Reclaiming His Pregnant Widow (6 page)

Tiny shivers prickled up her spine, spread across her nape and down her arms, bringing an urgent electric awareness she truly didn't need.

He leaned in farther, a dark hulk of shadow, and her heart skipped a beat…make that three.

Brand was going to kiss her.

She stopped breathing. Self-preservation was drowned out by a stronger emotion.

Brand whispered her name, softly, a gentle hiss across her skin. She suppressed the flurry of quivers. An ache unfurled low in her belly. Without thought, she moistened her lips.

Brand exhaled, a sharp burst of sound.

Clea's muscles clenched. She could already feel his mouth…taste him…

The last time she'd experienced this breathless nervousness had been in the over-the-top Chapel of Love in Las Vegas. But while there'd been the same sense then of being poised on the edge of a precipice, about to step into a whole new world, it had been different. There'd been anticipation. Hope. And happiness. They'd been in love, there'd been none of this knife-edge tension.

Back then Clea had known that fleeing to Vegas to marry Brand would mean trouble, but she'd been confident that her father would quickly forgive her—despite his reservations about Brand. She'd been eager to avoid her father's objections, the obligatory big, white wedding bash, full of guests she barely knew. Sure, Vegas had been neither special nor intimate, but her heart had been set on Brand. She loved him, after all.

He was her forever. From that first fateful moment at the auction when he'd cautioned her against bidding on the fake Roman coins.

Now Brand's thumb came down on the moist swell of her lower lip. His touch was surprisingly rough against her slickness. Her tongue probed his skin. He tasted of salt and musk. Of aroused male.

The old, never-forgotten thud of her heart began, and Clea melted. This time she licked his thumb with slow deliberation. Her tongue swirled into the tender fold that separated his thumb from his forefinger.

They had a second chance.

It was going to be okay…they could work it out.

His mouth came down on hers, and Clea's lashes fluttered lower. The glass was hard and cool behind her; by contrast, Brand's passion was hot. He shifted, and a moan broke from her throat. The kiss deepened. Her hands crept up his T-shirt, caressing the back of his neck.

The pressure of his mouth ceased abruptly.

Clea opened her eyes.

Brand moved back, putting an arm's-length distance between them, his eyes horribly knowing. “Well, I'd better go—you've been telling me you've got so much work to do, and I'm keeping you from it. And on second thought, I'll instruct my lawyers to have the order presuming my death set aside. That way I won't be using up your valuable time.”

Bastard…

So he knew she wanted him. How humiliating. He was going to leave her hanging like this…ravenous for him. She clenched her hands, determined not to reach for him, restrain him, beg him to kiss her…just once more.

How easily he'd demolished the barriers she'd tried to erect against him. How easily she'd forgotten about Anita…

She heard him move, and caught the scent she would always recognize as Brand's as he advanced again. “Take this as a warning,” he growled in her ear.

Refusing to cower, she glared at the broad bulk of his chest, the muscle clearly defined beneath the snug fit of the black T-shirt.

Brand placed his fingertip under her chin, and tipped it up, forcing her to meet his eyes.

“I'm far from dead.” He gave her a dangerous stare that caused her stomach to flip. “And while you might be planning to marry another man, you still want
me
. Think about that—because I intend to think of nothing else…all night long.”

Without giving her a chance to respond, he released her chin, turned and sauntered away.

Biting her lip ferociously to quell the frustrated sob that threatened, Clea watched him leave. And, even though everything in her screamed not to let him walk through the door, her limbs had turned to Jell-O. She heard the door whisper shut and through the glass she watched until he turned the corner and disappeared from her line of sight. His footsteps faded.

There was only silence.

Her shoulders slumped. Too drained to move, she tipped her head back against the coolness of glass, and fervently wished she never had to see Brand Noble again.

Arrogant bastard
. He didn't deserve her loyalty!

Well, she had no way of even contacting him—she'd have to wait for him to reach out to her. If he ever did.

At least she'd taken the first step toward weaning herself off the intensity of her feelings for Brand. She'd taken off his ring…and he knew it.

The nagging unease from earlier returned in full force.

His ring.

Clea started.
Her ring.

Oh, no! Adrenaline shocked through her as she stumbled out her of office. She could still visualize where she'd set it down on the granite counter top. She'd dried her hands, but afterward she'd failed to pick the ring up.

By the time she yanked open the door to the ladies'
room, her pulse was pounding. Dread mushroomed as her gaze fell on the granite slab beside the hand basin.

Her ring was gone.

B
rand shouldered his way through the summer crowds on Fifth Avenue.

Overhead, skyscrapers cut the blue sky into jigsaw shapes. Brand had thought he'd long ago hit rock-bottom. Clea had proved him wrong. The past hour had shaken his life to its very foundations.

On the corner he hailed a cab and gave an address, his stony face preventing the cabdriver from launching into conversation. When the cabbie ferociously gunned the accelerator, Brand's face didn't relax into a smile.

Not even the puzzle presented by the museum's newest exhibit could keep his mind off Clea's latest revelations. She'd taken off her ring. She'd agreed to marry Hall-Lewis.

And she'd already had him declared dead.

While he'd been thinking about her every day, con
sumed by how to find his way back home to her, she'd been planning how to bury him alive.

“Can't you drive faster?”

The cabdriver obliged. Brand stared blindly out the window as the city flashed past. In his old life he'd been impatient. Maybe too impatient. But his captivity—where minutes had stretched into hours and hours into days—had changed that. He'd acquired the ability to block out everything except what he most wanted: to survive.

The cab stopped outside a brownstone in a tree-lined avenue. Brand paid the cabbie with the last of the dollars Akam had lent him and headed for the house he'd bought for Clea back in what seemed like another lifetime. On the front door, brass letters spelled out Welcome Home.

Brand pressed the buzzer.

He didn't recognize the short, bald manservant who opened the front door. “Where is Bright?” Brand demanded, surprised not to see the elegant, stooped man he and Clea had hired in happier times.

“Bright retired last year, s—”

The butler ran his assessing gaze over Brand's no-label jeans and the black T-shirt that hugged his muscled torso and biceps before biting back the rest of the automatically polite
sir
. Having priced and dismissed Brand's clothing, he stated, “We're not employing bodyguards.”

Brand gave the stranger barring the way into his home a lethal glare. “I'm not looking for a job. I'm Brandon Noble.”

The butler stood firm, his solid body filling the doorway, disbelief glittering in his eyes. “Mr. Noble is dead.”

Was he never going to escape that myth?

While the butler's pugnacious attitude rankled, the man was only doing his job. Brand finally took pity on him and extracted a passport so new the dark cover was still stiff.

He flipped it open and flashed the identification page at the man. “Satisfied?”

The butler glanced at the photo taken less than a week ago in the back room of Akam's cousin's house and then back to Brand. His throat worked and he said thinly, “It appears I must apologize, Mr. Noble.”

With mordant humor, Brand suspected the butler was torn between evicting a possible interloper and risking his job if Brand's claim proved to be true. Just as well the man wasn't versed in detecting excellently crafted fakes.

“No apology necessary.” Brand pocketed the fraudulent passport and raised an eyebrow. “I didn't catch your name.”

Both of them knew the butler hadn't supplied it.

Discomfort crossed the butler's face. “My name is Curtis. The doctor is still at the museum, sir.”

The doctor.

The butler was referring to Clea. That was another piece of information she'd neglected to share with him—she'd gotten her PhD. Graduated. Something else he'd missed out on. He ought to have been beside her, celebrating her success. Brand tamped down his frustration at the tragic unfairness of it all. If he allowed resentment and anger to bubble over, he'd go mad.

“I know she is,” he said calmly. “I've just come from there.”

Relief relaxed the butler's frown. “Then you'll come back when the doctor is home?”

To prevent a pointless standoff, Brand asked, “Is Smythe still on the staff?”

It galled him to have to ask a man he didn't know if the chauffeur still worked for him. One day he'd been in control of every element of his life, and the following day he hadn't known where the next meal was coming from, even if it would come at all…or what his fate would be.

Death. Or life.

For four years the balance had hung in the hands of his captors.

The butler nodded, but he still blocked the doorway. Brand stepped forward. “Find him, Curtis,” he snapped. “I'm not standing here all day.”

Five minutes later Brand was inside his own home.

A smiling Smythe stood nearby, tears streaming down his wrinkled cheeks as Brand, his own throat thick with emotion, scanned the inside of the home he hadn't seen for years.

Home. Yet not home.

It was subtly different. Stark white walls had given way to shadowy hues that formed an admirable backdrop for the Kandinsky he and Clea had bid for in an auction a month after they'd bought this house. The large ship's chest that had once stood against the wall had been replaced with a walnut sideboard, giving the hallway an unfamiliarity he hadn't foreseen.

Brand shrugged off the sense of dislocation. Clea had changed beyond recognition—new man, new baby, new life—so why the hell should the house have remained the same?

He took the carpeted stairs two at a time and, at the end of a passage lined on one side with high-arched windows, strode into the master bedroom.

The curtains were new—a botanical print that added a light, green note to the sumptuous richness of the ivory wallpaper. His gaze moved on, seeking out familiar signs of Clea's daily life. Except for a vase that held tall white blooms and two crystal scent flagons, the dressing table was empty of feminine clutter.

Secret notes of jasmine lingered in the air.

Afternoon sunlight filtered through the spreading
branches of the chestnut outside the window, dappling the pristine bedcover. The magnificent mahogany sleigh bed he and Clea had chosen together after spending a hilarious Valentine's Day trying out beds what seemed like a century ago still gave the room warmth and contrasted with crisp white linen.

He'd made love to his wife on this bed more times than he cared to remember. Here they'd shared dreams. Promises. And passion…

The plush carpet muffled his footsteps. Brand halted in front of wide windows and looked through the boughs of the chestnut tree, across the backyard to a glade of silver birches, the warmth of the summer evening on his face. Nothing like the scorching desert heat of the Middle East.

Unbidden, he remembered that charged moment in Clea's office, the heat of her tongue as he'd touched her lip… God, he'd been tempted never to stop, to pull her to him in a bone-crushing hold and bury himself intimately in her softness.

But he'd been too angry. Here, in this bedroom where they'd shared so many hours of happiness, it might be different.

This was home.

And Clea was his wife—not his widow.

Placing flat palms on the wide, white-painted windowsill, Brand leaned forward and breathed in the perfumed mix of jasmine and gardenia from the garden below.

A snapshot of the past flashed back to him. The kind that had steeled him through his darkest days, strengthening his determination to return to Clea, yet now bringing only immeasurable pain.

The first time they'd discussed having children had been on a glorious summer day like today, the kind that
only New York could provide, with washed blue skies, golden sunlight and the slightest ripple of a breeze. Clea had prepared a picnic basket and together they'd ventured down to Central Park.

“Four boys,” she'd declared, leaning back on her elbows on the newly mown grass after she'd wiped the last crumbs of delicious apple pie from her lips.

“What?” The shock of her demand had forced his attention from her mouth to her eyes, hoping to find that she was joking. She wasn't. The green eyes had held a dreamy glow. Leaning back against the scarred trunk of an oak, Brand had echoed, “
Four
children?”

“Make that five. All boys. I want a big family.”

“Five boys?” he sputtered. “It's not all roses.”

He should know. Brand was one of four brothers, and he knew Clea envied him that.

“I don't care,” she said, her mouth tilting into a smile. “I hated being an only child. You're lucky! I wish
I
had siblings.”

“You can have mine anytime you want.”

“Okay, I'll take you up on that. But I wish your brothers lived closer—I wish we could visit often, be a family.”

Two of his brothers still lived in New Zealand, while the youngest was in London. Brand kept in touch with them, with a careless affection that drove Clea crazy.

“You aren't wriggling out of this, Brand. Five children. Absolute minimum.”

He'd pushed away from the rough bark of the oak and dropped down onto the grass beside her. “I'm happy to oblige, but we'd better get busy—five boys are going to take some work.” And he'd kissed her squarely on her open mouth.

That had been the end of any talk of children for a while.

Now, leaning on the windowsill of their bedroom, Brand stared at the weepy boughs of the birches at the end of the yard, barely noticing how much they'd grown in his absence. Clea was pregnant. But not with his child. It was not their dream that she was fulfilling. It was Clea's new dream—part of her vision of a future with Hall-Lewis.

Surrounded by the rich warmth of their bedroom, Brand knew he had to fight for his own future with Clea. The next stop would be a visit to his lawyer, who would no doubt be stunned to see him. His legal eagle could finally earn the handsome retainer Brand had always paid, by resurrecting him from the dead. Legally.

His and Clea's marriage was far from over.

It was a marriage that had been cracked wide open to its foundations. Distrust. Betrayal. Brand's breath hissed out as he straightened up. Across the garden, the silvery leaves of the birches quivered in the summer breeze. But there would be no divorce. He might not be the father of her unborn child, yet, despite everything, Clea was still his wife. For better or worse.

Not Hall-Lewis's bride.

It might not be the family they'd planned together, but the baby existed.
Another man's baby
. Brand shoved his hands into his jeans' pockets. He would learn to live with it. Far easier than the alternative of living without Clea.

With that decision made, the monstrous tension within him started to ease.

He was not going to let Hall-Lewis take her away from him without a fight.

He was home to stay.

 

Clea let herself into the darkened house.

Sconces cast soft shadows in the corners of the hall,
and her heels tapped across the dark wooden boards as she walked toward the carpeted stairs.

Upstairs, Curtis had already turned off the overhead lights, leaving only a muted glow from a lamp on the sideboard to light her way.

At the end of the passage the bedroom door was open a crack. Clea knew the bedcovers would already be turned down. Pushing the door wide, Clea made for the dim silhouette of the bed and sat down on the edge. After slipping her high-heeled pumps off, she leaned forward and flicked on the bedside light.

Rising to her feet, she eased the zipper of her black linen dress down and wiggled the straps over her shoulders.

“A striptease wasn't quite what I had in mind, but don't let that stop you.”

Clea whirled around, clutching the bodice of the dress to her breasts, and stared at the man who lay in the king-size bed, his arms folded behind his head, watching her through narrow, inscrutable slits.

“You nearly gave me a heart attack. What are you doing here?” she demanded, her heart still thudding with fright. “In my house?”

“Waiting for you.” Brand arched a dark eyebrow in a way that caused her stomach to flip.

The first thing that struck Clea was that—despite his air of lazy arrogance—Brand was angry. The second was that his shoulders and chest were bare.

“You're not wearing any clothes!”

His mouth curled. “You also forgot that I sleep naked?”

Naked.
It conjured up visions that made her sweat. Clea found herself flushing. She'd seen Brand naked a million times. They'd made love. Passionate love. So why did that one little word now cause her to shiver like a virgin?

Brand was smiling, a tiger-got-the-cream kind of smile
that caused Clea to suspect he knew exactly how the word
naked
made her squirm inside. No doubt he'd said it to provoke precisely this response. What had he said earlier?
And while you might be marrying another man, you still clearly want me. Think about that—because I intend to think of nothing else…all night long.

No.
Clea tightened her grip on the dress hugged against her breasts, making sure it didn't slip. “Get out of my bed,” she said in a rush. Whatever Brand had in mind, she wasn't about to fall into bed with him like an overripe, ready-to-be-devoured peach.

“Our bed.” The disconcerting gleam in his eyes warned her that he knew she was rattled. While she flushed, he murmured in a husky, suggestive undertone, “Don't tell me your fiancé wears pajamas?”

About to heatedly deny that she had a fiancé, Clea remembered in the nick of time that she'd told Brand she was marrying Harry and bit back the retort. She'd never been much good at deception. But revealing that she'd lied would only leave her more exposed. He'd demand to know why. Clea cringed as her discomfort grew. And she had no intention of letting him glimpse the hole he'd ripped in her heart.

At least the fiancé fiction gave her some protection from the unwanted effect Brand's physical presence had on her. Letting Brand believe she was marrying Harry salvaged her pride, and gave her the chance to think through how she was going to deal with Brand's betrayal. Even though on the inside she was a mass of tremors.