His Virgin Acquisition (13 page)

Marco felt himself grow hard as he thought about getting her in the water, her body slick, her nipples beaded tight from the coolness of the natural pool.

“We’re here to test out the facilities,” he said sagely. “I never buy a car without test driving it first. I’m not going to buy an island without sampling some of its attractions.”

An impish grin lit her face and she untied the flimsy strings of her halter-top. The close-fitting top had been tormenting him all morning. She pulled the silky shirt over her head and revealed a skimpy electric-blue bikini that barely concealed the fullness of her curves. Her nipples were hard and pressing tightly against the Lycra. He ached to touch her, taste her, to lave his tongue over the small raspberry buds until she cried out for fulfillment.

“See something you like?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Keep going.”

She rolled her eyes at him and pushed the khaki shorts she was wearing down her long, shapely legs. The bottom
to the bikini was just as tiny and insubstantial as the top, the tight blue fabric hugging the round curve of her bottom and revealing hints of peachy flesh.

Her irises expanded, obscuring the color in her eyes, as her body responded to his blatant appraisal of her. “Your turn,” she said, her voice taking on the husky quality that he knew signaled her arousal.

She watched as he stripped down to his swim-trunks, her eyes roaming over him with unconcealed desire. She was an anomaly when compared to any of the other women he’d known. She didn’t lower her lashes coyly, but neither was her look one of bold invitation. There was nothing contrived in her response. She had such total honesty in her desire. She wanted him, and she did nothing to hide that fact from him, but neither did she strut around like a cat in heat to try and gain his attention.

The pure need in her soft blue eyes was his undoing every time. He hooked his arm around her waist and drew her into his body. Shy excitement lit her face. It amazed him every time she blushed. A surge of emotion caught him off guard, and despite being on solid ground he had the strangest sensation of being unsteady.

He gripped her tightly and took two big steps to the edge of the water before jumping in and submerging them both in the aquamarine depths.

She came up sputtering, her blond hair plastered to her face. She moved the curtain of hair aside and gave him her best evil eye. His charming grin undid her, and all her pique was forgotten. She registered the heat of his skin, warming her in the cool water, the strength of his body as he held her locked against his hard, muscular chest. If she’d been standing her knees would have buckled.

She slithered out of his grasp, submerging herself again,
and swam to the waterfall, aware that he was following behind her, feeling a primitive feminine thrill over being pursued. She climbed up onto a rock that rose out of the pool at the base of the waterfall and sat down on the mosscarpeted surface, curling her legs beneath her.

Marco hoisted himself from the water and onto the rock with ease, his muscles bunching and shifting beneath his tan skin. Slick moisture pooled at the apex of her thighs, but it had nothing to do with the waterfall and everything to do with the supremely gorgeous man who was moving toward her, his dark eyes blazing with intent.

“Pouting?” he asked, trailing his finger along the line of her collarbone.

The contact was almost innocent, yet it made her thoughts turn wanton and wicked.

“Yes, well, you got me wet.”

His eyes flickered. “Careful, a man could let that go to his head.”

He moved his finger, dipping in the valley between her breasts. She gasped. “Is it always about sex with you?”

“Not always. But when I’m with you that seems to be the subject more often than not.” He cupped her breasts, teasing the straining peaks with the pads of his fingers. She shuddered.

She flicked a glance at the dense jungle, looking for any signs of movement in the thick growth of plants. “Marco, we’re right out in the open.” She couldn’t summon enough conviction to give her scolding any weight.

“It’s a private island. And the crew is still aboard the yacht.”

He leaned in and pressed a kiss to the curve of her neck. Her body went slack, leaning into his, surrendering to the feelings he aroused in her so effortlessly.

He untied the strings on her daring bikini, the one that she’d vowed never to wear on her first inspection of her new wardrobe, and left her bare to his hungry gaze.

He groaned. “You’re so gorgeous.” He moved his thumb over her tight nipple and she squirmed. She wondered if anyone had ever died from longing, from wanting a man so much it took the breath right from her body.

He moved his hand beneath the falls and let water pool in his palm. Then he brought his hand to her and tilted it slightly over her, let the water trickle slowly over her flesh, so it trailed down the dips and swells of her body, over her already aching breasts. The contrast of concentrated drops of cool water on her overheated skin made her gasp. It also wrenched her arousal up another untenable notch.

She reached behind her head, feeling for something to grip, something to keep her rooted to the earth. She found a fern frond and grasped it in her hands, holding it so tightly that the leaves bit into her palms.

He gathered more water in his hand, tormenting her again with the sharp chill as he let it fall in beads over her bare breasts, this time lapping up the drops with his tongue. She arched into him, begging him silently to possess her, to fill her and take them both to the heights they so desperately craved.

He leaned in and drew her nipple into his hot, moist mouth, and she let out a shocked cry that was swallowed up by the roaring of the water. She released her hold on the plant and gripped the back of Marco’s head, holding him to her, needing him to stop for fear that she would shatter, needing him to go on forever, needing to keep experiencing the wicked sensations that were coursing through her body.

He escaped her hold and untied the flimsy bikini
bottoms, his dark eyes turning black with the force of his desire as he looked at her naked body.

“I’m at a disadvantage,” she said. She was almost shocked by her growing boldness as she gripped his aroused length through the thin fabric of his swim-shorts. She squeezed him, loving the look of surrender that passed over his handsome face.

She put a hand in the center of his chest and gently shoved him back, moving his shoulders beneath the cascading water. She moved her hands over his bare chest, sliding her fingertips over his slick bare skin.

She hooked her fingers into his shorts and pulled them down his legs, smoothing her hands up his muscled thighs, skimming the area around his erection. His shaft jerked at the near contact and she thrilled at his response. She would never, ever get enough of his body. She would never tire of looking at him. He was the perfect example of what a man should be. Hard, hot, rough and smooth.

She leaned over and took the tip of him into her mouth. He gripped her hair, weaving his fingers into the wet strands. She didn’t know if he meant to pull her away or keep her there, but when she slid her lips down over his full length his hand froze, his grip tightening, whatever his original intention had been lost.

She pleasured him that way until his thighs began to quiver beneath her hands, and then he pulled her away, bringing her up the length of his body and taking her mouth in a fierce, deep kiss. When he broke the kiss his breathing was labored, his eyes dark with intensity.

“Was that okay?” she asked.

“Okay?” A strained chuckle escaped his lips. “Any more and this would have been over before it started.”

He settled her onto his lap, so that she was straddling
them. The water was showering them both, but doing nothing to cool their mutual desire. He lifted her and settled her onto his erection, gently sliding into her damp core, stretching her, filling her.

He cursed, and she cut him off by pressing her lips to his, absorbing his masculine groan of ecstasy as she began to move.

She rode him, their eyes locked, their breathing fractured. She felt the onset of her climax, but it felt like too much too soon, as though her body couldn’t possibly contain it. He moved his hand between them and rubbed her clitoris. She shattered. She screamed, not caring if anyone heard, not mindful of anything but the intense, pulsing sensation that was centered at her apex of her thighs and radiating out through her whole body, filling her so completely that she thought she might burst with it.

Marco thrust hard into her one last time and followed her over the edge, his harsh groan of completion shifting something inside her chest.

He rested his head against her breasts, his arms holding her tightly to him. She cradled his head, holding him to her, craving his closeness to a degree that frightened her.

She had been foolish to believe that she could conduct this affair as if it was business. She would never be free of him after this. He was part of her, in her. He’d changed her.

She had done exactly what she’d been so determined not to do—what she’d thought she would be incapable of doing. She’d committed the unpardonable sin. She had fallen in love with her husband.

“Y
OU’RE
in the mood for Spam this morning?” Marco asked incredulously.

Elaine swallowed the bite she’d been working on and shrugged. “It looked good. Very salty,” she said, taking another bite and relishing the flavor. She’d declined the local favorite every other morning during their breakfast in bed sessions, but this morning it had looked mouth wateringly amazing.

They’d been in Hawaii for nearly a month. The sale of the resort had been finalized, and Marco had been working on negotiating a deal for the island of Kapu. Her face, and other parts of her, heated as she thought of the afternoon they’d shared on the forbidden island, making love beneath the waterfall.

The days since then, since the realization that she loved him, had been a sweet kind of torture. On the one hand she felt more alive, more inspired than ever before. She felt things more deeply; her mind was more attuned to the things around her. On the other hand it nearly broke her heart every time she looked at his impossibly gorgeous face and realized that their relationship had a timer ticking on it.

She looked at the plate in front of her and was shocked
to see that she’d polished off more than her share of their breakfast. She gave him a sheepish grin. “I guess I was hungry.”

Marco dropped a kiss on her nose and a strange, hot, melting sensation flowed through her body, weakening her limbs. “Sex burns a lot of calories. At least if you do it right. Which we most definitely do.”

In spite of the fact that she’d shared every intimacy with him, she blushed. “I can’t argue with you.” She reached for the remaining piece of meat on their shared plate.

“Plans for the day?” he asked.

Because their “honeymoon” had gone on for so long, she’d been working remotely, doing the accounting for her firm, and she’d continued to actively work on her own business plan.

“No. I finished approving payroll last night while you were at your meeting.”

“Excellent. I have to meet with Mr. Naruto briefly this morning, to discuss a final price for Kapu, but after that we can spend the day together.”

A sweet feeling of absolute contentment stole over her, leaving her fuzzy. If she could pause everything right then, and just live in this stolen piece of time, she thought at that moment that she would. And that desire frightened her a lot less than it should.

“I might head into town for some supplies,” she said.

“You could have the concierge send over whatever you need.”

“I know, but then what else am I going to do? I’m not comfortable lying back and being served—especially not when I’m more than capable of going to a grocery store.”

Marco could only stare at her determined face. Not a
single one of his ex-mistresses would have opted to run menial errands when they could have been sunbathing or shopping for a designer wardrobe.

His chest tightened. He didn’t want to admit that Elaine was in any way different from his other mistresses. He didn’t want to admit that she was touching him, thawing some of the hardened, ice-encrusted edges of his heart.

He clenched his fist and turned away from the woman on the bed. She was a hundred times more deadly than the airheaded gold-diggers he’d dated in the past. Because Elaine Chapman’s beauty was mixed with a keen mind and a driving ambition that nearly matched his own. The connections their marriage could afford her were limitless. A merger with his corporation once she was at the helm of Chapman Electronics would be priceless. She had to know those things, and while it was easy for him to drop his guard when they were together, when she was offering to do down-to-earth things like grocery shopping it was of the utmost importance for him to remember that her highest goal was power.

Her brand of potent, innocent sexuality made it easy to forget to remain on his guard. But he had to wonder if she was using her innocence to her advantage as well. She was a smart woman, and she certainly wasn’t ignorant of the way men viewed a woman’s virginity. Perhaps it had seemed advantageous for her to give it to him, for her to use it to make him feel bonded to her? And he’d been allowing her to do that—allowing her to meld herself into his life.

Callous as it sounded, he didn’t typically share a room with his women if a trip were going to last so long. He valued his space, his privacy, far too much, and he certainly didn’t want to give a woman the wrong idea. But he had dropped his guard with Elaine, and it was a mistake he couldn’t continue making.

Marco strode across the room and began to dress. Elaine had seen the shutters come down over his dark eyes, but she couldn’t for the life of her figure out what had caused it.

Shrugging off the chill, she rose from the bed and chose her clothing before going into the bathroom to shower. When she surfaced, Marco was gone. His not saying goodbye hurt far worse than she should allow it to.

PMS. That was her excuse for being such an emotional wreck. She’d taken her first blank pill last night, and she was due to start her period any moment. Her body ran like clockwork, thanks to the miracle of her birth control pills, and she no longer had to deal with debilitating cramps and a cycle that ran on a timetable all its own.

She went to the bathroom to prepare for the impending event and was brought up short by the fact that she hadn’t started yet. Not even spotting. She placed a hand on her abdomen, expecting at least a slight ache—something to signal the arrival of her period. There was nothing.

With shaking hands she put the necessary items in her purse and made her way out of the villa. She would start soon. Any moment. She had to. Because if she didn’t that meant she’d broken a binding part of their agreement.

She slid behind the wheel of the car and tried to ignore the pounding of her pulse. She wasn’t pregnant. There was no way. She was on the pill.

The refrain repeated in her mind as she drove the car down the winding road and into town, stopping at the nearest department store.

No way. Not pregnant.

She made a pitstop in the restroom, hoping that nature would grant her a definitive sign that she had not conceived Marco’s baby. Still nothing. But it was too early to panic.
Yes, her body had run like clockwork, nearly to the hour, for the last five years, but that didn’t mean that there was a baby.

Not pregnant.

Numbly, she moved through the store and into the family planning aisle, pausing at a box of condoms that seemed to mock her with their promise of a ninety-nine percent success rate, and stopped finally in front of a wall of products she’d never looked at in her life. Pregnancy tests.

She placed her hand on her stomach, almost expecting it to be rounded. She began to shake as she examined the boxes. Digital readouts. Early results. Traditional lines. In the end she grabbed three different brands and hurried to checkout, trying to look as nonchalant as possible about buying potentially life-altering items.

With her bag gripped tightly to her chest, she raced out to the parking lot and into the car. She gripped the steering wheel, trying to still the tremors that were racking her body. She couldn’t be pregnant. It was a coincidence that she happened to be late for the first time in her memory. After becoming sexually active. A coincidence.

That was what she told herself during the drive back to the hotel. That was what she told herself when she took all three tests and set them gingerly on the vanity top, too afraid to check the results.

Not pregnant,
she begged silently.

Finally she stood and stared down at the tests. Two lines on the first test; the digital test proclaimed “pregnant” in stark black and white; two more bright pink lines stared up at her from the final test. There was no questioning the evidence.

Her knees buckled and she sat down on the toilet, gripping the edge of the countertop to keep herself up and conscious.

For one selfish moment all she could think was that her life was over. She’d lost the company—her driving force, the thing that she’d worked so tirelessly for. She’d signed the prenup, mentally shaking her head as she’d done so over the lunacy of even having to make such a deal when she knew there was no chance Marco would be getting close enough to her to make her pregnant.

A baby.
She didn’t know anything about babies. She didn’t want one. She never had. Yet morally she felt she had no option other than to carry the child. Adoption was a possible solution…

Blinding pain, as real and severe as the shock and fear she’d felt upon reading the positive tests, assailed her as she imagined lying in a hospital bed, sweaty and exhausted from labor, handing a tiny squalling baby over to someone else. Never seeing the baby again.

She couldn’t hold back the anguished cry that escaped her lips. She couldn’t do that either.

She stumbled into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed, her eyes so dry they stung, the tears that would give her relief nowhere to be found.

That was how Marco found her an hour later.

“Did your shopping go well?” he asked.

She didn’t respond. She only sat on the edge of bed, her knees folded up to her chest, looking smaller, more fragile than he’d ever seen her. She looked as if she was in shock, her lips chalky white, her eyes glassy.

“Are you all right?” He knelt down in front of the bed and gripped her hands. They were freezing. “Has someone hurt you?” Primitive male anger rushed up inside of him, and he felt capable of destroying whoever had dared lay a hand on her, capable of taking them apart piece by piece.

Her eyes snapped up to meet his. “No. I’m okay.” She sounded as though she were trying to convince herself.

“Well, you don’t look okay. You look like death warmed over.”

A broken laugh escaped her lips. “Just what every woman loves to hear.”

“You’re avoiding the question,” he said tersely, the gnawing fear in his gut making his voice harsher than he’d intended.

“I’m pregnant.” Her bald statement fell flat in the heavy tropical air, leaving a thick silence in the room.

“You said you were on the pill.” His voice held an air of deadly calm—much more terrifying than if he’d started shouting.

“I am. I haven’t missed one. I don’t know…I don’t know how it happened.” She looked up into his eyes. They were cold, flat. Somehow that was worse than the force of all of his rage. Yelling she could fight, but this dead silence, this calm, cold wave of anger, she didn’t know what to do with.

“You don’t know how it happened?”

“Marco, I swear I didn’t plan it. Why would I? Legally I’ve lost the company now. I’m as shocked as you are. This isn’t what I wanted!” she exploded.

His dark brows snapped together. “You don’t want the baby?”

“No! I mean, I don’t know. I haven’t had any time to process this. It changes absolutely everything.”

“You put on a very good show,
cara.
But you and I both know this only
benefits
you. Access to my power, my money, for far longer than the twelve months agreed. Child support. The prospect of our union becoming permanent. All things that would be very beneficial to you. Although
legally, as you said, that means you forfeit the company. I can’t imagine you being a very effective CEO with a baby on your hip.”

“You honestly think I planned this? That I planned to conceive your baby?”

“You would hardly be the first woman to try and snare me by using pregnancy. You’re simply the first one to succeed.”

“How could I have possibly planned for this to happen? I was on the pill.”

He waved a hand to silence her. “Perhaps. At the very least I think you planned to find a way to make our arrangement more beneficial to you. Whether you planned on using a baby to accomplish your goal, I don’t know. But I’ve suspected that you had ulterior motives since the moment you stepped into my office proposing marriage.”

His words cut through her like a knife. He had suspected her from the beginning? Had there ever been a moment when he’d trusted her? When he’d felt something for her? Anger rushed through her, rescuing her from the flood of tears that were threatening.

“If you suspected that I was nothing but a gold-digger, then what does that make you for conducting a relationship with me?”

“It was not a relationship. It was an arrangement,” he spat. He turned away from her, shutting her out, his shoulders rigid, his back straight. “Out of curiosity, what was the going rate for your virginity? A price none of the other men were able to pay but one you thought you would be able to extract from me?” He walked out of the villa, his parting shot hanging in the air.

Violent nausea overwhelmed her and she leaped up from the bed and raced across the room, barely making it
to the toilet before being sick. She leaned her head against the cool wood of the vanity and let the first of today’s tears roll down her cheeks.

Marco breathed in the heavily perfumed air and nearly gagged on the floral scent. That woman,
that puttana,
had made a fool of him. She had made him feel something for her. And all the time, every single moment, she had plotting against him.

And now she was carrying his child. His
child.

He had thought he could safeguard himself against anything she was planning, but this…In this she had won, because he would not abandon his child. He would not be an absentee parent. His child would be his focus. He would love him and care for him in a way his own parents had failed to do for him and his younger brother. In that he was absolutely determined.

And he would not let his child’s mother leave him. His child would want for nothing, and that included both parents in the same household. And he knew how to ensure that that happened.

He strode back into the villa, his mind absolutely made up.

“Elaine.”

She appeared in the doorway of the bathroom a moment later, her face white, a sheen of sweat on her brow. His heart clenched and he hardened it, shunning the tender feelings she still managed to rouse in him.

“There is only one way to solve this.”

She put a hand over her stomach. “I’m not giving up the baby.”