Princess's Secret Baby(48)

                It was a cool evening but they again chose to walk, and was it for potential cameras that they held hands?

                Leila wasn’t sure; she just knew that she liked it.

                And she wasn’t sure if the hand that went around her waist when they passed a rowdy group standing on a corner was for her sake, or the sake of the baby.

                They walked towards The Chatsfield and just a little way away from it James stopped and turned her around.

                ‘A kiss for the cameras?’

                ‘Where are they?’

                ‘Oh, the press are always sniffing around The Chatsfield. There’s always some scandal going on.’

                ‘One kiss then,’ Leila agreed.

                One blissful kiss that was light and delicious. His lips were warm and they teased, and when he pulled her a little into him, his hand was back on her waist. He hadn’t shaved since the proposal and she liked the roughness of his jaw and remembered how it had felt on her mouth that night.

                He stepped in a fraction closer and she wanted his coat around them; she remembered how they had danced. Leila remembered how those lips, how that rough jaw, had felt when he had kissed her some place other than her mouth and her lips parted.

                She wanted more passion, she wanted a more intimate taste of him, and she opened her eyes to find his were open too, smiling into hers as he refused her his tongue.

                ‘Once bitten...’ James said, pulling away, very, very pleased as to how much she had liked it.

                Oh, she had.

                She was blushing in the elevator as she remembered the kiss he had given her in here. She didn’t know that the tune he was whistling was ‘Memories’; she just knew she was under a different but delicious attack by his mouth.

                They headed up to their suite and when Leila came out from taking her make-up off James was in bed.

                ‘If I go to the sofa I’m staying there for the whole night,’ James warned, and he knew that he’d won because she shrugged and came over to the bed and climbed in.

                ‘You’ve got a bump,’ James commented, because he had noticed the little swell of her stomach as she came out of the bathroom.

                ‘I know!’

                She picked up her little bottle of oil and rubbed some into her hands and then smelled them.

                ‘Will you buy our baby such nice presents?’ Leila asked.

                ‘I already bought it one when I got your ring.’

                ‘Really?’ Leila said, and then examined the ring that she hadn’t so much as glanced at when he had put it on.

                ‘It’s actually very beautiful,’ Leila admitted. It was. A platinum band was beaded with little diamonds but it was the huge centre stone that Leila was examining, and she sat up in bed watching it sparkle under the light. ‘Who gifted the stone?’

                James smiled at her odd question. ‘Tiffany’s.’

                ‘I can’t believe that it fits.’

                James could.

                As he watched her long slender fingers he recalled buying the ring. The jeweller had said it could be sized later. And yet, he had pictured her fingers so many times. Pictured them tracing his body and he had also suckled each one with his lips. He had placed the jeweller’s sizer on the very tip of his little finger and had known beyond doubt that the ring would fit.