Page 19 of Christmas Baby with Her Ultra-Rich Boss

‘You think this is about ourkiss?’ she asked in disbelief.

‘I woke this morning unaware you were pregnant with my child. Hours later I felt it move. The emotion of the moment got the better of me. It won’t happen again.’

‘Yes, I know, it was just another mistake,’ she said bitterly. ‘You’ve made your feelings towards me crystal clear. You hate me.’

‘I don’t hate you. I hate that you kept our baby a secret from me.’

‘Because of the power you hold over me! I was always going to tell you.’

‘But only when you needed my money.’

‘No, when you no longer had the power to leave me destitute. One snap of your fingers and you could have made me jobless and homeless.’

‘You really believed that of me?’

‘Look at the way you behaved the morning after we slept together. You didn’t even have the courtesy to wish me a good morning, just straight out told me it was all a mistake and then...’ She snapped her fingers in the same way he could have destroyed her. Could still destroy her. ‘Gone.’

The pulse on the side of his clenched jaw throbbed. ‘What would you rather I’d done? Pretend I was happy to wake in your bed?’

She’d been happy to wake next to him. So very happy.

‘I do not lie, Lena,’ he continued. ‘I despise lies.’

‘You didn’t have to be so cold about it.’

He rubbed the back of his head and took another deep breath before saying, ‘We both crossed a line that should never have been crossed. It was better to sever it immediately.’

‘Well, you did just that. You spent the night making love to me, having sex with me,making a mistakewith me, whatever you want to call it, and then you up and left as if I was nothing but a toy you’d played with and decided was faulty.’

His vampiric face contorted with disbelief.

Her lethargy gone, Lena stood and stomped to her teeny food area and barely resisted throwing her plate into the sink. Hands on her hips, she faced him, practically trapping him against the pine wall.

‘That’sexactlyhow you treated me, and you wonder why I was so scared to tell you about our baby, when you’d already made your disdain for me so clear? And then you came back five months later and made your loathing even more obvious. Until you learned about the baby you were cold and offhanded with me. I genuinely thought you were looking for a reason to sack me, and then this morning,beforeyou knew about the baby, you were so keen to get away from me that you forgot your phone, so don’t tell me that you only hate me for keeping our baby a secret from you. You already hated me.’

‘Damn it, Lena...’ He looked her square in the eyes. ‘You are the only employee I have ever made this mistake with.’

She jabbed his chest. ‘Stop calling me a mistake!’

He snatched her jabbing hand and held it tightly to his chest. She could feel the thumps of his heart beneath it. They matched the beats of her own thrashing heart. ‘Youwerea mistake,’ he snarled, green eyes swirling with dark emotion boring into her. ‘It should never have happened and I have spent five months trying to forget it and forget you, and then I came back here and every time I look at you, it’s all I can see. It’s here in my head.’ Leaning his vampiric face right into hers, he tapped the side of his skull for emphasis. ‘Right here. I can’t escape it. I can’t escapeyou. I told you the truth the next morning that it was a mistake, and I was right. Only fools mix business with pleasure so that made me the fool who had to put the most incredible night of my life out of my mind and forget about it. God knows I’ve tried but I can’t forget, and if I’ve been cold with you it’s because sharing the same air as you—’

Lena’s mouth suddenly attached itself to his. It came without thought or reason, her body taking full control for a swift, clumsy kiss that had, for one fleeting instant, felt as necessary as taking her next breath.

Konstantinos froze. A short beat later Lena froze, too, in horror at what she was doing, and reared away from him. Brain burning, frightened to look at him, heart racing and blood pumping frantically, she pulled her hand free from his and quickly edged away from him, already planning to lock herself in the bathroom until her mortification had passed when his large hand snatched at her wrist and he yanked her back to him.

An arm snaked tightly around her waist, crushing her against him and then his mouth came crashing down.

With a moan that seemed to come from the very core of her being, Lena melted into Konstantinos and the dark power of his kiss. Lips fused, tongues entwined, arms wrapped around each other, until every inch of their bodies that could be flush pressed together and every single tendril of emotion and pleasure she’d experienced in his arms roared back to life.

This...this was what had clung like a cloud to her all these months. The sheer headiness she’d found in the taste of his passionate kisses and the scent of his skin and the thrills of his touch. All of her senses responded to him, as if Konstantinos Siopis had been specially created for her sensory delectation, and being with him now, caught in the hot fever that had captured them that night in an explosion of hedonistic lust...oh, it was the most incredible feeling in the world.

Hot, sticky desire pulsed through Konstantinos, the arousal he’d kept under such tight control unleashed, urgent, scorching him. Pressing Lena against the wall, he devoured her mouth, her hot sweetness feeding his hunger, thrills ravaging him. Other than their devouring faces, not an inch of flesh touched through the thick layers they wore, but the heat from their crushed bodies was as consuming as if they were naked.

It was a heat like no other. The way he reacted to Lena was like with no other. For five months the night they’d spent together had been a living memory constantly springing free from the reinforced crate he kept jamming it into. He’d been unable to enjoy even the simple pleasure of a glass of wine without conjuring Lena’s smile as she drank her own wine, unable to see the colour red without the image of unbuttoning her red blouse flashing into his mind. Damn it, even seeing the delivery of ice at one of his hotels had immediately made him think of her, which alone was enough for his loins to heat.

That was the worst part of it. It was impossible to think of her and the night they’d spent together without the accompanying tell-tale signs of arousal. Hundreds, often thousands, of miles of distance between them, differing time zones and climates and all it took was for him to close his eyes and he could feel her nails scraping over his naked back.

Breaths ragged and painful, he broke the fusion of their mouths and stared at her flushed, beautiful face with a heart that had swollen large enough to choke him. When he gazed into her desire-drugged eyes it came to him that much of the anger he’d been carrying since their night together had dissipated. Every part of him throbbed with desire but an invisible weight he’d barely noticed himself carrying had lifted.

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