Interesting.
He looped the bag onto his own shoulder, then brushed aside her attempt to pick up the cardboard box. He glanced at the contents: notebooks and screen cleaner, a nameplate and a framed certificate of her master’s degree. He realized she was permanently vacating this office and he was suddenly reminded why.
“We should go for dinner. To celebrate.”
“Celebrate?” She was so taken aback that she stumbled in retreat.
Amusement gathered across his cheekbones. “Your doctorate,” he clarified, adding dryly, “The baby, too, I suppose.”
He hadn’t fully processed her pregnancy. He would become a father next summer. Was it cause for champagne? It wasn’t cause for anything less, he decided.
“We don’t celebrate things like that,” she said stiffly, buttoning her overcoat. “Today was a completion point in exercising my academic potential, nothing more. Given this pregnancy wasn’t planned, I wouldn’t call it an achievement of remarkable note, either.”
Wow. Was she really made of ice or was her indifference a defense mechanism?
He pressed his hand over the seam of the door before she could open it.
She released the knob and pivoted to face him, lifting her chin. She was a nice height. He wanted to kiss her again. Press her into that door and make love to her against it. Drain the tension from both of them so they could talk without every word feeling like a grenade lobbing sexual anticipation.
He resisted. He didn’t even brush away the strand of hair caught on her eyelashes even though his fingertips tingled in anticipation of her warm, downy skin.
“This baby is a remarkable enough achievement that I won’t let another man take credit for it.” It was vow and warning combined. “I will be Papà. No one else. So you and I will celebrate our engagement.”
She displayed no reaction beyond a tremble of her eyelids and a fade of color from her smooth complexion and soft pink lips. After a long, tense moment she swallowed.
“How long have you known who I was?” she asked.
“I guessed your identity before I was off the property.”
“And you waited until I found you before you came to see me. Until I told you I was pregnant before you asked me to dinner. I bring more to a marriage than a womb, Angelo. I expect my future husband to want and value me. So, no,” she said firmly. Frigidly. “I will not marry you.”
“Oh, querida, you’re right that you don’t know me. You shouldn’t have revealed your deepest fear.” He enjoyed the subtle confusion of latent desire and wariness that came over her as he bent his elbow, looming as though he would kiss her again. “Marry me or I’ll go straight to the press with a tell-all.”
CHAPTER FIVE
DEALING WITH THIS man was like having a slippery grip on a slingshot aimed into her own face. He unsettled her. Worse, his kiss had completely undermined the control she needed to project. She was doing her best to pretend she’d already forgotten it, but he was impossible.
r /> She would love to go home and regroup, but there was no telling if he was serious about spilling their story or not.
“Dinner it is, then.” It was a basic negotiation tactic she had learned from dealing with her parents. Concede to something minor to buy time to work on her counterargument. “Where shall I meet you?”
“We’ll go in your car. I had my driver drop me.”
Her hatchback was perfectly serviceable for carrying rain gear and collection buckets to beaches. It achieved great mileage, was comfortable on long treks and slipped easily into four-wheel drive on a muddy track.
Apparently Angelo expected something sleeker and sexier. He looked at her with disbelief. “This is your car?”
She beeped the fob to prove it.
He stole the key and adjusted her seat as he climbed behind the wheel.
With Angelo’s attention on traffic, she brooded on the fact he had known who she was all this time and hadn’t bothered to get in touch. His indifference hurt to the point her insides felt raw.
Her brothers were so happy, so irrevocably in love, she had allowed herself to entertain, just for a brief second, that she might trip into something like it for herself, even though she knew it was unrealistic, especially with a man she barely knew.
After days of mulling it over, however, she had decided to risk learning whether she and Angelo had anything beyond lust between them.
The lust was in full force. She was still reeling from their kiss. And his bold personality was as overwhelming as she had recalled.