It was all suddenly becoming so wretchedly clear to her. What he’d gambled and what he’d lost. What he’d ended up being saddled with when he hadn’t wanted any of it in the first place!
‘Oh, Alex,’ she breathed. ‘I’m so very sorry!’
‘Why should you apologise?’ he drawled. ‘We both know who takes responsibility for the sex of any child.’
‘But your precious island!’ She was barely listening to him.
Suddenly he was squatting in front of her again. ‘Do I look like a man in need of sympathy?’ he demanded. ‘Look at me, Mia,’ he insisted, when she kept her burning eyes lowered to that damning picture, then made her look at him by placing a gentle hand under her chin and lifting it.
His eyes weren’t smiling exactly, but they were not miserable either. And his mouth was relaxed—a bit rueful maybe, and incredibly—
She sucked in a sharp gulp of air, shocked as to where her mind had suddenly shot off to—and at such a calamitous moment like this!
‘I have to confess to being rather pleased to be the first Doumas to father a daughter in over a hundred years,’ he admitted sheepishly. ‘I am also pleased,’ he added more soberly, ‘that this unexpected development has saved me from having to find another way of getting your father out of all our lives.’
‘He’s not out of mine and Suzanna’s yet,’ Mia shakily reminded him.
‘But he will be,’ Alex pledged.
‘He’s going to come after her, you know.’
‘I want him to.’ He nodded gravely, then raised his hands to her trembling shoulders. ‘Trust me,’ he urged. ‘Suzanna is safe here. He cannot touch her. I know this absolutely,’ he declared. ‘and by the time he arrives here I will be in a situation to make him know it also!’
Mia wished she could be so sure about that. She knew her father, knew how he responded to insubordination of any kind. She shuddered.
Outside, a sound drifted up from the garden. It was the laughter of a happy child.
A sob broke from her, and the hands on her shoulders tightened. ‘I make you this solemn pledge,’ Alex vowed fiercely. ‘No one—will ever—take that laughter away from her again!’
Tears slid into Mia’s eyes. Alex watched them come, watched her soft mouth begin to quiver, and something painful seemed to rip free inside him. He shuddered. ‘You are so damned vulnerable sometimes it makes my heart ache just to look at you!’
So was he, she realised with a shock that stopped her heart beating altogether. Alex was painfully vulnerable to her vulnerability!
‘Oh!’ she choked—why, she didn’t even know—but in the next moment her arms were sliding up and around his neck, and just as she had done once before without any warning, she buried her face in his throat and clung to him as if her very life depended on it.
How they got from there to kissing feverishly she didn’t know either. Or how they ended up in a heated tangle of naked limbs on the bed. But she knew by the time she took him into her body that something very radical had changed in their relationship because there were no barriers, no resenting the way he made her lose control of herself.
‘I adore you,’ he murmured against her clinging mouth. ‘You crept into my heart, without my even knowing how you did it. Now I cannot seem to take a breath without being made aware that you are there, right inside me.’
‘I know,’ she whispered in soft understanding because he had done the very same thing to her. ‘I love you so much that it actually hurts me to think about it.’
He reacted like a man who had been shot in the chest. He stopped moving, stopped breathing. ‘Say that again,’ he commanded hoarsely.
His eyes were black, his skin pale, his beautiful bone structure taut under stress. Mia lifted gentle fingers to cover those taut cheeks and held those black eyes with her own earnest green ones. ‘I love you,’ she repeated.
He caught the words in his mouth, stole them, tasted them and made her repeat them over and over again until the whole thing carried them off into one of those wildly hot passionate interludes that had always managed to completely overpower them even when they’d thought they hated each other.
‘This is it,’ Alex murmured lazily when they were lying, limp-limbed and sated, in each other’s arms. ‘I will never let you go now.’
‘Do you see me trying to get away?’ She smiled.
‘No.’ He frowned. ‘But—’ A knock sounded at the closed bedroom door.
‘Alex!’ his brother’s voice called out. ‘Frazier is on the phone! You had better get down here!’
‘Well?’ Mia asked anxiously. She was hovering in the doorway of Alex’s study where he stood, leaning against the desk behind him, his dark face lost in brooding thought.
He was dressed in the same clothes she had taken off him earlier, whereas she had delayed long enough to drag on a lightweight dress of cool blue cotton, before hurrying downstairs.