The Secretary's Scandalous Secret (17 page)

‘You’re shivering!’ He dipped his hand into the water and grimaced. ‘It’s stone cold!’

‘I must have nodded off.’ Agatha stared at him helplessly. In the faded jeans in which he had traveled, and an equally faded rugby jumper harking back to his university days, Luc was drop-dead gorgeous. She would have given anything for him not to have had this effect on her but there was no denying the stirring she felt between her thighs and the way her nipples tightened and hardened, standing to immediate, aroused attention.

‘Do you call this taking care of yourself?’ Luc growled.
With no escape-route handy, she felt herself scooped out of the water and deposited gently on the ground. And because something appeared to have happened to her legs, making it impossible for them to move, she was a very naked and willing recipient of one of the large, fluffy towels that had been hanging on the heated towel-rail.

‘I’ve been out in that bloody garden for the last thirty minutes hunting you down!’ he delivered with biting reproach, as he once again swept her off her feet, kicking open the bathroom door and heading towards the king-sized bed. ‘I’ve been worried sick!’

‘Y
OU’VE
been
worried?’
Agatha couldn’t stop the tingle of delight that gathered in the pit of her stomach at those telling words. In fact, the feeling obscured the very fact that she was still naked, wrapped in the towel and sharing the same space as Luc: three things that should have had her running for cover.

‘You should have informed me the minute you got back inside the house.’

‘You were working. I didn’t want to disturb you. Besides, I didn’t think that I was supposed to clock in and clock out like one of the temps in your office!’ Noticeably, he had dropped the ‘worried sick’ line of chat. Maybe he thought that an admission like that, an admission that might just possibly border on the not-entirely unemotional, would give her inappropriate ideas: ideas that he cared about her, when he patently didn’t.

‘It occurred to me that you might have got lost in the garden. It looks small, but there’s acres of it, and quite a bit of it is woodland. With the sun going down, it would be difficult for you to find your way around.’ That cool explanation was a far cry from the sudden pounding panic he had felt when he had walked round and round, calling her name with ever more urgency, imagining her merrily getting lost
in the sprawling countryside like Gretel, but without the trail of breadcrumbs to find her way back home.

Rage, that she should take such little effort to look after herself, when she had been warned often and well about the necessity of doing so, was easier to deal with.

He had been flipping his phone open, ready to call the local police, when he had decided to do a check of the house.

Pushing open the bathroom door had been the last resort, for he had again called her name various times and received no response.

Little wonder when she had fallen asleep in the bath! How long had she been there?’Are you beginning to warm up?’ he asked gruffly and she nodded and pulled the towel tightly around her.

‘You need to change,’ he said, moving towards her. ‘You’ll catch some kind of chill otherwise.’

Agatha was tempted to tell him not to be foolish, but what leg did she have to stand on when she had slept in a cold bath for heaven only knew how long? Now, instead of getting her act together and putting on her adult hat, she was yawning, feeling sleepy again and not really wanting to do anything except look at him and savour the concern etched into his harsh, beautiful features.

‘This is
exactly
why you can’t be left on your own,’ he fulminated grimly, searching through her drawers and coming up with underwear, a tee-shirt and a pair of stretchy jogging bottoms. He turned to look at her darkly. ‘What if you’d been on your own and fallen asleep in the bath?’

‘I expect I would have woken up eventually, a little wrinkled and a little cold.’

‘The doctor said you’re to take it easy. Freezing half to death in a bath because you’ve nodded off isn’t taking it easy by anyone’s standards.’

Agatha was only half-taking in what he was saying. She was fixated by the way he was moving towards the bed, her clothes in his hands and an expression of intent on his face.

‘Wh…what are you doing?’ she squeaked, when the mattress depressed under his weight as he sat next to her on the bed.

In truth, Luc wasn’t entirely sure. He was only now coming down from his extraordinary flight of panic. He looked down at her upturned face and frowned.

He was taking charge, he thought, as the fog cleared. It was what he did. And good thing too, because she certainly seemed to be pretty poor at it. He swept aside the memory of that sickening rush that had overwhelmed him when he had gone outside to look for her. Instead, he focused on the potential hazard she posed to herself and their unborn baby.

He hooked his finger under the towel where she had pulled it tight across her breasts and felt the whoosh of her sharply indrawn breath. But, although she reached to cover his hand with hers, her eyes remained locked with his; what he read there gave the lie to her pitiful show of brushing him off.

‘I…I can dress myself, Luc.’ Agatha heard the breathlessness in her voice with a sense of dismay. The warmth of his finger nestling in her cleavage was scorching hot against her skin. When she shivered compulsively, she prayed that he might mistakenly jump to the conclusion that she was still cold after her silly experience in the bath.

The hot flare in his eyes told her that, whatever conclusion he had jumped to, it certainly wasn’t the wrong one and she felt an answering leap in her pulses that didn’t surprise her. Why should it? Even when she had been giving herself long lectures about staying away from him because he was
bad for her health—even when she had told herself that he was only out to manipulate her because it suited him to have her firmly anchored under his thumb—she had still been susceptible to that ferocious charm of his and frighteningly undone by a love she hadn’t been able to sweep under the carpet.

How hard had she fought to hang on to her independence once she had discovered that she was pregnant? She might not have succumbed to his marriage proposal, because not all of her pride had been squashed into the ground, but the second her health had given cause for concern she had allowed him to step into the breach and take over.

And Luc could offer degree courses on taking over. Before she had had time to think straight, she had been moved lock, stock and barrel into his apartment and then, in the space of a heartbeat, here to his country house.

Her protests had been so ineffectual that it was little wonder that they had been comprehensively ignored.

A shameful sense of guilt assailed her because she
liked
having his finger touching her like a branding iron.

It took little more than a gentle tug to free her hand from its limp hold and for the towel to fall to the bed.

Agatha stared at the discarded puddle of towelling with an air of disassociation.

‘You’re carrying my baby.’ Luc’s velvety voice was a notch lower. ‘I want to see how it’s shaping your body.’

The sound of his voice snapped her back to reality and she made an attempt to scrabble for the towel, but he closed his hand around one slender wrist, pinning her in mid-movement.

‘Please, Agatha.’

‘This is inappropriate,’ she breathed unevenly.

‘Is it? I’ve seen you naked before.’

‘But we don’t have that kind of relationship now!’

‘Your breasts are bigger.’ He was vaguely surprised that he could speak at all, because the sight of her was breathtaking. Literally, he felt as though the breath had been driven out of his body.

He reached out and cupped her breast, feeling the naked weight of it in his hands, and it was as though her body had been trained to react in a certain inevitable way to his touch. She fell back against the pillows, her eyelids fluttering as a wave of heat stole through her body, sending her entire system in full crash mode.

‘And your nipples are bigger as well. And darker. Is that normal?’

‘Luc…’

‘I like it when you say my name like that,’ he confessed in a ragged, unsteady voice.

There was no way that making love fully was an option but he still wanted her with every fibre of his being.

‘This is so not right…’

‘How can it be
not
right?’ he murmured, briefly glancing at her face, but driven to look again at her even more bountiful body. ‘You’re pregnant with my baby. How can it not be right for me to look at you? But of course, if you want me to go, then I will…’ It was a chance, but he was a gambler, and he always knew his game. The gentle quiver of her body under his raking inspection told him all that he needed to know and the curling of her fingers now in his springy hair was confirming it.

Instead of triumph, however, he just felt a bone-deep sense of peace as he traced the outline of her nipple with a wandering finger and then moved on to circle her smooth, rounded stomach. She could still get away with wearing jeans, but to his sharp eyes she had changed in a thousand little ways, from the shape and size of her breasts and nipples to the infinitesimal thickening of her waistline. Already she
was beginning to put on a little weight and it suited her. It was incredibly sexy to think that all of this was due to his own flesh and blood inside her. Having never really given the question of issue a passing thought, he now wondered what the sex of the baby would be. Boy or girl? Dark hair, he imagined. Wasn’t that a genetic trait that superceded the fair-haired gene?

The need to weld her to him was intense. In a little over six months she would give birth to his child, a son or a daughter; it bordered on obscene to think of another man entering her life.

That thought gave an edge to his roaming hands. When he bent to lick her big, dark nipples and he felt her squirm under him, he felt a rush of satisfaction and purpose.

‘No making love,’ he said ruefully, standing to remove his clothing and keeping his eyes pinned on her avid, flushed face. ‘But I can still touch. Would you like that? Would you find it de-stressing?’ He stepped out of his jeans, kicking them to one side, and pulled off the rugby shirt in one swift, fluid movement.

Agatha felt like someone deprived of food and sustenance for way too long suddenly confronted with a banquet. Her senses seemed to reach overload with shocking ease as she drank in the long, lean lines of his body. Assurance was in his every move as he ditched the boxer shorts and stood completely naked in front of her, proud, beautiful and clearly turned on.

She shifted when he slipped into bed with her, pushing aside the covers and looking at her with such open hunger that she wriggled under the scrutiny.

‘This isn’t supposed to happen,’ she whispered, reaching out for sanity one last time before it disappeared altogether—then immediately contradicting her valiant
words when she traced the exquisite line of his sensuous mouth with a wayward, rebellious finger.

Luc didn’t answer. He gave her a slow, curling smile and then captured her finger, only to circle it with his mouth and suck gently on it while he locked his eyes on her surprised face.

He shifted a little so that she could feel what she was doing to him, heavy and urgent against her leg.

Still very gently, he moved to give the rest of her body the attention it deserved.

Agatha, caught up in a maelstrom of strong feelings and powerful sensation, could no more have fought his seductive onslaught than she could have hitched a ride to the moon. Her body responded to the lazy flick of his tongue on her nipple by heating up, yet seemingly turning to jelly. Her legs relaxed and fell open and she closed her eyes on a sigh of intense pleasure as his tongue teased and licked a burning path from one engorged nipple to the next.

Still exploring her sensitised breasts, he cupped one hand between her thighs and then slowly rubbed her, feeling her moisture like honeyed dew on his fingers until she came apart under his touch.

There was no need for him to guide her hand to him. Half-curling on her side to face him, she took him and played with him so that his hardness became as solid as steel, and he groaned and shuddered.

‘I think,’ he delivered unevenly, ‘That I am just about to have the safest sex known to mankind.’

Far more satisfying it would have been to be able to plunge into the wet depths of her and feel her silky dampness around his sheath, but all in good time. For now, he released himself to the rhythm of her sure hand and then sank back against the pillow for a matter of a few seconds, spent, just catching his breath before giving her a wry look.

‘What does it say that that was better than anything with any other woman?’

Leaving her little time to ponder that revealing reflection, he drew her gently against him.

‘You can completely relax here,’ he murmured soothingly into her ear. ‘No need to stack up your defences. As you see, we don’t have to be at war with one another. I’m a peaceful kind of guy.’ He stroked her thigh and Agatha was content to gaze into those fabulous eyes and go along for the ride. ‘Life,’ he continued with satisfaction in his voice, ‘will be infinitely more enjoyable if we can bury our differences and accept one another.’

‘You mean climb into bed together?’ She was beginning to review exactly what she had done and she didn’t like the slow-motion picture show that was taking place in her head. But waging war with that was the seductive pull of her senses, telling her that letting him into her life like this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing—was it? She had to think and she slowly eased herself away from him.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I need to have something to eat. I’m really hungry.’

‘Now? Right this instant?’

Feet already firmly planted on the ground, Agatha nodded without looking at him. ‘I’m wide awake now.’

‘Wait. You don’t know the layout of the place.’

‘It’s not that big, Luc. I think I can find my way to the kitchen and locate the fridge. If food’s already been cooked, it won’t test my intelligence too much to stick it on the stove.’

Luc, who had been keenly enjoying the drowsy warmth of her surrender, frowned at the subtle change of mood. Then he decided that mood swings were all part and parcel of the pregnancy process, and the fact that she had finally acknowledged what they both knew to be a fact was all that
mattered. The house, which had seemed the last word in self-imposed exile—so distant from all the things he took for granted, namely the buzz of civilization—now seemed a lot more palatable. He hadn’t realised how much he had missed touching her and feeling her curled against him. He also hadn’t realised how much he had missed having her around him, warm, content and compliant.

‘I’ll join you in a while. I’m going to have a shower and I need to make a couple of calls to the office. And don’t worry…’ He grinned and held up his hands in mock surrender, as though she had protested. ‘I’ll make them here and I’ll be all yours when I join you in the kitchen.’

Agatha smiled weakly back at him and climbed back into her clothes. Her body was still tingling in all the places he had touched and it maddened her that he had that effect on her. She wondered whether she had known all along that sooner or later she would end up back in bed with him. She wondered whether that tantalising prospect had formed the basis of her acquiescence to all his manipulations.