Just one kiss, she bargained with herself, just one, but the man who had once seduced her with kisses had no intention of breaking his perfect track record. He always knew what she wanted and he gave it to her, all the seething passion he had taught her to crave. He kissed her and she went up in flames. Her body flared into shocking awareness and suddenly burned back to almost painful life with every plunging thrust of his tongue. She gasped and quivered, filled with all the hunger she had suppressed.
He brought her down on a firm but yielding surface and her head fell back as he wrenched down her dress to squeeze a straining pink nipple between his fingertips, swiftly following it up as she arched up to him in response with the warm sucking pull of his mouth. It was as if a river of liquid fire ran down through her to engulf her feminine core. A strangled moan of excitement was torn from her as his mouth traced a fiery path down over her twisting body, long, lean fingers clenching on a slender thigh.
And just then she wondered how he had contrived that skin-to-skin contact and the answer shook her so much that she yanked herself violently free and rolled off the sofa, hitting her hip painfully hard in the fall. Her dress fell round her knees. Tears of pain and mortification in her eyes, she got onto her knees and, with great difficulty, clumsily and awkwardly hauled her dress back up over her exposed body, shame roaring through her in long agonising waves.
‘Thee mou...’ Jax began rawly.
‘I want a taxi home. This is not going any further,’ Lucy swore breathlessly, unable to even make herself look at him.
Jax wanted to break something. Instead he breathed in very deep. Lucy hadn’t changed. She had to have all the ducks in line before she would fire. Two years ago, that simple process of withholding sex had worked on him but he was no longer that suggestible, Jax told himself with fierce conviction. Yet when he touched her, she owned him, he recognised, unnerved by that realisation.
As she struggled with a singular lack of dignity or cool to refasten the difficult ties on her slender shoulders, Lucy’s hatred of Jax rose like a tide of poison inside her. Ten seconds and he had had her half naked, nothing but a pair of knickers standing between her and total nudity. She had been a pushover. Maybe she was so starved of sex she did need a man in her life, she decided, her eyes stinging with hot, angry tears. But that man would not be Jax Antonakos.
‘The limo will take you back home,’ Jax told her flatly. ‘That is if you really want to leave.’
‘It’s my turn to do the walking away,’ Lucy framed gruffly, loathing coursing through her slight body in such powerful waves that she trembled with it. ‘I wish I’d done it two years ago. What were you planning on happening? Another session of unprotected sex? Haven’t you ever had consequences from that?’
‘What the hell are you trying to imply?’ Jax demanded in a raw undertone.
Lucy flung her head back, all fired up on adrenalin and resentment and bitterness. ‘When you got bored and dumped me,’ she told him shakily, ‘you left me pregnant—’
CHAPTER FOUR
JAX HAD FALLEN very still. ‘That’s not possible—’
‘Why? Are you infertile?’ Lucy shot back at him, unimpressed. ‘I don’t think so because we have a child, Jax. A little girl, who’s fifteen months old.’
Jax stared back at her in rampant disbelief, hard lines settling between his nose and mouth, his handsome bone structure drawn stark and taut. ‘Impossible,’ he said again, green eyes brilliant with outraged denial.
‘That last week we were together you had sex with me in a changing-room cubicle and you didn’t take precautions,’ Lucy reminded him angrily. ‘Why do you think I tried so hard to get in touch with you that I got thrown off the yacht? I needed help.’
Shock ensured that Jax’s brain continued to rebel and tell him that what she was saying was totally and absolutely impossible but his memory was infinitely more accurate. He knew he had taken that risk and had thought nothing of it at the time, indeed revelling in the reality that not even the thin layer of a condom separated him from her. He also realised in that moment that if she was telling him the truth, he had very probably made the biggest, messiest mistake of his life.
Panic hurtled through Lucy when she saw the shrewd dawning of genuine concern in his glittering green eyes. What had she done? Throwing it at him like that? Oh, my goodness, what had she done? Dully she recognised that she had been hitting back at him the only way she knew how. Needing to shock and hurt him as he had once shocked and hurt her with his rejection. But she knew instantly that she should not have used Bella like a weapon against him.
‘This has to be discussed,’ Jax intoned in a driven undertone.
‘Not tonight. I want to go home,’ Lucy breathed tightly. ‘Right now.’
‘You can’t tell me I could be a father and then—’
‘Yes, I can,’ Lucy incised fiercely. ‘I can do whatever I like just as you do whatever you like. And it’s not a question of “could be a father”. Bella is yours because I’ve never been with anyone else!’
Jax knew that was a lie for he had seen her cheat on him with his own eyes but DNA testing would provide proof neither of them could refute. He was appalled by the idea that he could have unwittingly had a child with a woman who not only lied and cheated but also had a criminal record. Even his parents’ numerous unsuccessful marriages and affairs paled beside such a development. And the existence of an illegitimate Antonakos heir would send his father through the roof.
‘I want to see the child,’ Jax told her doggedly.
Lucy lost all her hectic colour. ‘No.’
‘If that child is half mine, you don’t get to say no. I’ll call in the family legal team,’ Jax warned her without skipping a beat. ‘Who looks after her when you’re at work?’
That reference to lawyers and the reality that she was a working mum made a cold, hollow sensation of fear spread inside Lucy’s tummy. ‘My stepmother,’ she told him, struggling to suppress the defiance rising inside her because a mood of conciliation struck her as being far more sensible in the circumstances.
‘I’ll call in with you tomorrow and we’ll take care of the necessities,’ Jax breathed coldly as he strode out to the hall. ‘I need your address—’
‘No.’ The sense of being trapped built up inside Lucy until she felt almost suffocated by it. She had told him about Bella. She had done it in a recklessly provocative way too, absolutely the worst way to give Jax bad news. As volatile as he was, he didn’t need the encouragement. And she had no doubt at all that learning that he was a father was very bad news on his terms because from the instant the concept had set in, Jax had turned icy-cold and businesslike. Now, however, Lucy recognised that she had to deal with the fallout from her impulsive decision and that would entail finally telling Kreon and Iola the truth.
‘If you come in the morning I’ll be there,’ Lucy conceded abruptly. ‘I usually only work evenings. My father and stepmother have a funeral to attend, so they won’t be at home.’
Jax demanded the address and then stood poised in the doorway of his home watching her clamber into the limousine outside. Lucy tore her gaze from his forbidding stance and told herself that she had only done what had had to be done. He had the right to know about Bella. It was his own fault that he hadn’t found out about his daughter sooner. Maybe he wouldn’t want anything to do with their child, Lucy reasoned with sudden hope that that might be the case. And then she felt horribly guilty because she knew how much it hurt not to have a father and she didn’t want her daughter to suffer the same way.
Yet when she looked back to her affair with Jax she could never have believed that they would have ended up so bitterly opposed. That night after the yacht party, Jax had sought her out and insisted on seeing her back to her room at the bar.
‘You are over twenty-one?’ he had checked. ‘I don’t get involved with anyone younger than that.’
‘I’m twenty-three,’ Lucy had lied instantly, adding on four years to her age, determined to make that all important grade for him.
He had told her he would pick her up for dinner the following evening. She had told him she was working.
‘Take a night off,’ Jax had urged.
‘I can’t afford to,’ she had argued.
‘I’ll cover the cost of it,’ Jax had declared.
‘But then you’d be paying for my time and I couldn’t agree to that—’
‘You’re very difficult,’ Jax had condemned.
‘And you don’t understand how to take no for an answer.’
‘I want to see you again,’ Jax had proclaimed impatiently.
‘I’m free Thursday night.’
‘I don’t want to wait that long.’
‘All right. You can see me at midnight tomorrow when I finish my shift...unless that’s too late for you?’
‘No, that will do.’
‘But know upfront I’m not spending the night with you, so if that’s what you’re expecting, just forget about me,’ she had warned him staunchly.
Lucy had learned to be blunt with men. She thought of it as managing their expectations. She had gone out with so many men who had simply assumed that she would sleep with them at the end of the night and who had reacted badly to a refusal. But her body was the one element in her world that Lucy had always felt was truly hers and until she finally met someone who could make her want him enough to move beyond that she had no intention of sharing her body with anyone. She genuinely hadn’t expected Jax to be any different and she had slowly learned her mistake until saying no to Jax had become painful because she hadn’t been able to control her own hunger.