Page 8 of Returning for His Unknown Son

Her long neck arched as she considered him with a quiet boldness he’d always sensed beneath her surface shyness. His fingers itched to follow the deep dip of her small waist and the flare of her hips. He wanted to cup her buttocks and pull her to him until she was plastered against him. This need for the woman in his dreams had forced him to survive when all he’d wanted to do was surrender to the black void in his mind.

But now that she was in front of him, a thread of something he didn’t understand filled his heart. It kept him still, even as desire filled his very veins, washing away all that aching emptiness that had driven him nearly insane.

“Have you forgotten how to take the clothes off a woman, Christian?” she said, her expression full of a haughty arrogance that was like tinder to the explosive desire coursing through him. “Have the last eight years changed you that much?”

Laughter barreled out of him, from deep within him, shaking him, purging the last remnants of the fear he’d carried within himself. Until he’d seen the shock and surprise in those beautiful brown eyes. Until he’d held her slender body in his arms and carried her into the house. Even his childhood home had felt like a stranger without her in it.

But beneath his laughter, there was discombobulation, too.

This wasn’t the Priya he’d met when he’d been a cocky eighteen-year-old.

She wasn’t the girl he’d been fascinated by when she’d been his best friend’s shy yet whip-smart fiancée who’d found holes in his code and broken his app with one try. Not the girl with whom his obsession had tied him up in knots of guilt and self-loathing.

Because he was the man who’d always had everything in the world and still, he’d lusted after his best friend’s girl. The very friend who’d been a brother and family to Christian from the moment they’d bonded in middle school.

She wasn’t the girl he’d rescued from a fog of grief and gut-wrenching loneliness that had threatened to devour them both after they’d lost Jai in a freak road traffic accident. She wasn’t the girl with a shy smile and wary words and unwavering loyalty who had been his only link to sanity when all he’d wanted was to howl at the universe and its cruelty in snatching away a person he’d loved yet again.

She wasn’t the girl he’d married and tried his best to keep at arm’s length, even then protecting her, this time from himself.

She wasn’t the girl in whose eyes he’d seen desire for him and promised himself that he’d taste it once. Only once.

She wasn’t a girl at all. This was a woman fierce and angry and sexy—a combination that sent his muscles curling with the kind of need that he was sure he’d never allowed to touch him.

The last eight years had left their mark on her. There was a fire in her eyes now and a cloak of armor she seemed to have wrapped herself up in. The hot pink dress clung to her curves—a sure departure from the mostly baggy clothes she’d worn then. The stilettos made her legs look longer.

Even the way she stood there and watched him over her shoulder was different. It was confident. Sexy as hell. It was also inexplicably bewildering.

With that hard-won patience he’d developed out of necessity, he examined his own confusion. He wanted the comfort of that shy, quiet girl she’d been. He wanted the comfort of knowing that she hadn’t changed in eight years. That she hadn’t moved on with her life without him. That she hadn’t stopped...needinghim.

Which was more than a little messed up but at least it was the truth.

He was Christian Mikkelsen, billionaire, one-half of the brilliant tech company Modi Mikkelsen Technologies and a philanthropist to boot. Although that last part had been mostly instilled in him by Jai. The one man he’d tried to emulate and whose standards he’d always tried to live up to, even after he’d died.

And this woman who stared at him with such undisguised anger and poorly hidden desire was his wife. A wife he’d acquired as a chess move against his grandfather and the MMT board’s compulsive need to curb hisextracurricularactivities. More important, she’d been a friend he’d sworn to protect, even from himself.

As he reached her and breathed in the scent of her, Christian understood the most important thing in all the muddy disaster of blackness his life had been for the last eight years. The attraction between them was as fierce and as wild as he remembered.

His heart thudding, he moved closer to her. Because of her struggle, the zipper of her dress had gotten stuck in the fabric. It was still damp in places. That urge to rip it off her and envelop her in the thickest, warmest blanket was overwhelming.

Weird how his mind remembered so vividly the time when she’d almost died due to pneumonia. He and Jai had spent an agonizing forty-eight hours in the sterile hospital café waiting for news. He’d been on edge all night, and Jai, as always, had been the calm, solid presence. When Priya had finally been out of danger, the distasteful truth had dawned on him—he was madly in love with his best friend’s fiancée.

At that time, he’d told himself that her appeal was that she was forbidden to him. God, what an idiot he’d been.

“It’s stuck,” he said, raising his hands but unable to drop them down onto her shoulders. His fingers shook slightly. It wasn’t that he felt useless so much as he was awed by how desperately he wanted to touch her. Anything that made him this desperate, he usually resisted. That was a truth he knew of himself.

The tall mirrors all around them reflected them back, blurring the boundaries between their bodies. He met her gaze in one.

“Christian?”

“I haven’t touched anyone in eight years.” The words came easily.

Her eyes widened, the bones in her neck standing out in stark relief. “What?”

“I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone touching me, either.”

He wasn’t sure why he was telling her this. He was also sure that this wasn’t him—this man who simply said whatever was in his heart. The skin of his abdomen still stung a little after she’d raked her fingers over him, marking him when she’d thought he was nothing but a mirage. How desperately she’d wanted for him to be real.

A cacophony of emotions sang through him, not that he could make head or tail out of them. Only that he needed her to know. To understand.

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