Page 29 of The Billionaire's One-Night Baby

It sounded as if Jago was asking her out on a date, that he wanted her with him on the night. But why? They’d just slept together, weren’t planning on doing it again and were now—eek!—having a baby together. Why was he complicating an already complicated situation by asking her to upmarket events at a luxurious rooftop venue?

Jago placed his hand on her knee and squeezed. ‘Stop overthinking this, Dodi. I need a date, and you, I think, need to get out of your head and your house. Come with me, meet some new people, plug your business. God knows there is always a bride or two wafting around looking for their first, second or third wedding dress. You might as well be the one to provide them with what they want.’

He sounded so cynical, Dodi thought. Is that how she sounded about marriage, about weddings? Sceptical and harsh? If yes, then she needed to tone it down a notch or four hundred.

Jago squeezed her knee again and Dodi realised that he was waiting for her reply. ‘Um... I don’t know, Jago. We said one night, nothing more.’

‘Nothing was written in blood, Dodi, and we can spend an evening together without us ripping each other’s clothes off, right?’ Well, maybe he could. She wasn’t so sure about herself.

‘And I’m thinking that, if we are going to be having a child together, we should at least try to be friends,’ he added.

She heard his logic, understood it, but her heart, soul and body didn’t want to be friends with Jago. Friends meant that he wouldn’t stroke his big hands over her bare skin, drop kisses on her lips, skim his mouth across her stomach, down the inside of her legs.

‘Say yes, Dodi. Don’t make me go alone.’

‘I’m pretty sure that you have at least fifteen women you can call up right now who would be happy to be your date.’

‘Sure. But you’re so much more interesting,’ Jago said, his deep voice raising goosebumps on her skin.

Interesting, Dodi thought as he swung down her road and approached her boom gate. Was interesting a good or bad thing?

She didn’t know and she wished she did.

CHAPTER EIGHT

JAGOPULLEDUPin front of Dodi’s double garage door, cut the engine to his car and raised his hand off the wheel, puzzled to see it trembling. Why?

He couldn’t be nervous. He didn’t get nervous. Scared? No!

Excitement, he eventually decided after picking up and discarding other emotions. He was excited to pick up a woman, to go on a date.

No, that was wrong. He was excited to seeDodi. To spend some time with her.

He hadn’t seen her for ten days, but his mind often wandered in her direction, and he frequently had to resist the urge to check in with her, to see what she was up to, to see how she was doing, to make sure she was feeling okay. At the end of the day, it took everything he had not to head over to the salon or her house so that he could look into her smoky eyes, count the freckles on her nose, feel her luscious mouth under his.

And his nights were pure torture. He took a long time to fall asleep, and when he did he had X-rated dreams with Dodi in a starring role. This wasn’t like him. He didn’t get excited over a woman, didn’t let anyone upset his equilibrium. Heneverallowed them to distract him from his work.

But Dodi frequently strolled into his mind during business meetings, plopped down and made him lose his train of thought. And when he wasn’t trying to work out how she got him to talk about his dad and the past—subjects he never discussed—he still scanned the horizon for Dodi-related trouble. What could go wrong with her pregnancy, her business,them? And after the child was born, what then? How were they going to raise a kid together, how might they disagree, what were the potential obstacles and how could he solve them now...?

He’d never spent this much time thinking about a woman, ever. He should nip his little Dodi obsession in the bud before it got out of control.

He refused to fall under her spell and be at the mercy of any sex-, lust- or attraction-induced craziness. He’d seen how his parents had acted—hot, cold, on, off, up, down—and he liked stability, things to be even keel, no drama.

That was why he’d married Anju, remember?

And really, he had so many other things in his life demanding his attention. Micah and an employee from the events planning company they owned—a business his father had acquired for Liyana to run years ago, and which hadn’t held her interest for long—had yet to find another venue for Thadie’s wedding and they were rapidly running out of time.

Thadie had more online threats than usual and the attention from the media and general public had ramped up exponentially, so much so that Thadie had employed a bodyguard from the local arm of an international company specialising in personal protection.

Her stalker/harasser had managed to cancel the wedding venue and tried the same scam on the caterer and Thadie’s florist. Luckily, they both called for confirmation, so those disasters were averted.

Thadie, and by extension he and Micah—and Dodi, he supposed—were all living on tenterhooks, waiting for the next axe to fall. And, honestly, his sister was looking like anything but the radiant bride. She was thinner than she’d been since she was a teenager, her face looked gaunt and her eyes haunted.

Thadie, her wedding, and his inconvenient attraction towards Dodi all took up a lot of mental energy, so much so that he hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about the fact that he was going to be a father, that Dodi was carrying his child. Or maybe he’d deliberately avoided thinking about his being a father because the idea scared him stupid.

He liked Thadie’s twins, he really did, but he had no experience with kids and had never planned to have any—that was a very deliberate choice he had made early on. He was far too much like his dad. Theo had been more of a business coach and hard taskmaster-motivator than a hands-on father. He didn’t know what a good dad looked like. He was abrupt and terse, impatient and competitive. What if he was as bad a father as his own had been?

Worse?

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