His eyes darkened. “You are a beautiful woman. I can’t keep men from looking at you. But had you not gotten your hand back when you did, Webber would have swallowed some teeth.”
He sounded a little possessive, but I squelched the reaction that had on my heart.
“I’m not going to take Sophie away from you,” he said after another tense minute. “I hate that I haven’t been a part of her life for the last five years. But I can’t put all of the blame on your shoulders.” His gaze trapped mine, refusing to let me look away. “I’ve made more mistakes in my life than most. What happened six years ago…?” He broke off and sucked in a deep breath. “That week in the Bahamas was probably the happiest I have ever been in my life.”
Me too, but I wasn’t going to admit to that right now. “You were so happy you came home and got engaged to the first piece of strange to cross your path?” I demanded, unable to hide my pain and anger over what had happened after our vacation in the Bahamas.
His jaw clenched, and he looked away. “Erin… I—”
“No,” I interrupted before he could say more. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It isn’t any of my business, and we aren’t here to talk about that anyway.”
“God!” he muttered. “I need something stronger than wine to deal with this tonight.”
“You drinking harder stuff than wine around me is what got us into this mess in the first place,” I told him with a little of my old sass breaking through. “Let’s keep the alcohol out of this equation, shall we?”
“It wasn’t the alcohol I was drunk on that first night, baby doll.” His rich, husky voice always made my heart rate go haywire. Right then, it felt like a physical caress over every inch of my skin. “One look at you out on that dance floor that night, and I went under. All the desire I had been feeling since our night in the hothouse—all the encounters afterward—none of that compared to how much I wanted you that night. Hell, I was lucky to get you back to the villa before making love to you. It’s no wonder we made Sophie that night. I was so lost that protection didn’t even enter my mind.”
Flashes of our time together in that beachside villa had me biting my lip. I couldn’t look away from him even if I had wanted to just then. “I set out to seduce you that night,” I admitted my shameful secret. “I was tired of you constantly rejecting me after every stolen moment up until then. I wanted you so badly, I was desperate to have you if only for one night.”
“Baby doll, you didn’t seduce me. Hell, I was worried that I had seduced you. We were just two people who wanted each other more than anything else. All you had to do was look at me across that dance floor, and I was yours for the taking.” He gave me a sexy smile that made me press my thighs together under the table. “I don’t think a bomb going off would have stopped me from having you that night.”
My body was on fire, trembling with both remembered desire as well as new. I wanted him so much still. After years of happy endings from my “friend,” I was in need of something more. Something only Rhys could give me.
That’s not going to happen, I scolded myself forcefully. It can’t happen again.
Our dinner was set before us, and I lifted my fork with a hand that trembled noticeably, and Rhys asked the waiter for a bourbon neat. We were both quiet for a few minutes while we got control of ourselves.
After several tense minutes, Rhys set down his promptly delivered tumbler. “Tell me about your pregnancy.”
I wiped my mouth with my linen napkin, having finally forced down a few bites of my chicken. “It was pretty normal. Well, as normal as it could be since I was in nursing school at the time. I was part of assignments during my last trimester. We did our labor and delivery rotation, and I was homework.”
He grinned. “That must have been fun.”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh yeah. Fun, fun, fun. I had the pleasure of letting nineteen of my fellow student nurses look at my lady parts.” I took a sip of my wine. “But I had a great team with me when I went into labor. I couldn’t have asked for better coaches right then.”
His smile dimmed a little. “I did a pretty good job with Lilli’s birth. I wish I had been there with you during Sophie’s.”
“I really am sorry, Rhys,” I murmured.
“I know. It’s not all your fault, Erin. I blame myself more than I do you.”
“She was a decent sized baby,” I continued. “Eight pounds exactly and twenty-two inches long. There was so much dark hair that all the women wanted to play with it.”
“Do you have pictures?”
“Millions,” I assured him. “Everything that has ever happened in Sophie’s life has been caught either on camera or camcorder. But they’re all back at my house in Atlanta.”
His brows rose. “That’s where you’ve been all this time? Georgia?”
“Yeah. I thought it was far enough that I would be away from this place, but still close enough that if I wanted to come home, I could drive it.”
“But you haven’t wanted to come home until now.” It was a statement, not a question. “What made you come home now, after so long?”
I had wanted to come home so many times I’d lost count, but he didn’t need to know that. “Aunt Chris called me a few weeks ago. There was something in her voice—I don’t know. I couldn’t put my finger on it. But I had this dreadful feeling in the pit of my stomach telling me she needed me.” I shook my head. “We still haven’t talked about it.”
“It’s Grayson,” Rhys told me, his tone growing hard. “He’s ten times more ignorant than I ever was when it came to the wrong woman. Nina is going to be the end of him if he doesn’t get rid of her soon. She has him so twisted up in knots that if she even looks like she is going to leave him, he can’t function.”
“Can he not see what she’s really like?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. He refuses to listen to us when we try to tell him. I’ve stopped for fear of pushing him away. He has to come to this decision on his own, or he’ll end up hating us all. Christa has tried to leave it alone too, but it’s hard for her to see her son being treated like a lap dog.”
I took a small bite of my chicken. We continued on with our meal in a tension-free atmosphere for the first time all evening. Once our dishes had been cleared away by the waiter and coffee set before us, I brought up the real reason we were there. “So, what do we do now?”
“I want to be introduced to my daughter as her father.” The determination in his blue eyes told me he wasn’t going to back down on this. “It will cause problems, I know that, and I’m prepared for what happens once everyone knows. But I can handle anything that anyone throws my way as long as Sophie is acknowledged as mine.”
After only a slight hesitation, I gave in. “Okay.”
He let out a relieved breath. “And I want you to move back here. I don’t want to have to put Sophie through the constant trip back and forth from here to Atlanta every other weekend and holidays. That isn’t fair to her.”
“I’ll think about it.” But it was already something I had been considering. I didn’t want to put Sophie through that any more than he did.
His eyes narrowed, but he inclined his head in acknowledgment of my answer. “I’ll have to accept that for now, I guess. When should we tell Sophie?”
“That’s up to you. But not in the morning. Christa is having everyone over for brunch, and I think this should be something you and I do together without an audience.”
eight
For the second night in a row, I couldn’t sleep. My time with Rhys kept flashing through my mind, making me restless and frustrated. Muttering a curse under my breath, I tossed back the covers and got out of bed. Even though the AC was hard at work, I felt suffocated.
The only relief I could think of was to go to the hothouse. First, I checked on Sophie, who was fast asleep once more with Lilli on the princess bed. I tucked them in and kissed them both before making my way downstairs and out into the backyard.
I le
ft the lights off, able to see easily enough by the full moon. The loungers were the same as always, except for the new cushions now on them. I dropped down onto my favorite one and glared up at the star-filled sky.
It probably would have been best if I hadn’t begged Christa to give me a week in the Bahamas as a graduation present. That had been the beginning of the biggest mistake of my life, although I would never consider the consequences—Sophie—as a mistake.
A few weeks after graduation, I set out for my paradise experience. Cammi was supposed to go with me, but at the last minute had had to go to New York with her parents because of a sudden death in her family. I knew Christa would send someone to check on me, but I never thought it would end up being Rhys. Although I couldn’t say that I was disappointed by her choice.
The first night I got there, I went dancing, and that was where he found me. I was surrounded by a few of the girls I had made friends with on the plane ride over. We were all dancing, ignoring the guys who kept coming up to us, trying to tempt us into going back to their rooms or villas. Every time one of them even looked interestedly in my direction, I would shoot him a look that would have made snow fall in July. They got the message pretty quickly, and I went back to having fun.
It was quite a while before I felt the tingle going down my spine. I knew that tingle well. I got it every time I was anywhere near Rhys, and it was normally at its strongest when he was looking at me. Heart racing, I turned away from my newfound friends and nearly gasped when I saw him sitting at the bar watching me. He looked good sitting there in his black dress pants and a baby-blue shirt that was half unbuttoned, leaving his chest exposed for my hungry gaze.
Our eyes locked, and I couldn’t help the smile that crossed my lips. I decided then and there that I was going to have him. It was wrong, I knew that. After all, not everyone would understand that he wasn’t my real cousin, that there was no blood between us. Not to mention the huge age gap between us. His thirty-two to my eighteen would seem excessive to some, but to me, it was just a number.
I didn’t go to him, wanting him to come to me instead. I continued to dance, but now I was doing it solely for his benefit. The rest of the club disappeared as I let my body move seductively to the throbbing music. My eyes didn’t dare leave his as I continued to perform for him.
Even with the distance I was from him, I could see the throb of his pulse in his throat. The way his lean, muscular body kept tensing more and more with every second that passed. I knew I was driving him crazy, and I basked in the knowledge.
Time had no meaning as the music’s tempo grew more seductive, and I turned myself over to the rhythm. I knew exactly when he lost all control. His eyes were so dilated they looked black from my position on the dance floor. His long body seemed to flex with every stride he took as he moved toward me.
Finally, he was only a step away, and he held out his hand. Without the slightest hesitation, I put mine in his much larger hand, and he jerked me against him. “How far is it to your villa?” he rasped out, his voice sounded more beastly than human, and I thrilled at the knowledge that I was affecting him so badly.
Heart racing, I cocked my head back to better meet his gaze. “Just down the path,” I murmured, more than a little breathless.
“Thank God,” he bit out as he pulled me through the crowd and outside.
The walk could have taken seconds or hours, I could never quite recall. All I knew was I was trapped in a heavy haze of desire that I hoped never to find my way out of. When he at last reached the door to my private villa, he took the key from my numb fingers and unlocked it.
As soon as the door was open, I was lifted into his arms. My legs wrapped instinctively around his waist, and my arms went around his neck. My fingers tangled in his thick blond curls, and I met his lips halfway.
The kiss was intense. Ten times more so than our first kiss. My body was on fire, and all I could think of was finding relief. We were moving, but I couldn’t care less where we ended up as long as he became a part of me soon.
His lips left mine to leave a scorching trail down my neck and across my collarbone. I threw back my head and cried out as his lips locked onto my nipple through the cotton material of my dress. My nails scraped his skull roughly, and he gave a pleasure-filled growl at my aggressiveness.
Suddenly, my back was against something firm, and I gazed up at Rhys from the bed as he shucked off his pants and boxers before nearly tearing off his shirt. I pulled the dress over my head and rested back against the pillows in nothing but my bikini panties.
Rhys sucked in a deep breath at the sight of me laid out for him. I was a little nervous, but I pushed my anxiety away and boldly spread my legs for him, letting him see that my panties were damp with desire. While he was watching, I let my gaze travel over his sun-kissed body.
His chest hair was the same shade of dark blond as on his head and was scattered over a set of firm pectoral muscles. It then trailed in a thin path down over his hard abs, past his navel and lower still. A gasp of deep pleasure and a little apprehension left me as my gaze locked on to that impressive part of his anatomy.
I had only a few to make a comparison to, and those had either been in the one naughty magazine I had bought for Cammi as a gag gift for her birthday as well as the one exotic tape that had gone along with said gift. But not one of those guys could ever outdo the man before me in that department. Those pictures and the movie had left me cold in comparison to the sight of this man fully aroused.
As I watched, he raised a long-fingered hand and stroked himself once, twice. A drop of his desire beaded on the broad head, and as if in a trance, I reached out and let my finger collect the moisture. Bringing it to my lips, I sucked away the saltiness, my eyes closing in delight.
A word that could only describe what was about to happen between us escaped his lips, and I opened my eyes to find him closer than before. “Erin,” he breathed my name. “I don’t think I can be gentle.”
“I don’t care. We can do gentle later.”
That was all the invitation he needed. He covered my body with his own, and we were a tangle of arms and legs. The room echoed with our moans of pleasure and shouts of ecstasy. My panties were torn away, and my nails tore up his bare back. The first thrust stretched me, the pain barely noticeable. I quickly forgot about it and anything else as we drowned in each other’s arms…
I shot up on the lounger and wrapped my arms around myself. My body hurt with both unanswered desire and the remembered pain that followed that one perfect week with Rhys. I scrubbed at the tears I hadn’t noticed I had been crying, wanting to have that part of my life erased from my memories forever.
After I had returned home from the Bahamas, alone, I had been thrown into a nightmare. Rhys had gone to London on business, but that didn’t stop the gossip rags from reporting his every move back home. It seemed that no sooner had he left my bed than he was in someone else’s.
I tried to call him so many times that I lost count, but the only thing I got was his voice mail. I needed to know the gossip was just that—gossip. But weeks went by, and I still was no closer to the truth. By the time he had gotten back to Craven, the gossip mags were reporting on the upcoming wedding of Rhys to the notorious Southern belle, Tawny St. James.
I couldn’t get Rhys to talk to me. He avoided me at all costs. It was Christa and Ram who confirmed the trash mags had gotten it right and that Rhys was going to marry the Savannah, Georgia debutante. By that time, my heart was already shattered to the point there would be no way to repair it.
So I left without a backward glance.
My father had left me a sizable inheritance, so I didn’t have anything to worry about when it came to the financial side of things. But when I found out I was pregnant, I felt so alone in the world that it was a while before I could function on any level. Thankfully, school and my fellow students took me under their wings, and I made it through.
It wasn’t until after Sophie’s first birthday t
hat I even called home. That first phone call had been filled with tension, most of the tension on my part and not Christa’s. She had been so happy I had finally called her, and I started to call every few weeks. I guess I had to ease my way back into my beloved aunt’s life after all the destruction I had done to myself emotionally.
And now that I was home, where I so desperately wanted to stay, I was going right back down that same emotionally destructive road. Where Rhys—and my feelings for him—was concerned. Hell, it hadn’t even been a whole weekend yet, and I was already so twisted up inside I could barely breathe.
Maybe it wasn’t the wisest choice to move back. Of course, I would still have to face Rhys on a regular basis because of Sophie. But it wouldn’t even come close to what I would be putting myself through if I were in Craven full time.
I was so confused. My heart and my brain were pulling me in two different directions, and it was making me ache in ways I had promised myself I wouldn’t let happen ever again.
nine
Things were a little crazy the next morning. Christa had invited everyone over for brunch, and they had all shown up. Drew brought Cammi, a turn of events that I was more than pleased to see. Grayson had somehow conned Nina into coming which, in the mood I was in, might not have made for the best of Sunday morning family get-togethers.
Matt had come too, alone, as usual. He helped me set out the last of the buffet of scrambled eggs, bacon, ham, pancakes, crusty rolls, and various fruits. It was a feast, and I was starving.
Everyone was just starting to serve themselves when Rhys joined us. Dressed in jeans and a polo shirt that hugged his chest in that yummy way I liked so much, he had me sweating a little. He greeted his half-brothers and father with handshakes and dropped a kiss on Christa’s cheek before taking his daughter into his arms for a hug. Lilli kissed him quickly before loading up her plate.