Escape for Easter

‘Then you did know who I was.’

A hissing sound of exasperation escaped her clamped lips. ‘I keep telling you I had no idea who you were.’

‘The dictionary definition of anonymous sex is carnal relations with someone you don’t know.’

‘You don’t read the same dictionaries I do. Look, I really don’t know why you’re making such a big thing of this… Honestly, to hear you talk anyone would think I drugged you into submission. It just happened, and I’m not going to beat myself up over it.’ That sounded really grown up—in a perfect world she really would be this well balanced and pragmatic. ‘And for the record I’d have been quite happy to have sex, it was Will who…’ She stopped, an expression of mortified horror spreading across her face as she realised what she had said.

‘Your fiancé wouldn’t sleep with you?’ Cesare thought of her soft body beneath him, of her pulling him down towards her.

There was no question in his mind that any man who could have had that and rejected it was a fool—a certifiable loser.

‘He fell in love with someone else and my personal life is none of your business,’ she hissed, wishing she had realised this before she had blabbed all the embarrassing details.

‘Tell me what else am I to think? You turned up out of nowhere, pretending to be a cleaner… You tried to get inside my head…’

‘Believe me, your head is the very last place I’d want to be.’

‘You say you didn’t want to be in my bed but that’s where you ended up. Where you planned to end up?’

The totally unjustified suggestion drew a cry of protest from Sam. ‘I did no such thing! I didn’t plan anything, it…it was an accident. It was sympathy sex,’ she was driven to claim.

The words were barely out of her mouth when she was racked by shame and guilt. It had been a mean and petty thing to say, not to mention a lie, but there were times, she told herself, when only a lie worked, and she felt desperate.

Frustratingly her pitiless assertion did not even dent his self-assurance, let alone do irreparable damage to his self-esteem, which looked to be fully intact. He even laughed before he drawled, ‘Sure it was, cara.’

She watched his expressive mouth curl upwards, then swallowed as she closed her eyes and remembered feeling the hot, carnal caresses of his mouth on her. A shiver passed through her body and she thought how it was better by far not to go there.

‘A second ago I was capable of sleeping with you for a story, but suddenly I slept with you because you’re utterly irresistible. Maybe I was just curious?’ He greeted the suggestion with an arched brow. ‘I’d never slept with a blind man before.’

‘You’d never slept with any man before.’

‘Then I hope it makes you feel special!’ she yelled. ‘You know, I don’t know why you’re so mad with me. Unless it’s because you resent that I saw through the macho tough-guy façade. Don’t worry, I know what happened wasn’t personal.’

‘Not personal?’

‘You needed someone and I was there.’

Cesare frowned and pushed away the intrusive memory of the feelings that had twisted in his chest when he’d held her in his arms in the breathless aftermath of their love-making. The knowledge that he had been her first lover had shocked him, but it had also deeply aroused him, more than he had imagined possible.

‘It is true there have always been some things, cara, that I prefer not to do alone—’

The deliberate crudity made her blush.

‘It’s a foible of mine and if we’re talking needs I’d say that you needed me at least as much as I needed you. Will you put that in your story? Is this is a courtesy visit to inform me of the imminent article? I’m interested—what tack did you take…?’

‘Go to hell!’ she choked.

‘Which is where I was when you dragged me back from the edge by sharing your delicious little body with me. An interesting angle for you—how I saved the billionaire on the brink by generously sharing my luscious little body. But I have to tell you it was only sex—you were not my salvation.’ It was something he had told himself on more than one occasion.

‘Believe me, I wouldn’t want to be!’ she was able to rebut with total sincerity.

‘What are you, then?’

The words slipped out before she could stop them. ‘Pregnant. I’m twelve weeks pregnant.’

In the act of straightening his already perfectly symmetrical silk tie, Cesare froze. For several seconds he did nothing at all including, or so it seemed to Sam, breathe.

‘Pregnant?’

‘It was quite a shock.’

Cesare’s heartbeat and the world around seemed to have slowed. ‘You’re sure?’

The question sent a surge of anger through her. ‘You think this is something I would say if I wasn’t absolutely sure? You think I just came here on the off chance?’ She stopped and blinked back the sudden rush of tears that filled her eyes. ‘Of course I’m sure!’ she added thickly.

‘You’re crying!’ Cesare accused.

‘No, I’m not,’ she denied, shaking her head as she scrubbed a hand across her pink nose. Through her damp lashes she watched as he speared his fingers into his hair and rested the heels of his hands against his closed eyes.

‘I don’t know about you, but I don’t see any need for a post-mortem over why and how and—’

His head lifted. ‘I think we both know how.’

His wry interruption brought a dull flush to Sam’s pale cheeks. She bit her lip, lifted her chin and continued doggedly as though he had not spoken.

‘The why still remains something of a mystery to me, but,’ she added adopting a bright tone, ‘these things happen…’ She stopped and bit her lip again. Couldn’t she say anything that wasn’t a cliché or a platitude?

A muscle clenched in his lean cheek. ‘Not to me.’

‘Well, me neither, as it happens.’

‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ He hadn’t just impregnated a woman, he had impregnated a virgin! In some societies that could be a capital offence.

‘Look, don’t worry, I’m not expecting anything from you. I just thought you might like to know…so now you do I’ll be off…’ She shrugged the strap of her bag firmer onto her shoulder and turned.

‘You’ll be off…?’ he choked.

‘Yes.’

His shook his head. ‘This is surreal…’

Sam knew what he was talking about. ‘Hard to take on board all at once, I know, but I’ll just leave you my number in case you want to contact me.’ He would probably throw it in the waste-paper bin when she left, but she had done the right thing in telling him.

‘Who are you?’

‘You know who I am, I’m Sam Muir.’

He shook his head impatiently. ‘I mean who…why were you cleaning at that place that night? A cold, drafty castle in the middle of nowhere.’ Cesare had only noticed the cold after she had gone. ‘The woman I spoke to the next day…’

‘Clare—my sister-in-law. I asked her not to—’ She could hear the strident ring of a phone somewhere in the distance and it seemed strange to Sam that normal things were happening in other parts of the building while she was experiencing the most abnormal moment of her life. She would never complain about mundane or routine again.

‘Be cooperative about your whereabouts?’ Cesare finished for her suggestively.

‘Even if I hadn’t asked her to be discreet, she wouldn’t pass on the details of any employee to a stranger.’

‘Discreet? The woman invented some crazy story about epidemics.’

‘That’s not a lie, it’s the truth. Look, if you must know, I don’t make a habit of having one-night stands with total strangers and I left because I was…embarrassed.’ Sam recalled the burning shame she had felt when she had awoken with a man’s face cushioned on her breasts.

Her heavy eyelids closed and her eyelashes fluttered against her flushed cheeks as things low and deep inside tightened and quivered. She was able to recollect in exact detail how the heat of his breath on her skin had felt and the sensual, abrasive roughness of his jaw against the ultrasensitive flesh.

Even filled with total horror and self-loathing at the situation she had been unable to resist the temptation to sink her fingers into the lush thickness of his hair and smooth the strands back from his brow before she had carefully extricated herself.

‘So you’re related to the people who run the Armuirn Estate?’ Cesare asked.

Sam nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see her. ‘Yes, by marriage. Clare and my brother run the estate. He was ill that night with the flu. So there was a flu epidemic. I stepped in as a cleaner to help them out.’

‘The man you spoke of when we were together that evening…Ian, is it? He is your brother?’ Cesare could remember feeling an irrational spurt of hostility to the man she had casually referred to.

Sam, who couldn’t recall having mentioned Ian at all, said, ‘Yes. He and Clare can’t afford to live in the castle. They have twin boys, but you really don’t want to know any of this, do you?’

If the man didn’t want to know about his own child he was hardly going to be much interested in the offspring of total strangers.

His voice, deep and impatient, cut across her. ‘Look, maybe you should sit back down?’

‘I’m fine as I am.’

‘Maybe I’ll sit down, then.’

She watched as he folded his long, lean length into a chair and sat there with his chin rested on steepled fingers.

The silence stretched.

Finally he broke it. ‘This isn’t a joke—you’re actually pregnant?’

Sam caught herself in the act of nodding again and bit her lip. ‘Yes.’

She waited tensely.

He looked pale, but, considering the bombshell she had just dropped, he appeared to be taking it pretty well, if you discounted that muscle in his lean cheek that was spasmodically throbbing.

‘Did you plan this?’

Sam stiffened. ‘I beg your pardon?’

The ice crystals in her normally expressive voice gave him a pretty clear idea of what she was feeling. The frustration of not being able to see her face was like a dull ache in his chest. There had been many bitter moments since he’d become blind when he had grieved for the loss of his sight, but never had he felt it as acutely as he did at this moment.

‘You think I planned this?’

‘It is a possibility.’ Even as he spoke he recognised his own lack of conviction.

‘Only if you have a warped mind, but don’t worry, I don’t want anything from you. It just seemed…polite to let you know.’

‘Polite?’

‘If I’d known you were some sort of weird conspiracy-theorist nut I wouldn’t have bothered. You obviously think that all women are out to get impregnated by you… Well, let me tell you, from where I’m standing you don’t look like such a bargain,’ she snorted contemptuously. ‘Unless you like cynical, mean-minded and plain nasty. For the record, if I could have chosen a father for my baby it really wouldn’t be you! You wouldn’t even make the shortlist. So go ahead, think this was all part of some cunning plan, and feel happy because if it was it definitely backfired!’

He heard the lock on the door click and realised she was walking out on him again. Rage rose up in him, closely followed by something he refused to recognise as panic.

‘Marry me.’

The flat statement—it could hardly be called a request—delivered in that terse, peremptory tone effectively ruined her sweeping exit and almost made Sam fall off her high heels.

She slowly turned her head. ‘You’ll laugh, but—’ He didn’t laugh, though, or even smile as she stared, unable to tear her eyes from his dark features. Not a muscle in his face moved and his beautiful eyes somehow remained focused on her own face.

Sam turned her head and told herself the feeling of something hard and heavy lodged behind her breastbone was pity. The sort she would feel for anyone who had suffered such a tragedy.

‘For a moment there I thought you said…’

‘Do not play games. You heard me, Samantha.’

Her headmistress had been the only other person to call her Samantha, but it had not made her nerve endings prickle or even lightly tingle.

She swallowed, her voice rising to an incredulous squeak as she asked on a note of hysterical query, ‘You’re proposing we get married?’

‘Is that not what you wanted me to say?’ Cesare, who had been almost as surprised as she appeared to be to hear himself make the proposal, could now see that it was the obvious solution—the only solution. ‘Is that not why you came here?’

Sam’s eyes went saucer-wide—he sounded so incredibly matter of fact about the subject.

‘I never in a million years expected you to suggest this…or wanted you to,’ she added, thinking of and instantly dismissing those few silly fantasies she had been guilty of weaving in the middle of the previous interminably long sleepless night. Fantasies were harmless—things only got dangerous when you started trying to act them out.

‘Look, I don’t know if you’re actually serious—’

‘It is not a subject I am likely to joke about.’

Despite the outraged note of offence in his interjection, Sam was not so sure. This man’s personality and the motives that drove him were still pretty much an enigma to her—ironic considering that he knew her more intimately than any man. At her side her fists clenched as she struggled not to think about how intimately.

‘But don’t you think this is a slight overreaction?’ He couldn’t see her so he wouldn’t know how badly she failed in her attempt at a smile—it was cold comfort when she was shaking hard from the inside out. As if things weren’t already complicated enough, he had to throw a crazy idea like this into the mix…and make her think about how different this would be if what they had shared had not been just sex.

‘To a situation as trivial as having my child, you mean?’

‘Our child.’ His sudden possessive attitude was something that made Sam uneasy and something she definitely didn’t want to encourage.

He dismissed the correction with a fluid shrug. ‘I have some old-fashioned idea about family life.’

‘I’m sure your girlfriend might have some too. Look, I’m not treating this trivially, I’m just trying to make life easier on you. I’m not making any unreasonable demands.’

‘You should be,’ he said. Sam was still struggling to make sense of his condemnation when his distinctive dark brows drew together in an irritated frown of incomprehension. ‘Girlfriend…?’

Will he dismiss me from his thoughts as simply when I walk from the room? Sam wondered bleakly.

‘Candice was leaving as I arrived.’

‘Candice need not concern you.’

‘She might have something to say about you marrying someone else.’ Probably very loudly, too. To people like the actress, publicity was a way of life. To Sam the idea of her personal life becoming the currency of gossip columns filled her with utter horror.

An expression of baffled irritation settled on Cesare’s features. He moved his right hand in a dismissive arc. ‘What has it to do with her?’

‘Or me, I suppose?’ she suggested, utterly appalled by his display of callous unconcern for his ex-lover…maybe not even ex…? The man was clearly as ruthless in his personal life as he was reputed to be in business.

‘Do not be ridiculous!’

The suggestion drew a laugh of sheer incredulity from her throat. ‘Me ridiculous?’ she echoed, laying her palm flat against her heaving chest. ‘I’m not the one saying we should get married. For God’s sake, you didn’t know my name until a few minutes ago!’ She lifted a hand to her brow and shook her head. This entire situation was beyond surreal and the scary thing was that for a split second she had almost started to consider it.

‘But I knew a lot of other things about you, Samantha.’

The sexual inference in his deep drawl sent a flash of heat over her skin. ‘You don’t know me at all,’ she snapped back, her anger divided between him and herself. Why did she let him do this to her?

He ignored her statement and asked, ‘Are you worried a blind man would not make a good father?’

The frustrating thought of the many things he would never be able to do with his child rose in Cesare’s head to torment him. He realised he would never see his child’s face and the acknowledgement was like a knife thrust to his heart.

‘You being blind has got nothing to do with it,’ Sam said. ‘They say that women are instinctively drawn to alpha males to father their children.’ Up until now Sam had been able to say she was the exception to the rule. ‘And as you’re about the most alpha male on the planet…’

‘A man who requires guidance to cross the road cannot protect his child from danger.’ It was a father’s role to guard his offspring from the perils in the world, and the thought of this role reversal filled Cesare with a furious impotence.

Sam studied his self-critical expression and felt her tender heart twist as she recognised the fear and doubts that lay under the confident front he presented to the world.

‘Being blind does not make you a bad father or role model.’ Unlike, to her way of thinking, sleeping with blonde actresses with long legs. ‘It has nothing to do with this situation at all, except,’ she admitted, adhering reluctantly to honesty, ‘that if you had been able to see none of this would have happened.’

‘You mean I would not have been in Scotland that night.’

‘I mean you would have been able to see me,’ she blurted. Irritated by his blank frown, she spelt it out. ‘I’m not your type.’

She saw the flicker at the back of his eyes and wished she had let him continue to carry the clearly unrealistic image he had of her, but as tempting as it was, she couldn’t.

‘I think you should let me be the judge of that. I have seen your face with my fingers.’ Eyes half closed, his fingers inscribed a series of soft motions in the air.

Sam found the contemplative smile that curled one corner of his mouth deeply disturbing. ‘You could do the same with your child.’

His hands fell and something she could not read flickered across his face. His deep voice fell softly and it carried a note she could not interpret. ‘So I could.’

‘I have freckles.’

The abrupt insertion drew a grin from him.

‘Seriously,’ she stressed.

‘That of course alters things,’ he said with a wry smile. Then his expression grew solemn before he released a hissing sound of frustration between his teeth and wondered angrily, ‘Has this fiancé who cheated and rejected you given you such a low opinion of yourself?’

The suggestion startled Sam. ‘No! I was never in love with Will.’ And she was sharing with him the realisation that had taken her months to recognise because…?

‘Well, it is true. You are not my type.’

Sam was glad he could not see her flinch.

‘But not because of any imagined physical template you appear to imagine I expect my sexual partners to conform to. You are not my type because you are incredibly high maintenance.’

The accusation robbed her briefly of the ability to speak. ‘Me? High maintenance?’

‘Yes, you. Also I do not have relationships with women who need me to tell them they are beautiful.’

‘I do not—!’

He cut back in before she could complete her hot rebuttal of this outrageous claim. ‘I do not have relationships with women who never lose an opportunity to point out my myriad flaws.’

‘And yet you still want to marry me—only you don’t really, do you.’ She paused and he didn’t speak. She’d have thought less of him if he had. She thought less of herself because she wanted him to. Struggling to rationalise the irrational desire to hear him lie, she lifted her chin.

‘Look, I’m sure you’d be—will be—a great father, blind or not, but you’d be an awful husband and I don’t want to be married to a man who doesn’t love me.’

His cynical smile deepened as he heard her out. ‘So love conquers all?’

‘Maybe not, but despite my apparent lack of self-esteem I’m not settling for second best.’

Cesare, suffering from the shock of hearing himself called second best, heard the door open.

In his head the memories he had been holding back surfaced with merciless accuracy to taunt him. He remembered running his fingers over the surface of her belly and feeling the fine network of muscle beneath the soft skin quiver. Tracing the curved angle of her hip with his hands, drawing the tight little swollen buds of her delicious breasts into his mouth and hearing her beg him not to stop. Kissing the hollow at the base of her throat where the echo of her heartbeat had passed from her to him through his fingertips and lips.

It was ironic. She was the only woman he had slept with but never seen and he carried a more vivid memory of her body than anyone else’s before.

It took seconds for the images and tactile sensations that went with them to flash through his mind, but it was long enough to make his body burn with the strength of his out-of-control arousal.

Teeth clenched, Cesare leapt up from his chair, a growl that registered too low for human ears vibrating in his chest as he stalked towards the door. He was actually in the act of tearing it open when he stopped himself. What the hell was he doing?

His breathing slowed. The damned little witch was running out on him again and he was following—straight down a stairwell probably in this sort of temper. He decided if she ran and he followed it was not a good message to send out. Not if a man wanted to maintain the illusion at least of being in control.

Face set in a dark scowling mask of discontent, he turned and walked back to his chair.

CHAPTER FOUR

IT BEGAN to rain just as the taxi drew up on the kerb. It only took seconds for Sam to reach the waiting vehicle, but by the time she closed the door on the downpour her hair was drenched, despite the bag she had held over her head to shield her.

She looked out the window and her thoughts were drawn irresistibly back to her weekend break in Scotland—it had been raining like this that last day.

Sam had read no sinister portents into the gathering storm clouds, she had had no inkling that her life was about to change as she drew the Land Rover up on the gravelled forecourt of the Armuirn Castle.

She had simply been doing a favour for her harassed sister-in-law and about the only thing that had been on her mind was a nice hot bath. She had not anticipated that the cleaning of eight cottages would be so physically strenuous. Not that she had had any intention of letting on and confirming her brother’s mocking opinion that city life had made her soft.

She had shaded her eyes and tilted her head as she’d looked at the castellated turret. The grey-stoned landmark could be seen for miles around. It had been her sister-in-law’s childhood home, but these days Ian and Clare lived in one of the farms and rented out the big house along with several crofts to tourists.

Sam had lugged out a basket containing the cleaning materials, thinking how wielding a feather duster and changing bedlinen hadn’t quite been the way she had viewed spending her holiday. But she could hardly have gone off hiking in the hills when a virulent flu bug had had her sister-in-law so short-staffed that she’d been trying to do ten jobs as well as look after two-year-old twins.

Though Sam had pronounced herself willing to do anything, she had actually been relieved when the anything had not involved looking after the twins. She loved her nephews dearly, but the responsibility of keeping that fearless pair amused and safe was not a responsibility she felt equipped to deal with.

Instead a guilty and grateful Clare had asked if she would clean and prepare the cottages on changeover day for the new intake of holidaymakers and, if she had time, take a grocery order up to the castle and change the linen there.

When Sam had asked if she should run a duster around the place Clare had said definitely not. It seemed the man who had rented the castle for the summer did not want housekeeping.