Forgotten Father (20 page)

They’d be together like this always, on fire for
each other, matched halves of one soul. She’d help him heal that
doubting heart of his.

He held her in his arms, her chin tipped back for
his kiss and the scent of him, so achingly familiar, tickled at her
memory. Just one night in his arms and he’d become a part of her,
the timbre of his voice, the texture of his kiss blotting out
everything but him.

She’d never had another lover. He was the first to
truly awaken her heart. She knew that despite not being able to
remember the interlude that resulted in her child’s birth. She knew
that no man had touched her like Mitchell.

Her arms trapped in his embrace, Delanie raised a
hand and pressed it to his chest, reveling in the pounding of his
heart beneath her palm.

Mitchell loosened his arms, his mouth still on hers,
wooing, nibbling till she was breathless, swamped with need and
wanting. As he stroked a hand down over her back, she felt his
strong fingers splayed there, holding her for his feasting.

He was such a contradiction. All buttoned-down
businessman on the outside; wild heathen lover on the inside. She
loved it. Loved this unsuspected, passionate soul beneath his
tailored suits. Loved that his composure unraveled just for
her.

And they had a lifetime together. Eons of bickering
and making up, of promises and long, hot nights. They’d have
children together and make a family for her Jenna.

All the darkness was behind her, the coldness warmed
by his love. She felt the brush of his hand on her cheek, his
fingers cupping her chin as he kissed her.

“Darling,” he muttered, pressing a kiss at the
corner of her mouth. “Let’s find a bed. Bathrooms can be erotic,
but beds offer more…possibilities.”

Surfacing through the haze of passion and
disoriented by the heat of the response he wrought in her, Delanie
turned, blindly leading him to her room.

He stood with her beside the bed, a tall solid
shadow in the dimness. With all her heart, she loved him. Needed
him.

There was no getting past it. She’d have to tell him
about Delanie’s father before they married. Have to confess to
conceiving a child with a man she couldn’t remember. But not
tonight. Not now in the first flush of their own discovery.

Reaching up, she slid her arms around Mitchell’s
neck, pressing her body against his. Solid and hard, he felt
incredibly good. Incredibly right. She lifted her mouth to his, her
hands anchored to his broad shoulders.

The glimmer of moonlight shifted with the shrubbery
at the window, blown shadows dancing across the wall. Even the
faint chill in the room lent an air of enchantment, a crystal sigh
of magic to their loving.

He kissed her long and drugging, his hands smoothing
and cupping her breasts through her clothing. Squirming against his
body, big and hard in her arms. Her lover. Her one true mate.

“God,” he muttered, drawing her close again, sliding
his hands around to cup her fanny and lift her against his
arousal.

Pleasure splintered through her, her skin feeling
hot enough to give off steam through her clothing. This was so
right, feeling him against the apex of her thighs, his erection
riding her softness.

So familiar.

Almost as if she were in an altered reality, she
slid back, lying on the quilted bed in a heated daze. He followed
her down, his hands and mouth greedy on her body.

Fumbling for the buttons of his shirt, she struggled
to free him quickly. She needed him, needed and loved Mitchell.
Lying sprawled with her across the bed, he buried his face in the
curve of her neck, his fingers dragging at her shirt, sliding
against her bare belly. In a scramble of passionate urgency, she
found herself naked with him, the quilt rucked beneath them on the
bed.

On the bed beside her, he slid his knee between
hers, his hands tugging at her nipples before skating down to
smooth the curve of her hip. He rocked against her, driving thought
away and she clung to him, breathless.

Breathless and overwhelmed. Lost in him, in his
touch. His mouth at her breasts, his hands everywhere. This was
heaven, being touched by Mitchell. Mitchell who she loved, who
wanted to marry her and be a father to her child.

The only man to ever build this raging fire in
her.

He rose up then, splaying her legs on the bed,
toying almost reverently with her moistness before lowering his
mouth to her there. Throwing her head back as pleasure surged
through her, she let go of any semblance of thought and tumbled
into sensation.

Pleasure rocketed through her in fragmented tingles.
His hands on her hips, his shoulders pressing her thighs wide.
Everything…every part of her lit by the touch of his mouth.

Minutes later, she lie shattered on the bed, her
breath panting in her throat as he knelt before her on the bed.

Vaguely, she saw him reach down to where his pants
lie on the floor. He opened the condom and slid it on, returning to
her. Poised at her entrance, he leaned in and then thrust into
her.

Delanie felt the pleasure of his entry ripple
through her, her body welcoming and rejoicing in their union. Lying
on the bed beneath him, their bodies locked in passionate union,
Delanie’s hands clutched his shoulders.

So good. He made her feel so incredibly good. Each
touch, each movement, sent ecstasy through her.

She loved him. Would always love him.

Her body at a fever pitch, she clung to him and as
he drove into her, taking them both to the peak, she felt herself
splinter as her body exploded into tumultuous joy…and her tears wet
her cheeks.

******

Mitchell stood over the crib in the dim light of
morning, staring down at the child he believed to be his own. An
overwhelming sense of love crowded into his chest.

The baby slept there on her stomach, her legs drawn
up under her, tiny bottom in the air. With her head turned to the
side, he could see the fan of dark eyelashes across her porcelain
cheeks, the tiny rosebud of mouth that moved in her sleep.

His daughter.

His and Delanie’s.

For her sake, he had to make this marriage work, had
to give her, at least, a few years of security. Two parents. Even
if her mother was as driven by money as his own had been.

Jenna still deserved a mother. A perfect, blameless,
precious child, she deserved every good thing he could give
her.

Mitchell stood with his hand on the crib railing and
made a vow to himself. No matter what it took, he’d make his
child’s life filled with love. If he had to, he’d pay her mother a
million dollars to stay in her life.

Even if Delanie didn’t stay in his.

******

Delanie lay awake in her empty bed the next morning,
stretching lazily beneath the covers.

Earlier in the half light of dawn, Mitchell had
gathered his clothes and left, saying in hushed tones that he
didn’t want to confuse baby Jenna.

She’d blinked up at him sleepily, only aware enough
to be grateful that the man she’d fallen in love with could be so
considerate of her child’s welfare.

Staring at the cottage’s white-washed walls an hour
later, Delanie watched the dappled pattern of sunlight through the
lace curtains at the window. Contentment held her limbs relaxed
against the sheets, a faint smile curving her lips as the previous
night’s lovemaking replayed in her head.

He was such a lover, as perfectly attuned to her
needs as she felt to his.

And he was so beautiful, his body powerful and
erotic.

An image of Mitchell streaked through her
consciousness. Kneeling naked on the bed before her last night,
smoothing the condom into place.

In a flash,
déjà vu
gripped her. As if she’d
been in this same place before, having this same moment before.

Only that was impossible. Delanie shook her head
with a rueful laugh. She was losing her mind, no doubt about it,
her fragmented memory playing tricks on her.

Over the last year or so, she’d learned to cope with
the vagrant wisps of remembrance. They had plagued her fiercely
through her pregnancy, only to subside for the most part after
Jenna was born.

Cuddled under the covers now, Delanie lifted her
hand, examining the unbelievably romantic ring Mitchell had given
her. Who’d have thought her brusque, cold-hearted businessman would
choose such a ring?

Definitely, she’d never been
here
before. In
love and engaged to be married. Finally, she’d found the lover of
her heart.

In her mind’s eye, she measured the breadth of his
shoulders, felt again his taut muscled thighs spreading hers
wide.

A bolt of something spiky and strange shivered
through her suddenly.

She remembered that picture of him kneeling before
her, remembered the economy of his movement as he’d put on the
condom. Last night?

Shaking her head to clear the sudden mistiness in
her mind, she fought against the sensation of two pictures
overlying one another. Mitchell kneeling between her spread legs,
that same aroused tautness in his body, his face shadowed in the
darkness, but still…Mitchell.

Delanie sat up abruptly in bed.

Feeling herself slipping into a strange sense of
déjà vu
, as if she were being awakened into a dream, her
hands clenched on the quilt.

She had seen him like that before, kneeling on the
bed, putting a condom over his aroused member…and it wasn’t last
night.

An image burned suddenly in her brain. In the flash
of an instant, the crazy chaos in her head coalesced, chunks of the
past crashing into her mind like meteorites. In a rapid succession,
memories flashed in front of her eyes.

Mitchell.

Mitchell coming across the crowded room the night of
the cocktail party. Drawing her out on to the veranda and into his
arms. He’d seemed to have walked out of her fantasies.

Then, he’d taken her back to his room…and made
fierce, life-altering love to her. Made her pregnant despite the
condom he’d slid so efficiently into place.

Mitchell was her lover. Had been her lover all those
months before.

It was him. Jenna’s father.

Mitchell, all along.

The man who hated her and believed she’d slept with
his grandfather for money.

How could she have forgotten him?

Her heart pounding suddenly against her rib cage,
Delanie struggled with a sense of suffocation, fighting to draw
breath into her body.

All the rest of it, the rest of that wonderful,
terrible twenty-four hours came flooding in on her now with a
relentless crashing force.

In an instant, she stood beside the lake and felt as
though her heart were being torn from her. His hard, ugly words.
The vicious hostility in his face.

That other morning, more than a year and a half ago,
the sun had shone, too, before the clouds came in. Delanie sat now
in the middle of her sunlit bed, drowning in memories.

She’d been the one to sneak out early that morning,
foolishly planning to tweak him for not discovering her name.

What a idiot she’d been.

Here now, every crystal detail of every moment came
back to her. He’d thrown her out, a year and a half ago. Cast her
out of The Cedars, out of Donovan’s life and, most importantly, out
of his own.

Shaking her head as if movement could clear the
jumble of thought, Delanie struggled with the realizations
bombarding her. It was Mitchell with whom she’d made love and
conceived. They’d been lovers before.

Lying back in her cottage bed, the pillows stacked
high against the old iron bedstead, Delanie flinched with each
returning memory. She remembered it all, as if a sheet had been
ripped off that obscured month of her life.

The frantic last days before the reopening weekend.
Donovan’s pride and excitement. Mitchell that first evening at the
cocktail party. That perfect night in bed with him, the coming
together with no words.

Just the memory of their first meeting drew a shaken
breath from her now and Delanie felt a dampness on her cheek that
she quickly wiped away. She could only be grateful that her sweet
bundle of energy was sleeping past six this morning. It would never
do to greet her baby with weepy eyes.

Delanie shifted restlessly under the covers she’d so
recently shared with Mitchell. Her Sir Galahad, she thought
mockingly. The man she’d waited for all her life.

And he thought her a money-grubbing tramp.

Now she understood his hostility toward her at the
lawyer’s office the day she’d learned she inherited half The
Cedars. Donovan’s quixotic gift must have seemed like confirmation
of Mitchell’s opinion of her as a heartless woman out for what she
could get.

Not that he’d had much doubt. She still remembered
the coldness in his voice, the hatred in his eyes when he denounced
her down at the lake.

Delanie smiled bitterly.

Suddenly, his animosity at the reading of the will
made so much more sense. Not only had he lost half The Cedars, he
had believed he lost it to his grandfather’s conniving
mistress.

He thought her capable of that.

So, why hadn’t he denounced her then? Why not spew
out his hatred again the way he had that morning by the lake?
Instead, he’d looked at her with that cold disdain, the
ever-controlled businessman.

Hands clenching again on the quilt covering her,
Delanie struggled to push back the bitter tears.

He was so controlled, her would-be husband. No
doubt, he’d steeled himself against showing his anger as freely as
before, unwilling to even give her that now. Yet, there had been
snide comments, things said that should have clued her in. The
occasional remark he’d made about “putting the past behind them.”
He’d been referring to that wild night together, hinting at the
hostility he felt then and must still harbor.