string of curses as
he caught her around the middle and pulled her tight to his chest.

“That’s not what I meant,” he spoke quietly near her ear,
taking the blows as she hammered her fists on his forearms.

When she slammed her heel down on his foot he let her go
despite the fact that he barely felt it through his riding boots. She retreated
to the middle of the room between her bed and the back of her couch and faced
him.

“What the fuck could you possibly have meant?” she screamed,
tears streaming down her bright red cheeks. “I get it, Oscar. You did your part
and now this is
my
fucking problem. Get the fuck out of my goddamn
motherfucking house and
I
will decide what I want to do about it.”

He crossed the room to her in two strides, caught her by the
arms and drew her up so they were face-to-face so quickly she gasped. Her eyes
were so big he could see the whites all the way around her irises.

“The night of Jamie’s wedding you stood outside of the
reception hall and told me you were nowhere near ready for marriage and babies
yet, Eva,” he reminded her.

He loosened his hold and she sank slowly back onto her
heels.

“Remember?” he asked gently, smoothing his hands over her
arms. “
We
didn’t plan this. We took precautions against this that didn’t
work, but when it comes down to it, Eva, it’s you who has to decide whether you
want to have the baby.” It was going to kill him to say what needed to be said.
“It’s your body, sweetheart.”

Her eyes softened and filled with tears and her chin
puckered.

“I need you to tell me what you want,” she said in a small,
trembling voice. “Because I have no fucking idea what I want to do.”

It was a bad idea to try to sway her decision no matter how
much he wanted to.

“I want you,” he assured her. “No matter what.”

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be a pussy,” she said in a tone
that sounded much more like Eva than he’d heard since he’d arrived. “Tell me if
you want the baby or not.”

He forced himself to be still, to not drop to his knees and
beg her to keep it.

“I want the baby,” he told her, his heart knocking hopefully
in his chest. “I want you and me and the child we made to be a family, Eva.
Call me greedy, but I fucking want all of it.”

She pressed her lips into a thin line nodded gravely as two
tears rolled from the corners of her eyes and down the sides of her face.

He took her face in his hands and wiped them away. “What
does that mean?”

She put her hands flat on his chest. “It means we’re going
to have a baby.”

Saying the words and making it real only brought up a
thousand other questions—about Chicago, having a baby away from her family, her
father’s reaction and whether a baby would change his mind—but Eva knew the
moment tears rose in Oscar’s beautiful dark eyes that she’d made the right
decision.

Because if anyone deserved to have it all when it came to
family, it was Oscar.

She was scared out of her ever-loving mind, but he would be
there right alongside her every step of the way. She had no doubt about that.

“I love you,” he told her quietly, still cradling her face
gently.

Eva nodded. It was all she could do with her throat tight
with emotion.

“And you love me,” he said, that dimple appearing along with
the smallest, sweetest of smiles. Christ, she loved him so much her heart was
going to burst with it.

Tears rose to her tired, burning eyes and she nodded a
second time.

He reached into his jeans pocket and his hand came back up
holding a small black box. “I thought it was going to be so easy, that I’d talk
to your mom and dad and then come back here and propose, but it didn’t quite
work out the way I planned.”

Her hands dropped away from his chest and her vision
narrowed until all she could see was the box sitting upside down in his palm.
“I need to sit down,” she whispered.

Two steps backward and she felt the edge of her bed on the
backs of her legs, so she sat. He sat next to her and the hinges creaked as he
opened the small, black velvet cube. Sitting inside was a large, deep-red stone
in a simple but gorgeous platinum setting.

“It’s not a diamond,” he started.

She shook her head in a tight, nervous movement. “I’m not a
diamond girl.”

“A few weeks ago I went to see the jeweler who made Leni’s
ring for Jamie. He started showing me stones, diamonds, and we were talking
about having a setting custom made.” He took the ring out of the box and held
it between thumb and finger. “And then I saw this one sitting in a case, and I
knew it was supposed to be yours.

“It’s my heart,” he told her quietly. “It’s actually been
yours for a very long time, Eva.” He took her shaking hand and slipped the ring
on her finger.

It was a little loose but it looked perfect on her hand. The
perfect ring from the most wonderful, most frustrating, most perfect man.

She managed to rip her gaze away from it and looked into his
eyes.

“You fucker,” she whispered, close to full-on bawling again.

His beautiful mouth pursed, amused. “Is that a yes?”

“I would have to be some kind of dumb bitch to say no to a
proposal like that, now wouldn’t I?”

“You are definitely not some kind of dumb bitch,” he
conceded matter-of-factly. “A little hot-headed, and possibly crazy, but not
stupid.”

Eva managed to get her legs under her long enough to turn
and straddle his lap. She pressed her body to his chest to crotch and ran her
hands over his silky black hair.

“I love you,” she told him, all the fear and frustration
from a few moments earlier starting to drift away.

Whatever new complications they had to face could wait a
little while.

“Say the words ‘yes I will marry you, Oscar’,” he prompted,
running his hands down her back, then slipping them under her shirt and
smoothing them over her skin.

“Yes, I will marry you, Oscar.” She ran her hands over his
hair and squeezed his hips with her thighs. She could feel his dick starting to
get hard. “Yes, I will have your little french fry. And yes, I will let you
fuck me senseless to seal the deal.”

That must have been all the prompting he needed, because her
shirt came up and over her head the instant the words were out of her mouth.
She rose and his mouth covered her already tight nipple, his eyes on hers. His
cheeks caved in slightly as he sucked and then she couldn’t see straight from
the pleasure coursing through her.

She grabbed handfuls of his shirt and pulled it off a lot
less gracefully, his cross and St. Christopher medallion getting caught in the
bunched-up fabric and then hitting him in the face as they came free. He didn’t
seem to mind. He got his arms under her ass, lifted and turned quickly and
easily so she ended up on her back, pressed into the mattress by his weight.

The deep plunge of his tongue into her mouth and the feel of
his warm, naked chest on hers was pure heaven. God, she was desperate for him,
her man.

Her fucking fiancé.

She reached between them to unbutton her shorts and let him
know she was ready—really, really goddamn ready—without wanting to break the
kiss that was making her go fever hot from head to toe. He balanced his weight
on one arm and helped her open the zipper, then slid his hand around her hip to
palm her ass. When he gripped a handful of her flesh roughly and ground his
cock against her pussy, still through their clothes, she shivered with the
thrill it gave her.

Eva dug her heel into the mattress, rolled him onto his back
and scrambled off him and to her feet. She dropped her shorts to the floor and
went for his boots, laughing as she fought the first one, then quickly got rid
of the second. He’d already mostly gotten out of his jeans by the time she tossed
the second boot aside, and she made quick work of getting him all the way
naked.

He sat up on the side of the bed and she straddled his lap,
gripped his cock in her hand and took him all the way inside her on a quick
downward thrust. His eyes closed and his mouth opened. The rush of hot breath
as he exhaled sharply—as if it had been weeks or months, not two days, since
they’d last fucked—mixed with hers.

Oscar wrapped his arms around her, held her close and kissed
her in that slow, deep way that scrambled her thoughts and zinged through her
body as if she was being touched by a live electrical wire.