Page 117 of The Billionaire's Demand

This apartment was impersonally furnished, but it was beautiful and she realised she’d been wrong about this too, because it had absolutely come to feel like home. She belonged here. Maybe it wasn’t about the picket fence and flowerbeds and cosy furnishings, but about who you were with...

She stared at Raul with a sense of wonder, a sense of dawning comprehension, and she smiled, despite the nerves that were making her stomach loop and twist.

‘You look happy.’ Raul, in contrast, seemed perplexed.

‘Do I?’ She bit down on her lower lip. ‘I think I am. Or I might be. I don’t know. That’s kind of up to you, I guess.’ She shook her head, because that was the wrong thing to have said. She didn’t want to pressure Raul into thinking he had to return her feelings. As if anyone could pressure Raul into anything! But this had to be an act of choice, a decision they both made, if it was ever going to work.

‘Is it?’

His cautious tone caused her confidence, and mood, to dip slightly.

‘Raul, about yesterday...’

‘It was a mistake.’ A muscle pulsed low in his jaw. ‘I apologise.’

‘But what if it wasn’t,’ she said quickly, the words rushing out of her. ‘What if it was the right thing to do?’

His expression was impossible to interpret, but she saw the immediate rejection in the depths of his eyes and it stung, way more than she’d expected. This was going to be hard.

‘It wasn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Our situation is complicated enough without letting sex enter the equation.’

‘Sex is a part of our equation,’ she reminded him. ‘It’s disingenuous to pretend otherwise.’

‘We can control that.’

‘Evidently not,’ she said, patting her stomach.

‘From now on.’

‘Why?’

He looked at her as though she’d started speaking a made-up language.

‘Why do we have to control how we feel?’ she pushed. ‘Why can’t we just surrender to what’s good in this relationship? And there is so much good, Raul. In fact, I think this could be one of the best things either of us has ever done.’

He looked stricken. ‘It was a mistake,’ he repeated.

‘It was a kiss.’

He shook his head. ‘Not yesterday. This.’ He gestured to Libby’s stomach. ‘The boat. Sex. The pregnancy. None of this was supposed to happen.’

She ignored the immediate inflection of pain, held true to her goal in having this conversation, but a part of Libby was falling through the cracks in time, becoming a little girl again, desperate to put her heart on the line because she knew no one loved her.

‘But it did. We slept together because neither of us could resist.’

‘We had been through something. Adrenalin is a powerful motivator.’

‘It wasn’t just adrenalin. It was a feeling that if I didn’t reach out and grab you, I’d always regret it. How much I wanted you scared the heck out of me. It’s why I said no to dinner that night.’ She leaned closer, putting her hand on his. ‘It’s why you asked me for dinner. Isn’t it?’

Something shifted in the very depths of his eyes, but he blanked whatever emotion he’d been feeling almost immediately.

‘I asked you for dinner because it seemed appropriate, given we’d just had sex. I didn’t want you to feel used.’

Her stomach tightened. Was that true? Had it just been a case of going through the motions for Raul?

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